Matthias Toedt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
A banner for Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s 2018 re-election in Cairo
When President Obama met with Director of Egyptian Intelligence Khaled Fawzy late in his second term, a note-taker accompanied the major general to the White House. But there was something odd about him, recalled Andrew Miller, who served as Mideast aide to the National Security Council: “He did not have pen or paper.”
Though the gentleman was young and hardly said a word, it was as if he was there as the intel chief’s handler. “He sat there silently observing what the director had been saying,” said Miller. “We had already picked up rumors that he was increasingly influential.” That note-taker without a pen, it turned out, had rapidly risen through the ranks of the powerful Egyptian intelligence apparatus. Small wonder: He was Mahmoud El-Sisi, the eldest son of the Egyptian president.
Reporting about Mahmoud El-Sisi is particularly sparse, and one Egyptian friend has insisted that there are no photos of him on the internet. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that one of El-Sisi the Younger’s responsibilities has been to consolidate the Egyptian media under front organizations. His day job is the number-two official in the General Intelligence Service, and he has played a key role in the government’s top-down decision-making, in a paranoid state where family comes first.
Last week, the independent news outlet Mada Masr, which translates as Egypt Scope, ran an explosive investigative story that brought the president’s son into the open: “President’s eldest son, Mahmoud El-Sisi, sidelined from powerful intelligence position to diplomatic mission in Russia.” (For the protection of its journalists, it was published under the byline “Mada Masr.”)
Such exposure for Mahmoud indicated a rift rarely seen in Egypt, a sign perhaps of several well-placed sources’ discontent with bungling leadership and nepotism. The El-Sisi family is consolidating power within the Egyptian security state. Mada’s reporting also notes that the young El-Sisi had overseen the response to sporadic protests against his father in September, as the president traveled to the United Nations General Assembly. If so, Mahmoud is responsible for a harsh crackdown, with more than 2,000 Egyptians arrested in a month.
On Sunday, authorities raided Mada Masr’s office in a Cairo apartment building. Even though its website is among hundreds that have been blocked in the country since 2017, making it only accessible through VPN, mirror sites, or social posts, Mada Masr has maintained a commitment to enterprise stories, criticism, and creativity. It continues to publish daily in Arabic and English. For the past seven years since the military takeover that has contracted the space for free expression, the website had flown just below the radar, despite being the country’s last independent news outlet.
The authorities seized the site’s laptops and phones and questioned journalists. They held employees, including several American citizens, at the office, as well as two French journalists who happened to be visiting. They later detained senior editors Lina Attalah, Mohamed Hamama, and Rana Mamdouh at a local police station. One day earlier, Egyptian authorities had arrested Shady Zalat, who is also an editor, and interrogated him. He was released later on Sunday, left on the side of the Ring Road on the dusty outskirts of Cairo.
“We very much want to come back, we very much want to continue what we started,” Attalah, the site’s founding chief editor, told me. But after a National Security prosecutor issued a statement on Sunday confirming that the government had authorized the raid, there were indications that it is now building a legal case against Mada Masr. “What people are not aware of is, it’s not over yet,” she added.
Does the mere publication of such a story expose hairline cracks in the regime? Like any journalism with unnamed sources, one must wonder who told Mada Masr’s reporters of these high-level personnel changes, and on whose behalf they were settling a grudge. Surely this question was on the minds of Egyptian authorities as they flipped through the young journalists’ mobile phones.
Robert Springborg, a longtime expert on the Egyptian military, says that the raid “was certainly related to the piece they published on Mahmoud El-Sisi.” In an analysis to be published by the Carnegie Endowment, he emphasizes that the Italian notion of la famiglia helps explain the Sisi way:
Mahmoud, who like his father served in Military Intelligence, was shifted to GID [General Intelligence Services] where in 2018 he was promoted by his father from Brigadier to Major General, nominally ranked number two in that body but in fact the key figure in it.
Reports indicate he personally has taken over numerous “files” which formerly were in the hands of the NSA [National Security Agency], including that of Giulio Regeni, the Italian PhD student tortured to death, ostensibly by five low ranking NSA agents whose names were provided by the Government of Egypt to the Italian government. It is commonly believed that this “file,” maybe like Regeni himself, was in fact in Mahmoud Sisi’s hands.
Springborg further details that Mahmoud’s brothers, Hassan and Mustafa, also played “key roles in their father’s 2018 presidential election campaign and in the constitutional amendment referendum that followed,” and now oversee both the civil service and the private sector through surveillance-based agencies.
Sisi is not the first Egyptian leader who has sought to build a filial dynasty. Former President Hosni Mubarak had tried to hand off the reins of power to his son, which failed miserably when Mubarak was arrested after the January 2011 uprising. Mubarak had advantages that El-Sisi lacks: a ruling party, however nominal, to help him in Parliament, and an economy that had yet to collapse. El-Sisi has no party of his own, and as for the economy, inflation mounts while foreign reserves dwindle.
“It’s obvious that this regime considers any and all dissent to be an existential threat,” says Joshua Stacher, a political scientist at Kent State and author of the forthcoming Watermelon Democracy: Egypt’s Turbulent Transition. “You’re actually watching the fragmentation of the Egyptian state. That’s what keeps happening.”
Elsewhere across the Egyptian capital, a new millennial-ish news outlet has popped up, called Cairo24. Though it promotes itself as fresh and independent, it is thought to be linked to Egyptian intelligence. Cairo24 ran a story a few hours after the release of Mada Masr journalists, with quotes from senior political and security sources. The reason for the raid was indeed related to Mada’s report on the president’s son, noted Cairo24.
“In spite of the report not being true,” one of the sources said, officials had recommended that the Mada Masr journalists “be released immediately.” Among those who refused to have their name connected to the arrest of the journalists, and who advocated for a quick release, the source told Cairo24, was Mahmoud El-Sisi.
