Unseasonal south eastern winds had churned up sand storms in Sinai and buffeted Cairo in recent days and Sadat — who had been visiting the ongoing recovery and salvage work at Ismailia where the Suez Canal was still blocked by four sunken merchantmen and a Egyptian Navy frigate — had radioed the Heliopolis Palace earlier that morning warning that he might be delayed.
The two men had spoken often of the ‘unseasonal’ weather which had afflicted Egypt since the October War. Last winter the Nile floods had come early like a biblical nightmare, flooding parts of Cairo, inundating huge swathes of the Delta, killing thousands, and ever since there had been drought, absolute and dust dry, with the great Nile falling to unprecedented low spring levels. The weather was not so much ‘unseasonal’ as simply, dreadfully, ‘wrong’ as if the war had in some malevolent fashion unhinged normal Saharan and sub-Saharan climatic patterns. Flood one month and weeks of sand storms two months later; each so extreme as to make a God-fearing man wonder if the events of October 1962 had been so terrible as to anger Allah, alayhi as-salām.
Peace be upon Him…
Nasser had put back the meeting with the visiting US Secretary of State, J. William Fulbright two hours in the hope that his friend would fight his way through the sand storms by then. Important as the Secretary of State was, that evening Nasser was scheduled to address a council of restive senior Army and Air Force officers and in the present atmosphere of ‘uncertainty’, each and every one of his political imperatives revolved around the preservation of his own support and the unity of Egypt. Moreover, since these were considerations that American foreign policy and post-Cuban Missiles War military deployments had singularly failed to take into account; whatever message J. William Fulbright was bringing to Cairo in the latest round of his so-called publicity seeking ‘shuttle diplomacy’, was very low on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s personal priority list.
Nevertheless, the diplomatic niceties had to be observed.
“We’d never have kept the Americans waiting in the old days,” Anwar Sadat observed dryly as the two friends fell into step.
Their feet and those of their coterie of ever-present bodyguards — both men were at the top of the hit lists of disenchanted factions in the military and any number of religious extremist splinter factions — rang on the gleaming marble floors of the corridor.
Until as recently as 1958 the Presidential Palace located in the heart of Cairo had been the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. Built by the Heliopolis Oases Company between 1908 and 1910 in what was then open desert east of the Nile as the centrepiece of a new suburb of the capital, it had been Africa’s most luxurious hotel when it opened its doors on 1st December 1910. Designed by Belgian architect Ernest Jaspar in what purported to be the local Heliopolis style — a lavish and overblown melding of the European Neoclassical with Persian, Moorish Revival and Islamic influences — it had been constructed by the two largest civil engineering concerns in Egypt, both foreign, Leon Rolin and Company, and Padova, Dentamaro and Ferro. Internally, the hotel’s power and other utilities mimicked the technological marvels becoming common in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and North America, installed lavishly with little or no expense spared. For example, Siemens and Schuepert of Berlin had been contracted to install the hotel’s cabling and modern electrical wizardry. Notwithstanding, the hotel had always been something of a white elephant, out of place and time. The Heliopolis Palace Hotel’s original French management were long gone, and within five years of its gala opening the building had become Cairo’s major military hospital, a fate it suffered again in the Second World War. Between the two World Wars and afterwards, its decline hastened by the waning of British imperial power the hotel had become a half-forgotten vanity project slowly falling into disrepair, increasingly neglected until the 1950s the Egyptian Government had begun casting around for an appropriate setting for a new Presidential Palace, a Palace fit for the leader not just of a nation that traced its lineage back to the Pharaonic epoch; but that was self-evidently the most powerful, leading Arab polity.
For its current role — if never a viable business proposition — the old hotel was perfect. It sat in a Cairo suburb surrounded by great buildings constructed in the grandiose Heliopolis Style, it looked and felt palatial inside and out, it had over four hundred rooms, a great Moorish reception hall, numerous magnificently appointed large public rooms presented like something transplanted straight from Versailles, and an enormous Central Hall which might have been created specifically to host great state occasions. The apex of the dome of the Central Hall — which had formerly been the grand dining room — stood one hundred and eighty feet high, and the lavishly decorated ceiling was supported by twenty-two Italianate marble columns. To each side of the Central Hall there were other public rooms, one planned as a banqueting hall and the other as a large billiard room. Although much of the original furniture had been lost during the World Wars, stolen or sold off to keep creditors at bay; here and there mahogany chairs and tables — supplied by Maple’s of London — survived.
The President of the Egyptian Republic — Nasser had been head of the United Arab Republic, which had merged Egypt and Syria between 1958 and 1961 before infighting in the Syrian regime had torpedoed the alliance — liked to remind his guests that the Heliopolis Palace was so large that a narrow gauge railway had been installed in the basement running the entire length of the building!
Nasser understood that the great Palace impressed the British hardly at all; Americans only when they paused long enough to actually notice their surroundings, and most Arab visitors — although they admired some of the Moorish Revivalist and Islamic characteristics of the imperialistic hubris of the former French and British overlords — privately asked each other what all the fuss was about? The point about the Heliopolis Presidential Palace was that it impressed the people that Nasser actually wanted to impress, the Egyptian people.
J. William Fulbright was Nasser’s latest US Secretary of State. First he had had to deal with John Foster Dulles. President Eisenhower’s man in the State Department had been preoccupied with propping up the Shah of Iran and in meddling in Asian and Southern American affairs. Notwithstanding that Dulles had been against the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, within months he had violently taken against Nasser and by 1958 American arms shipments had ceased. Dean Rusk, President Kennedy’s first Secretary of State had broadly held to this ‘anti-Egyptian, anti-Nasser’ line; effectively driving Egypt into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, meaning that most of Nasser’s Army and part of his Air Force was now equipped with relatively modern Russian equipment. The first time Nasser had met Fulbright, the new man had seemed to be a much more pragmatic man than either of his predecessors, and much less concerned with ‘old history’; but now, like his predecessors he was clearly flexing his muscles.
Before flying to Cairo, Fulbright had spent two days in Tripoli, the one stable major city in Libya still nominally under control of the Italian colonial regime. This administration was partially estranged from the Fascist Tuscan league government of the Italian homeland; a situation the Americans badly wanted to remedy as a bulwark against Egyptian territorial ambitions in Cyrenaica. The rest of Egypt’s western neighbour was slowly fragmenting into warring tribes and enclaves and, for the time being, nobody was doing anything to extract the oil reserves which eventually, would be Libya’s economic salvation.