A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Read Online Free PDF

British. Foreigners were also drawn by the Corniche, the graceful palm-lined promenade with the broad bay to one side and handsome cafés and clubs to the other—a sanctum in the heat and poverty of North Africa. After World War I, the British nominally returned control of Egypt to the Egyptians, but Britain retained an enormous influence over the country, and the Europeans who ran the nation’s telegraph companies, railways, and trading houses remained. They continued to make their symbolic capital in Alexandria, which by the middle of the twentieth century was a pleasant bustle of a million beings.
    So, at least, did Alexandria seem to Europeans—and to a minority of Egyptians who had profitably attached themselves to the Europeans. Most Egyptians had long held a different view, as Europeans could have seen if they had but looked. Flaubert, on visiting Alexandria in the mid-nineteenth century, observed complacently, “We have had bands of ten or twelve Arabs, advancing across the whole width of a street, break apart to let us pass,” and he quoted his traveling companion, “Whatever happens, I’ll be able to say that once in my life I had ten slaves to serve me and one to chase away the flies.” Egyptians were less sanguine about chasing away their colonizers’ flies. Among the many other debasements they endured, one for which Alexandria became known was sexual depravity. For a hundred years starting around the time of Flaubert, a class of Europeans came to Egypt generally and Alexandria particularly on what amounted to whoring safaris. Boys rented their mothers to tourists for a few pence, jesters had themselves buggered by animals for public amusement, and ghastly child brothels operated in Alexandria without censure into the middle of the twentieth century. A protagonist in a Lawrence Durrell novel famously synopsized the city “Alexandria, princess and whore. The royal city and the anus mundi .” This state of affairs did not endure.
    IN 1952 a postman’s son from Alexandria who had risen to a colonelcy in the army led a coup that overthrew King Faruk, the playboy descendant of Muhammad Ali and bootlick of Britain. Gamal Abdel Nasser soon expropriated nearly all of the property of Europeans in Egypt—their factories, their farms, their banks—some of which he gave to the people and some of which he reserved for the state. The foreigners bayed, but their governments were not ready to war with Nasser, and in the end the bayers left like concertgoers denied an encore. Their departure left a large economic and, in some ways, cultural void, particularly in Alexandria. Nasser thought he could fill it with a nimble socialism. The profits of Egyptian labor that had once passed to foreigners would be redirected to schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure, which would be built and run by and for Egyptians. There would be electricity, clean water, sewers, literacy, and jobs. Of course, there would be costs. Political opposition would have to be forbidden for a time, lest opponents hinder the young socialism, and persistent opponents might need re-education of a forceful, highly unpleasant kind. But Nasser was confident that once Egypt prospered, few would complain.
    Had the oil of Kuwait lain beneath him or genius within him, he might have succeeded. Instead, in his eighteen years in power, his economy soured for want of natural resources and intelligent investment. The poor increasingly lived ten or twelve to a room, took unclean water from a tap down the block, endured open sewers where sidewalks should have been, and sent their illiterate or barely literate children into the streets to sell cigarette butts to supplement the family’s meager income. The government meanwhile became an all-fingering oligarchy. Its elite, who grew fat skimming the national pot, gave thick contracts to cronies, sent their children to the best schools at home and abroad, and built sporting clubs and villas that outdid the