The Official Egyptian Story

Egyptian government officials were astounded by the reactions to the prosecution of the Operation Susannah conspirators. For them, this was a clear case of espionage and sabotage with both confessions and material evidence to support the prosecution's charges. They claimed they were reacting to the discovery of the conspiracy just as any European state threatened with subversion would. Government spokespersons and reports in the press repeatedly stressed that the accused were not on trial as Jews and that the Jewish community per se was not being subjected to any persecution. These claims were not entirely accurate. Jews faced continuing difficulties in establishing Egyptian citizenship (see Chapter 2), and many felt uneasy about their future after 1948. Though the Egyptian government's case against the conspirators was well supported by the evidence, there were aspects of its presentation and surrounding circumstances that made it difficult for a Western audience to accept the official Egyptian version of the story.

In the aftermath of the contest between Naguib and Abdel Nasser in March 1954, which definitively established the latter as the leader of the new regime, the government stepped up its anticommunist campaign in the press. A prominent feature of this effort was to accuse the communists of being Zionists. A month before the arrest of the Operation Susannah conspirators was announced, lead articles in the major Egyptian dailies explained that the Egyptian communist movement was controlled by a Zionist Jew, Henri Curiel, who resided in Paris.^[26] The campaign continued throughout the fall, concurrent with major trials of communists, including several Jews. A photo essay in al-Musawwar asserted that the communists were Zionists, atheists, and sexually promiscuous. It featured a picture of Curiel in short pants, which made him appear totally alien and ridiculous by Egyptian cultural standards.^[27]

The equation of Zionism and communism was common among conservative Arab leaders, including the Egyptian prime minister in 1948, Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi, and King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud of Saudi Arabia. This notion was not an expression of primordial Arab or Muslim anti-Jewish sentiment. Its categories are too modern for that and obviously inflected with European anti-Semitic ideas, such as those in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Developed as an instrument in the struggle against Zionism, it offered a facile explanation for certain superficially consistent facts—the disproportionately large number of Jewish communists, the strength of socialist Zionism in Israel, and the support for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state by the Soviet Union and the international communist movement. It may also have been an effort to adapt to the Manichaean discourse of the cold war in the United States during the McCarthy-Dulles era. That certain Egyptians and Arabs believed such claims to be effective arguments against Zionism attests to the great gap between their conceptual universe and Euro-American political discourse. Especially after World War II, these charges resonated with Nazi efforts to portray Jews as the animators of the international communist movement and could not but arouse suspicion in Western Europe and North America.

Equally suspicious was the shift in the public representation of the seriousness of the conspiracy. After the announcement of the discovery of the plot, the Egyptian police appeared to minimize the whole affair, calling it “child's play.” ^[28] Perhaps this was because the authorities were embarrassed by failing to discover the operation before several bombings had been successfully executed. Indeed, Operation Susannah caused no personal injuries or deaths and resulted in relatively minor damage to property. On the opening day of the trial, the headline of al-Ahram, like all its previous headlines reporting the story, did not mention the bombings and referred only to “The Big Zionist Spy Trial before the Supreme Military Court.” ^[29] It was only two days after the trial began that the paper's headlines acknowledged that the accused were charged with committing acts of violence.^[30] If their crimes were insubstantial, as the Egyptian authorities first claimed, it did not seem reasonable to impose the death penalty or life imprisonment on the perpetrators. Foreign observers generally viewed the shift in the severity of the characterization of the actions of Operation Susannah in the Egyptian press as motivated by the concurrent trial and execution of the Muslim Brothers who had attempted to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser in Alexandria on October 26, 1954. These political circumstances aroused suspicion about the legitimacy of the charges and the fairness of the judicial procedures.

The cosmopolitan cultural qualities of the Operation Susannah conspirators and the political considerations that motivated them were discordant with Egyptian norms. However, they were easily recognizable in Western Europe and North America, which further enhanced Westerners' propensities to believe the worst about the Egyptian charges. The cultural and social differences between the Operation Susannah conspirators and the standards of urban middle-class Egypt were strikingly expressed in the representation of the gender relations among the conspirators. The prosecution portrayed Ninio as a beautiful and seductive Mata Hari who acted as chief liaison between the Cairo and Alexandria branches of the spy ring, charges reinforced and embellished by the Egyptian press.

Marcelle Ninio received the most extensive and graphic coverage of all the accused, including regular and detailed commentary on her physical appearance and dress. Al-Ahram featured her picture on its front page three times during the first week of the trial and described her as “a young Jewish woman with a great deal of intelligence, shrewdness, and spirit of self-sacrifice.” ^[31]Al-Musawwar's coverage was the most imaginative and developed the gender dynamics of the plot in greatest detail: Ninio “used her femininity to influence and control her abettors. She was the brains of the ring, which operated under her direction and instructions.” ^[32] The young men, who had gone to Israel secretly and illegally to receive instruction in intelligence operations, “were trained by Israeli young women.” ^[33] Under the subheading “Always…Money and Women,” a subsequent article in al-Musawwar explained how the young male minors were seduced by money and pretty girls in Paris (where they stopped on their way to Israel), Israel, and Alexandria. The furnished flat in Alexandria, which was the operations center of the network there, was portrayed as a place for youthful foolishness full of girls, drink, music, and wanton entertainment.^[34]Al-Musawwar noted Marcelle Ninio's admission that she had frequented the Alexandria flat and occasionally spent weekends there, a sure indication of debauchery by prevailing Egyptian standards. According to al-Musawwar, the young men were simply enjoying themselves when an Israeli devil came and ordered them to burn and destroy U.S. establishments and threatened to reveal that they had been to Israel if they refused.

The Israeli and Western press also devoted disproportionate attention to Marcelle Ninio's dress, physical appearance, and role in the trial. In Egypt, the image of manipulative and uncontrolled female sexuality enhanced the prosecution's claim that the defendants' behavior was beyond the norms of civilized behavior. But in Israel and the West, focusing on Marcelle Ninio feminized all the defendants and made them appear less threatening to Egypt and more vulnerable as victims. The differing effects of comparable representations of gender were one more reason for Westerners to distrust the Egyptian account of the affair.

The Egyptian press repeatedly stressed that proper judicial procedures were being followed in the trial. The Qur’an, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament were all available in the courtroom for witnesses to swear on.^[35] To counter widespread reports that the accused had been tortured to obtain their confessions, al-Musawwar published photos and interviews of the defendants in jail, claiming they were properly treated and well fed by prison authorities.^[36] Because Marcelle Ninio had attempted to commit suicide, the authorities were especially anxious to demonstrate how well she fared. Her prison diet was said to include string beans, meat, cheese, winter cress, and tangerines—fare more ample and varied than that enjoyed by most Egyptians. Her only complaint about prison life was that she wanted to write a story about how generous her jailers were to her, but she was not allowed to have a pen and paper. No one familiar with prison conditions in Egypt could possibly believe such a description, and the interviews and photos of the defendants surrounding it were obviously staged. The defendants probably cooperated in this propaganda effort, hoping to improve their situations. But it was unconvincing and could only arouse suspicion that something was not right.