Egypt: Of Life & Death

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s talent for spreading subversion in the Middle East is equaled only by his instinct for sniffing out subversion at home. That instinct has never been keener. Last week his courts sentenced 93 plotters for trying to beat Nasser at his own game.

Ninety-two of the 93 were members of Egypt’s powerful 500,000-member Moslem Brotherhood, a group of religious fanatics who want to ban all liquor, movie theaters and female education and live strictly by the Koran. Twelve years ago, six of its leaders were tried and executed and thousands more jailed after an attempt on Nasser’s life. But by 1960, many of the members had served their terms and were plotting more mischief. One group specialized in making bombs. Another in power-station sabotage. Another in arms smuggling. After years of planning, a new assassination plot was arranged for July 1965, during the regime’s 13th anniversary celebrations. One unit was supposed to blow up Nasser in his motorcade. If that failed, another would bomb a train he was to ride. Still another group stood ready to gun him down on his way home.

But Nasser agents got wind of the plot and ordered another massive roundup. Last week, after a four-month trial, seven of their leaders were ordered executed, another 85 will go to jail for terms ranging from one year to life.

Notes on the Table. A few days before the brotherhood’s 92 were sentenced, one of Nasser’s courts decreed a life sentence for Cairo Publisher Mustafa Amin, 52, who was accused of passing security information to an alleged CIA agent named Bruce Taylor Odell, officially listed as a political attaché at the U.S. embassy in Cairo (TIME, Aug. 6, 1965). Nasser’s government claimed that Amin, a longtime confidant of Nasser before his arrest, met Odell regularly to divulge information on such matters as Nasser’s relations with his Vice President and with the Soviet Union.

To get the goods on Amin, the police planted intelligence agents among his servants and bugged his two apartments and his black Buick limousine. When they arrested the portly publisher 13 months ago, during a lunch with Odell in Amin’s seaside villa, the police claimed that they found 20 pages of Odell’s handwritten notes on a table near by. Odell was released because of his diplomatic immunity, and immediately flew back to Washington “for reassignment.” “I am innocent,” Amin insisted last week. “I have faith in my country, and history will reveal the truth.” As far as Nasser was concerned, it already had.