What Happened to Hilaly

To a U.S. correspondent in Cairo last week went a cable from his editor requesting an interpretive piece on why Premier Ahmed Naguib el Hilaly Pasha fell. Replied the correspondent: "Can't give real reasons from here. Do you want ostensible ones?"

The censors were sitting tight on the story of the intrigue that felled Egypt's most promising Premier in years. Like all suppressed stories, it became garbled and sensationalized as it spread by whisper, but this week the outline was coming clear.

June 20, on a train speeding from Alexandria to Cairo, Foreign Minister Abdel-Khalek Hassouna Pasha entered Premier Hilaly's compartment with disquieting news: an important ex-government official and crony of King Farouk, acting for the powerful Wafd Party, had called on U.S. Ambassador Caffery and offered to make a deal. Its substance: the Wafd would reverse itself completely and support the State Department's pet project, the Middle East Command. In return, the U.S. embassy had to use its influence with King Farouk to get Hilaly fired and the Wafd returned to office. Reason for the Wafd's sharp about-face: Hilaly's hard-hitting anticorruption drive was getting closer & closer to Wafd bigwigs.

The Court Jester. Over the clack of the car wheels, Hassouna Pasha continued his story. The intermediary was Kareem Tabet Pasha, a sort of amateur Rasputin who has been floating around Cairo for years. Tabet Pasha, King Farouk's press counselor until 1951, actually functioned more as court jester, five-percenter, and fellow nightclubber. Investigations into the Palestine arms scandal --in which defective arms were purchased and supplied to Egyptian troops fighting the Israelis--had repeatedly turned up his name. About nine months ago, Farouk dismissed Tabet, who scurried off to Switzerland. He had returned recently to Egypt.

The man behind Tabet's mission to the U.S. Ambassador was squat and suave Ahmed Aboud Pasha, one of the three top figures in the Wafd, a multimillionaire who dabbles in sugar, fertilizer and shipping lines. Premier Hilaly was poking into some 140 tax-evasion charges against Aboud which the Wafd had quashed before Hilaly came to office.

When Foreign Minister Hassouna Pasha finished, Hilaly seemed convinced. The next day a pro-Hilary newspaper plastered the story of the Wafd maneuverings over its front page, and when the Wafd indignantly denied it, Hilaly, an honest, conservative sort of man, snapped: "The report is not a lie. It is true."

The Hopeless Fight. Sixty years old and weary, Hilaly reconsidered his position after four months in office. His attempt to clean up Egyptian politics seemed almost hopeless. The courts were jammed with tax-evasion cases. The battle to win sovereignty of the Sudan for King Farouk had made little headway, despite endless talks with the British. On top of all of this, it now seemed to Hilaly that his monarch, on whom he had counted, was weakening.

Hilaly went to the King's summer palace in Alexandria, told his story and resigned. The chief of the Royal Cabinet begged Hilaly to name his conditions for continuing in office. Snapped Hilaly: investigation and trial of all those involved.

The price was too high. That night, begged again to reconsider, Hilaly replied: "For the last time, no. Allah helps a man but once in his lifetime, then leaves him to the devil. I have had my once."

A few days later Hilaly departed the premiership, leaving Egypt to the devil. The new caretaker-Premier: cigar-puffing Sirry Pasha, a respected independent, who happens, however, to be vice president of two of Millionaire Aboud's firms, a fertilizer factory and a sugar-cane company. One of Sirry's first steps was to create a new post of Minister of State to handle liaison with the palace. For that job, he picked none other than the once discredited court jester, Tabet Pasha, who is now apparently back in royal favor.

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