Nasser and the Missile Age in the Middle East

Owen L. Sirrs

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134200511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Egyptian efforts to acquire long-range surface-to-surface missiles in the early 1960s carry important lessons for our time, when weapons of mass destruction and charges of politicizing intelligence are key issues.

This new study traces the history of the early Egyptian ballistic missile program, which began with the successful recruitment of German scientists who had experience in Hitler's V1 and V2 missile projects. Yet even as these Germans began their work on developing missiles for Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Israeli intelligence was busy collecting information on their activities, sparking a crisis in the Israeli leadership as top Israeli officials anxiously debated strategies to grapple with this new threat to their national security. Ultimately, they adopted a multifaceted approach that included intimidation of the scientists and their families, appeals to the West German government to order the scientists' recall and an attempt to involve the US government in the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Drawing extensively on material from recently declassified US government documents, this new major work demonstrates how Nasser's missile program played an instrumental role in cementing the US-Israeli national security relationship. The book concludes with several key lessons that can help stem the global proliferation of advanced weapons.

This book will be of great interest to scholars of proliferation, international relations, the Middle East, disarmament and security studies in general.

1 Genesis

Like many countries interested in acquiring ballistic missiles, Egypt began with an artillery rocket program. Given its paucity of scientific and technical talent, Cairo turned to German scientists steeped in the knowledge gained from World War II missile programs to develop this rocket. Although it showed some initial promise as a weapon, the CERVA rocket was doomed by bureaucratic ineptitude, the 1956 Suez War, and Egyptian impatience with the limited strategic applications of an artillery rocket. After it disbanded CERVA, Egypt turned to the Soviet Union for rockets and possibly ballistic missiles. Rebuffed by Moscow, Cairo once again examined the possibility of indigenously producing ballistic missiles with the help of German scientists. In the Stuttgart Institute for the Physics of Jet Propulsion, Egyptian recruiters found all the requisite talents for their missile program.

We do not know when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to pursue an indigenous ballistic missile capability, nor do we know what specific event prompted that decision. But we can make a safe guess that the 1956 Suez War likely triggered Egypt’s interest in long-range rocketry even though the sources on Egyptian decision-making during this period are scarce. Egypt’s interest in artillery rockets and possibly ballistic missiles almost certainly predated Nasser and his 1952 Egyptian revolution.¹ The origins of Egyptian rocketry date back to the aftermath of the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–1949, when Egypt’s royalist government examined tactical rockets to offset Israel’s military prowess. The performance of the Egyptian armed forces in this war had been tarnished by allegations of corruption, indolence, and incompetence.² One consequence of Egypt’s poor showing on the battlefield was a crash program in improving the operational and tactical capabilities of the armed forces.³ Stymied by the US–United Kingdom–France Tripartite Declaration of 1950, which embargoed arms to the Middle East, Egypt’s King Farouk turned to another source that was only too willing to help Cairo reconstitute its shattered military capabilities: West Germany. Soon Bonn’s Economics Ministry authorized the departure of seventy-one military and naval experts who arrived in Cairo in January 1951 to train the Egyptian army and navy in armored warfare, explosive ordnance disposal, naval gunnery, and commando tactics. Among those tasked with training the Egyptian military under Farouk and his successors were General Wilhelm Fahrmbacher, Captain Theodor von Bechtoldsheim, Major General Oskar Munzel, and Gerhard Mertens.

Fahrmbacher was the chief adviser to the Egyptian army. Born in 1888, he had extensive experience leading men in battle: not only had he fought in World War I, he also served in the interwar Reichswehr and commanded army groups in World War II. At war’s end, Fahrmbacher was imprisoned by the French until 1950 when, after his release, he accepted the job of rejuvenating the Egyptian army.⁴ Von Bechtoldsheim was tasked with reviving the fortunes of the Egyptian navy, while Munzel, a veteran Panzer commander, helped develop the new Egyptian armored formations. For his part, Gerhard Mertens was the architect of Egypt’s new parachute unit.⁵

Although the Egyptian assignment may have been financially rewarding to these officers, differences with their client quickly clouded the arrangement. According to one account, Munzel and von Bechtoldsheim frequently expressed their frustration with their Egyptian colleagues; Munzel eventually quit in disgust.⁶

At the same time that the military experts arrived in Egypt, another West German team was helping develop an Egyptian arms industry. Spearheading this effort was the former general manager of the Skoda arms production works and the Hermann Goering Steel Mills, Dr Wilhelm Voss. Dubbed by one source the “uncrowned ambassador” in Cairo, Voss became influential in Egyptian government circles.⁷ Not only was he entrusted with developing Egypt’s military industrial complex, Voss also had the mission of creating a “small caliber rocket” for the Egyptian army. Since Voss had no practical experience in rocketry, he turned to another German known to us today only as Herr Fuellner to recruit several German rocket scientists for the effort.⁸

The historical record is sparse on this period in Egypt’s rocketry program. According to one source, Fuellner’s team made some initial progress; however, by early 1952, the Egyptian government was beginning to express interest in a longer-range missile.⁹ A ballistic missile proved too ambitious for Fuellner, whose rocket project soon foundered over a lack of specialized steel, propellant ingredients, and fuses. A test flight of the new rocket in 1952 failed to impress Fuellner’s Egyptian customers, who demanded that the entire program be placed under state control. Fuellner rejected this proposal and, as a consequence, was forced to leave the country along with some of his rocketry experts.¹⁰

Following Fuellner’s departure, a new company, known by its French acronym CERVA – for Compagnie des Engins à Réaction pour Vol Accéléré (Jet Engines for Accelerated Flight Company) – was set up as a joint military–civilian firm with research and development facilities reportedly located at the al-Mazah airfield, outside Cairo.¹¹ CERVA had a board of directors headed by another elusive figure, the Count de Lavison.

Even as CERVA began its work, events in Egypt’s domestic political arena took a dramatic turn. On the night of 22–23 July 1952, the Committee of Free Officers, a group of junior army and air force officers, seized power in a relatively bloodless coup. Stranded in his Alexandria palace, King Farouk was forced into exile in Italy, taking with him whatever he could store on his yacht.

The new junta, which styled itself the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), soon got down to the difficult business of governing Egypt. Although General Mohammed Naguib was the nominal ruler of the new Egypt, real power was wielded behind the scenes by men junior to Naguib in rank. Indeed, the motive force behind the coup was a young army officer by the name of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Among Nasser’s closest followers in the Committee of Free Officers were names later to be made famous in Egyptian history: Abdel Hakim Amer, Nasser’s closest associate, and Anwar Sadat. Significant for the rocket program and Egyptian national security policies, the formative experiences of many Free Officers were forged in the disastrous war with Israel. This shaped their thinking with regard to military modernization and the need to handle the Israeli threat.

In its first years in power, the RCC embarked on a radical reform plan which included extensive land reform, the reorganization (and eventual banning) of Egypt’s political parties, and purges of the civil service. On 18 June 1953, the RCC ended the fiction of the regency by declaring Egypt a republic. Thus, by a stroke of a pen, Egypt’s tradition of monarchy, which extended back to Pharaonic times, was finally laid to rest.

Egypt’s new government had ambitious plans for the armed forces as well. Nasser and his cohort made much of the corruption and bureaucratic incompetence that had plagued their country’s war effort against Israel. Not only did they force some 450 officers to retire, but, with an eye to a key constituency, they raised military salaries, improved military health care, and issued new uniforms to the rank and file. Compulsory service was introduced as the regime sought to militarize society. In addition to these personnel policies, the junta placed special emphasis on accelerating Farouk’s military industrialization program and carrying out his military modernization plans. A new ammunition factory was built, as well as Gomhuriya (Republic) training aircraft. New quays were built for the navy, even though that service’s loyalties during the coup were suspect to the plotters.¹²

In addition to retaining many of Farouk’s ex-Wehrmacht advisers, Nasser also approached the head of West German intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen, to help organize and train the Egyptian security services.¹³ According to one Gehlen biographer, the German intelligence chief could not spare of any of his own officers, so he recruited Otto Skorzeny to accept the mission in Egypt. Skorzeny, a Hitler favorite who spirited Benito Mussolini out of captivity, was then living in Spain, where he had successful business interests. Skorzeny assisted Nasser for about a year, and upon his departure from Cairo, left the Egyptian security and intelligence services in the care of some former SS and Gestapo men.¹⁴ The West German-trained Egyptian intelligence services later had a few successes against the main enemy in Israel; they also fomented disturbances in several Arab countries, including Jordan and Iraq.¹⁵

The RCC carried out Farouk’s military industrialization plans as well. Dr Wilhelm Voss, the mastermind behind Egypt’s drive for indigenous arms production, was appointed by General Naguib as the director of the Central Planning Board and primary consultant to the War Ministry. Egypt’s new rulers also provided new impetus to the rocketry program with the assignment of Rolf Engel to head up the CERVA team.¹⁶

Born in 1912, Engel was an early enthusiast in the field of rocketry and spaceflight. In 1928 he attended a meeting of the German Society for Space Travel (Verein Für Raumschiffahrt) in Berlin where he met the future star of German and American rocketry, Wernher von Braun. A year later found Engel involved in the Rocketport (Raketenflugplatz) Berlin, which experimented with small rockets. While von Braun was lured away by a contract to work on ballistic missiles for the German army, Engel pursued amateur rocketry until April 1933, when he was arrested for corresponding with French and American rocketry experts. After his release from prison that same year, Engel continued to associate with amateur rocketry groups. Even so, as the German army extended its monopoly of rocket research, Engel was effectively frozen out of his abiding passion. From 1935 to 1942, he was an active participant in Nazi student groups and the SS. In late 1942, Engel was disciplined by his superiors for lying about his academic credentials (he took to calling himself Dr Engel, even though he had, as Michael Neufeld points out, only three semesters of junior college education). Sent to Danzig, Engel decided to resurrect his rocketry career by specializing in solid-propellant rockets. By spring 1943, not only had he established himself as an SS rocket expert with his own firm, he worked on a variety of SS rocket projects, including 8-centimeter-diameter solid-propellant, fin-stabilized rockets, larger, 15-centimeter solid-propellant rockets and an anti-aircraft rocket. In August 1944, Engel became head of the test division in Pibrans, Czechoslovakia of the Waffen-Union Skoda-Brunn, an SS-influenced firm with responsibilities for arms production, owned by the Third Reich. It was here that he probably met Wilhelm Voss.¹⁷ At the end of World War II, Engel was hired by the French Office National d’Études et de Recherches Aéronautiques to direct a team working on the Véronique rocket.¹⁸

Assisting Engel was a German electronics expert named Dr Paul Goercke, who, in addition to his CERVA work, helped the Egyptian air force to develop a nationwide radar network.¹⁹ Together, Engel, Goercke, and several others tinkered on a 1.5-meter rocket that most likely was built around a solid-propellants motor. Several flight tests were conducted, but technical difficulties and supply problems similar to those that afflicted Herr Fuellner’s efforts hindered further progress. Nonetheless, the Egyptian government was steadily developing the infrastructure to support CERVA’s efforts, including the Sakr factory to house the CERVA team and the Egyptian Astronautical Society, founded on 8 September 1953.²⁰

CERVA’s attempt to create a battlefield rocket for the Egyptian army did not go unnoticed outside of the country. Having fought a war with Egypt in 1948, the new state of Israel was very interested in Farouk’s and Nasser’s militaries and, in the late 1940s, Israel’s intelligence services established an underground network in Egypt both to encourage Jews to emigrate to Israel and to develop fifth-column capabilities should a conflict arise again. Implementing some of these efforts was Unit 131 of the Intelligence Department of the Israeli Defense Forces General Staff.²¹ According to historian Samuel Katz, Unit 131’s mission was to execute covert missions against Israel’s neighbors:

Unit 131’s operatives were to be sleeper agents according to the classic definition; they were to act as a base, a friendly bastion in enemy territory, to assist other agents who were to be dispatched into the target nation. The intelligence they gathered was to be of a passive nature, and they were not – under any circumstances – to risk their cover in order to obtain information.²²

In the early 1950s, the head of Unit 131 was Lt Col Motke Ben-Tsur, a veteran of Israel’s pre-independence, underground army, the Haganah, and a company commander during the 1948 war for independence. As Ben-Tsur’s officers analyzed the Egyptian problem in 1951–1952, they decided to infiltrate Cairo’s growing German community with a 26-year-old Austrian Jew named Avri El-Ad.

On paper, most of El-Ad’s credentials looked solid. Born in Vienna as Avraham Seidenwerg (he changed his name upon reaching Palestine), El-Ad witnessed the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany from the Hofburg Palace. At the age of 13, he immigrated to Palestine, leaving his mother behind to perish in Hitler’s death camps. In 1939, El-Ad took the oath of the Haganah, and in 1942 he joined the Palmach, an elite Jewish force created in cooperation with the British Special Operations Executive. Trained in commando tactics and intelligence collection, El-Ad was a member of the Palmach’s German platoon, a unit whose mission was to collect intelligence and create disorder behind enemy lines. During Israel’s war for independence, El-Ad protected critical convoys bound for besieged Jerusalem.²³

Up until this point, El-Ad’s résumé seemed promising; however, there was a blemish on his record: the theft of a refrigerator, which resulted in his demotion from major to private.²⁴ At the time he was recruited by Ben-Tsur, El-Ad was unemployed, depressed, and newly divorced. Still, the problem of theft aside, El-Ad seemed to hold promise as an intelligence officer, and he was eventually hired by Ben-Tsur for the Egyptian job. In preparing for his mission, El-Ad was trained in building and operating transmitters, cryptology, martial arts, explosives, small...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Genesis
• 2. Prototypes and testing
• 3. Jerusalem responds
• 4. Bonn’s dilemmas
• 5. Washington mediates
• 6. Enter the Scud
• 7. The Condor II and No Dong projects
• 8. Proliferation lessons
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index