By Mona Eltahawy – The New York Times –
The officer, who identified himself by rank and first name only, did correctly name other places I had visited, including some I had not mentioned on my Twitter feed. That led me to believe the agency also monitors networks like WhatsApp and FaceTime chats that I use for private communications.
“We just wanted to check in with you,” he said. “Did you visit Israel? We’re calling you because you used to live in Israel. Has anyone offered you any work?”
I was a Reuters correspondent in Jerusalem years earlier, from 1997 to 1999. Egypt and Israel have been at peace since the 1979 Camp David peace treaty; even so, Egyptians who visit Israel are regarded with suspicion and are often subjected to questioning upon return. I told the officer that I would not answer his questions unless my attorney was present, and ended the call.
This was my second phone call in three months. In September, on the pretext that they were “updating” their records, Officer Rank and First Name wanted to know whom I worked for and if I had any trips planned. I was visiting my parents that day, so they sent a low-ranking foot soldier with a phone through which I spoke to the officer. I got the message: They knew where to find me.
He asked me if I had moved back to Egypt permanently. “Why are you asking me questions you know the answers to?” I replied.
I joke with friends that a phone call is a promotion of sorts. From the start of my journalism career in Egypt in the early 1990s, I joined the many journalists and activists who are surveilled by the government. Sometimes, a state security officer would send a note inviting me to tea — what a perfect euphemism for an interrogation — at headquarters.
For my first invitation to tea with the agency then known as the State Security Investigations Service — or just State Security, as we called it — two officers escorted me from the Reuters Cairo bureau, where I was a correspondent, to their headquarters. There, I was threatened with a night in jail if I didn’t reveal the source of a story. I refused, and after a few hours I was released with the backhanded patriarchal compliment “You’re a tough girl.”
State Security as Big Daddy took on a whole new meaning when I returned to Cairo after my stint in Jerusalem. When I went in for “tea,” I had my very own assigned officer, who had given himself the nom de guerre of Omar Sharif (no relation, absolutely no resemblance).
“Mona Eltahawy! Finally! You’re a real character!” Mr. Sharif exclaimed. “Who on earth goes to Israel? I have to meet your father. If my daughter ever told me she wanted to go to Israel I’d break her neck!”
Sitting across a desk from Omar Sharif as he held up files he said were full of information gleaned from my being followed and from my phone’s being tapped was bad enough. But our encounter turned Kafka-esque when he took out a photograph of his wife, a woman in a head scarf who he said was a religious instructor in a local mosque.
“Are you married? How old are you? A woman like you can never get married,” he said. “Who’s going to want to marry you with the life you lead, every day in a different city? You’ll end up with a man like my brother, a womanizer, who’ll cheat on you.”
A few months later, while I was visiting some relatives, together with my parents and my sister who had come from out of town, the telephone rang. It was Omar Sharif.
He knew my father was in Cairo, and demanded to speak to him, too. The next day, my father told me that Mr. Sharif had said that I lived a life “that was not suitable for Egypt.”
Although the organization existed before the nearly 30-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak, it became one of the myriad civilian security services he used to keep a seesaw balance with the rival power of the military. For a brief period, in 2011, after we turned out Mr. Mubarak and wrong-footed the old men who run Egypt, the State Security Investigations Service was abolished.
Those of us with firsthand experience understood that this was essentially a rebranding process. Lo, State Security was laid to rest in March 2011; behold, it was resurrected soon after as National Security.
I often wonder if Omar Sharif made the transition from one to the other. And I worry what he and his colleagues are doing with the Egyptian government’s increasing ability to trawl data from applications like Skype, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with the help of See Egypt, the sister company of the American-based cybersecurity firm Blue Coat.
National Security is also busy rounding people up. Four members of the April 6 Youth Movement’s political bureau were recently taken from their homes in middle-of-the night raids. The government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi also targeted Facebook group administrators, a publishing house and an art gallery in a crackdown ahead of last month’s anniversary of the 2011 revolution.
I am lucky because I am a known writer whose profile protects her. National Security’s combination of viciousness and incompetence leans hardest on those with the least protection: the young and the anonymous. These days, Egypt’s youth can’t expect an invitation to tea.
Mona Eltahawy is the author of “Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution,” and a contributing opinion writer.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/opinion/my-secret-policeman.html?ref=international&_r=0
