The Deep State
Out after curfew again on Sunday night (this time, though, only 9 p.m.) I was returning home after a long day talking to protestors. Plainclothes men frantically waved down my taxi at a joint army-police-neighborhood checkpoint when they saw my foreign-looking face (they looked like police trying to dress like civilians, in a style instantly recognizable as mukhabarat undercover). “Journalist?” they asked. “Camera?”
While a soldier affably thumbed through my passport, a police intelligence officer strode over and emitted a theatrical sigh. “You are coming from Tahrir Square?” he said. “You should know that not everyone in Egypt supports them. We are 80 million people. 1 million cannot make the decisions for us all.”
The soldier, who looked half the intelligence man’s age, interrupted the soliloquy about Egypt’s put-upon security state.
“You can go,” he said, with a smile that struck me as far more sincere than his colleague’s.
