The detainee might then cry or scream, cursing or begging for mercy. Safwat, like veteran stage actors, had learned how to remain silent until the suspect was through with his reaction. He would wait a moment then say in a soft voice that would reverberate in the detainee’s ears like evil suggestions hissed by Satan, “That’s my last offer. You either agree to talk or I’ll let the policemen violate your wife before your eyes. You should thank me—I’ll be offering you the chance to watch a pornographic movie for free.”
For many years, not a single detainee stood his ground vis-à-vis Safwat Shakir. Many detainees confessed to belonging to several organizations at the same time or signed blank sheets of paper that Safwat Bey later filled in to his heart’s content with any confession he wanted.
In addition to his rare efficiency, Safwat Shakir was also well known for encouraging younger officers. He taught them patiently, and he sincerely tried to make them benefit from his experience. He would pick up a pen and a sheet of paper and draw a sloping graph that began from a high point and stayed in a straight horizontal line for some distance then plummeted fast to zero. He would explain to his students, the young officers, “This graph represents the resistance of the detainees: you’ll notice from the drawing that the resistance always starts at a high point and remains constant for a while then suddenly collapses at a certain point. The efficient officer will bring about that point of collapse quickly. Don’t rely on beating only: after a certain point of physical pain, the detainee might lose sensation. As for electric shocks, they might kill the detainee, creating an unnecessary problem. Try my way and you’ll appreciate it. The most hardened and most vicious detainee cannot bear to see his wife or mother violated in front of his own eyes.”
Safwat Shakir stayed in State Security until he made the rank of colonel, and then the state wanted to utilize his genius in a new field. So he was transferred to General Intelligence, where the modus operandi was different, of course. His new job consisted of keeping spy rings under surveillance, following and documenting public opinions, and controlling and coordinating agents of the service—university professors, media personalities and executives, party and government officials—and assigning them specific tasks.
General Intelligence in its long and eventful history would, however, remember one of Safwat Shakir’s greatest feats. Back at the time of strong opposition to the Egyptian regime by Egyptian intellectuals living in Paris, led by a well-known writer who enjoyed respect in French circles, Safwat Shakir asked the head of General Intelligence to give him a free hand in the operation to deal with the situation. Permission was granted and Shakir went to Paris. After getting permission from French intelligence, he hired a prostitute for a quarter million francs. He trained her and she started a relationship with the Egyptian author. She slipped him a sleeping pill in his whiskey then called Safwat and his men, who injected him with a strong drug and shipped him in a box that they had carefully prepared. The author regained consciousness a few hours later and found himself in intelligence headquarters in Heliopolis. It was a brilliant coup; French investigations led nowhere, so the incident was attributed to person or persons unknown. As for Egyptian dissidents, their voices were muffled for a long time afterward for fear of a similar fate.
In fact, recording all of General Safwat Shakir’s professional achievements would require another lengthy book. He kept going from one success to the next until he was appointed counselor (the official and publicly announced title of the head intelligence officer in Egyptian embassies) in Accra, Tokyo, and finally in the most important capital for the Egyptian regime: Washington. He knew quite well that that post was the last stepping-stone to glory, and he worked extraordinarily hard and proved quite successful at it. He saw the forthcoming visit by the president as the chance of a lifetime: if the president saw him and liked him he would appoint him in the next cabinet as minister of the interior or foreign minister or even minister of international cooperation. But if he made a single mistake in preparing for the visit, he would be pensioned off in the next round of appointments and promotions.
Have we learned everything about Safwat Shakir? There are still two aspects of his
