By: Sami Abdul‑Latif Al‑Nisf
Source: Al‑Anba Newspaper – Kuwait
I once appeared on the program “Muwajaha” (“Confrontation”), hosted by Jassim Al‑Azzawi on Abu Dhabi TV, opposite the rarely‑seen Nasserist media figure Ahmed Saeed—the man who, in his famous nightly radio program “Lies Exposed by Facts” on Sawt Al‑Arab, would “bring down” Arab governments with his broadcasts.
His program began by listing the targeted radio stations, followed by the words “Lies” or “Facts”, depending on the political mood in Cairo. If Gamal Abdel Nasser was angry with a particular government, its station became “Lies”; if he was pleased, it became “Facts.” The introduction always ended with:
“This is Sawt Al‑Arab… Facts, Facts, Facts.”
Ahmed Saeed told me that the Nasserist regime believed it had the right to interfere in the affairs of other states. He said that in 1963, he visited Kuwait and secretly crossed into Iraq to help complete the plan to overthrow President Abdul‑Karim Qasim in a daytime coup that ended with Qasim’s death.
He also recounted that in 1959, he delivered a fiery speech at Shuwaikh High School in Kuwait, attempting to drag Kuwait into the violent ideological conflict between Arab nationalists and communists—conflict that had erupted in Mosul after the Shawwaf uprising and led to mass arrests of communists in Egypt, including the torture and death of their leader Shuhdi Atiya, while Khalid Bakdash fled Syria.
In truth, the media of Ahmed Saeed and Mohamed Hassanein Heikal at the time was closer to “facts obscured by lies.” Defeats were turned into victories, and wise conservative governments were deliberately targeted. After the (so‑called “victorious”) defeat of the 1956 Suez War, the Nasserist media accused Saudi Arabia of opposing Egypt. Yet historical facts show that Saudi Arabia was Egypt’s strongest ally during that crisis.
Nasser visited Saudi Arabia twice in 1956. He sent his aircraft to Saudi airports to protect them from destruction. The Kingdom cut off oil supplies to Britain and France, the aggressors, and placed its army and resources at Nasser’s disposal—an act he acknowledged at the time before later turning against the Kingdom.
One of the major lies of that era was Nasser’s claim, in a speech delivered in Damascus in March 1958, that King Saud had paid two million pounds sterling to Syrian Interior Minister Abdul‑Hamid Al‑Sarraj—the “Red Sultan”—to break the union between Egypt and Syria.
The truth is that Nasser sent Vice President Abdel‑Hakim Amer to Taif on 16 July 1958 to apologize, saying it was all a misunderstanding. Later, on 31 August 1959, King Saud visited Cairo and received an unprecedented welcome—something that would never have happened had the accusation been true.
Final Notes
- Even Israel, despite its hostility, was not spared from the lies and manipulations of the Nasserist intelligence apparatus—though Israel ultimately benefited from them.
In 1954, the so‑called “Lavon Affair” was exposed: Israeli agents in Alexandria were caught bombing American and British targets in Egypt to frame Egyptians and provoke hostility between Cairo and the West.
(If such an accusation were valid, then no one executed it better than Nasser and his media machine.) - The hidden and frightening truth is that the Lavon Affair was actually a conspiracy orchestrated by Moshe Dayan, with the involvement of a Mossad officer named Avri Elad, who recruited young Egyptian Jews to carry out the bombings—only to later expose them to Egyptian intelligence.
Elad, who was working as a double agent, was sentenced in 1960 to ten years of solitary confinement for espionage with the Egyptian presidency.
The goal of the “plot and its exposure” was to topple the dovish Israeli government of Moshe Sharett and Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, paving the way for war with Egypt and the occupation of Sinai—plans Dayan had already written about in his 1954 memoirs.
The affair also accelerated the emigration of Egyptian Jews, including a young man named Eli Cohen, who later nearly became president of Syria under the alias Kamel Amin Thabet.