Gamal Abdel Nasser, while serving in the…

Gamal Abdel Nasser, while serving in the Egyptian army in The Sudan, had met three fellow officers—Zakaria Mohieddine (later vice president of the United Arab Republic); Abdel Hakim Amer (later field marshal); and Anwar as-Sadat (who will one day succeed Nasser as Egyptian president).

Together, they had planned a secret revolutionary organization, the Free Officers, whose composition will be known only to Nasser; their aim is to oust the British and the Egyptian royal family.

A veteran of the 1948 war—he had been an officer in one of three battalions surrounded for weeks by the Israelis in a group of Arab villages called the Faluja Pocket—Nasser and eighty-nine other Free Officers stage an almost bloodless coup d'état on July 23, 1952, ousting the monarchy.

Sadat favors the immediate public execution of King Farouk and some members of the establishment, but Nasser vetoes the idea and permits Farouk and others to go into exile.

The country is taken over by a Revolutionary Command Council of eleven officers controlled by Nasser, with Major General Mohammad Naguib as the puppet head of state.