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Pentagon Places Its Bet on a General in Egypt

WASHINGTON — The chief of staff of the Egyptian armed forces, Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, had just finished breakfast at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City with two old American friends — one a former head of Central Command, the other a top defense official — when he got a call that the Egyptian Army was going into the streets of Cairo to manage the revolution.

Within hours on that late January day, General Enan was on a plane home — after telling Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he would have to skip their dinner the following week.

Today General Enan, a favorite of the American military, is the second in command among the group of generals moving toward some form of democracy in Egypt. In meetings of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, he sits to the right of its leader, the 75-year-old defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, and is considered his potential successor. In the meantime, American officials say, General Enan, 63, has become a crucial link for the United States as it navigates the rocky course ahead with Cairo.

If he is not yet the Pentagon’s man in Egypt, many hope he will be.

“He’s a sharp guy,” said Adm. William J. Fallon, the retired head of the United States Central Command, who oversaw American military operations in the Middle East, including Egypt. “He’s thoughtful, astute and competent professionally. And I believe he will try to do the right thing.” Admiral Fallon, along with Mary Beth Long, a former high-ranking Pentagon official, was among those at the January breakfast.

The central question about General Enan and the military rulers of Egypt is whether they will, in fact, “do the right thing” and move as they have promised toward the democratic election of a new president, scheduled for August.

General Enan and the military government have been in power since a youth movement toppled President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11, but their reforms have so far been mostly cosmetic. Protesters continue to demand change even as the military on Friday appointed a new prime minister acceptable to the demonstrators.

Pentagon officials remain in daily contact with the new military rulers, who are described as overwhelmed and alarmed that no potential candidate for president, including Amr Moussa, the departing secretary general of the Arab League, has the ability, at least in their view, to unite the country.

Some experts on the Egyptian military have suggested that General Enan could be a candidate, a proposal swiftly dismissed by Pentagon officials and the Egyptian military. “The Supreme Council will not field a candidate from one of their own,” an Egyptian military official said in a rare interview on Friday in Washington. The official requested anonymity under ground rules imposed by the Egyptian government.

No one disputes, though, that General Enan will play a central role in Egypt’s future government, more likely from behind the scenes, where the country’s powerful and traditionally secretive armed forces are still most comfortable. There, out of sight of most Egyptians, they run national security policy and operate lucrative businesses as part of a parallel “Military Inc.” economy that produces electronics, household appliances, clothing and food.

In contrast to Field Marshal Tantawi, a government loyalist whom junior military officers referred to as “Mubarak’s poodle” — and who is seen by the United States as mired in Military Inc. and resistant to economic reform — General Enan is considered more of a traditional military man focused on Army operations and modernization. Like other Egyptian officers of his generation, he has studied in Russia, and has taken courses in France. He drinks occasionally, according to two Egyptians close to the military, and speaks some English and a little French.

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Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan will most likely play a central role in any future government.Credit...Nasser Nasser/Associated Press

He was born in Mansoura in the Nile Delta in northern Egypt and came up through the military’s Air Defense branch, where he commanded battalions responsible for launching Egypt’s missiles. Unlike a younger generation of Egyptian officers, he has not studied or trained in the United States, the Egyptian military official said.

At the Pentagon, General Enan is known as self-effacing, deferential, humorous and conservative. He also is said to have a fondness for American consumer goods.

During his trips to Washington, officials always scheduled a day of shopping for him and his wife, as they did for other Egyptian officers, at the Tysons Corner mall in suburban Virginia, where the Egyptians liked to buy electronics, jeans and other clothing. The couple has three children.

The trips, yearly exchanges between the Egyptian and American armed forces, alternated between Washington and Cairo and were meant as centerpieces of a close 30-year relationship between the countries’ militaries.

The visits focused largely on the annual $1.3 billion in military aid that the United States gives Egypt and what type of American-made arms and equipment — typically F-16 fighter jets and M1A1 Abrams tanks — that the Egyptians wanted to buy with the money. (Since the 1978 Camp David accords, the United States has given Egypt $35 billion in military aid, making it the largest recipient of conventional American military and economic aid after Israel.)

General Enan led the delegations of some two dozen senior Egyptian military officers to Washington in odd-numbered years, and was here for the 2011 meetings when his trip was cut short by the crisis at home. United States military officers who were part of previous meetings describe them as a steady diet of formal lunches and dinners at Washington’s best restaurants, with the Egyptians put up by the United States military at the Ritz-Carlton, near the Pentagon.

Despite the meetings’ pleasant surroundings, tension often lurked below the surface because of what United States officers described as the Egyptians’ unrealistic shopping list of the most technologically advanced American weapons, which the Pentagon intended to keep for itself.

“What I always tried to get them to do,” said James Beatty, a retired Navy commander and the former Navy Sea Forces chief in Cairo, “was tell me in the year 2020 what you want your military to look like, so we have a gradual, phased buy of using your money in an intelligent way instead of coming up every year with a new list.” In the end, he said, “they always felt like, ‘You’re having these meetings, you’re telling us how important we are, but you’re not giving us the stuff we want.’ ”

On those same trips, General Enan was flown for visits to the Central Command headquarters in Tampa or to a Coast Guard base in Miami, or taken to meet with an emergency response team in Fairfax, Va.

These days, he remains in close contact with Pentagon officials by phone, including Admiral Mullen; the two spoke most recently on Thursday. A United States military official would not provide specifics about the call other than to say that General Enan and the military rulers had “no illusions about the difficult job they face.”

On Friday, the Egyptian military official cautioned that much confusion remained in Cairo and that no assumptions should be made in Washington about General Enan. The official said that the previous armed forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Hamdy Wheba, did not become defense minister but was appointed head of the Arab Organization for Industrialization, the military’s main commercial industry.

After the elections, the military official promised, “we will go back to our bases and do our normal jobs.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Cairo.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Pentagon Places Its Bet On a General in Egypt. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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