Forty years ago, on October 6, 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist terrorists in Cairo. I was then the Egypt analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and had just published an internal paper on the prospects for succession if Sadat was killed, which I judged to be likely given the deep opposition to his unilateral peace deal with Israel. Sadat’s death set in train the disastrous road to the war in Lebanon in 1982, the creation of Hezbollah, and the seeds of al-Qaida.
Sadat enjoyed celebrating the anniversary of the start of the Ramadan War (or Yom Kippur War) every October, reliving the day — October 6, 1973 — that Egyptian soldiers crossed the Suez Canal. He was “the hero of the crossing.” Earlier in life he was Gamal Abdel Nasser’s right-hand man. He and Nasser had led Egypt into a disastrous war in Yemen in the 1960s, a quagmire where Cairo was bogged down when it stumbled into the catastrophe of the 1967 war with Israel. In 1973, Sadat and the Egyptian military had redeemed both themselves and Egypt.
