Nasser received CIA political coaching from learning to smile more frequently to designing a more effective security

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 286.

Churchill acknowledged the justice in the stated aim of the revolution, which was to close the yawning chasm between the Egyptian elite and a peasant population that struggled to survive on $50 a year, with an average life expectancy of thirty-six. He welcomed the advent of ‘Neg-wib’, scribbling on a memo ‘Down with the Pashas and Up the Fellaheen!’ In fact, real power lay with a thirteen-strong junta that met in Faruq’s boat house at night, which was dominated by Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Nasser. Nasser received CIA political coaching from learning to smile more frequently to designing a more effective security, immigration and customs service. The CIA discovered that in Egypt it was sometimes more ‘socially efficient’ to redirect 500 employees to copying the Koran than to make them redundant, thereby alienating their numerous dependants and kinfolk. Copeland had soup and sandwiches two or three times a week with Nasser, either in the Interior Ministry or at the Revolutionary Command Council HQ in Zamalek.

In August 1952 the new regime suppressed a textile-factory strike by executing the leaders. In January 1953 they banned all political parties except their own Liberation Rally mass movement. A year later they proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood on the grounds that it was a political party in disguise. The relationship between Naguib and Nasser was fraught, with Nasser playing Lenin to this ‘Kerensky in a fez’ until he forced his rival into retirement in late March 1954. Since Naguib was an ethnic Sudanese, Nasser became the first native Egyptian to rule Egypt since the time of the ancient pharaohs.25 In October a member of the Muslim Brotherhood tried to assassinate him as he addressed a huge crowd in Alexandria. Eight shots miraculously missed their target. Nasser put Brotherhood leaders on trial and executed them, going on to eliminate sharia courts too. The CIA brought in a New York policeman to improve his security, and even concocted anti-American propaganda for him, to boost his image of incorruptible independence.