My Time Working for Egypt - Part 1 - Oddities

In which I relate one of the stranger experiences of my life

Sitting in my office back in March 2010

NOTE: A version of this article previously appeared at amymantravadi.com.

I occasionally refer to the fact that I spent a period of time in the employ of a foreign government: the Egyptian government, to be specific. It was a fascinating epoch in many ways, and yet thoroughly uninteresting in others.

In 2009, I completed my Master’s degree and began looking for a job that would pay the bills. I applied to numerous think tanks, congressional offices, and government departments. I even considered joining the CIA. What I did not expect was to see a job listing with the Egyptian Press Office in Washington, D.C., a kind of satellite campus of the Egyptian Ministry of Information. Although I had never been to Egypt and did not speak Arabic, I applied. (It was 2009 and U.S. unemployment was the highest it has been in my lifetime, necessitating creativity.) Shockingly, they invited me to D.C. to interview.

I suspect there were three things that won me the job: 1) I had a good knowledge of politics and media in the United States, which was what they sorely craved. 2) I demonstrated sensitivity toward their culture and religion. 3) The person who interviewed me had attended the same graduate school as myself. For my part, I agreed to work for the Egyptians because they had positive relations with the United States and had made peace with Israel.

So it was that on a snowy December day, my parents helped me move all my belongings into an apartment in northern Virginia, from which I would commute to my new position as Assistant to the Director of the Egyptian Press Office.

Oddities

Some people are surprised that I was able to work for the Egyptian government as an American. In fact, many D.C. locals work for the diplomatic outposts of foreign nations, though not in political positions.

There are certain limitations that come along with such a job. For one thing, there is little or no opportunity for advancement within the organization, as the big jobs will always be held by the citizens of the country in question. For another, you must be willing to support a government to which you owe no allegiance by birth, and which may be opposed to your own ideals in any number of ways. A further practical consideration: I was treated as a self-employed consultant for tax purposes, which was most disadvantageous. I did at least get a health care plan.

Eleven people worked in our office when I started: eight Egyptian men, one Lebanese woman, one female Filipino receptionist, and me. The men were all Sunni Muslims, though some were more observant than others. The women hailed from the three main branches of Christianity. I variously held down the fort for Muslims attending Friday prayer services and the receptionist who trotted off to midday Mass. At 23 years old, I was also the youngest.

Our office existed to monitor U.S. media coverage of Egypt, help with logistics for American journalists traveling to Egypt and vice versa, perform public relations work for the Egyptian Embassy in D.C., analyze U.S. government policy toward Egypt, and assist the National Democratic Party (the party of power in Cairo) in its own public relations efforts. It was this final aspect of our work that eventually created ethical qualms for me.

In the course of an average day, I took all the phone calls for our director, Mr. K. These included journalists with interview requests, journalists seeking travel credentials, academics who wanted to chat discreetly about the political situation in Cairo, and a wide variety of more personal calls. Every morning, it was up to the receptionist and me to put together the “clippings.” We achieved this by having Google alert us to any mentions of Egypt in the news. We then copied and pasted the most important stories into a document and sent it to a large mailing list of people within the Egyptian government.

In my final year there, I personally put together a U.S. domestic news summary each day. We received the hard copies of seven or eight newspapers, and every morning I picked them up and brought them into Mr. K’s office. If I was alone, I would often glare at the painting of President Hosni Mubarak on the wall.

None of this was the primary reason they had hired me. What they truly desired was my ability to quickly turn out reports that demonstrated a good depth of research. This was the kind of work that I had been prepared for in my academic studies. On any given day, Mr. K might say, “Read this report by the Brookings Institution and write me a three-paragraph summary,” or, “Write a ten page analysis of the Obama administration’s policy on Iraq,” or, “Examine how American scholars reacted to the use of foreign poll monitors in our last presidential election.” He would also send me to various lectures and presentations to take notes. Then there was the occasional bid to turn up dirt, as in, “One of our other embassies is thinking of hiring this consulting firm. Figure out if they’ve been involved in any controversies.”

Once a week, I would accompany Mr. K and our political attaché on a walk from our non-descript office building near DuPont Circle to the glitzier digs of our paid consulting firm near K Street. (For those who don’t know D.C. geography, that’s where the real money is spent and made.) This organization was paid more per month than I made in a year to give public relations advice and assistance to the Egyptian government. We were certainly not their only foreign client. I believe they represented the interests of three or four other governments in addition to ours. All of this had to be disclosed with the U.S. Department of Justice because of strict rules about foreign money influencing U.S. politicians.

What the Egyptians actually received in exchange for that money was perhaps debatable. The thing that was most precious to Cairo was the massive military aid package authorized by the U.S. Congress as a sort of thank you for Egypt’s willingness to recognize Israel’s existence. We had one of the most powerful lobbying firms in D.C. on that case.

Due to my background as an opinions editor and columnist for my college newspaper, I particularly enjoyed the occasions when we all worked together to draft op-ed pieces in the name of different Egyptian officials. I was not the primary author, but I did contribute to both the writing and editing process. Thus, some of my work ended up in The New York Times and The Washington Post, although I cannot claim that on my resume.

My name did unfortunately end up in print on one occasion. A journalist from The Washington Post called to ask if we had put out a press release on a particular subject. I told him no, and that was the extent of our conversation. Well, this journalist was unable to get anyone to speak with him on the record, and he needed a quote for his piece. Therefore, I was very surprised to see myself quoted as a “spokeswoman for the Egyptian Embassy” saying that we had not put out a press release.

This was thoroughly inaccurate, as I was neither an official spokesperson nor an employee of the embassy. Mr. K called me in and reminded me that I was never to speak on the record with journalists. I apologized, but in all honesty, I had never thought anyone would have a desire to quote such a thing. I ended up in the office of my fellow employee and friend, Mohamed, feeling rather distraught. “Don’t worry about it. These guys are just bastards,” he said.

Things in the Egyptian Press Office were rather odd in numerous respects. The receptionist and I worked a strictly ordered shift every day, but many of the men seemed to float in and out as they pleased. None of the Egyptian employees were considered competent enough in the English language to answer the phone (with the exception of those who were too important). Therefore, the receptionist and I could never take vacation at the same time.

This was made both easier and harder by the fact that she typically saved up all her vacation and went home to the Philippines for a month at a time. Another complicating factor was that both financial attachés who served there during my time of employment were so uncomfortable with written English that they could not fill out a check. The receptionist usually assisted them, but occasionally I was asked to do it.

Not only our office, but also the ministry in Cairo had no capacity to make a credit card payment, which greatly complicated online transactions. I had two options: either call the company and ask them to take an electronic check directly from our bank account or pay the cost on my personal credit card and get refunded from a drawer of cash in the financial attaché’s office. With no exceptions, I insisted upon the former.

No one adequately explained to me when I started what our policy was for requesting vacation days. I usually just asked my boss and accepted his approval. If he instructed me to, I informed one of my colleagues who sent some paperwork to Cairo.

However, there was one occasion after I had been working there a couple years when I was at my parents’ house in Michigan and received an angry phone call from our financial attaché demanding in broken English to know where I was. “I’m on vacation like I told Mr. K,” I said. I was then alerted to a previously unknown requirement that I inform this man personally and receive his blessing. My mother threatened to come on the line and give him a piece of her mind. As it turned out, when I got back to D.C. and spoke to him in person, he backed down from his hard stance.

The cultural differences between myself and my fellow employees sometimes created awkward or humorous situations. I once heard a colleague use the n-word and had to inform him that it was considered extremely offensive. Another colleague would frequently make comments about my appearance. “You look very shiny today,” was his favorite. He would also ask me, “Why you lose weight?”, inform me that I looked good in black, and on one occasion told me my clothing was tight. (I assure you it was not immodest.)

I was once invited to an Egyptian engagement party where I waited three hours for the guest of honor to arrive, by which point I was quite ready to leave. In general, time is a relative thing for Egyptians. When I observed what a fondness my Egyptian colleagues had for Starbucks coffee, one of them joked that if you look closely at some of those ancient hieroglyphs, you will see the two-tailed mermaid.

My fellow employees were generally quite friendly. We would watch soccer together, particularly during the 2010 World Cup. Mohamed would often bring me drinks from Starbucks, which I appreciated as I was attempting to scrape by on an entry level salary in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S.

I was able to have several discussions about religion with another employee. The trouble was that he thought I was so nice that he tended to blur the differences between Christianity and Islam. When I asked him point blank if he thought we would see one another in Paradise (the Muslim afterlife), he insisted, “Yes!” This seemed to violate my knowledge of Islamic theology, and it was probably a case of wishful thinking. It often occurred to me that I might be the only committed Christian with which these men would ever interact, and I felt an extra need to maintain a good attitude despite the circumstances.

Mr. K was highly intelligent, well educated, and able to maintain good relationships with most of the major players in our part of D.C. He had already held multiple important positions within Egyptian politics, and I was certain he could one day become foreign minister or at least the ambassador to the U.S. He was also the most secular minded person in our office and an open advocate of Western political ideals. As he was my boss, it was difficult for me to have spiritual conversations with him, but he did once feed me the line we hear so often from Americans: “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

He came from a family with a history in the Egyptian diplomatic core. I wished he would take a job at the Carnegie Endowment (or somewhere similar) and live out the rest of his days in the U.S. rather than being forced to do the bidding of his Egyptian overlords. Indeed, I believe I suggested this to him on one occasion.

However, after I met Mr. K’s father, I knew this would never happen. They had a family reputation to maintain. Mr. K’s wife was the daughter of another Egyptian diplomat. All these people ran in the same circle, went to the same schools, and followed the same path. That is a hard thing to break.

At one point, the Obama administration hosted a Nuclear Security Summit in D.C. with the heads of all the G20 nations. We traveled to the conference center to provide some assistance to the Egyptian press delegation. As we prepared to go through security, I said to Mr. K and Mohamed, “I never set off a metal detector.” “Why’s that?” Mohamed asked. “Because I’m so pure of heart,” I answered. Mr. K then responded, “I always seem to set it off. What does that make me?” Without missing a beat, I said, “Muslim.” Luckily, I had the kind of relationship with those two men that the joke was appreciated.

I tried to be sensitive toward the religious peculiarities of my fellow employees. When the men were all fasting during Ramadan (the one part of Islamic law that they all seemed to follow perfectly), I would close the door to my office and eat in private. I tried not to even let them smell my food. When Pope Benedict XVI took his final helicopter ride as Christ’s representative on earth, I hugged the receptionist while she fought back tears. I strove to be accommodating to everyone. Then at 5:00 p.m., I would leave the office and re-enter the normal world, where I was just another citizen.

Come back next time to hear how the political situation in Egypt affected my job and what ultimately caused me to offer my resignation.

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PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:

• My review of Called into Questions by Matthew Lee Anderson at 1517