Egypt’s Missile Programs

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

No, you guys don't want to let go? Yeah! Okay, fine. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:20

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East, and a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog. Jeffrey, I'm back after a week off.

Jeffrey 0:29

Yeah, but that wasn't like a vacation week. That was like a poor Aaron is crushed with work week.

Aaron 0:36

Right, that was me sending you a Twitter direct message at like 12.59 on Sunday night saying, can I push this to Tuesday because I'm snowed under and I can't get out from underneath the avalanche of work. And then the hour or so we devote to the podcast just seemed too much to take on last week. But it's good to be back.

It's definitely good to be back.

Jeffrey 0:58

Well, Scott and I did a podcast in your absence.

Aaron 1:01

Scott, you know, Super Producer Scott can certainly step in and ably fill in probably even better on a lot of the technical details than I can on some of the missile-related topics that we like to talk about here on the podcast.

Jeffrey 1:15

Two words for you, Aaron. Wally Pip.

Aaron 1:19

I'm looking forward to the episode. You haven't put it up yet.

Jeffrey 1:22

Ah, well, by the time listeners hear this, we will have put it up. Throwing us under the bus.

Scott LaFoy 1:28

Throwing us under the bus!

Aaron 1:29

Yeah, I mean, for listeners, I think this will go up soon, but we're recording this the day before the election, and it's a beautiful sunny day here on the east coast of the United States.

Jeffrey 1:39

Ah, yeah. I won't tell people to go out and vote because by the time they hear this, they will have already voted and hopefully our long national nightmare is over.

Aaron 1:47

That's right.

Jeffrey 1:48

Or it's just beginning.

Aaron 1:51

We're a nonpartisan show, Scott. Anti-partisan show. We're an anti-partisan show. We don't have a preference.

Scott 1:56

They can take that whoever they want is their national nightmare.

Aaron 2:00

Right. Today we thought – we delved back into history, talked a little bit about a country in the Middle East, my sort of realm of expertise that doesn't get a lot of focus in terms of the missile realm, Egypt.

Jeffrey 2:13

I was going to make like a funny Egypt joke and then my brain totally went blank. Yeah, Egypt.

Aaron 2:18

Yeah, it's the place everybody visits and comes back. Everybody from the United States used to go visit Egypt, the place to go, peace treaty with Israel.

Jeffrey 2:26

Yeah, it used to be like the relatively safe country, yeah?

Aaron 2:30

Yeah, I'd say it's still relatively safe. Why not? Head on out to Egypt. But it has a long, very interesting history with the development of ballistic missiles. It's something that we talk about here a lot in the show, and it'd be interesting to unpack that because all of its various mutations and variations touch on a lot of the themes that we have here on the Art of Control podcast.

Jeffrey 2:54

Yeah, I really wanted to do this because it's so odd to me that we never hear about Egypt's missile programs. I mean, I think Egypt probably has the oldest missile program in the Middle East.

Aaron 3:09

Yeah, I think that's right.

Jeffrey 3:12

After Iran, it's probably the second biggest. And yet I never hear about it. And it's so strange to me. We have all this focus on North Korea and Iran. And Egypt is like, you know, thick in the middle of that, but they get a pass. And I don't know why, but not today.

Aaron 3:37

When you mentioned you wanted to do this, the source that I always go to for Egypt and anything sort of nuclear proliferation, missile-related is Jim Walsh, his MIT PhD dissertation. It's never been published, but nevertheless, I think, widely circulated amongst the arms control community. Bombs Unbuilt. Very interesting. Bombs Unbuilt. That's a great book. It's not even a book.

He didn't even turn it into a book.

Jeffrey 3:58

Let me rephrase that. It's a great printout sitting in a manila folder on my shelf.

Aaron 4:03

Whenever anything Egypt-related comes up, I just go pull that thing off and just start to read back through it. It is fascinating how – I actually hadn't thought of it like that. They do have the oldest missile program in the Middle East, I would venture to guess. Yeah.

Jeffrey 4:20

Dude, Nazi rocket scientist.

Aaron 4:23

It's entirely nefarious because of the characters involved in its first inception in the late 1940s, 1950s.

Jeffrey 4:31

Yeah, I have to say, and it runs up, I guess we really started seeing them in the early 1960s when they started parading them around. I mean, they built this series of missiles with help from German scientists who were like straight-up Nazis, right, who fled Europe. And it's like, oh, where's a Nazi going to go? Like, well, Argentina, which we'll talk about.

Aaron 4:52

That's Block B on the podcast. We're still Block A. Yeah, Block B.

Jeffrey 4:56

And Egypt. Yeah. There are both – I guess I shouldn't say they're hilarious stories because people die. But the Israelis, it turns out they are fairly unamused by the thought of an Egyptian missile program run by ex-Nazis.

Aaron 5:15

I'm going to let you tell the story because – But it sort of foreshadows a lot of the stuff that happened very recently, sort of Israeli activity and how they deal with countries that piss it off, particularly in this sphere of missiles and – well, more missiles in this sphere but also nuclear.

Jeffrey 5:34

Yeah. Well, so there are these kind of two pieces of it, right? So the first is that – Egyptians show off these what they call sounding rockets that are built by these – the declassified intelligence reports call them West German technicians, which I guess is what you should call them in 1962 rather than ex-Nazis.

Aaron 5:59

Two of them are named Wolfgang, which is even better. Just two Wolfgangs and a Paul. And so the –

Jeffrey 6:10

Egyptian and I guess at the time it was the United Arab Republic which is a whole other universe of just crazy historicity. But the – the West had long thought Nasser wanted these sorts of things and then Nasser sort of starts saying like, yeah, I do and I have them, right? And the Israelis Infiltrate the program and use various ex Nazi figures auto score Zany, right?

The crazy commando makes an appearance. But also this I guess he's also an auto this guy I can't speak German, but his name is like, he's a, I'm sure your pronunciation is perfect. Oh, geez. It's the worst possible endorsement. But we did some research because we were interested in this – the idea that the Egyptians had looked at a radiological warhead for these missiles.

And so this guy – it turns out – so the Israelis have this thing called Operation Damocles. And basically what they're doing is they're – They do end up killing, I think, one or two of the guys, but mostly they're sending bombs in the mail and harming and otherwise threatening these German scientists that are working on something called Project 333 in Egypt.

And Joklik is such a fascinating character because – He is the one who I guess sells the Egyptians on the idea of a radiological warhead but has no idea how to build one. And so when the Israelis find like who he is and they're like, hey, what are you doing? He's like, oh, you know, it's just for kicks.

I'm happy. Like if you're willing to pay me, I'm happy to like help you. And he and this Israeli try to intimidate the daughter of one of these guys. In Switzerland. And she, like, runs off to the police and they get prison terms for it. And it, like, blows the whole thing, right? So it's kind of a fascinating story in that the campaign to terrorize these scientists both was real and I think it worked.

Lots of them went home. But it also had this, like, you know, semi-comedic aspect to it where it was kind of a catastrophe and caused a lot of heartburn in Israel when it was revealed because it wasn't like it was a well-coordinated thing. It was a particular guy. Who was, I think, freelancing a bit.

Aaron 8:37

Right, and one thing I found interesting about this aspect of the program, or this era of the program, Was that in a way it mirrors what we know about Nasser's decision-making about the bomb itself. You know, it sort of vacillates between indigenous development with sort of help from outsiders and then turning elsewhere to try and actually just purchase off the design shelves, off the shelf designs, excuse me.

Jeffrey 9:05

Yeah. So, you know, it seems to me like they have these two missiles, Conqueror and Victor. Not Victor like Victor Hugo, but Victor like Victory, right? Right. And they're really… Run by German scientists, right? So there's Eugene Sanger and Wolfgang Pils. I mean, these are like real... I think Pils and one of the other guys were at... Oh, jeez, I can't speak German.

Penemunde, right? Whatever we call the V2 test site. And so, you know, they, I think, go in the late 50s. And then they... Do create the basis for this Egyptian missile program. But then, like, everybody goes home. And I actually don't know if they go home because of the campaign of the Israelis or just because the German government leans on them.

But, like, at the end of the day, that technical expertise leaves Egypt. And there's this kind of these first series of missiles, which is sort of a technological dead end. And it is a nice kind of, like – Story about somebody who, you know, a country that's interested and that goes out and gets foreign assistance, but then the foreign assistance doesn't doesn't stick.

And I suspect that that's probably true of a lot of a lot of Nasser's efforts. But you're the you're the regional guy, not me.

Aaron 10:30

No, that's exactly right. And it builds upon also. The weakness within bureaucratic institutions in these states and how we often think about how it's linear, like you can import expertise and then they can begin to build up a design of a missile and then it should be easy to manufacture. But that makes a certain set of assumptions, which I think Egypt is a wonderful test case about how programs are mismanaged because of concerns internally Nasser had about his own bureaucracy, but also just weakness in manufacturing and how they have to try and offset that.

Jeffrey 11:06

Yeah. I mean, I've got sitting on my shelf, because I am the new arms control deterrence disarmament book reviewer for survival, unclear physics. Do you know Malfred?

Aaron 11:23

I do. I was actually, somebody just sent me a, yeah, I do.

Jeffrey 11:27

Malfred Braut Haugamer. She's written an amazing, amazing, amazing book about Iraq and Libya, their nuclear programs, and it's

Aaron 11:35

Really sort of about like why they sucked at this right what's funny is all i really say is that in my inbox my email inbox as of today at 11 29 a.m east coast time is an offer to to would you like to review unclear physics why iraq and libya failed to build nuclear weapons which i was about to say yes to so you beat me to it

Jeffrey 12:00

Well, but for different publications, we should all be encouraging people to read Malford's book.

Aaron 12:06

Okay. I haven't read it yet, but sure. No, absolutely.

Jeffrey 12:08

So you say yes. Say nice things. I'm telling you, you know, you got to say nice things. That's right. Yeah. No, I mean, it's the central question, I think, of a lot of this stuff. And it'll come up again as we look at the blocks B and C of the podcast, right? Right. Cooperation with other countries. That there is this desire to have these things.

And I think... We often imagine that countries are technologically backward. But that's probably not right. It's not that they don't have the basic technology. It's that they don't have the bureaucratic and the organizational ability to make good decisions about how to acquire and integrate technology. Because Pakistan didn't have a great technology base. But for all his flaws, AQ Khan seemed good at organizing.

Aaron 12:54

Yeah, and I think that there are synergies there within this aspect of the Egyptian program, too, about how they had to go about to acquire parts, or at least components, missile components to this as well.

Jeffrey 13:08

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's – well, do you want to do Argentina-Iraq-Egypt first or do you want to do North Korea-Egypt first?

Aaron 13:17

No, we got to do Argentina second because that's the way they build into each other. That block of Egyptian missile development tailed off because of whatever reason, bureaucratic, and also the Israeli infiltration. But it didn't go away. The interest in the missiles continued.

Jeffrey 13:36

Yeah, I know what I'll say. I'll say this. So they get some Soviet-provided scud bees to tide them over.

Aaron 13:46

That's where I was going, where they bought off the shelf.

Jeffrey 13:49

Put a little footnote there. Right. We'll come back to those scud bees. We'll come back to those scud bees. Yeah. So they buy the Scud Bs. The Scud Bs are not good enough or not enough for them. And in the 80s, they engage in this, I think, really fascinating co-development of a solid-fueled missile with Argentina, which calls it the Condor II, and Iraq, which calls it the Batur 2000.

Aaron 14:17

But they call it Vector. Yeah, Vector. Exactly. Not Victor. Vector. Yeah, not Vector. It's Vector. I say Vector. You know, it's the Vector.

Jeffrey 14:28

Like you're a James Bond villain?

Aaron 14:30

Yeah. It's interesting. That time is fascinating in both Egyptian history, because they had sided with Iraq and the Iran-Iraq War as well, and there was collaboration there, at least militarily, to a certain extent. And that was, you know, would you call that sort of like The golden age of missiles in the Middle East where sort of that conflict, the Iran-Iraq conflict and how those missiles were employed piqued the interest of a lot of states.

And this is what we should be doing, developing missiles.

Jeffrey 15:05

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's like a false dawn or something. Like it's this moment in which all these countries become infatuated by missiles. Yeah. They don't all – Achieve them, right? And some of them start programs that don't work and later give way to other stuff. So the thing I find interesting about Vector is that it's a, well, I shouldn't say about Vector because we can talk about what Vector was, but certainly the Condor 2 and the Botter 2000 were a two-stage missile.

The first stage of which was solid fuel. Yes. And that was technologically hard for the Iraqis. It was hard for them to make a solid fuel motor that big. And they had this weird – I think they had to like – they had to pour them in like segments. And so like a fair number of them blew up.

I think they – didn't we have this conversation in a previous podcast? There's this great sort of discussion in the – I think it's in the UN, the UNMOVIC report.

Aaron 16:08

Yeah, it was the Yemen podcast. Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:10

Right where the Iraqis are like, oh, you know, it was really hard. We had to, you know, we didn't have, I think they were, they must have been, they couldn't make the rocket propellant in big enough batches because they didn't have the equipment. You know, and so they had to do them in, you know, in piecemeal. And they're like, no, no, you know, it worked out.

Like only like 10% of them exploded on launch.

Aaron 16:32

Right. In that podcast, we talked about how different countries have different thresholds for success. Sometimes good enough is better than perfect.

Jeffrey 16:39

I'm hoping I'm remembering that right. Like, I just, yeah. So, yeah. I mean, it's pretty technologically daring. On top of being weird, like, I don't I don't know why you wouldn't just. Well, I mean, I think I know why I think they were going to import the upper stage. But obviously, Argentina goes and, you know, gets all democratic.

And so they end up abandoning Condor to Saddam goes and gets himself out. Kicked out of Kuwait and put under crushing sanctions. And so Iraq abandons the Badr 2000. And then the Egyptians seem to soldier on. You know, you see the condor mentioned in intelligence reports through the 1990s. Yeah. Although it's not clear what it is because the range goes down.

You know, the two-stage... Solid liquid thing was like a thousand kilometers. And then you see U.S. assessments of the range of the vector go down to like, you know, 500 kilometers. So I think it might just be the first stage.

Aaron 17:45

Without, without the upper stage, the Iraqis also did like a one-stage version, but had even lower range to get onto the Security Council resolution, right? So what they were talking about is how I think the Iraqis, and it's you and Scott were actually mentioning this off-pod, took, took the second stage, and that got them underneath the limits post-1991, whereas the Egyptians may have soldiered on. And one thing that's fascinating about this is that you know.

Egypt doesn't get a lot of scrutiny because Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel and is nominally considered a U.S. ally. And so, again, it doesn't get much scrutiny in terms of the missile proliferation world because we have a magnifying glass on Iran. But in this instance, I would say in the late 1980s, so before Saddam got himself kicked out of Kuwait, there was Egyptian espionage on the solid fuel side.

Right here in the United States.

Jeffrey 18:44

Yeah. Dr. Helmy.

Aaron 18:46

Dr. Helmy. Yeah. Another good pronunciation here on the, on the, on the podcast. Yeah. Well, what do you want from me? You know, I can't pronounce it.

Jeffrey 18:57

I think it's a really interesting case that there was this Egyptian-American engineer who got arrested because he was helping the Egyptians engage in all kinds of illegal procurement in the United States. And he did time. Yep. And I believe actually the Helmy case I think sometimes gets used by people who are in jail for longer periods of time, right?

Because they're always like, you know, you let this guy go. But I do think that he was pretty – I mean I wasn't there, but it seems like he was pretty cooperative and there was a pretty enormous amount of evidence. And so once he was busted – There's a fair amount of information about the status of Egypt's missile program through the end of the 80s and it's It's something, right?

I mean, they really tried to make Vector work. And I don't know how long it soldiered on. It sort of disappears from U.S. intelligence reports in the very late 90s. But, you know, just like we put a little asterisk next to that Scud B, maybe we should put a little asterisk next to Vector and come back to that.

Aaron 20:16

We will. Let me just ask you one question before we come back to asterisk number one. What... You're proficient in missiles and modeling missile ranges and stuff like that. What do you think they're aiming at with wanting a two-stage mixed solid liquid-fueled missile? What's the operational requirements? What mission do they have attached to those operational requirements?

Jeffrey 20:42

Yeah, I mean I think it's weird. I mean obviously for Iraq – I think getting into Israel from various places around Iraq probably was pretty valuable. But, you know, like it was pretty hard to hunt the scuds. Like you could just put that stuff out in Western Iraq. Like I don't fully understand. I don't fully understand the enthusiasm.

And a kind of mixed system always seems to like add to just operational complexity in ways that I'm not sure I understand. Not sure that I get. I guess they were just enthusiastic about solid-fueled missiles and maybe because that's what the Argentines were doing. You know, everybody else went around with it. But yeah, like, what is Egypt trying to hit?

I mean, I always find it... I mean, like, you know, Israel's pretty close and, you know, maybe they'd be kind of honked off at the Libyans. But Libya is pretty close. I think that may be why when you saw Argentina and Iraq drop out, maybe the range on the vector comes down because maybe the Egyptians actually do think like solid fuel is nice because we don't have to fuel it.

Like you can launch it faster, but like. Don't need that extra, like, 400 kilometers.

Aaron 21:59

Yeah, and I completely agree. I don't understand the mission behind that. But maybe the answer lies in Argentina, not in Cairo. But if you flip around to asteroid number one, Scud B, I understand that. Oh, that makes a lot of sense to me. And then this is right in your wheelhouse. Like this is one of those podcasts where I should just like this section, you know, block C, I should just get out of the way because this is, we know where they went.

This brings in the North Koreans. So we have the scud being in the North Koreans and Egypt.

Jeffrey 22:28

Yeah, so the Soviets provided scud bees, and you can actually see in U.S. intelligence documents, we see them provide them, and we initially wonder if maybe they're nuclear armed. The Soviets have claimed that they kept pretty tight control over those scud bees, but we know that is not true.

Aaron 22:46

That's true. I mean, I think we learned a lot about Soviet accounting after they collapsed, that we went and began to look at some of their most sensitive sites. Let's say it wasn't very rigorous.

Jeffrey 22:56

Yeah. So the Soviets provide the Egyptians with scud bees in time for the 1973 war with Israel. And I think the 1973 war with Israel is really, really fascinating and criminally understudied. So one thing is it has the first post-World War II combat use of ballistic missiles. Right. The Egyptians slash Soviets rocket the Israelis. Not much effect, but it doesn't matter.

It's a first, right?

Scott 23:27

Not specifically target a bridge with a scud. A very narrow, narrow... I think it's a bridgehead or a pontoon bridge that the Israeli forces have. With a scud. Why would they do that?

Aaron 23:40

I didn't know that. That's dropping knowledge, Scott. I'm like, why would you drop... Okay, good job there, guys.

Jeffrey 23:46

Because you go to war with the missiles you have.

Aaron 23:49

That's silly.

Jeffrey 23:53

You know, we should actually do the SSPK on a conventionally armed scud against a bridge. Zero. Yeah, I mean it is like – yeah, that would be – yeah, I'm presuming they missed it.

Aaron 24:08

You can see why the US Intel assessments at that time maybe thought that there were some nukes on it.

Jeffrey 24:14

Well, that is a podcast that I think that we've touched on a little bit. It is definitely the case that the enthusiasm among countries outside of the United States for conventionally armed ballistic missiles I think has always baffled American analysts because the accuracy of conventionally armed ballistic missiles has historically been so low. And the value of using a conventionally armed ballistic missile to try to destroy a point target.

I mean, it just, it's, I think you often see U.S. analysts struggling with, like, well, they can't really be building that ballistic missile for this reason. Like, because it doesn't make any sense. But they, like, no, they just disagree with you. I mean, like, they might be wrong. But, yeah, they do things like that. So. Second reason 1973 is interesting, and I saw this circulating on Twitter the other day, North Korean fighter pilots.

Aaron 25:14

They make an appearance out in the desert?

Jeffrey 25:18

Yeah, the North Koreans send fighter support to the Egyptians, and they engage Israelis. Do they take any losses? You know, I don't know actually. I just said the thing was criminally understudied. I include myself in the criminal understudying.

Aaron 25:36

That's one of those that's – I didn't know that either. I mean I knew that because we talked about it on the show. But it seems like one of those things in like alliance management where they said, OK, we'll send some fighter squadrons out to help you out.

Jeffrey 25:51

Well, so this I think gets to a really important historical fact, which often in the West we forget. And it's a huge mistake to forget it. The Egyptians and the North Koreans are allies, right? The North Koreans were there for the Egyptians in 1973. They have been there for the Egyptians in a number of other cases since, mostly involving missile proliferation that we will talk about.

And so... We often act like... Oh, Egypt, here you are not following sanctions again. And we act like they're just some random country that doesn't want to be bothered with these sanctions against North Korea. But this is actually a really close military relationship, one that we don't appreciate. In fact, I have a – well, I have a story.

I think it is a funny story. Maybe I can't tell it in a funny way. I'm at this dinner in – In a foreign capital and at this dinner, there are officials from various governments. I think I can tell this, right? And one of those officials is Egyptian and one of those officials is South Korean. And so the conversation has turned to North Korean proliferation.

I make the argument that this is a historical relationship that we don't appreciate and that we always forget. And so we act like Egypt isn't doing enough. And it's like they aren't doing enough. But they're really close. And if we want the Egyptians to put pressure on the North Koreans, we got to do more. And we got to realize that there were North Korean fighter pilots in 1973.

And everyone looks at the Egyptian official terrified that he's going to – Assail me you know for like asserting that Cairo and Pyongyang are close and he just kind of looks at me and was like yeah like it's an important relationship and so I think people are shocked but like one manifestation of that is that Probably in the late 70s, certainly no later than the very early 1980s, Egypt gets two of these Scud B missiles out from under the Soviet accounting mechanism, if there was in fact any.

Shocking. And they ship them to North Korea.

Aaron 28:15

I can imagine what those Russian soldiers were doing based on our last podcast, my and your podcast. Although it's warmer down there than it is up there.

Jeffrey 28:27

Vadim, you have a bag? I am missing bag. A bag is on its way to North Korea.

Aaron 28:33

It tells me that it's easier to grow weed down there, I assume, right along the Nile than it is up in Kaliningrad. Got to keep it clean for the kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 28:44

Yeah, I think it's... It's really interesting to me because, you know, the Egyptians have this ongoing effort to acquire missile technology. And, OK, so the Nazi rocket scientists, that doesn't stick. And Vector, I think, ultimately breaks down given Argentina's withdrawal and the isolation of the Iraqi regime. But this one works. And so they give the North Koreans – I shouldn't say give – They make a deal, right?

They send the North Koreans, I think it's two Scud Bs. The North Koreans reverse engineer them, and then the North Koreans set up shop in Egypt and help them build their own Scud force.

Aaron 29:27

Right, which makes up the backbone of their missile force today.

Jeffrey 29:31

Yeah. I mean it really is interesting to me. The North Koreans parade these things all the time but the Egyptians don't, right? So we have – I think we have like a total of two pictures of the Soviet-supplied scud bees and I have never seen – Whatever it is that the – and actually it's got a netting over it so you can't really see the missile.

I've never seen what the Egyptians build themselves with North Korean help. But what we do have, right, is we have geolocation. So we have these declassified cables from the 80s talking about where the North Koreans are in Egypt and we're able to find those locations and monitor changes at them. And it's pretty interesting. Right.

Aaron 30:11

So this is where the story gets –

Jeffrey 30:15

That missile, or that missile testing facility, isn't static, you know. It's, you can see it, right? So there are, I think, three locations that matter, right? So the first location is in Helwan, and I think that's where North Korea helps Egypt make surface-to-air missiles. The second location is outside of Cairo. Usually we say it's at Heliopolis. And there are a ton of declassified cables saying that there are North Koreans there working on the SCUD program.

And that's a really interesting location because it's big and it's kept in pretty great repair. And we don't really know if the North Koreans have ever gone home. And then, yeah, the third thing is we have the test site. The test site is out in the desert. And it's in great repair. It's got new buildings at it.

There's just been a big construction project in the last couple of years that they've finished up. So, you know, it doesn't look to me. Like Egypt's missile program has stopped. All of the contributing industrial enterprises from the factories up through the test site are in really, really great repair and yet because they don't show them off, right?

They don't parade them. They don't threaten to use them. It seems that we never talk about them but we know, we literally know that North Korea and Egypt continue to cooperate on missile production.

Aaron 31:52

And so this brings us back to the pin number two, which is that solid fuel first stage of the vector. And sort of trying to extrapolate intent, or at least what perhaps the Egyptians are up to, because what are they doing with this well-maintained and perhaps recently renovated missile testing facility out in the desert? And are the North Koreans still involved?

Jeffrey 32:23

Yeah, I mean we know the North Koreans are still active. Like we can see the – thanks to WikiLeaks, some of the cable traffic. There's one great cable where a South Korean official goes to a Demartian Egyptian official and he basically gives them the like, yeah, where the hell were you in 1973 answer, right? Like, yeah. So, you know – Go ahead.

No, no.

Aaron 32:47

I was going to make a joke about being on the other side because of the way the alliance structures broke down that time. But never mind.

Jeffrey 32:54

Yeah, rooting for the Israelis. What the hell is wrong with you? So we know that this has been an issue of continuing concern. You know, the panel of experts for the sanctions committee, right? For the North Korean sanctions, that's a terrible way to say it. For the sanctions on North Korea, there's a panel of experts. They report the shipment of scud components to Egypt as late as 2013.

And there have been other reports. I think in the late 90s, there were a couple of North Korean diplomats who skipped town, including the ambassador in Cairo. And so we've long known that there's activity out of Cairo. The question I guess is how much of that activity is related to Egypt's missile program and how much of that activity is just because Egypt is relatively friendly.

Comid and other proliferators feel like they can operate out of there.

Aaron 33:51

Right. It's a place to meet.

Jeffrey 33:54

Yeah. Well, and store your shit. Like maybe that's where – if you're going to send components – I don't know. Maybe Egypt is a good transshipment point. I don't know. So that's one set of questions. But then you have this other set like if – why do we really think that Egypt is happy with their North Korean supplied scuds?

You know, like they have this big test site. So clearly they are not happy with – Maintaining them as museum pieces, right? So maybe they're just firing them over and over and over again. But doesn't it seem likely that they're building something else? And yet I have never – I've never seen hint one of why the North Koreans are modernizing this test site.

But boy, it has my attention.

Aaron 34:52

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah. I'm going to ask – and Can we extrapolate for maybe other countries that have a warm relationship with the DPRK on their missile development? And I'm afraid to get too much into conjecture here, but some other stuff that we talked about in previous podcasts.

Jeffrey 35:12

Right. Well, that's why we come back to the footnote about Vector, right?

Aaron 35:14

Right. So dudes from the Schick.

Jeffrey 35:18

Well, in this case, not – well, like the – yeah. The podcast of dudes from the Schick to electric bugaloo.

Aaron 35:26

So the implications of that podcast, although transposed on the...

Jeffrey 35:31

Right. So we know that Iran and North Korea have a really close cooperation in liquid-fueled ballistic missiles. Yeah. We have seen solid-fueled ballistic missiles appearing in Iran and North Korea. They don't seem to be the same missile. No, they don't. They're different. Right. So the Iranians have... Something that – I don't want to say it's like a Nodong because a Nodong is liquid-fueled and is different in like a bazillion ways.

But something that is sort of about that big, right?

Scott 36:05

But it's a two-stage solid-fueled missile.

Jeffrey 36:08

Yeah. And the North Koreans have something that looks like a solid-fueled version of the SS-N-6, which was a liquid-fueled SLBM, right? So they visually look like liquid-fueled missiles like that, right? Or they look like known ones. But inside, it's a totally different missile. And in both cases, they're solid-fueled. And we know that the Iraqis wanted a solid-fueled missile, right?

Because that was the joy of Vector. The bomber in Iraq. Yeah. And so when we vector the solid-fueled Egyptian missile just kind of went away. But like globally, enthusiasm for solid-fueled missiles is kind of up. And they're more achievable now than they were 20 years ago. So like isn't that at least a possibility?

Aaron 37:01

I mean I'd say so. But – I think this is the byproduct of the U.S.-Egypt relationship is that they don't parade these things around. I mean, just as you said, when I was doing research for this before we got this podcast off and running today, there are no photos of any of this stuff. It's really difficult to do any type of open source analysis on Egypt.

In Egypt in particular because they really keep everything close to the vest. And so you can only make inferences based upon – and if you had an interest in solid fuel up until the mid-1990s or early 1990s, then one doesn't expect that interest to go away. And then – What makes me think that it's also possible is that you couldn't come up for a mission for the – neither you nor I could come up with sort of a coherent idea of what the vector was actually supposed to hit.

And so it could just be scientific inquiry or interest in a missile that they think that they need for unknown reasons.

Jeffrey 38:01

Yeah, I will say – I mean I'm sure there is just the appeal of knowing how to make solid-fueled missiles. And I'm sure any military wants increasingly long-range systems because that's just – That's just like a trend. And it is very hard because we've seen – would you say two or three very different governments in Egypt in terms of their threat perception?

Aaron 38:25

Oh, you mean between the Morsi government and the Sisi government?

Jeffrey 38:29

Right, and then obviously the Mubarak government that preceded it.

Aaron 38:33

Oh, radically different. I mean let's just take in the past couple of days here in Egypt. I mean you had a Sisi government that after – Executing the coup, you know, completely cozied up to the Emiratis and the Saudis and preying upon their fears of the Muslim Brotherhood to be able to procure hard cash because of Egypt's financial woes.

Buck with those two ostensible allies for a while and has begun to approach Iran for the sale of subsidized oil imports because the Saudis have cut them off because the Egyptians aren't playing ball on Syria. The various other things are going on. And so you do have, you know, and I would say that that's wildly different than what you had with, obviously, with the Morsi government.

That was one of the main sort of transit points for the illicit shipment of conventional weapons out of Libya through Turkey into the Syrian conflict. To support the rebels that the current government now absolutely hates. And so you have absolutely wild swings in threat perception going on in Egypt at the moment. It's hard to even keep your finger on the pulse because the country is having a little bit of an identity crisis as it searches for hard cash to keep itself afloat.

Jeffrey 39:56

Well, and I ask because we started by talking about how much we love Jim Walsh's Bombs Unbuilt, right? And one of the lessons of Bombs Unbuilt – and I think that other scholars like Edel Solingen and Jacques Hyman have really – Pushed on understanding proliferation as an organizational event, right? And that's why I think Malfred's book is such a wonderful addition to that literature in that it's very easy for us to sit back and say like, well, what does Egypt want with this?

And I teach this in my China class too. If we try to imagine who the people who are in charge of the missile program are, at least I don't really feel like I know who those people are. If we don't understand their politics and their entrepreneurialism and the kinds of arguments they're making and how they're adapting to this culture or these wild swings in governance, I think it's going to be very hard to anticipate what they might do.

I can imagine – The same people running the missile program through all three of these governments making three very different arguments to support the same program. I can imagine money flooding in. I can imagine money flooding out. I can imagine chaos. I can imagine them successfully insulating themselves from that chaos. And so it seems to me that until we really understand who the drivers for the missile program are, whether they're in the military or in an R&D establishment, until we really understand how they fit into Egypt's politics – The assumption that the modern facilities aren't accompanied by modern missiles seems to me a really dangerous one.

Aaron 41:34

Can I ask you, before we sign off here, they have an active surface-to-air missile program as well in air defense. In your open-source research, do you get a sense that that facility could be for air defense rather than offensive missiles?

Jeffrey 41:55

Well, you know, so those technologies are not different. I mean one of the things that we saw in both Iraq but also in South Korea is that surface-to-air missiles get converted into surface-to-surface missiles, particularly if you're working on solid-fueled missiles. They – Those technologies are very similar. And so if you – well, those technologies are identical, right?

The missiles themselves may have small differences in terms of guidance and things that you need to fuss with. And I know that one of the problems of Vector is the Egyptians, I think, struggled with the guidance system.

Aaron 42:31

That's been a problem with all of their missiles. Yeah.

Jeffrey 42:38

But one thing is once you figure it out, like you figure it out. And so I think one thing we've seen in North Korea is that the appearance of the solid-fueled KN-11 submarine-launched ballistic missile corresponds with the appearance of a new surface-to-air missile that we're all still kind of looking at and corresponds with an extended range – SS-21 clone that's solid fueled.

And so, you know, like these breakthroughs, when you see them, I think they can spread through the missile systems really, really pretty quickly. So if the, you know, one thing that I would Really, really push hard on, and I think I'm kind of alone on this, is the proliferation of increasingly advanced surface-to-air missile systems is a real problem for the MTCR, the Missile Technology Control Machine, right, the supplier's cartel that is supposed to help us control the spread of missiles.

It may be doomed for lots of reasons, but yeah, if a country is building solid-fueled SAMs, I would think solid-fueled offensive missiles, if they're not Shortly behind, maybe they're a little bit ahead and we just haven't heard about them.

Aaron 43:50

Yeah, I think that's right. Isn't the MTCR often attributed as one of the reasons that killed the vector in terms of them being able to acquire parts?

Jeffrey 44:02

Right. And I think that the whole point of the cooperative development of the vector was to pool resources to get around that. Right. That they thought that maybe they could work together and that that would allow them to evade those restrictions. And, you know, so vector didn't pan out. But it does seem to me that the Egyptian assistance to North Korea, which now has shown up in Iran, that did pan out, right?

The Egyptians did help the North Koreans build an independent liquid-fueled missile capability that has manifested itself in the Nodong and what we in the U.S. would call the Taipodong series in Iran, the Shahab and the Samorg and all of that stuff. And so – It isn't impossible for me to imagine that there is some similar thing happening on the solid-fueled missile side and we just can't see it, right?

We just don't know what its contours are. We don't know if it's the Iranians and the North Koreans working together or maybe it's the Egyptians and the North Koreans working together. It's kind of hard for me to imagine all three of them working together. I, you know, I don't know. I mean, it was also hard for me to imagine the Israelis providing certain help to certain countries that ended up turning around and reappearing in the Middle East.

So who knows?

Aaron 45:14

Yeah, that country rhymes with Smeran. But, you know, let me ask you a question before we wrap up here.

Jeffrey 45:23

I was thinking of a different case. Really? Which one were you thinking of? Yeah. You know, the... Reports are that the – I shouldn't say the Israelis because I'm not sure it was government sanctioned. But some Israelis helped the Chinese with the guidance on the conventionally armed DF-3 that they turned around and sold to Saudi Arabia.

Aaron 45:46

Oh, yeah, yeah. I do know the story. That's a great story.

Jeffrey 45:49

Which I'm pretty sure somebody in – Tel Aviv. What the – or Jerusalem. Like what do you guys – no. No, you didn't. No. No, no, no.

Aaron 46:02

Yes. Talk about indigenous Israeli fighter aircraft development and sort of proliferation of China as well.

Jeffrey 46:13

You know you help out a country, you don't know what they're going to do with it.

Aaron 46:16

Right. Right. Let me ask you one final question. It's kind of a hypothetical, but did Egypt start it all with the lax Soviet accounting leading to two Scud Bs going to the DPRK, them being able to reverse engineer and expand upon, which they then used to market around all two dudes from the KOMED running around all over the place in the Middle East?

Jeffrey 46:42

I think so. Right. Yeah. I don't think that – I mean, maybe the North Koreans find somebody else to give them scud bees later on. But they didn't, right? They didn't find someone else to give them scud bees. They found the Egyptians. And I don't know who else would have given North Korea those missiles. So, yeah, I mean...

It is interesting that the North Korean proliferation into the Middle East caused enormous amount of heartburn in Israel in the 1990s. And there's even the famous – like they try to buy the North Koreans out, which I love. There's a whole debate inside Israel about whether that was a good plan or a bad plan. Like these two delegations like ran into each other.

I think they were flying – I can't remember if they were flying in or out of Pyongyang. But like there was this effort to like, hey, North Korea, it's fine that you're building these missiles. Like that's your business. But like please don't sell them to our neighbors. Like can we just cut you a check?

Aaron 47:38

It's like the corn subsidy. We'll pay you to grow corn or pay you not to grow corn.

Jeffrey 47:43

Yeah, right. Except we'll pay you not to – we'll pay you not to sell missiles to our neighbors. But like – That horse was out of the barn, right? Like that horse was – like it wasn't just about – I mean it was about money, but it wasn't just about money. It was about this ongoing strategic relationship with Egypt.

Like Egypt was getting those missiles back, right? So Egypt was always going to get that North Korean assistance no matter what the North Koreans offered. Maybe they could have cut off the Iranians. Right? And Syria, it's a more complicated question. Possibly they could have cut off the Syrians. But to a first approximation, I think those missiles were always coming back to Egypt.

And once that happens, like is that Israeli deal really feasible? And if it's not, then it totally falls apart and you get what we got. Sometimes you have a great policy solution and you're willing to pursue it, but you're too late. And I think it was too late. The time to cut that deal was about the time that they did Camp David to stop the sale of those missiles out of Egypt.

Aaron 49:01

Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know... Or they could have shot down the North Korean fighter pilots and just ended it all right there. But I think we leave this podcast at the end with some questions about where we're going in sort of an atypical fashion. But it really remains a very fascinating case of the history of proliferation. And it makes me think.

You know, when you go back and look at it, the mechanisms and methods both outside actors used to try and stop it, thinking of the Israelis, and then. Mechanisms that the Egyptian used to try and circumvent, circumvent proliferation controls, or to offset manufacturing weaknesses, show up later, you know. I would say in the Pakistani program, and even the North Korean program today, today. So you have, you know, different proliferators, same mechanisms across various times in history and I would say continuing up until today.

Jeffrey 49:59

Yeah, I'm really excited. We're going to have one of our research assistants, Sam Meyer, is working on the Nazi period. He got a bunch of the documents from the Joklik court case, which are, like, in German. So they're useless to me, but they're pretty awesome. We got Nate Taylor, who is obsessed with Helmi and the Vector program.

And I'm obviously, you know, keeping us, like, focused on Egyptian-North Korean cooperation. So I think, you know, one of the three of these groups, you know, ought to at least in the next few months produce some interesting work together.

Aaron 50:29

About Egypt, that is a positive note. That's a happy, happy note that we have more work coming from, from you and your team on this topic. Hey, Aaron. Yeah, thank you for letting me talk about Egypt for 45 minutes. I've learned a lot. This is great.

Jeffrey 50:45

Hey, listeners, thank you for listening to me talk about Egypt for 45 minutes. If you like the podcast, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps grow the supporter base. And if you really like the podcast, consider visiting our Patreon page.

Scott 50:59

We have our first benefit available, Super Producer Scott. Yeah, we have a Slack channel that we've just started, acwpodcast.slack.com, which any... Patreon subscribers who give $3 a month will get access to that, and we're going to basically just fill it with wonky media, declassified documents, all sorts of basically fun stuff to support episode and episode-related content.

Jeffrey 51:26

We're just basically going to nerd out there, and the theory is that the nerding out will result in podcasts. So if you're the kind of person... Who was always like, gosh, I wish they would do a podcast on X for a mere $3 a month, which is not very much. You can have access to the Patreon page, and you can stick your idea in front of our eyeballs and possibly enlist Scott into beating Aaron and I over the head to actually get us to do your podcast.

Aaron 51:54

It costs less than your latte at Starbucks, so come on.

Jeffrey 51:58

And that will help us cover our costs associated with hosting and distribution and maybe even fund some yet cooler subscriber benefits that will be coming down the pike. So, again, guys, thank you for joining me.

Aaron 52:14

Thank you.

Jeffrey 52:15

And thank you for listening.