Egypt: Unchanged

© 2011 John Edgar. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/16/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3383-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3384-1 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3385-8 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011901316

Printed in the United States of America

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Table of Contents

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

EPILOGUE

About the Author:

PREFACE

In this era of cell-phones, iPads, iPhones, skype, facebook, and a myriad of other varieties of marketing innovations that make the telecommuniations industry cash register go ka-ching, calls still have to be routed, switched, and delivered. These same objectives of routing switching and delivering calls had to be met some thirty years ago but used what might be considered by people today as archaic methods. Then all but perhaps one per cent of the calls was sent over wire lines. At that time widespread personal communications using radio systems was still to come.

Then as now telephone calling over wire lines is the back-bone method used worldwide supporting commerce, industry, and the military. Wire line service is the bed rock on which the filigris of radio service is built. It is reliable, secure, and is one of the four main components of any nation’s infrastructure of roads, water, power, and communications.

Before the advent of today’s radio band supported personal communications systems, if a nation’s basic phone service started to crumble, businesses faltered and communications reverted back to humans carrying messages from place to place. This was happening in Egypt in the late 1960’s when Gamal Abdel Nassar was President of Egypt. ARENTO’s telephone revenues were declining and fell short of operating expenses, so funding of building maintenance was cut off. There were the floor sweepers, and the tea go-fers wandering the halls of every exchange building, but when a window got smashed anywhere it never got repaired. Buildings were open to the air most of the time. Sahara’s winds brought in the talc-like sand through the broken windows. It penetrated those buildings like an evil gas, leaving gritty deposits on work papers left on desks over night. It permeated the large rooms that housed the big banks of switches. Fine deposits got onto the thousands of switch contacts. These 1920’s era switches were in place long before sealed glass reed switches were invented.

Failures in some of the switch banks started showing up. Calls didn’t get switched properly, and often the number you dialed failed to connect to the party you wanted. In Egypt the saying on everyone’s lips when a mishap occurred was Inshallah or it is the will of God, thus excusing anyone from trying to resolve it. Thus it went with the slow but relentless downward spiral of Egypt’s telephone system.

Nasser had started the modernization of Egypt, arousing it from its pre-WWII backwater setting. He became President of Egypt in 1956 after King Farouk fell dead at the dinner table in 1956, and remained in office until 1970. During his tenure a huge dam - - courtesy of USSR - - was built across the Nile River at Aswan for improving crop yield, and producing electricity to accelerate the modernization process. Anwar Sadat pushed the modernization further when he became president in 1970 but inherited a declining set of infrastructures, among them the telecommunications sector that was in urgent need of repair and upgrade.

Underground cables were going bad, because lead sheaths, the protective coverings of the cables went missing. Hundreds of their paper insulated telephone wires were exposed to the soaking from rainwater. Cairo’s streets have no storm drains. When it rains, occasionally very hard, streets flood, the water gathers in the gutters, and runs down into telephone company manholes. And this is what happened in Cairo, grave-robbers had shamelessly triggered the deterioration of cross-town communications! As that paper insulation became water-soaked, the cables shorted out, and eventually most cross-town communications failed.

Over time the grave-robbers had run through the fat cross-town cables and then started in on the thinner local distribution cables. Deterioration of service went from cross-town call failures, to failures within a single exchange area, as the distribution cables started to fail.

As an interim fix for inter-office trunk cable failures, the Raytheon company was hired to install a multimillion-dollar microwave system. Microwave-Radio towers were erected on the roofs of each Exchange building with antenna dishes pointing towards other Exchange building towers. Exchange to exchange connections that permitted cross-town calling, were now supported by these radio links. And they worked well. Telephone traffic picked up again, growing over time until these radio links too, became over loaded. With the over loads, came delays in service, an increase in customer’s frustration level.

Hoping to prevent complete failure in the switch rooms the telephone company, ARENTO, for Arab Republic of Egypt National Telecommunications Organization, put their best people to work there maintaining the system. It was a holding action. Many phones had excessive dial tone delay, some didn’t get any dial tone, many calls were lost, there were wrong connections, and sudden unexplained dropped calls. These service failures added to customer disgust with the system. Something had to be done.

Anwar Sadat appealed for and got massive aid programs for infrastructure upgrades from the United States. Congress budgeted nearly $400 million for USAID, for United States Agency for International Development, to rehabilitate Egypt’s telephone system - - primarily for the cities of Cairo and Alexandria. The firm of Arthur D. Little, Inc. and their subcontractor Continental Telephone Company were awarded USAID contracts to design the upgrade and repair of their system.

This tale is about the design, and the designers of this ambitious communications system expansion in the cities of Cairo, and Alexandria, Egypt. Events depicted in this novel are based on actual happenings during the period 1979 to 1983, and led to stark improvements in Egypt’s telecommunications infrastructure. ARENTO got the most modern telephone system at the time giving a major boost to Egypt’s economy. Sadly Anwar Sadat never saw the results of his efforts, but the work was completed under the Presidency of Hosni Mubarak.

PROLOGUE

During the period 1958 to 1970 when Gamal Abdel Nasser was President of the United Arab Republic episodes like the following took place regularly:

In the dead of night, around 3 am, in Cairo, Egypt on a street not too far from the Bab-el-Louk train station, two Arab men got out of their Opel. They were wearing ski masks and hooded sweatshirts. They had parked on Shari Sheik Rihan and left the car doors open. It was dark as pitch, the streets were empty, and it was as quiet at a tomb. There was no moon that night, but buildings to the west were outlined by a soft yellow glow from sodium vapor street lamps along Corniche el Nil.

One of them spoke in Arabic, whispering: Farouk, did you bring that lever tool? Yes, in the back seat and don’t worry about it, but help me get the ladder off the roof, and keep your voice down. Ahmed and Farouk, on the dark street, silently lifted the short ladder off the roof of the car. They set it in the street, and then Ahmed went back and got the lever tool, a curious looking long steel bar, that had a short hooked rod fastened loosely to it by a hinge.

Hey Ahmed, where’s that manhole cover, I thought it was just south of the curbstone, he whispered, playing his flashlight from curb to curb. It’s over here, a little east." Ahmed knelt down over the square iron lid searching with his fingers for one of the access holes. Finding it he inserted the hook from the lever tool into the hole near the center of the heavy iron lid. Farouk got onto the end of the rod, and bracing the other end against the pavement lifted with all his might, then Ahmed took a hold of the same end, and slowly the 200-pound man-hole cover lifted free. They slid it to one side, with a loud scraping noise. They winced.

Putting the ladder into the hole Ahmed let it slide down until it touched bottom, about 8 feet down. Descending the ladder they entered one of Cairo’s hundreds of telephone company manholes. At bottom, they were standing in about 3 inches of muck.

While Ahmed held the light, Farouk took his box cutter and slit the lead sheath lengthwise along the cable, slitting from one wall of the manhole to the opposite wall. He did it again on a second cable, then another, then another cable, and continued until he had opened up eight fat inter-office trunk cables. His cuts were about ten feet long. Deftly he cut around the circumference of each cable, carefully so as not cut the wires within. Both Ahmed, and Farouk were experienced hands at sheath-slitting, having gained experience through maybe thirty or forty such man-hole penetrations.

Ahmed peeled the thick lead skin, or sheath, from a cable, wrestling with it’s weightiness. He peeled off a sheet that weighed nearly 75 pounds, folding it into an accordion shape. Bracing his feet as firmly as he could in the slimey manhole floor, he passed it up to Farouk who was now waiting at the surface. Farouk laid the mass in the back seat of the Opel. Ahmed peeled another sheet of lead from the cable. Again he made an accordion of it and passed it to Farouk who struggled to put it in the trunk of the car. When they were done taking the eight cable sheaths they had accumulated over 600 pounds of lead.

Ahmed climbed up out of the man-hole, then Farouk hoisted the ladder up out of the hole. Together they set it on the roof of the car fastening it with a bungey cord. Now their Opel’s wheels were spread out dangerously. They exchanged glances, shrugged their shoulders, and grinned both thinking about the black market value of the lead they had stashed in the trunk. Many Egyptians and Arabs wanted the lead for roof flashing, gutter repairs, and bullets. Their haul was probably worth about $700 U.S. Not bad for a night’s work. Then, with grunts and groans, and scraping sounds, Ahmed and Farouk managed to get the square iron cover over the hole just right this time, and it dropped the half-inch or so into place. Ahmed stowed the lever tool back inside the car.

A few nights ago these thieves had their difficulties: that time the lid tipped across the diagonal and fell down the hole, all 200 pounds of it. They said zibl! and left the scene as fast as they could with their cache of lead sheet.

Meanwhile back in the man-hole the hundreds of paper insulated telephone wires were exposed. Not tonight, nor tomorrow night, nor perhaps for several months, but eventually rain water, and sewage sludge would creep up to the wires, soak through the paper, and slowly ruin telephone service.

CHAPTER ONE

In Cairo in their 5th floor walk-up flat as Leah finished ironing the shirt for her husband, Sami, she asked: Sami, would you please call your brother Albert and ask him when we should come next week for Easter?

Sami Nahkla, his wife Leah, and their two sons always spent holidays with his brother Albert and his family. Tonight, Sami was sitting in the parlor reading from the Egyptian Gazette about Anwar Sadat meeting with Menachim Begin. Yes, dear, he said lifting the black telephone handset from the cradle intending to make the call. He made the usual assumption expecting to hear dial tone by the time he placed the handset to his ear. This time there was silence coming from the earpiece.

Leah, the phone is dead, I got no dial tone, he said. Then to himself: ‘so it’s finally happened here in our area now. I’ve got to go to the cabinet in the alley behind the apartment building and test for a live pair. Or I can go down to the central office and call Albert from there. Well at any rate Leah and I must have telephone service. So I’ll just go now to the cabinet and connect our line to a live pair, and make the call with the butt-in-ski.’ A butt-in-ski is a telephone service-man’s portable handset, that comes equipped with alligator clips and signalling electronics.

Sami, in his late thirties was ARENTO’s lead engineer in the outside plant area for Egypt’s telephone network. He had intimate knowledge of the workings and the cable connections in the telephone system here in Cairo, Egypt. He and his wife recently celebrated their eleventh wedding anniversary. Their two sons Alex and Hamdi were enrolled in a Coptic Church School in Cairo. Although Sami’s family were practicing Christians, they celebrated Muslim holidays as well.

Sami said: Leah, I’m going out to the service box behind the apartment building, and rig up another connection for us, if there is one, so we can use the phone. Well, be careful, she said and gave him a kiss.

Sami took his keys and flashlight, walked down the five flights of stairs in the apartment building, went outside to his car. From the trunk he took the butt-in-ski, and his lineman’s test meter also. Slamming the trunk lid, he turned to the alley, and walked between the buildings towards the service cabinet. Arriving at the metal cabinet, about forty paces down the alley, he inserted the special key in the door lock. Sand, grit, and a few wire clipping dropped out as he opened the