Behind the indictments, a foreign spy service at work
“What else can the love of my life do for you?” asked Nadine Arslanian, the girlfriend of Sen. Bob Menendez.
She posed the question at a cozy dinner at a steakhouse in May 2019 attended by Gen. Ahmed Helmy, Egypt's top spy in Washington. The discussion was revealed in a federal indictment Thursday.
As Helmy would come to find out, even if Ars- lanian and her soon-to- be husband were not always able to deliver what Egypt wanted, they at least seemed to try very hard.
The indictment charged Menendez, D-N.J., and his now wife with conspiring to act as agents of the Egyptian government. The document, in addition to another indictment made public last month, paint an unseemly picture of how the couple advanced Egyptian interests on numerous fronts.
They tried to head off potential cuts to the more than $1 billion in aid that the United States sends to Cairo each year. They gave Egyptian officials internal information about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. And they pushed the U.S. secretary of state to help block a dam project on the Nile River that Egypt's government vigorously opposed.
In return, prosecutors say, the Menendezes received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold bars, cash and other bribes.
The fact that the couple was talking directly to Helmy and his boss, Gen. Abbas Kamel, the chief of Egypt's powerful General Intelligence Service, is a measure of how important the senator was to the highest levels of the Egyptian government and how central the country's spies have become to its interests.
Neither Helmy nor Kamel are named in the indictments, and their roles have not been previously reported. Helmy is identified in the indictment only as “Egyptian Official-3” and Kamel as “Egyptian Official-5.” But three U.S. officials have confirmed their names.
The roles of the two Egyptian spies in trying to influence U.S. policy also provide more evidence to suggest that the information-passing and bribe-paying could be part of an espionage operation centered on Bob Menendez and not just another tactic to wield influence in Washington.
The spies in Washington also reflect a deliberate strategy by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt to lean on those he trusts most — the intelligence cadres led by Kamel — who form part of the military and intelligence apparatus that helped el-Sissi seize power in 2013.
In Cairo, General Intelligence handles virtually all key foreign policy matters and has shunted aside the once powerful Foreign Ministry. General Intelligence also has domestic responsibilities such as keeping Parliament in line and micromanaging the news media.
Along with Egypt's military, General Intelligence has become one of the country's biggest economic players and gobbles up what scholars have determined is a huge portion of Egypt's economy.
Details in the two Menendez indictments reveal how central the couple was to the efforts of Egyptian intelligence officials.
In one instance, in May 2019, Helmy pressed Menendez to intervene with his Senate colleagues who were holding up military aid to Egypt because of the government's unwillingness to properly compensate an American who was injured in an Egyptian airstrike in 2015.
Days after meeting with Menendez, Helmy sent an encrypted text in Arabic to Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessperson who had introduced the couple to several Egyptian officials and has also been charged by prosecutors. The general wrote that if the senator helped resolve the matter, “he will sit very comfortably.”
“Orders, consider it done,” Hana replied, according to the indictment.