On the night of 26 September 1962, a column of T-34 tanks trundled through the streets of Sanaa and surrounded the palace of the new Imam of Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, who had succeeded his father Imam Ahmad (r.1948-62) only one week earlier. Opening fire shortly before midnight, the Yemeni Free Officers announced the ‘26 September Revolution’ on Radio Sanaa and declared the formation of a new state: the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). The revolution drew on support from a domestic coalition of military officers, Aden-based traders and trade-unionists, reformist Imamate officials, and tribal leaders the Imam had antagonised it was also supported by Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, which had encouraged plots against the Imam and supported opposition to his rule since the 1950s. Once the formation of the YAR had been declared, Egypt rapidly deployed troops and experts to Yemen.

Within little more than a week after the overthrow of the Imam, 3,000 Egyptian soldiers had arrived in Yemen. After three months, there were 15,000, flanked by growing numbers of civilian advisors. One year after the Imam was overthrown, some 50,000 Egyptian soldiers and 300 civilian advisors were in Yemen, that is one Egyptian soldier for every 100 Yemenis and one advisor for every ten Yemeni civil servants. The Egyptian military presence continued to grow to reach 70,000 soldiers and an extensive intelligence apparatus by the summer of 1965, supported by up to 400 civilian advisors, including managers, experts and teachers, before it ended in the autumn of 1967, after Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War. Between 1962 and 1967, Egyptian experts in Yemen were engaged in everything from building and running ministries and hospitals, to teaching students, from overseeing road construction, to reconfiguring local administration. They explicitly touted Egyptian models. Within a short time, Egyptian officers trained thousands of Yemeni volunteer soldiers and conscripts according to Egyptian manuals, teachers introduced the Egyptian curriculum in schools, and experts re-organised ministries according to the organigrammes of their Egyptian counterparts.

Surprisingly little has been written about this significant top-down and externally-driven transformation, perhaps the most dramatic of Egypt’s extensive efforts at promoting revolution and regime-change across the Arab world during the Nasserist era. Despite the unparalleled scope of the Egyptian deployment in Yemen, the commanding importance of Egyptian officers and secondees in Yemeni politics, and the centrality of the Yemen debacle for Egyptian regional and domestic politics of the 1960s, ‘little research has been conducted on seconded Egyptians’ involvement in Yemen throughout this period.’ This is true both of Egyptian historiography, which, when it has discussed the Egyptian presence in Yemen, has generally focused on military issues and Saudi-Egyptian summit diplomacy, and of writing on Yemen itself. To address this relative blind-spot, the chapter draws on hitherto unexplored documents from the Egyptian National Archives (ENA). As recently as 2012, Jesse Ferris identified ‘the closure of the relevant Egyptian archives to researchers,’ as a major obstacle; and the consulted documents provide a far more granular perspective on Egypt’s presence in Yemen than hitherto available. The chapter also draws on interviews, memoirs, journalistic accounts of the war, and other archival material.