Wael Ghonim embraces the mother of dead businessman Khaled Said in Tahrir Square, 8 February Wael Ghonim met the mother of dead businessman Khaled Said in Tahrir Square on 8 February

In Wael Ghonim, Egypt’s anti-Mubarak street movement finally found a hero to rally around after a period of leaderless protest.

The Egyptian-born Google marketing executive first played a role in organising the opposition through Facebook, only to disappear into police custody for 12 days.

Emerging again, he denied he had done anything heroic at all, instead paying tribute to the young activists who had been on the streets since 25 January.

But his return to the public eye – marked by an emotional TV interview on 7 February which gripped Egyptian viewers – re-energised the movement just as it seemed to be losing steam.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of protesters returned to the streets of Cairo the day after he spoke testifies to his appeal.

He was hailed on Facebook and Twitter as a hero, Egyptian blogger Issandr el-Amrani noted.

“You know how this has been a leaderless movement and they’re saying they want to designate him as a leader of the youth component in this movement,” Mr Amrani told the BBC World Service.
Cyber activist

Mr Ghonim walked free after a campaign waged by Google on behalf of its marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa.
Wael Ghonim weeps during his Dream TV interview, 7 February Wael Ghonim wept on television

The search engine giant may not have been aware that its Dubai-based manager had been running a popular Facebook page, with 400,000 Egyptian followers, outside of office hours, BBC technology correspondent Mark Gregory reports.

Named after Khaled Said, a businessman who died in police custody in Alexandria last year, the page played a crucial role in organising the protests.

The “We are all Khaled Said” website became a rallying point for a campaign against police brutality. For many Egyptians, it revealed details of the extent of torture in their country.

The 30-year-old executive says he was blindfolded for most of his time in custody, threatened with torture but not actually hurt.

Soon after being freed, he appeared live on one of Egypt’s most watched talk shows, on the Dream 2 television channel.

“This is the revolution of the youth of the internet, which became the revolution of the youth of Egypt, then the revolution of Egypt itself,” he said.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

I delegate Wael Ghonim to speak in the name of Egypt’s revolutionaries”

End Quote Title of Facebook page with at least 130,000 followers

“I’m not a hero, I slept for 12 days,” he continued.

“The heroes, they’re the ones who were in the street, who took part in the demonstrations, sacrificed their lives, were beaten, arrested and exposed to danger.”

He was shown video of some of those who had died during the protests, events he was seeing for the first time.

He burst into tears, insisting it was the fault of the authorities, not the campaigners, and left the studio – a human response that provoked a wave of sympathy.

“Ghonim’s tears have moved millions and turned around the views of those who supported [Mubarak] staying,” the website masrawy.com wrote two hours after the interview.

At least 130,000 people have joined a Facebook page titled “I delegate Wael Ghonim to speak in the name of Egypt’s revolutionaries” since the interview, the Associated Press news agency reports.
Patriot

Addressing the giant rally on Tahrir Square on 8 February, Mr Ghonim declared: “We won’t give up.”
The Facebook Freedom Fighter
Wael Ghonim’s day job was at Google. But at night he was organizing a revolution.

Khaled Desouki / AFP-Getty Images

After spending almost two weeks in detention, Ghonim found himself anointed a leader by the leaderless movement he’d helped to create.

The telephone call from Cairo came late on Thursday, Jan. 27. “I think they’re following me,” the caller told the friend on the other end. “I’m going to destroy this phone.”

And then the line went dead.

Soon after, so did cell phones across Egypt, and then the Internet, as authorities cut communication in a last-ditch effort to halt the protests gripping the country.

The only trace the caller left was in cyberspace, where he had delivered a haunting message via Twitter: “Pray for #Egypt.”

Three days later in Washington, D.C., Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian émigré and media-relations professional, sat staring at her computer, hoping rumors of the caller’s disappearance weren’t true.

Suddenly his screen name flashed to life. She stared at the message.

“Admin 1 is missing,” it said. “This is Admin 2.”

Admin 1 was the caller, the anonymous administrator of a Facebook page that had played a crucial role in inspiring the uprising in Cairo. He had left Wahab with a contingency plan. If he disappeared, Wahab should wait until Feb. 8, two weeks from the date of the first protest, before she revealed his identity and sounded the alarm. At all costs, she was to maintain the appearance of normalcy on the page.
Alex Majoli / Magnum for NewsweekThe Agony and the Ecstasy

The contingency plan had made no mention of an Admin 2, and Wahab worried that the message might be a trap.

For the next week, Wahab and her small cadre of online associates became immersed in what seemed like a shadowy cyberthriller. At its center was a bespectacled techie named Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old father of two, and Google’s head of marketing in the Middle East.

Months of online correspondence between Ghonim and Wahab, parts of which were provided to NEWSWEEK, as well as telephone and online conversations with the magazine, reveal a man who adopted a dead man’s identity to push for democracy, taking on a secret life that nearly consumed him.

Ghonim had received a master’s degree in marketing and finance from American University in Cairo and began working for Google in late 2008. In little more than a year, he was promoted to head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, a position based in Dubai, where he and his family moved into a house in one of the city’s affluent suburbs.

Ghonim and Wahab met electronically last spring, after Ghonim volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner who had emerged as a key opposition leader; Wahab offered to help with PR. Ghonim had a strong tech background, having already founded several successful Web ventures. But it was his marketing skills that would fuel his transformation into Egypt’s most important cyberactivist.

Under Ghonim, ElBaradei’s page, which promoted democratic reform, grew rapidly. He surveyed its fans for input, pushing ideas like crowdsourced video Q&As. “Voting is the right way to represent people in a democratic way,” he wrote Wahab in May. “We use it even inside Google internally. Even when our CEO is live, if someone posts a tough question and others vote, he must answer it.”

Ghonim thought Facebook could be the ideal revolutionary tool in Egypt’s suffocating police state. “Once you are a fan, whatever we publish gets on your wall,” he wrote. “So the government has NO way to block it later. Unless they block Facebook completely.”

As the page grew, it became increasingly consuming, and Ghonim began to feel he was leading two separate lives. “In the morning I lead a 1m budget,” he mused to Wahab in June. “At night, I am a video editor at YouTube.”

That month, a young Alexandria businessman named Khaled Said, who had posted a video on the Web showing cops pilfering pot from a drug bust, was assaulted at an Internet café by local police. They dragged him outside and beat him to death in broad daylight. Photos of his battered corpse went viral.

Ghonim was moved by the photos to start a new Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” to which he began devoting the bulk of his efforts. The page quickly became a forceful campaign against police brutality in Egypt, with a constant stream of photos, videos, and news. Ghonim’s interactive style, combined with the page’s carefully calibrated posts—emotional, apolitical, and broad in their appeal—quickly turned it into one of Egypt’s largest activist sites.

Only select people, including Wahab, who quickly signed on to help, knew of Ghonim’s involvement with the page. To run the page, Ghonim had assumed the pseudonym El Shaheed, or The Martyr, to protect himself and commemorate the dead man—creating a persona that became one of Ghonim’s most powerful tools. “My purpose,” he said in a conversation with Wahab, “is to increase the bond between the people and the group through my unknown personality. Thisway we create an army of volunteers.”

On Jan. 14, protests in Tunisia felled that country’s longstanding dictator, and Ghonim was inspired to announce, on Facebook, a revolution of Egypt’s own. Each of the page’s 350,000-plus fans was cordially invited to a protest on Jan. 25. They could click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to signal whether they’d like to attend.

In the space of three days, more than 50,000 people answered “yes.” Posing as El Shaheed in a Gmail chat, Ghonim was optimistic but cautioned that online support might not translate into a revolt in the streets.

“The bottom line is: I have no idea,” he said. While some commentators hyped “that the internet is making a revolution,” others proclaimed that the “revolution can’t be tweeted,” he said. “I don’t know, and I don’t give a s–t. I’m doing what it takes to make my country better.”

Ghonim implored his Facebook fans to spread word of the protest to people on the ground, and he and other activists constantly coordinated efforts, combining online savvy with the street activism long practiced by the country’s democracy movements. Ghonim seemed to view the page both as a kind of central command and a rallying point—getting people past “the psychological barrier.”

Ghonim insisted that neither he nor anyone else was in charge. The real driving force behind the protest, he predicted, would be the people he was trying to empower. “What you don’t understand, and it seems what you don’t want to understand, is that this protest doesn’t have real organizers,” he told NEWSWEEK. “It’s a protest without a leader.”

Despite his insistence on anonymity, Ghonim was far from humble. “BTW, I want my photo to be on the cover” of the magazine, he joked.

When reminded that this might compromise his still-hidden identity, he suggested using a photo of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the protagonist in V for Vendetta, a film about a mysterious revolutionary, and insisted on being referred to as “V” in any stories, before eventually settling for El Shaheed.

An American NGO had contacted him to offer financial assistance, he claimed. “I replied with two words,” he said. “ ‘F–k You.’ ”

In another conversation, he mocked the idea that any politician could corral the growing protest push. “A virtual guy that they don’t know is telling them what to do,” he said. “I have the people on my side.”

Ghonim seemed to think the anonymous persona was an equalizer that could prevent the protest push from being hijacked—by politicians like ElBaradei, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps even by Ghonim himself. “I’ll keep my identity anonymous even if a revolution kicks in and this government is kicked,” he said. “Cause the reason why I think we are f–ked up in this country is that everyone is looking for his personal fame. Everyone starts somewhere with good intentions. Then eventually they get corrupted.”

He had already laid the groundwork for the El Shaheed persona to live on without him, acknowledging in another conversation with NEWSWEEK that the moniker of The Martyr might come to represent his own fate. It was clear, as he flew to Egypt to join the protest, that he would be under threat.

On Tuesday, Jan. 25, Ghonim joined the first demonstration, along with hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Esraa Abdel Fattah, another organizer, who knew Ghonim but didn’t realize he was El Shaheed, saw him that night in Tahrir Square, along with scores of other protesters.

In an online conversation the following day, Ghonim was ecstatic but also worried. Activists, he said, were beginning to disappear. On Thursday night, as organizers were planning another major protest the following day, Facebook began flicking in and out of service. “Facebook is blocked again. Sons of bitches. I was just announcing the locations,” Ghonim said.

A few hours later, he made the ominous phone call to his friend, saying he thought he was being followed.

The next morning, plainclothes police officers came for him.

Ghonim—Admin 1—was now missing.

Admin 2, who asked not to be named—“I’m the guy who’s the backup in case something really horrible happens,” he said in a Skype call with NEWSWEEK—had his own protocol to follow. Once he realized Ghonim was missing, he notified Google and Ghonim’s family, and then set to work changing passwords and securing things on the Web. “I wanted the page to stay alive. The most important thing is the page itself,” he said. “The page is more important than any individual.”

In fact, he worried that by changing the passwords, he could be risking greater harm for Ghonim—what if police were torturing him for access to the site? “I either protect my friend or I continue the movement,” he said, clearly haunted by the dilemma. “It turns out I am not a good friend.”

Still following Ghonim’s instructions, Admin 2 proceeded to pore through the El Shaheed inbox to find the person Ghonim had described only as the girl in the United States, whom he had been told to contact.

When Nadine Wahab got his message, she first worried that Admin 2 was Egyptian police, but she quickly saw that Admin 2 was equally frightened, and the two began posting on the Facebook page, posing as El Shaheed. (Admin 2 also gave a sealed envelope to a friend, with instructions to open it if he went missing for more than a day. The envelope contained user names, passwords, and instructions on maintaining the site.)

For more than a week, it was unclear whether Ghonim had even been arrested—an exhaustive search of local prisons and hospitals turned up nothing. Google put out a statement that Ghonim was missing, without mention of his political involvement. The company also set up a phone line and email address for any tips about his whereabouts.

As the search continued, and word of the missing Google executive spread, rumors began swirling on the streets and in the press that Ghonim was El Shaheed, which Ghonim’s family feared might put him in even greater danger. Protesters in Tahrir Square, meanwhile, announced him as their symbolic leader. Facebook pages titled “We Are All Wael Ghonim” began to emerge.

Between frantic calls to the State Department, Wahab tried desperately to quash the rumors—even emailing NEWSWEEK from the El Shaheed address in an attempt to suggest that all was well.

All the while, she felt like she was trapped in a movie plot. She put pillow feathers beneath her front door, to tell if someone sneaked into the house. (Her cat dragged them away.) “It’s been a theater of the absurd,” Wahab said recently. “How did I get myself into this?”

As Ghonim sat blindfolded in detention, trapped in the custody of Egypt’s notorious security forces, the very people he’d spent the last eight months excoriating online, his main concern, he later said in a television interview, was that his identity would be revealed to the protesters.

Ghonim spent nearly two weeks in custody with no idea of the fomenting revolution taking place outside. When he was finally released, Ghonim discovered that he had become the face of Egypt’s revolt—the exact fate he had said he wanted to avoid.

In a phone interview with NEWSWEEK hours after his release on Monday, Feb. 7, in which he finally admitted his real identity, Ghonim tried at first to distance himself from this new role. “That was not my plan, and I hate it, but it was out of my hands,” he said. “I’m not a hero. I’m just one guy. Actually I did the easiest thing, which was writing. A lot of people died.”

Yet as Mubarak clung to power, and then finally fell, protesters continued to look to Ghonim for a voice.

The anonymous persona was finally dead. But in its absence, it seemed Ghonim had been anointed a leader by the leaderless movement he’d helped to create.
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Google exec Wael Ghonim’s first interview out of Egyptian government custody

February 7, 2011 | 8:27 pm

Wael Ghonim, shortly after being freed from custody by the Egyptian government Monday, gave a quick video interview about his experience to Egypt’s On TV network.

Ghonim is Google’s head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa. He was reportedly missing since Jan. 27, after taking part in anti-government protests calling for the removal of President Hosni Mubarak from office as well as for other political changes.

Mubark has been president of Egypt for nearly 30 years.

After his release, Ghonim also posted on Twitter and rejoined protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which has been a center of the nation’s anti-government demonstrations.

In the On TV interview, the Cairo native asked that people not heroize him too much and said he hadn’t been tortured while jailed.

Ghonim’s political profile rose in the time he was held by the government. Egypt’s April 6 opposition group named him its official spokesman during that time, calling on the government to free him and talk to him if it wanted the group to take part in negotiations to end the anti-government protests.

According to captions on a YouTube video posted by ONtveg, Ghonim said in the On TV interview:

First of all, I give my condolences to the Egyptian people who died. I give my condolences to them.

I can’t say I apologize because none of us were breaking anything. Our protests were peaceful and our motto was “Do not break.”

Second of all, I would like to say, please don’t make a hero out of me. I am not a hero. On the contrary, I am a someone who has been sleeping for 12 days.

The heroes are the ones who went down to the streets. Please direct the camera on the right people.

Also, I am all right, thank God.

By God’s will, by God’s will, we will change our country. All the trash that has been happening in our country (Egypt) must be cleaned.

We are all one hand that will clean it, by God’s will.

The video can be seen above. English captions can be seen by clicking the CC icon near the bottom right corner of the video player.
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Egypt’s New Hero: Can Geek-Activist Wael Ghonim Overthrow Mubarak?
By Angela Shah / Dubai Tuesday, Feb. 08, 2011

Wael Ghonim addresses the crowd in Tahrir Square, in Cairo, on Feb. 8, 2011
Dylan Martinez / Reuters

Wael Ghonim is talkative and confident, just like many in the new generation of Arabs who are out to change their world — and prosper in it — by way of technology. He once pointed out that Norway, so much smaller than the Middle East in population, had more indigenous language content on the Web. There was so much room to grow. “We live in a digital age, and it is important that the Arab world takes advantage of this new medium,” Ghonim told an Abu Dhabi paper.

I met him briefly on a couple of occasions in Dubai, where the expatriate Egyptian lived and worked as Google’s head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa. Slim and standing a little more than average height, Ghonim, 30, is typical of the new guard: he speaks English with an American accent but is audibly Arab when he pronounces Arabic words. He is at ease in both worlds. (See TIME’s special report “The Middle East in Revolt.”)

But in spite of his career achievements and comfortable life, he chose to be part of a hidden, more dangerous world — one in which he sought to activate change in his homeland. After he returned to Egypt, that work thrust him into prison for more than 10 days. When he emerged, he was hailed by some as the leader of the faceless group of young revolutionaries who are credited with getting the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak off the ground.

Only a few of Ghonim’s friends knew that he was the creator of the Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said,” on which he called for the Jan. 25 protest that launched the uprising in Tahrir Square. (Said was a 28-year-old techie and businessman who is believed to have been brutally killed by police in Alexandria in 2010.) Ghonim spent “nights and days” on the page, says his friend and fellow geek-entrepreneur Habib Haddad. “I had been in close touch with him as he was doing it and as he was seeing it taking off,” he says. “He was quite emotional about it.”(See pictures of the mass demonstrations in Egypt.)

Haddad, the founder of Yamli.com, an Arabic search engine and transliteration technology, says he and Ghonim engaged in cross-continental Internet chats. Haddad says that after he would go to bed and then get up, he’d see from the chat indicator that Ghonim had stayed up all night working on the page. In fact, he remembers Ghonim joking that his countless hours on the Web were causing tension in his marriage. (Ghonim is married to an American, and the couple have two children.) Still, says Haddad, “it was like the feeling you would get when you are a college student, when you think you’re onto something big.” Haddad, who splits his time between the Middle East and Boston, met Ghonim about four years ago, and says his friend found himself in a situation where he could use his skills to help the movement in Egypt. Says another entrepreneur, Yousef Tuqan Tuqan, CEO of Flip Media, an interactive ad agency in Dubai: “We’re in this young digital generation. What can we do with this wonderful gift that we have besides just make money?”

Haddad says he urged Ghonim to be careful. But Ghonim knew the risks he was taking. On Jan. 27, he tweeted, “Pray for Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die.” He was arrested shortly afterward. And on Jan. 28, anti-riot police pounded protesters with tear-gas canisters as they marched toward Tahrir Square. (See TIME’s exclusive pictures of the turmoil in Egypt.)

Ghonim’s friends and family shared their concern over Twitter and other social media to get his name out into cyberspace. And when Ghonim was released, he increased his media profile by giving an emotional interview on Dream TV, one of Egypt’s satellite stations, breaking down in tears during a montage of images of young men killed in the protests. He said, “I want to say to every mother and every father that lost his child, I am sorry, but this is not our fault. I swear to God, this is not our fault. It is the fault of everyone who was holding on to power greedily and would not let it go.” Then, clearly overcome with emotion, he said, “I want to leave,” and walked off the set.

The next day, many people in Tahrir Square said they had been motivated by the footage to show up to the protest. The epicenter of the uprising had suffered a slackening of dissent, as the focus of the political events shifted to meetings behind closed doors. Ghonim appeared in Tahrir that day as well, and was met with a thunderous greeting. Among the thousands of people who had never been to a protest before was Fatma Gaber, 16, who had finally persuaded her parents to let her go. “When I saw Wael Ghonim [on television],” she says, “I really got affected by his words and understood that a lot of people suffered in this revolution. I really wanted to be part of it and support it. I wanted to join for Egypt, because I didn’t want the people who had died, and the ones who had protested every day, to pay the price alone for what all Egyptians would benefit from.” (Comment on this story.)

But even as he grows increasingly popular and mediagenic, Ghonim has pleaded that he should not be portrayed as the hero of the movement. “I ask you, really, please don’t turn me into a hero,” he said during his TV interview. “I am not a hero, O.K.? I am not a hero. I am a very ordinary person. The heroes are the ones in the street.”

He took time to tweet thanks to “@Google for all the efforts you did in ‘searching’ for me. Today ‘I’m feeling lucky’ that I work for this company.” Through the technology he so fervently embraces, Ghonim has become for many the archetype of the future of leadership in the Arab world: educated, savvy and entrepreneurial. Says Tuqan back in Dubai: “He really does represent what’s best in all of us.”

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Who is Wael Ghonim?
Young Google manager is being hailed as major figure in Egyptian uprising
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 8, 2011 | 1:15 PM ET Comments12Recommend3

Wael Ghonim, a manager in Google Inc.’s Middle East and North Africa marketing divisions, has emerged as one of the prime catalysts in the recent uprising against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

In January, the 30-year-old man created a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” named in honour of the 27-year-old Egyptian blogger beaten to death by police in June. The Facebook page, which was operated anonymously under the handle “El Shaheed” (the martyr), became a rallying point for the anti-government protests that began on Jan. 25.

On Jan. 27, Ghonim went missing. On his Twitter feed that day, he wrote this chilling note: “Pray for #Egypt. Very worried as it seems that government is planning a war crime tomorrow against people. We are all ready to die #Jan25.”

For several days, family, friends and Google co-workers struggled to determine Ghonim’s whereabouts. It was discovered that he was being held by Egyptian authorities.

After 12 days in detention, Ghonim was released on Feb. 7. That night, he did a highly emotional interview on Dream 2, a private Egyptian channel, in which he confirmed that he was the administrator of the Facebook page. Ghonim also created the official web site for Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize winner who has emerged as one of the most visible opponents of Mubarak, according to Ziad Al-Alimi, a senior aide to ElBaradei.

Ghonim said that he had not been tortured while in detention, but Egyptian officers did interrogate him relentlessly about how the anti-government protests were organized.

In the TV interview, he stressed that the Facebook page was the work of many contributors. “This was a revolution of the youth of all of Egypt,” he said. “I’m not a hero.”

A longtime Internet activist, Ghonim has a computer engineering degree from Cairo University and an MBA in marketing and finance from the American University in Cairo. Born in Cairo, he grew up the United Arab Emirates and currently resides in Dubai.

Several commentators have pointed out that by targeting and detaining Ghonim, Egyptian authorities have only legitimized him as a leader in the uprising.

More than 130,000 people have now joined another Facebook group backing Ghonim as the spokesperson for the revolt. On Feb. 8, Ghonim arrived to a hero’s welcome in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where thousands amassed to catch a glimpse of him.

Ghonim has been modest, if not downright ambivalent, about emerging as a leader of the rebellion.

“That was not my plan, and I hate it, but it was out of my hands,” he said.