Karim Pasha Thabet, the press advisor to King Farouk, was a journalist from a family that had migrated from the Levant to Egypt in the mid-19th century. His father was the editor-in-chief of Al-Muqattam newspaper, which had close ties to the British occupation authorities. Karim Thabet inherited this position from his father. He co-founded Al-Masry newspaper in 1936 with prominent journalists Mahmoud Abu al-Fath and Mohamed al-Tabi, his colleagues at Al-Ahram newspaper. In 1942, King Farouk appointed Karim Thabet as his press advisor, a position that had not existed before. The British Orientalist Sir Walter Smart, the Oriental Advisor at the British Embassy, recommended him for this post. Smart was married to the daughter of Fares Nimr, the owner of Al-Muqattam newspaper, who was also Karim Thabet's maternal uncle. Karim Thabet remained in this position until 1952, when he was arrested by the Free Officers Movement and imprisoned for a long period. During his imprisonment, he wrote the first chapters of his memoirs about his life in the royal palace, memoirs that were not published until the late 1990s, after Karim Thabet's death. These memoirs were published by Dar Al-Shorouk in two parts, the first entitled “Ten Years with Farouk”, and the other entitled “Farouk as I Knew Him”, with an introduction written by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, and they sparked widespread controversy due to the doubts of some of those who lived through the same events regarding their content.
