CAIRO — The Egyptian authorities on Wednesday confiscated all the copies of one of the country’s largest private newspapers in order to censor an article, just days after President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi vowed in an American television interview that there was “no limitation on freedom of expression in Egypt.”

In fact, the censorship is another example of constriction of news media freedom since the military takeover in July 2013 that brought Mr. Sisi to power. The article, in the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm, was the latest installment in a serialized interview conducted with a senior spy before he died.

Although all the printed copies containing the article were seized, it was available through PressDisplay.com, an online newsstand, which evidently archived the edition before it could be confiscated. The headline quoted the former spy, Refaat Jibril, declaring that Egypt had never executed a single Israeli spy. “We used to return them to Israel in the context of deals to bring back our prisoners,” he said, according to the article, which may have undercut the intelligence agencies’ hard-line image.

Records indicate that Egypt has executed defendants convicted of spying for Israel as recently as the 1980s, with famous cases in 1954 and 1962, said Yossi Melman, co-author of “Spies Against Armageddon,” a history of the Israeli intelligence services.