The Angel Read online

  The Mossad men knew about Pujol and similar affairs, and thoroughly went through the documents and other information that Marwan gave Dubi. This, they concluded, was no chicken feed. It was not only reliable but exceptionally valuable. This made it seem even less likely that Marwan had been sent by Egyptian intelligence. And no less important, the officials concluded that even if he were a double agent, they would have the means to discover it in a timely fashion. They would need to constantly double-check both the accuracy and the style of information he passed along. They also set up two committees to oversee his handling: one just of Mossad officials, the other a joint committee with Military Intelligence. The latter was the product of a strong tradition in the Israeli intelligence community, which held that at least some of the people evaluating new operatives needed to be completely disconnected from their recruitment and handling.

  The consensus that emerged concerning these two initial questions enabled Zamir, Vardi, Goren, and the others to turn the discussion to more practical matters. The first concerned payment. Marwan did not mention any specific figure he expected to receive, but everyone knew it wouldn’t be small. More than four years earlier, in August 1966, the Mossad had paid $50,000 to Munir Redfa, an Iraqi pilot, to take his advanced MiG-21 fighter and land it safely at the Hatzor Air Force Base in Israel. This dramatic operation, painstakingly planned and executed, allowed Israeli pilots to study up close the dominant warplane in the Egyptian and Syrian arsenals, and contributed significantly to Israel’s air superiority in the Six-Day War. Israel then let experts from the US Air Force examine the aircraft, helping boost Israel’s security ties with the Americans, for whom the MiG-21 had been a mystery. To convince Redfa to defect, then Mossad chief Meir Amit had been willing to pay twice as much, but Redfa accepted the first sum offered him. That, however, was a one-off. Marwan, they figured, would want to be paid for every meeting in which he handed over secret information. At this point there was little choice but to wait and hear his price.

  This, however, raised another problem. From everything they knew about Marwan, it was clear that an infusion of cash could translate into a suddenly profligate lifestyle—raising questions about whether he was selling state secrets. The Mossad had faced this problem in the past, but the amounts were always small and the agents extremely careful. The recruitment of Ashraf Marwan now raised the problem to a whole new dimension. The Israelis, however, were familiar with the behavioral norms of upper-crust Egyptian society and concluded that Marwan would be able to find a plausible explanation for his sudden change in standard of living. As he would himself later tell his handlers, in a country like Egypt, where bribe taking was the rule rather than the exception, you don’t have to explain why Nasser’s son-in-law might have money. The answers were so clear that the questions didn’t need asking.

  The final question concerned who would be Marwan’s handler. The problem was complex. A successful handler combined a variety of outstanding skills and traits. John le Carré, who served in British intelligence, once described the successful handler as offering his operative an “image of mentor, shepherd, parent and befriender, as prop and marriage counselor, as pardoner, entertainer, and protector. . . .”5 Such was the prevailing attitude in the Mossad as well, especially when thinking about how to handle a young man as complex as Ashraf Marwan. The handler ought to be someone of unassailable authority, a shoulder to lean on, who could help him function while leading a dangerous double life. Someone older, experienced, wise, and cautious.

  Dubi did not exactly fit the bill. He had been chosen to meet Marwan in London mainly because no one else could be found in the narrow time frame. But he was not a natural choice. His experience with operatives was relatively limited. A number of names were raised in the discussions that now took place. And yet, Dubi had proven himself amply since arriving at the London bureau and had earned a reputation of being responsible and professional, accurate and a stickler for rules, someone who wrote reports that described things as they were, without embellishment. This last quality was especially valued in a handler. Agents like Marwan were often willing to work with only one person, which meant that the handler was the agency’s only source of information about what was happening on the ground. Dubi had other advantages as well. He had charm, grace, and the ability to generate chemistry. All these created the potential for a high-quality relationship with Ashraf Marwan.

  What ultimately tipped the scales in Dubi’s favor were the specific circumstances at hand. His one meeting with Marwan had clearly gone well. From his restrained report it was clear that a bond had been forged. But because of the personal risk involved, Marwan had insisted that he would not meet with anyone other than “Alex.” At this stage, the main concern of Zamir and the others was that Marwan would not renew contact the next time he came to London, and they were unwilling to take any chances. Replacing Dubi might have led Marwan to feel that the Mossad was not taking his needs seriously, and the new prospect could easily be lost. Thus it was decided, after considerable deliberation, that Dubi would continue to handle Marwan for the time being. As opposed to other operatives, however, Marwan’s handling would be conducted in direct consultation with headquarters in Tel Aviv. This reflected Marwan’s unusual significance. In effect, it put both Vardi and Zamir in the circle directly involved in handling Marwan.

  With this they concluded their discussions about the recruitment of Ashraf Marwan. All that was left were a number of bureaucratic procedures involved in any new agent’s recruitment. One was assigning a code name to protect his identity. This was the responsibility of a subunit of Tzomet. Names were taken from prepared lists and were assigned at random. Ashraf Marwan’s early code names included “Packti” and “Atmos.” The one that stuck, however, was “the Angel.” The officer who had come up with it was a fan of the 1960s TV series starring Roger Moore, The Saint. Because of the original title’s Christian resonance, the show was sold in Israel under the title Hamal’ach—“The Angel.”

  Years later, after the Yom Kippur War, it would become clear just how apt the code name really was.

  Chapter 3

  APRIL 1971: ENTER MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

  The first meeting with Ashraf Marwan took place about four months after an August 7, 1970, cease-fire agreement brought an end to the War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel. The outcome of that war had not given the Egyptian government any reason to believe it was in a position to launch another round of hostilities, especially one aimed at crossing the Suez Canal and taking back the Sinai Peninsula. True, the war had proven the Egyptians’ resolve to roll back the losses of the Six-Day War—but it had also proven their abiding military inferiority.

  The Egyptian strategy behind the War of Attrition had been to wear down Israel’s will to fight through the steady letting of IDF soldiers’ blood. Egypt took advantage of its superior artillery, constantly shelling the line of Israeli fortifications along the canal known as the Bar-Lev Line, as well as the roads connecting them, while occasionally launching commando raids aimed at killing Israeli soldiers. The cost to Israel was high but not insufferable. In the seventeen months of fighting, 260 IDF soldiers lost their lives—less than half the number of highway fatalities tallied in Israel in 1970. Nor is it clear exactly how many Egyptians died in the war. One American source estimated no fewer than 5,000, while Israeli sources put the number around 15,000. Not only was the kill ratio intolerable for the Egyptians, but it was an ongoing reminder that on every battlefield, in the air or on the land, Israel had the upper hand.

  This was most pronounced in air warfare. The ratio of planes shot down was seven to one in Israel’s favor—compared, for example, to American major aircraft losses in the Vietnam War of up to fifteen F-105s for every North Vietnamese MiG-21. By late 1969, IAF raids had eviscerated Egypt’s antiaircraft batteries, leaving the country completely open to air attack. In early 1970, Israel began launching bombing raids deep in Egyptian territory, attacking military installations in the
suburbs of Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere. These raids aimed not only to weaken Egypt militarily but also to destabilize Nasser’s regime and force him into a cease-fire. But then the Soviets came to Egypt’s rescue, sending a whole antiaircraft division, including more than seventy batteries of SA-2 and SA-3 surface-to-air missiles and seventy MiG-21 fighter planes—a major deployment that put an end to Israel’s deep-bombing raids and, to some extent, evened the playing field in the sky. Hostilities escalated, reaching their peak on July 30, 1970, in a direct Israeli-Soviet air battle in which five Soviet warplanes were shot down and just one Israeli aircraft damaged. After the battle, the sides agreed to a cease-fire.

  In July, when Marwan first called the Israeli embassy in London, the War of Attrition was at its peak. By mid-December, when he finally met Dubi, the sides had signed a ninety-day cease-fire agreement that had already lapsed. Although an extension was signed for another ninety days, it was clear that without significant diplomatic progress, including an Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Suez Canal, the resumption of fire was just a matter of time. The Angel quickly became a crucial source for the Israelis as they tried to understand Egyptian intentions regarding war, and this question dominated his intelligence-gathering assignments.

  The question, of course, was seriously complicated by the death of Nasser in September 1970 and his succession by Anwar Sadat. In a series of meetings between Dubi and Marwan, a picture emerged of the new Egyptian leader as a man facing an impossible dilemma. On the one hand, the more Sadat explored the options for taking Israel on militarily, the more he realized how few and futile they were. With the end of the War of Attrition, some generals had insisted they knew how to take back the Sinai; Sadat, however, did not believe his army capable of even crossing the Suez Canal. Instead he was more interested in launching a limited military assault aimed at forcing Israel back to the negotiating table. At the same time, even that was dangerous; the Israelis had warned explicitly that if Egypt restarted hostilities, Israel would make sure they did not remain static. Sadat’s biggest problem was the IAF’s overwhelming air superiority, which had rendered the Egyptian home front extremely vulnerable. The only way for Egypt to keep Israel from using the full weight of its air force was if the Soviets were to give Egypt some serious “weapons of deterrence”—namely, long-range warplanes that could attack the IAF bases in Israel and missiles that could reach Israeli population centers. Yet the Soviets, for fear of another Egyptian defeat and in order to maintain detente with the United States, were not forthcoming. And so, in early 1971, Sadat did not believe he really had a military option.

  At the same time, the diplomatic door seemed locked as well. True, Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan advocated cutting a deal in which the IDF would pull back from the bank of the Suez Canal, but Egyptian forces would not enter the territory vacated, in order to enable the reopening of the canal and create a buffer that would make it a lot harder for Egypt to retake the Sinai by force. But Prime Minister Golda Meir opposed any diplomatic initiatives with Egypt at this stage and forbade Dayan from making any moves in that direction. When Sadat made a similar proposal in February 1971, about two months after Ashraf Marwan began feeding information to Israel, she dismissed it out of hand.

  In a meeting with Dubi early in 1971, Marwan described the dead end Sadat felt he had reached, adding that even if the current president was more open to a diplomatic accord than was his predecessor, the best one could hope for was a broad armistice rather than a peace agreement. Marwan also presented the new Egyptian offensive battle concept developed by Minister of War Mohamed Fawzi and the fruitless talks with the Soviets about supplying “weapons of deterrence.” From all this, the Israelis came to understand just how unrealistic the military option for Egypt was—lending significant support to those in the Israeli government, especially Golda Meir, who opposed any diplomatic initiative.

  Marwan’s compensation for all this was relatively modest. Just as in his first meeting with Dubi, Marwan did not raise the issue of payment in their second meeting, either, allowing the matter to simmer while the Israelis learned to appreciate his full value. When the subject finally came up, it was agreed that he would receive payments of $10,000 from time to time. This was not a small sum, but it was reasonable given the quality of his intelligence, especially the top-secret documents from the President’s Office that began finding their way to the desks of Israeli leaders at a startling pace.

  This was a promising beginning, to say the least. Yet despite the ease with which “Alex” and the Angel established their relationship, efforts were already under way to have Dubi replaced as Marwan’s handler. The driving force behind them was Shmuel Goren, head of operations in Western Europe. He knew from experience that a too-close relationship between a handler and his operative could get in the way, for example, of pressuring the agent to hand over the most urgently needed information. Dubi, for all his merits, was still pretty new at the job, and Goren wanted someone more experienced. Goren may have had ulterior motives, however. His relationship with the station chief in London was tense, and he wanted direct authority over an operation that was turning into a stellar success. His candidate for the job was a veteran intelligence officer born in Aleppo in Syria. Goren pressed Zvi Zamir, who promised to consider it but in the end decided not to make the change. This was not the last time the subject of replacing Dubi would come up.

  As Marwan’s importance became more evident, however, it became clear that he ought to be introduced to officials from different parts of Israeli intelligence, people who could bring their own experience into the dialogue. This was not unusual. According to the accepted division of labor in the Israeli intelligence community at the time, the agency responsible for formulating national intelligence assessments was IDF Military Intelligence (MI); the Mossad, on the other hand, was formally under the command of the prime minister and charged with running operatives in Arab states and other relevant places. Information gathered by the Mossad was then sent to the IDF MI’s Research Division, which was the Mossad’s main consumer of intelligence; there it was analyzed along with materials from the Shin Bet and MI itself. MI-Research would then formulate the priorities for intelligence gathering, including specific questions that the IDF wanted answers to. MI’s Unit 11 was in charge of relations with the Mossad, preparing the questions and sending them to the Tzomet operations branch of the Mossad, which would then pass them on to the relevant handlers. This is how Marwan was handled from the very first meeting with him, until the early spring of 1971. Dubi would ask him the questions that Intelligence Unit 11 had sent, writing down the answers and sending them back to MI-Research and Air Force Intelligence.

  Cooperation between the two agencies included another practice, however, in which high-quality agents would meet not only with their Mossad handler but also with different experts in the specific areas being discussed, usually from MI-Research. Marwan had quickly positioned himself as Israel’s top-ranked operative in the entire Arab world. The heads of the Mossad and MI decided that in light of the importance of air battles in any conflict with Egypt, and Marwan’s access to crucial materials in that area, it might help if an analyst from Israeli Air Force Intelligence met him. But the man who they believed could best take advantage of a direct meeting was the chief of MI-Research’s Branch 6 (Egypt), Lt. Col. Meir Meir.

  IN 1971, MEIR MEIR had been head of MI-Research Branch 6 for almost two years. But he had been in intelligence much longer than that. In the 1948 War of Independence, he had been seriously wounded in defense of Kibbutz Negba, a grueling battle that had slowed the advance of Egyptian forces into the Israeli heartland. After recovering from his injuries, Meir joined the IDF’s nascent Military Intelligence branch, where he gained an expertise in field intelligence, and in preparation for the 1956 war he was chosen to assemble the field book for the Sinai Peninsula, which would serve as the IDF’s main reference during the war. The book, which benefited from the input of the country’s exper
ts in geology, hydrology, oil drilling, and more, proved to be exceedingly accurate, an irreplaceable aid for the troops conquering the peninsula. After the war, Meir took up a series of posts in MI, including assistant intelligence officer for the chief of the Northern Command and chief of staff under MI commander Meir Amit. During the crisis leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War, he served as the personal assistant to MI commander Aharon Yariv. But when Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, cutting off all maritime traffic to Israel’s southern port of Eilat and making war with Egypt all but imminent, Meir tried to get transferred to something more combat-oriented. During the war, he served as intelligence officer for the 84th Armored Division—the force responsible for destroying the bulk of the Egyptian forces in northern Sinai—under Maj. Gen. Israel Tal. After the war, Meir took part in the interrogations of captured Egyptian officers and was later appointed deputy military attaché in Paris, his final position before becoming the IDF’s top intelligence expert on Egypt.

  In the late 1960s, Branch 6 (Egypt) was the most important branch of MI-Research. As commander, Meir Meir brought together some of the most talented intelligence minds in the country. The head of his military section, Maj. Zusia Kaniazer, was a superb intelligence man. The head of the political section was Shimshon Yitzhaki, who later wrote a book about Arab perceptions of the Six-Day War based on his MI service. He was soon replaced by a civilian named Albert Sudai, who was one of the country’s foremost experts on Egypt. Under Kaniazer and Sudai there emerged an entire class of young officers with tremendous knowledge of the Egyptian military and political regimes. As opposed to MI-Research’s other divisions, Branch 6 was so large that it couldn’t be housed in a single space. Meir and the military section worked on the same floor as the chief of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aharon Yariv; the political section, as well as other officers connected with various North African states, sat with the commander of MI-Research, Brig. Gen. Arieh Shalev, on a different floor at IDF headquarters.