The Angel Page 8
“And how,” Meir asked, “will you fight in the desert when we have air superiority?” Marwan answered with what he had clearly heard from the generals. Egypt would get attack aircraft and surface-to-surface missiles to attack and neutralize Israeli air bases in the Sinai. Meir pressed the point: How would Egypt neutralize the air bases located in Israel proper, out of the missiles’ range? Marwan hesitated and then repeated what Meir had heard from countless other sources: If Egypt failed to neutralize the IAF’s bases, the Soviets would provide advanced antiaircraft weaponry that would allow the Egyptians to cross the canal under their umbrella. Then, after the first strip of land on the east bank of the canal was taken, they would move the antiaircraft missiles across the canal into Sinai, extending the umbrella eastward, allowing the ground forces to push farther in.
Meir had received no instructions about how to proceed, but he had enough experience with Mossad operatives to decide, on his intuition, to move the conversation toward something more productive. Over and over he tried, carefully, gingerly, to make it clear to Marwan that what he was describing with respect to the Egyptian plans for conquering Sinai made no sense or that he had heard it before. He asked again how the Egyptian generals planned on overcoming Israel’s superiority in both air and armor, but all he kept hearing were slogans rather than plans. It became clear to Meir that Marwan actually had no idea how the Egyptians could retake the Sinai, not that he didn’t know such plans existed or that he couldn’t get his hands on them. Instead, Meir realized, Marwan’s non-answers reflected what was actually being said in Egypt. The generals themselves had not yet found a way to overcome Israel’s air and armor dominance.
While trying to extract whatever he could about Egypt’s battle plans, Meir also kept trying to assess Marwan’s reliability. Occasionally he would throw in a question to which he already knew the answer. Who is the commander of the 21st Armored Division, and where are its headquarters? Who commands the Cairo-West airfield, and what planes are stationed there? Marwan never failed. In most cases his answers matched what Meir already knew. In others, when he didn’t know, he said as much and promised to have the answers by the next meeting. As the session progressed, the mood in the room began to change. Marwan dropped much of his pose and began to look at the intelligence officer before him as someone who understood military affairs in general and the Egyptian military in particular every bit as thoroughly as Marwan himself did. His arrogant tone gave way to a more careful choosing of words. From time to time, when Meir’s questions became more specific and professional, Marwan was forced to concede that he didn’t know the answers.
This had been Meir Meir’s goal all along.
Now the conversation turned to a subject that especially troubled the Israeli leadership. Since the middle of March 1970, when the Israelis first espied Soviet military personnel manning antiaircraft units in Egypt, Israeli decision makers had been worried that in the next war, the IDF might have to clash directly with Red Army troops. When Meir asked about the subject, Marwan revealed his loathing for the Soviet units stationed in Egypt, and for the Soviet Union as a whole. He repeated his belief that the Soviets were trying to take over Egypt and its army. Here he revealed a sincere, potent nationalist sentiment. But given the fact that the Soviets were effectively helping Egypt defend itself at an especially difficult time, while Marwan was selling his nation’s most closely guarded secrets to its gravest enemy, there was something pathetic, even perverse, about his patriotism. It reflected the bizarre duality of his mind-set, the contradictions of his soul.
The meeting lasted three full hours. Near the end, Meir gave Marwan his assignment for the next meeting. He was to bring with him the Egyptian army’s plans for crossing the Suez Canal, as well as the order of battle for the entire Egyptian military. These were the top priority for Branch 6—and also the kind of materials that would lay any suspicions of his double agency to rest.
Dubi escorted Marwan out of the apartment. Meir sat at the heavy dining-room table and started writing, wanting to get it all down while it was still fresh. The hardest part of these meetings, he thought to himself, was making sure nothing was forgotten or distorted. Fortunately he was not alone. Dubi came back a few minutes later, and the two compared notes, checking every detail and resolving inconsistencies. Finally, they wrote up a four-page communiqué that included everything Marwan had told them. They sent it the next morning from the Mossad’s London station to headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Meir and Dayagi went back to Israel the day after the meeting, as well. The car that picked them up at the airport took them straight to Mossad headquarters. They returned their fake passports and went to accounting to submit the receipts for their expenses. They both were sternly advised not to divulge the purpose of their trip to anyone. Meir was asked to go over the report that the Mossad had produced based on that morning’s communiqué from London. A few hours later, the report went out, under the code name Khotel, to exactly three people: Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and IDF chief of staff Chaim Bar-Lev. Over the next few years, this unusual way of disseminating raw intelligence directly to the top leadership, without going through MI’s process of compilation and analysis, would become routine for reporting about meetings with the Angel.
Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan would become totally dependent on these Khotel reports.
THE NEXT MEETING between Meir Meir and Ashraf Marwan took place about four months later. Sadat had declared that 1971 would be the year of decision between the diplomatic and military roads to restoring the Sinai to Egypt. In the absence of any diplomatic progress, the option for war gained ground. But Egypt’s military preparedness had not improved dramatically. Sadat knew that his army wasn’t ready to take on the IDF.
Indeed, the question of whether and when hostilities might be renewed was the central focus of Meir’s line of questioning in their second meeting, and the answers Marwan gave did not fully satisfy. But that didn’t matter once he pulled out the documents he’d brought with him. Meir now held in his hands both the plans for crossing the Suez Canal and the order of battle for the entire Egyptian army—exactly what he had asked for. If Meir still had any doubts about Marwan’s intentions, they were now gone.
In the months that had passed since their last meeting, Egypt had undergone a number of internal changes in the wake of Nasser’s death. A new cadre of leaders now occupied most of the top positions in Egypt. One of them was Ashraf Marwan.
Chapter 4
MAY 1971: LIFTOFF
From the day he first ascended to the world stage, Gamal Abdel Nasser was seen by Israeli leaders as potentially the most dangerous enemy they had ever faced, a man who could one day unite the entire Arab world in a war to destroy the Jewish state. A number of developments seemed to confirm these fears. In 1955, Nasser dramatically upgraded Egypt’s military posture by cutting a huge arms deal with the Eastern Bloc countries; in 1958, he initiated the formal unification with Syria to create the United Arab Republic (a union that dissolved three years later); and in 1967, he precipitated a massive crisis with Israel that triggered the Six-Day War.
The arms deal was seen by the Israelis as an unparalleled menace; once it was completed, they believed, Israel would no longer be able to defeat Egypt in war. To ward off the threat, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion launched the Sinai Campaign in 1956, in order to destroy the Egyptian army before it became a major threat. The plan was effective but short-lived, with Israel soon pulling out of Sinai under intense international pressure. Egypt’s unification with Syria, together with the fall of the monarchy in Iraq and efforts to overthrow King Hussein in Jordan and the ruling Christians in Lebanon, combined to give Israelis the sensation of a vast geopolitical noose tightening around their country’s neck. The Israeli intelligence community believed that the conditions were ripening for Nasser to launch a full-blown war against Israel.
And then, in May 1967, Nasser ordered the UN peacekeepers stationed in Sinai since 1956 to
leave, and he began amassing his forces in the peninsula. Overplaying his hand, he then ordered the closure of the Straits of Tiran (a narrow water passage separating Sinai from Saudi Arabia) to Israeli ships, cutting off Israel’s southern port of Eilat to all maritime traffic. This constituted a casus belli by any standard. This was no longer just rising tensions; it was a full crisis, with Egypt now leading a broad coalition of Arab armies and triggering what many Israelis saw as their first existential crisis since independence in 1948. Even after Israel’s overwhelming victory in six days in June 1967 put the crisis behind them, many Israelis remained traumatized long afterward from the weeks of tension that had led up to it.
That victory was probably what ended up doing Nasser in. “Those who knew Nasser,” Sadat wrote later in his memoirs, “realized that he did not die on September 28, 1970, but on June 5, 1967, exactly one hour after the war broke out.”1 Nasser genuinely felt that the policy of brinksmanship with which he had led his country prior to the war had precipitated the worst catastrophe in Egypt’s modern history, and this may well have contributed to the deterioration of his health.
Nasser had suffered from health problems, especially diabetes and ulcers, for years, however. That is why he always had food specially prepared for him, even at state dinners. His intense lifestyle didn’t help matters; since 1961, he had been taking painkillers on a regular basis. After the 1967 war, things got worse. His insufferable pain led to hormone therapy, which triggered stress and nervous attacks. His diabetes worsened, and he saw the first signs of heart problems. He retained a personal physician, Dr. Al-Sawy Habib—a cardiologist by training. In his memoir, Habib wrote that Nasser suffered his first heart attack in December 1969. After recovering, he refused Habib’s advice to slow the pace of his life. In early July 1970, while on a visit to Moscow, he was hospitalized and underwent a series of tests, in which it was discovered that he suffered from arterial sclerosis and heart disease. The doctors again counseled rest, but his workload won out.
A month later, just a few days before the armistice was reached ending the War of Attrition with Israel, tests revealed that his condition had not improved, and Habib again urged him to rest. The end of the war allowed him a brief hiatus from the stress on him, but then, just weeks later, fighting erupted between Jordan and the Palestinian groups operating in its midst—the bloodshed that became known as Black September. On September 28, 1970, just hours after seeing off Arab leaders who had convened for a grand summit in which Nasser had successfully brokered a deal between Jordan’s King Hussein and PLO leader Yasser Arafat that would end the violence, Nasser suffered another heart attack. A few hours later, surrounded by his close relatives, friends, and physicians, the greatest Arab leader since Saladin was dead.2
Reports about Nasser’s ill health had appeared in Western media from time to time, but his sudden death shocked the entire world—all the more so the Arab world, and still more so Egypt itself. The sight of millions of Egyptians weeping in the streets of Cairo, the funeral procession joined by more than two million people, which spun out of control when inconsolable mourners turned hysterical near the coffin, newspaper headlines declaring that one hundred million Arabs were now orphaned—all of these expressed the sincere, immeasurable pain, the vacuum left behind.
Nasser’s passing had huge implications for the future of Egyptian and Arab history, as well as for the Israeli-Arab conflict. It triggered a fierce battle for power among Egyptian elites and a shifting of alliances in the Arab world in the short run, as well as a major change in Egypt’s relations to the Cold War powers in the long run.
Nasser’s death also had immense implications for the Mossad’s greatest spy. Eight months after the leader’s fatal heart attack, his relatively obscure son-in-law would, under dramatic circumstances, become a close aide to the new president. Marwan’s access to the most closely guarded secrets of the Egyptian regime was now almost unlimited. Nasser’s death, in other words, took the greatest source of intelligence Israel had ever had and made him suddenly far, far better.
FOR ASHRAF MARWAN, the death of his father-in-law presented both new dangers and new opportunities. The greatest danger was that he would lose whatever privilege he had gained from being a member of the president’s family. This threat quickly abated. If anything, Nasser’s status only grew after his death, and the family he left behind would gain a patina of royalty both under Anwar Sadat and, later, under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. At the same time, Ashraf Marwan had always been something of a black sheep. There were more than a few people among the ruling elites who knew exactly what Nasser had thought of his son-in-law. They knew that less than a year before his death, the president had demanded that his daughter divorce Marwan, and that only Mona’s stubbornness prevented this from happening. With Nasser’s death Marwan knew there was some chance that the new regime would feel less impressed by Mona’s passion than her father was, and would cast Marwan out.
At the same time, Marwan had reason to feel immense relief. Although he assumed that regime officials like Sami Sharaf would continue keeping tabs on him, none of them would hold him to Nasser’s standard, according to which members of the family were forbidden from taking advantage of their status. On the contrary, for these officials, profiting from one’s status was perfectly normal. Suddenly, the chances of Marwan triggering a scandal like the one involving Souad al-Sabah had shrunk dramatically. Nasser’s death cleared the way for Marwan to significantly improve his financial situation.
Much harder to tell, however, is whether the president’s passing had any impact on Marwan’s motivation to work for Israel. Nasser was still alive when Marwan made his first moves. But we have no reason to think anything changed when Nasser died. The financial impetus might have become less of a factor, in light of all the new opportunities that now would present themselves. His need to get back at Nasser for slights to his honor might have lost some of their edge once Nasser was dead. But the fact is that Marwan never displayed any hesitation in helping Israel whatsoever, neither before nor after the president’s death. Once he had crossed the line of making that first phone call to the embassy in July 1970, calling again the following December seemed that much easier.
Nasser’s successor was his deputy, Anwar el-Sadat, one of the less noteworthy members of the Egyptian leadership following the Free Officers revolution in 1952. Most people in the know, both in the Arab world and in Israel, believed Sadat would not hold power for long. But over the next few months, he solidified his position, outmaneuvering his opponents and keeping his nose above water. The period between Nasser’s death in September 1970 and the climactic purge of pro-Nasserite elements that Sadat undertook the following May, which he called the “Corrective Revolution,” proved his mettle as a political survivor and impressed observers around the world. Marwan’s own political gymnastics over the same few months drew far less attention—except among Israel’s intelligence chiefs. Like Sadat, Marwan displayed a breathtaking ability to seize opportunities while deflecting threats to his position. A close alliance emerged between Sadat and Nasser’s young and ambitious son-in-law—an alliance that came about through no small amount of luck. The end result was that by May 1971, when Sadat had finally stabilized his rule over Egypt, Ashraf Marwan enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Egyptian hierarchy.
And thus Egypt became an open book for Israeli intelligence.
ANWAR EL-SADAT WAS fifty-two years old when he was chosen, because of his position as vice president of Egypt, to succeed Gamal Abdel Nasser as president. He was born on December 25, 1918, in the isolated village of Mit Abu al-Kum in the Nile delta. In 1938 he completed the officers’ academy and quickly became known as a nationalist fiercely opposed to British influence in Egypt. He achieved renown during World War II when he was arrested by the British on charges of spying for Germany. Later he was charged in the murder of a senior minister in the Wafd Party–led regime in Egypt, which was considered a puppet of the British government—but was then acquitted due
to lack of evidence. Sadat was a member of the Free Officers Movement that carried out the coup in 1952, overthrowing King Farouk and installing a new republican regime led nominally by Muhammad Naguib, the republic’s first president, but more substantially by Nasser, who ousted Naguib and assumed the presidency in 1954. Sadat’s coconspirators remembered him principally for his delay, of several crucial hours, in joining the revolutionary movement as it was trying to overthrow King Farouk, because he had been at the movies with his wife. The Egyptian public, however, remembered Sadat on more positive terms, as the officer who declared the overthrow of the king via Egyptian radio.
Yet despite his high profile, Sadat was not a prominent figure in the Free Officers Movement. The positions he held tended to be more ceremonial than executive. Nasser and the others held him in low regard. “Give him a car and vouchers for gas,” Nasser used to say of Sadat, “and he’ll be happy.” Sadat, it was believed, lacked political ambition and could be bought for a fairly low price. And when he did attain positions of consequence, his performance was substandard at best. One example was his unique contribution to the Egyptian war in Yemen. In 1962, when the Yemenite monarchy was partially toppled by a military coup, a civil war erupted between the new republican regime supported by Egypt and the loyalist forces supported by Saudi Arabia and Western states. Nasser sent Sadat to Yemen to see whether it made sense for Egypt to intervene. When he came back, he announced before the entire National Assembly that helping the republicans win the war would be “like a picnic by the Red Sea.” Basing his decision heavily on Sadat’s opinion, Nasser sent his army to Yemen. The war quickly became a quagmire, occupying fully a third of Egypt’s forces, dragging on for years, and offering little hope of ending. Sadat’s hasty, arrogant assessment resulted in one of Nasser’s greatest international failures.