The Angel (11 page)

THOUGH IT IS
hard to tell what exactly Ashraf Marwan did to prevent the coup of May 1971, his role clearly went far beyond just delivering the letters of resignation. Marwan also, it seems, gave Sadat incriminating evidence against the conspirators. Neither Sadat nor his wife mentions it in their memoirs, but reliable Egyptian sources say that in the years that followed, Sadat would say that Marwan had “lit his path” regarding the events of May 1971.
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Given this, combined with Marwan's immediate and dramatic promotion, his role must have been substantive and decisive.

Even the story about Marwan robbing Said at gunpoint, as far-fetched as it sounds, seems more likely than Sami Sharaf's claim that he was the one who told Said to give Marwan the documents. One may accuse Sami Sharaf of many things, but he was no naïf. To suggest that he deliberately gave Sadat the documents that led to his own arrest just hours later seems implausible.

So if it is safe to assume that Marwan gave Sadat, on the night of May 13, the evidence he needed to prove the conspirators' guilt, it seems pretty likely that he first removed anything that might have tainted him in the president's eyes. We know that Marwan did not hold Sadat in the highest regard;
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if evidence of this appeared in the documents, he would have done everything he could to make sure the president never saw it. This also dovetails with Jehan Sadat's account that Marwan appeared uncomfortable during the visit, apologizing that he had come so late. After all, if he was bringing the president smoking-gun evidence of the wrongdoing of others, material he had risked his life to acquire, why would he feel ill at ease for being late? It seems reasonable, then, that Marwan took the time to go through all of the documents and remove anything that might get him in trouble—and this was the real reason for his delay.

THE CONFLUENCE OF
INTEREST
that brought Sadat and Marwan together is a central pivot around which the Angel's whole story turns, and it warrants a closer look. How did Sadat, who seems to deliberately downplay Marwan's role in the whole conspiracy, come to rely on him so heavily and appoint him, despite his lack of experience and connections to the military-intelligence establishment, to so sensitive and important a position as the director general of the President's Office instead of Sami Sharaf? Questions run the other way as well: What led Nasser's son-in-law to jump on Sadat's horse, which, according to most observers at the time, was a long shot at best, risking his status with the most powerful men in Egypt?

As to the first question, two considerations made Ashraf Marwan especially attractive to Sadat. The more important one was the aura he carried as a member of the nation's founding family. The centers of power presented themselves as Nasser's true heirs, and Sadat needed to build up his own legitimacy through association with Nasser's family. Marwan was the only member of Nasser's family available to help. Tahia, Nasser's widow, had cut herself out of public life during her husband's lifetime, and all the more so after his death. Nasser's three sons were still too young; Khaled, the oldest of them, was just twenty-three and despised Sadat. Just a month before the attempted coup, Sadat placed a call to the Nassers' home, asking that they let him use their bulletproof Mercedes limousine, which had cost the state $36,000. Since the president's death, the car had sat untouched in the family's garage. The family refused, however, saying it belonged to them and not the government. Sadat insisted. In the thick of the argument, Khaled went to the garage, poured gasoline on the car, and torched it.
¹⁴

While he may have expressed it in an unusually impulsive manner, Khaled's animosity to Sadat was shared by much of Nas
ser's family. His oldest daughter, Hoda, and her husband were the only family members who could be considered natural heirs, but they were deeply ensconced in the centers of power. Sadat, therefore, had little choice but to turn to Ashraf Marwan if he was to benefit from the family's imprimatur at all. Nasser himself might not have approved. But the Egyptian people didn't need to know that.

The second consideration was the fact that Marwan worked in the President's Office, which had paradoxically become the nerve center of the conspiracy. Sadat desperately needed someone there who could tell him what was really going on in the one institution most clearly identified with serving his interests. Marwan, who felt little loyalty to the Nasserites who filled the office, fit the bill perfectly.

No less important for Sadat, however, was the fact that Nasser's son-in-law was available. He was not beholden to any “comet tail” or “center of power,” not even that of his boss, Sami Sharaf. This made him immensely valuable to a president trying to find his footing when almost all the players were committed to preexisting alliances. Marwan's situation was different. He was both Mona Nasser's husband and a close friend of Anwar and Jehan Sadat. This friendship, of course, was not without interest. In her memoir, Jehan describes Marwan as a man whose character and ambitions resembled those of her husband more than did anyone else's in the Nasser family. She took advantage of her friendship with Souad al-Sabah, the wife of the Kuwaiti sheikh who helped Marwan in London, to deepen the connection between Marwan and Sadat.
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The question of why Marwan chose to ally himself with Sadat is a trickier one—especially given Sadat's ostensibly weak hand in the struggle for succession. Even more problematic, perhaps, was the fact that in the Nasser family, support for Sadat was taken as a repudiation of the family itself, with everything that might entail.
From Marwan's perspective, helping Sadat could easily have ended his political career and ruined his public stature as a member of the family. His decision to take that risk tells us a great deal about both his calculus and his character.

First off, there was the question of alternatives. True, it would have been safer to support Sami Sharaf and the other leaders. But that was not especially appealing. Marwan felt shamed by his lowly position in the President's Office and had no reason to believe things would improve if Sharaf were to become president. Sharaf knew exactly what Nasser had thought of Mona's marriage to Marwan—and that Marwan had married her out of ambition rather than love. What's more, Sharaf and the others probably had plenty of incriminating evidence of his taste for the good life that clashed so sharply with Nasser's puritanism, evidence that could easily be used against him. In the best possible scenario, he would be one of many people struggling up the comet tail. This was not what he had planned for himself.

By comparison, the idea of becoming a part of Sadat's entourage looked a lot more promising. Sadat had no comet tail but rather a small number of loyal people on whom he relied. For Marwan, working directly with the leader was much better than joining one
sheelah
or another. The way to achieve this was by swearing loyalty to Sadat. The most important thing Marwan could offer the president was the link to Nasser's family, which could lend Nasserite legitimacy, inauthentic as it might have been, to his independently pursued policies.

Beyond this there was also a financial angle. Marwan well knew that as opposed to Nasser, who demanded that his family members refrain from graft or other gain, Anwar and Jehan Sadat saw things differently. Nasser's Spartan lifestyle was alien to them. Before Sadat had replaced Nasser, they married their oldest daughter off to Osman Ahmed Osman, one of the richest men in Egypt, who
made much of his money as one of the main contractors building the Aswan Dam. Another daughter later married Sayed Marei, scion to one of the wealthiest families in Egypt. Nor were the Sadats sticklers when it came to their own finances. According to the rumors around Cairo at the time, shortly before Sadat became president, his wife fell in love with a house in Cairo. The owners had no interest in selling, however. In early July 1970, Nasser traveled to Moscow; Sadat, as vice president, took the helm and immediately slapped an order of forfeiture on the house and everything inside it. When Nasser came back to Egypt a few days later, the owner petitioned him about the confiscation of his property. After a brief inquiry, Nasser canceled the order and gave the man back his home. According to one account, Nasser was so angry that he decided to fire Sadat, but he didn't get around to it before his death in September.

Regardless of whether the story is true or just an example of the rumors about the Sadats' attitude toward corruption, what is clear is that the new leader's intimate circle was far more open to this kind of behavior than Nasser had been. Marwan, whose greatest crisis with his father-in-law happened because he took money from Souad al-Sabah, could be certain that under Sadat's aegis such a crisis would never have occurred. Marwan, finally, needed a plausible explanation for his newfound wealth since he started working for the Mossad. Personal corruption was the perfect excuse.

But beyond all these considerations, there was also a psychological element at play. Again, Marwan had a deep-seated urge for stimulus and risk. By tying his fate to Sadat, he got his “fix” of risky behavior—certainly much more so than if he had joined the comet tail of Sami Sharaf. But there was another psychological factor as well, what we might call the “alliance of losers.” Marwan felt rejected by Nasser, and Sharaf and the other power brokers
had treated him accordingly. But they held Sadat in contempt as well, and Marwan may have felt a sense of common cause with the beleaguered president. Not that Marwan himself thought all that highly of Sadat, as he told his Israeli handlers more than once. But he may well have also identified with him. In so complex a soul as Ashraf Marwan's, a soul driven by powerful urges mixed with cool calculations, this sense of common fate may have played a crucial role in the choice he made at that pivotal moment.

Finally, we should remember that Ashraf Marwan lacked any sense of true political loyalty or, for that matter, moral standard. The only people to whom he was consistently loyal, it seems, were his wife, Mona, who stood by him in the face of her father, and his two sons. After all, for a man willing to sell his homeland's secrets to its most vicious enemy, giving Sadat the evidence that put Sami Sharaf and his coconspirators in jail was really no big deal.

WHEN ANWAR SADAT
picked Ashraf Marwan to replace Sharaf as presidential secretary, the Mossad's most important spy ever suddenly became much more valuable. He was now in charge of the nerve center of the most powerful regime in the Arab world. Marwan, of course, was no Sami Sharaf: The position alone did not automatically confer anything like the power Sharaf had wielded. As “Secretary of State for Presidential Affairs,” Sharaf had turned the President's Office into a terrifyingly effective intelligence agency, as well as a clearinghouse for every piece of intelligence relevant to the security of the state and Nasser's regime. But it had taken years for Sharaf to grow into that role. Beginning in 1954, when Marwan was about ten years old, Sharaf began weaving his web, gaining influence and experience gathering information. His network extended into every dark hole in Egypt, and there was very little that Sami Sharaf didn't know or couldn't find out. It was a custom-built, handcrafted masterpiece, and he did his best to
ensure that it was staffed entirely of people of unflinching personal loyalty to himself. That was his comet tail.

None of that was passed on to Ashraf Marwan when he took Sharaf's post.

Moreover, Marwan entered the position almost entirely lacking relevant experience. True, he had worked under Sharaf for two years. But since his boss had never trusted him, he had learned little about the office's inner workings and had rarely been given sensitive assignments. Neither did Marwan have any especially useful connections with the other “centers of power” such as Interior Minister Shaarawy Gomaa or the military chiefs. Once in office, he tried to take command of Sharaf's intelligence network, but to little effect. Very quickly it became clear that Sharaf's people weren't giving their loyalty to someone as young and untested as he was. Moreover, as opposed to Nasser, who turned the President's Office into the fulcrum of his entire regime, Sadat worked differently. He preferred not to get overly involved in day-to-day affairs but rather to put most of his focus on the grand, strategic decisions—on war and peace—and to let other people run the country, people he felt he could trust. Marwan's youth, inexperience, and political weakness, alongside his personal habits and especially his extreme ambitiousness that brought him into conflict with other leading figures—all these made it impossible for Sadat to place the full portfolio of Sharaf's responsibilities in Marwan's hands.

So, while Marwan continued to hold the title of presidential secretary for some time, in practice his role was dramatically reduced, and he became a kind of “liaison for special affairs,” above all acting as the president's personal emissary to key leaders in the Arab world. Marwan's youth and family ties made him perfect for maintaining contact, for example, with the new Libyan regime led by Col. Muammar Gaddafi, which had overthrown King Idris in a military coup in September 1969. Gaddafi, who was an enormous
fan of Nasser, was just two years older than Marwan. Abdessalam Jalloud, who was Gaddafi's second in command, was Marwan's age.

Sadat's choice proved wise. Jalloud and Marwan worked together closely, most importantly on a deal that enabled Egypt to get around the weapons embargo France had imposed in 1967 as part of efforts to keep arms from reaching conflict states. In return, Marwan helped Jalloud work around prohibitions that the United States and Great Britain had put on selling weapons and replacement parts for civilian aircraft to Libya. But the relationship went beyond the work itself. Soon rumors spread in Cairo about illegal dealings the two had been cooking up together, as well as wild parties they attended in London, Rome, and Cairo.