The Angel (12 page)

In addition to the Libyan brief, Sadat also asked Marwan to work on relations with Saudi Arabia, which underwrote a large part of Egypt's state budget. Marwan's contact in the Saudi royal family was King Faisal's brother-in-law Kamal Adham, who had founded the Saudi intelligence services in the mid-1960s and continued to direct them. Oddly enough, those agencies had been created mainly to stop the spread of Nasserite Pan-Arabism in the Arabian Peninsula. But after Egypt pulled its forces out of Yemen, relations between the Saudi royals and Nasser had markedly improved. Here, too, Sadat's choice proved wise. Beyond the professional relations between Adham and Marwan, the two also became close friends, a relationship that included no small amount of personal economic gain for both of them. Shortly after being given the Saudi brief, reports started appearing in the Egyptian press about various kinds of corruption that Marwan was allegedly involved in, and on at least one occasion the name of Kamal Adham was raised. We will return to both Marwan's corruption during this period in general, and the case involving Adham in particular. It is important to note, however, that Marwan's reputation for corruption made it hard for anyone to notice the money he was getting for his treason.

But even without having the full responsibilities that Sharaf had, Marwan's value to the Mossad nonetheless skyrocketed after May 1971. His closeness to Sadat, previously based on personal connections alone, now became official. Marwan could legitimately ask anyone for any piece of information he wanted. From now on, there was no limit to the intelligence Israel could get out of Egypt.

E
ven before the Corrective Revolution of May 1971, Ashraf Marwan had impressed his handlers more than any other agent in Israeli history. In his first meeting with Dubi in December 1970, he delivered top-notch documentary intelligence, and in subsequent meetings he continued providing remarkably accurate information about everything happening in the Egyptian leadership. The addition of Lt. Col. Meir Meir to the meetings in London helped sharpen Marwan's effectiveness, focusing his efforts on attaining whatever Israel considered the most important information. In his first meeting with Marwan in April 1971, Meir asked Marwan for the Egyptian plans for crossing the Suez Canal. In their next meeting, Marwan carried with him the actual written army orders for the crossing, which gave every detail about how the Egyptians would attack. The orders described which forces would be building the bridges, where they would be positioned, who would cross first and who later on, and many additional operational details. A copy of the orders lay in the safe of every division commander stationed anywhere near the canal. According to Marwan, exercises had been conducted based on these plans since before the War of
Attrition had ended in August 1970, but they had continued with far greater urgency since then. These orders, we now know, were exceptionally accurate, with the first phase being carried out to the letter on the day of Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973.

The second document Marwan gave Meir was the order of battle for the entire Egyptian army. It comprised the military structure, lists of commanders, division numbers and their chiefs, the weaponry at their disposal, detailed listings of warplanes and their locations for every squadron of the air force, and a vast collection of details about every operational unit in the Egyptian military. Until then IDF Military Intelligence had pieced together a fairly accurate map of the Egyptian army, based on a variety of human and technical sources. But this added a level of depth and detail that went far beyond anything they had known. It was unprecedented in its quality, and also helped establish the level of certainty of what they already knew. And because of the high degree with which it corroborated the information already in their hands, it dramatically increased their confidence that Marwan was no double agent. For anyone who still wondered, this should have removed all doubts.
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The dramatic developments in Marwan's life and status, and especially his appointment to the post previously held by Sami Sharaf, created an exceptionally rare situation in the history of espionage: The direct assistant to the leader of a country preparing to launch an attack on its enemy was a secret agent on behalf of that enemy. At around the time when Marwan started working for the Mossad, the East German spymaster Markus Wolf succeeded in planting an agent, Günter Guillaume, in the position of personal assistant to West German chancellor Willy Brandt. As with Marwan, Guillaume's handlers never imagined that he would reach so high a position; their aim was just to have someone in the upper ranks of the ruling party. Guillaume worked closely with Brandt for four years, passing strategic top-secret information to East Ger
many and, by extension, to Moscow. He was caught in 1974, and Brandt was forced to resign.
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Unlike Egypt in 1970, however, West Germany did not have immediate plans to attack East Germany; the information that Guillaume passed along was political and diplomatic, not military. Marwan, on the other hand, handed the Mossad Egypt's most closely guarded military secrets concerning concrete plans to attack—the top items on the Israeli intelligence community's wish list.

Today, the documents that Marwan gave Israel take up four very large binders in the Mossad archives. They include not only the documents and their Hebrew translations, but also the transcripts of his own orally given impressions, known as “source assessments.” They cover a range of topics. Some are relatively minor, like planned government appointments, Sadat's take on his country's economic challenges, the restructuring of the police and internal security forces, and other domestic issues. All these allowed the very small number of Israeli intelligence officers who read them to have an unmediated sense of life in the upper echelons of Egyptian society.
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The most important material, however, was military. A large part of it included stenograms—notes of conversations that, unlike formal minutes, were written during rather than after the conversations—dealing with the most critical subjects in the most important bodies in the country. They included, for example, discussions of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the army's General Staff meetings, conversations between top generals and their Soviet counterparts, meetings with officials from other Arab states, including summit meetings, and Sadat's meetings with foreign leaders in his trips abroad. Sadat's management style caused him to skip meetings covering subjects he was not too interested in, even if the forum was extremely sensitive, such as the military's General Staff meetings. He would often send Marwan in his
place. In such cases, stenograms were just the icing on the cake. In his conversations with Dubi and Meir, Marwan left no doubt that he had attended the meetings himself. “The room was noisy,” the source assessments tell us. “Sadat seemed annoyed the whole time.” And so on.

The information Marwan provided about discussions with the Soviets—a subject of top interest to Israel because of the Egyptians' belief that they needed Soviet weaponry in order to attack—was exceptionally thorough, including not just stenograms and minutes of conversations between Sadat and Soviet leaders, but also a detailed account of lower-level meetings between ministers of defense, army chiefs of staff, and intelligence chiefs. Taken together, these reports opened a wide window through which Israel's top political and intelligence leaders could see not only what Egypt was thinking vis-à-vis war with Israel, but also what the Kremlin was thinking—namely, that the Egyptians were not ready to take on the IDF.

Probably the best example of just how thoroughly Marwan helped Israeli intelligence penetrate Egyptian-Soviet relations has to do with Sadat's talks with Soviet leaders in Moscow in October 1971. The purpose of the visit was to convince the Kremlin to supply “deterrent” weaponry, the mere threat of which would prevent Israel from launching deep-bombing raids at sensitive Egyptian targets. In an earlier round of talks with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in March 1971, Sadat asked for a shipment of Kelt missiles—air-to-surface rockets launched from Tupolev Tu-16 bombers. This time around, he was asking for Scud missiles, surface-to-surface rockets with a range of about 170 miles—enough to reach most major targets in Israel.

Military Intelligence and the Mossad had received only partial information about the two visits, including the fact that an arms deal had been inked in the current October talks. Since these
were taking place just as Sadat's “year of decision” about war with Israel was coming to an end, the Israelis were especially eager to find out what had been discussed and what the deal included. Soon after Sadat left Moscow, Marwan met with Meir and Dubi in London. Meir peppered Marwan, who had not accompanied Sadat, with questions, prepared mostly by IAF intelligence. How had Egypt presented their war plans? What were the details of the agreement—which weapons systems, and when would they be delivered? Marwan answered as best he could, but there was much he didn't know. At the end of the meeting, Meir asked him whether he could produce an account of the conversation between Sadat and Brezhnev, and emphasized the high importance of such a document. Marwan said he would get the document.
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If on previous occasions the time that passed between meetings was weeks or months, this time Marwan got back to his handlers within days, giving them the actual minutes of the meeting. The Soviets, it turned out, promised to give Egypt the Kelt missiles, without demanding (as they had back in March) that Egypt get Moscow's permission before using them against Israel. But the Soviets still refused to commit to a delivery date—or to selling Egypt the Scuds they so eagerly wanted.

Beyond this highly valuable concrete information regarding weapons procurement, the Israelis also got a direct look at Egypt's preparations for war, the Soviets' impressions of them, and the dynamic of relations between the two states. Standing in front of a large map of the Sinai that had been hung in the conference room at the Kremlin, Egyptian war minister Mohammed Ahmed Sadek described Egypt's plans for crossing the Suez Canal and sending its tanks into the Sinai, toward the Mitla and Gidi Passes in an effort to cut across the peninsula. At this point, Brezhnev stood up and asked to see the two passes on the map. Sadat hurried over and pointed them out. The minutes revealed the Soviets' doubts about
Egypt's ability to carry out the plan. More than once during the meeting, they told Sadat and his men that the Egyptian army was not prepared to take on the IDF on land or in the air, and that the plan being shown on the map therefore had no chance of succeeding. “You have T-34s,” one of the Soviet experts said. “With these you would fight against the Jews?” The T-34 was a thirty-year-old tank that had been the core of the Soviet armor during World War II but was useless against the IDF's modern weaponry. In truth, the Soviets had sold Egypt the next-generation tanks, and for years Egyptian armor had been based on T-54s and T-55s. But they refused to sell Egypt the newest T-62s, which had been built to fight against American M60s, the IDF's mainstay. The comment, the Israelis understood, was not meant literally, but to express the Soviet expert's low opinion of Egyptian armored capabilities—and, by extension, the Kremlin's desire to discourage Egypt from launching another disastrous military campaign against Israel.
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The details Marwan gave Israel about Sadat's talks in Moscow became a central component of the intelligence assessment that IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Chaim Bar-Lev sent to a very small forum that included Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, and Minister Without Portfolio Yisrael Galili. On November 21, 1971, Bar-Lev reported that the Soviets had agreed to sell Egypt a squadron of twelve Tupolev Tu-16 bombers capable of launching Kelt air-to-surface missiles with a half-ton payload at a range of up to 125 miles. Bar-Lev said that Egypt now hosted some 9,500 Soviet advisers, technicians, and trainers, and more than 10,000 Red Army troops deployed in an antiaircraft division including SAM sites, as well as fighter squadrons manned by Soviet pilots. He also had information about intensive military activities taking place along the Suez Canal, including exercises for crossing the canal and earthworks for the crossing. Much of the intelligence, we may assume,
came not only from Marwan but from MI's own sources, including surveillance, reconnaissance flyovers, wiretaps, and more. The Mossad, too, had sources besides Marwan. But he was probably the source of one additional, especially worrisome piece of intelligence: Sadat, it was learned, had entered the army's underground war room known as Center 10, a move that showed the seriousness of his intentions. A similar picture emerged from a speech Sadat gave to officers and soldiers stationed at the canal, in which he declared that since he saw no chance of getting the Sinai back through diplomacy, the only way forward was war.
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Marwan's data proved decisive in Israeli attempts to decipher Egyptian intentions as Sadat's “year of decision” drew to a close. The Soviets, who knew more about Egypt's military capabilities than anyone else, may have thought that Egypt couldn't win a war and wouldn't try; for Israel, however, a number of indicators combined to raise a red flag. To figure out what Egypt had in store, MI-Research held a series of intensive meetings that focused on the apparent contradiction between Sadat's hostile public declarations, combined with Egypt's preparations for crossing the canal, on the one hand, and the prevailing belief in Military Intelligence, on the other, that Egyptian commanders were so thoroughly aware of their inferiority on land and in the air that the likelihood of their launching an attack must be low. Eventually, Meir Meir, who headed up MI's Egypt branch, concluded that without further indicators that the Egyptians had completed their preparations for war, there was no need to sound an alarm. Some analysts have claimed that this sober assessment was what earned Meir his promotion to full colonel.
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But even if his sobriety at the time proved wise—the Yom Kippur War was still another two years off—Egypt's procurements from the Soviet Union were cause for serious concern. The defense minister, in a meeting of the cabinet in November 1971, said that even if Egypt would still take a beating in any war with
Israel, it would now have the ability to do some damage as well. He was especially worried about the Kelt missiles. If such a missile “were to fall in the area of Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, or Bat Yam,” he warned, “there will be an avalanche, because these areas have high-rise buildings.”
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THE MATERIALS MARWAN
gave the Mossad also had an impact on relations between Israel and the United States. Sometimes the Mossad would send reports to the CIA based on Marwan's intelligence, after it was carefully edited in a way that made it impossible to identify the source—a process known as paraphrasing. Moreover, the most sensitive items were handed directly by Mossad director general Zvi Zamir to CIA director Richard Helms, to ensure that on the American side, too, the number of eyes that saw the documents was kept to a minimum.

The minutes of the October meeting between Sadat and Brezhnev, however, were too important to leave in Israeli hands alone or to pass along to the CIA as a paraphrase. Prime Minister Golda Meir decided that Israel had to present it to the White House in its original form, giving the Americans a rare glimpse into the USSR's relations with one of its most important third-world client states. The document also offered a firsthand account of the Kremlin's attitude toward the Middle East, and would enable the Americans to draw conclusions about a number of other aspects of Soviet foreign policy. Fearing the exposure of his source, Zamir was reluctant. But he accepted Golda Meir's decision and summoned the head of the Mossad station in Washington, Efraim Halevy, who was in Israel mourning the loss of his mother, to take care of the handoff. Zamir then joined Golda Meir on her trip to Washington. Sitting with President Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the prime minister handed each of them a copy of the minutes. Meanwhile, Zamir
met with CIA chief Helms in a nearby room to get his thoughts on the document. The CIA, Helms affirmed, vouched for its authenticity and congratulated the Mossad on its success in developing so valuable an intelligence source. In the intimate relations between the two agency heads, there were clear rules of conduct. Helms didn't ask anything about the source's identity, and Zamir gave him nothing to go on.