The Angel (13 page)

Golda Meir wasn't much of a note writer. But at the end of the visit to Washington, she wrote a few words to Zamir on a photograph of her taken with Nixon, expressing her admiration and gratitude for Zamir's work. Orally she added that not only were Nixon and Kissinger deeply impressed by the Israeli achievement and by Israel's willingness to share the document in its raw form, but the president was now ready to sell Israel additional F-4 Phantoms.

Not long afterward, Marwan passed along additional top-secret information about Soviet-Egyptian relations, and Golda Meir wanted to give that to the White House as well. This time, Zamir was more adamantly opposed, convinced that now the CIA would certainly figure out who the source was. The prime minister insisted, and a stalemate ensued. In a top-level meeting that included military secretary Brig. Gen. Israel Lior and Minister Without Portfolio Yisrael Galili, Zamir informed Meir that if she forced his hand, he would carry out her orders, but he would continue to insist that it was endangering the safety of the source. Meir, no less stubborn, told him to get on a plane and deliver it himself. Zamir said that Efraim Halevy could deliver it just as easily as he could. Meir insisted that Zamir not just carry out her orders but accept her position
in principle
regarding the decision to hand the material over. Zamir refused, and Golda Meir got up and stormed out of the room. Unimpressed by her passive-aggressive tactics, Zamir stood his ground.

In the end, the prime minister capitulated, and the Americans never laid eyes on the document.
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BEGINNING IN LATE
1968, when the Egyptians had finished rebuilding most of their military after their defeat in the Six-Day War, the question of whether and when they would attack had been the foremost concern of the Israeli intelligence community. Military Intelligence had done an impressive job answering that question early on. That fall, it had estimated that Nasser was going to attack in March 1969. It would be a static conflict, at least at first. On this basis, IDF chief of staff Bar-Lev gave the order to complete its preparations for war along the Suez Canal front by March 1. The Bar-Lev Line, a string of earthworks and fortifications along the canal, was completed on time, including the logistical infrastructure to support it during a prolonged conflict with Egypt. When the War of Attrition began on March 8, 1969, Israel was ready. That war ended on August 7, 1970, without any diplomatic or military gains on Egypt's part.

Egypt's failure, however, immediately raised two questions. Would they now look for a diplomatic or a military way to get the Sinai back? And if their plan was war, when would they feel ready to attack?

Marwan's promotion into Sadat's inner circle after the Corrective Revolution of May 1971 enabled him to pass on to the Israelis, the following July, the actual thoughts of Egypt's president regarding the first question. According to an MI memorandum disseminated that month,

            
According to a high-ranking source in Egypt, there is no longer hope for a diplomatic agreement, and according to all indications Israel has no intention of withdrawing from the territories it conquered. A “diplomatic agreement,” in
their view, would require Israel's commitment to Egypt that it return all territories taken in 1967, not just Sinai [i.e., also the West Bank and Golan Heights to Jordan and Syria, respectively]. The Egyptians came to the belief that the Americans had been leading them on, when the truth was they had neither the will nor the way to press Israel to withdraw. Egypt concluded that in light of the situation, there was no way to convince the Egyptian army and the Egyptian people that there was still hope for a diplomatic agreement, and there would therefore be no choice but to employ military force.
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At around the same time, Israel's ambassador to the United States, Yitzhak Rabin, was asked to prepare a personal, for-your-eyes-only message that he would deliver to Nixon and Kissinger. This, too, was based on information passed along by Marwan concerning the Egyptian perspective, and was to include four specific points:

               
1. Egypt is prepared for a full peace agreement with Israel on the basis of the Rogers Plan [which proposed returning the Sinai in exchange for peace];

               
2. The United States has repeated to the Egyptians its commitment to the Rogers Plan;

               
3. If the United States refuses to put pressure on Israel, Egypt will have no choice but to go to war;

               
4. The emphasis of the Sadat regime in its political and military struggle is not on the fate of the Palestinians, but on reclaiming Egyptian territory.
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It is unclear what convinced Golda Meir that she ought to send a message to Washington depicting Egypt as peacemaker and Israel and the United States as belligerents. Most likely, she was trying to show the Americans how Israel was working in line with the administration's hard-edged Middle East strategy—a central part of
which was refusing any peace deal that would give Sadat back the Sinai without his switching over to the American side in the Cold War. And since Israeli decision makers had little faith in Egypt's peaceful intentions anyway, and were thus uninterested in giving up control over the eastern third of the Sinai under any conditions, the confluence of American and Israeli interests wound up torpedoing any Egyptian effort to move forward with a peace treaty in exchange for a full return of the Sinai—the same terms that, seven years and many lives later, became the basis of the Camp David Accords. Rabin, however, never delivered the message, for fear that it would result in increased US pressure on Israel.

Regardless of how these moves may be judged in hindsight, the fact remains that because of Ashraf Marwan, Israeli decision makers developed a very accurate picture of Egypt's intentions regarding war and peace. The Egyptians knew that they couldn't retake Sinai by force, and the Israelis knew they knew it. Among the analysts of IDF Military Intelligence, the belief emerged that if Egypt were to start a war, it would not be with the aim of recapturing the Sinai, which was unrealistic, but only “to force the powers to intervene and impose a solution.”
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Having successfully answered the first question, MI got to work on the second: Under what circumstances would Egypt see itself ready to attack, even for more limited aims? Their efforts here would constitute a major step in developing what became known as the
kontzeptzia
—or Concept—which became the overarching paradigm that guided Israeli intelligence and decision making for most of the period between 1970 and the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. According to the Concept, Egypt would never attack without first solving the problem of its military inferiority. Here, too, Marwan's intelligence made a decisive contribution.
¹³

The number one problem facing Egypt was Israel's dramatic air superiority. With the loss of the Sinai Peninsula, an Egyptian
surprise attack on IAF air bases similar to the one that the IAF used to destroy the entire Egyptian air force on June 5, 1967, had become nearly impossible, for two reasons. First, the much greater distance Egyptian fighters would now have to fly, combined with improved Israeli radar coverage, made it extremely unlikely that Egypt could surprise the IAF the way Israel had done to Egypt. And second, the Soviets had yet to produce a fighter plane that could penetrate Israel's air defenses. As opposed to Western countries that were producing advanced aircraft like the US-made F-4 Phantom and A-4 Skyhawk (which Israel had) or the French Mirage 5 (which had been developed specifically for the IAF), Soviet manufacturers had focused their efforts on short-range interceptors and strategic long-range bombers meant to carry nuclear payloads. The Kremlin simply didn't have the kind of planes Egypt needed. The commander of Egypt's air force, Gen. Ali Mustafa Baghdady, expressed his frustration in a meeting of the Supreme Council in early 1972: “What I need is a deterrent aircraft. A fighter-bomber, about Mach two, with a good payload and range, that lets us go deep into enemy territory.”
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At the time there was only one plane that met Baghdady's demands: the F-4 Phantom. So long as Egypt was a Soviet client, the problem of Israel's air superiority had no solution.

But without neutralizing Israel's air superiority, any Egyptian effort to advance into Sinai would run into a wall. Egypt's main military achievement since the War of Attrition had been the deployment of massive antiaircraft batteries along the western bank of the Suez Canal, with Soviet help and in flagrant violation of the cease-fire agreement. These would provide an effective air umbrella for Egyptian troops and tanks crossing the Suez Canal. These SAM batteries, however, were fixed in place, creating a situation in which any Egyptian forces that remained under the antiaircraft umbrella—extending about six miles to the east of the canal—
were safe from IAF attack; but the moment they tried to advance beyond that range, hell would rain down upon them. Under such circumstances, retaking the Sinai was impossible. And since in every attack plan the Egyptians produced through the end of 1972, the main objective was retaking a significant portion of the Sinai, Israeli air superiority continued to be the decisive consideration in determining the likelihood of war. Both to Israel and to Egypt, in other words, it was clear that unless something significant changed, Egypt could not attack.

Marwan made two decisive contributions to Israel's understanding of the conditions under which the Egyptians would launch an attack, and of how close the Egyptians thought they were to fulfilling them. His oral reports and the documents he provided confirmed Israel's assessment that the air superiority issue was decisive. In conversations he had with Meir Meir when Marwan was still working for Sami Sharaf, only one solution was offered: After crossing the canal under cover of antiaircraft guns, the Egyptians would try to physically move their stationary antiaircraft sites eastward, gradually allowing the tanks to penetrate the peninsula, always under the umbrella, toward the Mitla and Gidi Passes. But from everything known at the time about Egypt's war plans, it was clear that they had put far too much emphasis on designing and training for a ground assault and not nearly enough on the Achilles' heel of IAF attacks. In 1970 the Egyptians did not yet have mobile SA-6 antiaircraft batteries, just stationary SA-2s and SA-3s. The SA-3s were manned by Soviet troops, and it was unclear that the Kremlin would approve their use if Egypt decided to launch an aggressive attack on a close ally of the United States. But even without this caveat, moving a SAM site across the canal was an extremely complex operation, and the small number they could successfully relocate would not have been enough to counter Israel's massive air power—power that had been significantly augmented
since the late 1960s, with the arrival of large numbers of F-4s and A-4s from the United States. So even if the Egyptians had plans for crossing, and were conducting exercises according to those plans, everybody knew they were impracticable.
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But if the Egyptians knew they couldn't launch a successful campaign with the weapons they had, what did they think they needed to make it possible? After Nasser's death, and especially after May 1971, the Egyptians began looking at the problem of Israeli air power more realistically. Under the direction of the new minister of war, Mohammed Ahmed Sadek, a number of scenarios were worked out, and it became clear that the idea of gradually moving SAM batteries eastward wasn't going to work. Neither could Egypt tolerate a resumption of the deep-bombing raids. The only real solution to both of these problems was well known: convincing the Soviets to sell them better weapons, including long-range bombers that could carry serious payloads to Israeli air bases, and air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles that could reach Israeli population centers, in order to deter Israel from launching deep-bombing raids on the Egyptian home front.

From the details Marwan gave Israel about Sadat's talks in Moscow in March and October 1971, it became clear that Egypt was most interested in weapons that could threaten Israel's home front, in order to deter Israeli attacks on Egypt's own home front. As recalled, by October 1971 the Soviets agreed to sell Egypt a squadron of Tu-16 bombers carrying Kelt missiles but still refused to sell them Scud surface-to-surface systems. Around September 1972, Marwan gave the Israelis a copy of a letter by Sadat to Nikolai Podgorny, president of the Supreme Soviet, in which Sadat complained about the Soviets' continued unwillingness to give Egypt “weapons of retaliation that will deter the enemy from attacking Egyptian targets in the depth of our territory.” Sadat added that “it was and remains clear that if we do not have retaliatory weapons of
this kind, we will be without any military options whatsoever.”
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The information that Marwan passed on later described in detail the next stages of the process, including the arrival of the Kelt missiles to Egypt in late 1972 and their becoming operational in 1973. Marwan was also the first source who told Israel about the Soviets' change of heart regarding the Scud missiles in late May 1973, and their delivery—along with Soviet personnel to man them—in August 1973.

The matter of the long-range fighter-bombers was a tougher nut to crack, mainly because the Soviets didn't have any. The Egyptians pinned their hopes on the MiG-23, but by 1971 the plane had not yet entered mass production. An interceptor version of the MiG-23 became operational in the Soviet air force in June 1972, and a ground-attack version for export to third-world countries went into production in 1973. The earliest possible date for their becoming operational in the Egyptian air force was 1974—and as far as Sadat was concerned, waiting that long was not an option, especially since there was no guarantee that the planes would really be ready by then. The Egyptian war planners determined a minimum need of five attack squadrons (between sixty and seventy-five warplanes) for effectively attacking Israeli air bases.