The Angel (19 page)

Nor was this understanding limited to the Mossad. On November 26, 1972, one month after Sadat fired many of his top military figures who disagreed with his new approach, and just days after the second meeting with Marwan in London, Moshe Dayan reported to the government that “there are reports . . . which we must relate to with utmost seriousness, of an emerging trend in Egypt to restart the hostilities . . . including escalation, if possible by the end of the calendar year.” According to the reports, Dayan said, the Egyptian move would be taken together with Syria, with the aim of “creating an ‘Eastern front' together with Jordan.”
³

The warnings coming in from Egypt caused the Israeli prime
minister to convene her “kitchen cabinet,” the government's top decision-making body. On December 1, 1972, she met with Dayan, Yigal Allon, and Yisrael Galili, as well as the IDF chief of staff, David Elazar, who had replaced Chaim Bar-Lev; the new chief of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira; and Zvi Zamir from the Mossad. The sole agenda item was Egypt's immediate war intentions. On the basis of information MI had received about the October 24 meeting, Zeira declared that “Sadat has given the order to finish preparations by the end of December, [but] he hasn't given a date of attack.” He estimated that the chance of an attack was therefore “not high,” and the likelihood that Egypt would actually try to cross the Suez Canal “close to zero.” At the core of Zeira's error stood a misunderstanding of Sadat's expulsion of the Soviet troops just a few months earlier: Instead of seeing it as a preparation for war, he took it as a dramatic setback to Egypt's defensive capability, which therefore made Sadat
less
likely to attack rather than more so.

The Mossad chief's assessment was more cautious and took more seriously the latest information from the Angel. “In light of what we know, we need to go on the assumption that there could be an exchange of fire,” Zamir told them. “When I say ‘fire,' it doesn't necessarily mean restarting hostilities along the whole canal, but rather harassment here and there.” The IDF chief of staff, for his part, was skeptical about the possibility of war in the near term, but he expressed a healthy caution when he added: “We can't look at ourselves as free from the need to be prepared . . . we can't say there is ‘no chance' of fire and we can sleep easy.”
⁴

In fact, the only person at the meeting who took Marwan's warnings very seriously was Moshe Dayan. “We need to assume that Egypt will launch an attack at the canal in early 1973,” he declared, adding that “Egypt and Syria are in collusion.” Dayan then insisted that Israel send Egypt a message via the Americans, or pos
sibly the Soviets, warning against even a limited Egyptian assault—and affirming that Israel “has no inclination to enter another war of attrition, and if they start a fight, we will hit back hard.” Given the possibility that Jordan would join the fight, Dayan also suggested that a similar message be sent to King Hussein.
⁵

Despite Zeira's assessment that the chances of an Egyptian attack on the canal were “close to zero,” Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan decided to alert the Americans. That same day, Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's envoy in Washington, sent a message to Kissinger reporting that they had received word that Egypt was planning an offensive by the end of December; a similar message went to the CIA from the Mossad. It was unclear, the communiqués added, whether the Egyptians were planning a full-scale war to take back the Sinai, or something more limited such as shelling the canal area or commando raids without trying to take the eastern bank.
⁶
The Americans answered that they, too, had received information confirming that Egypt had indeed changed its mind about launching a war. The CIA, however, shared Zeira's assessment that Sadat was fully aware of his military inferiority and that therefore the likelihood of a new war was not high.

The outlook shared by Dayan, Elazar, and Zamir at the meeting had its merits. On the one hand, it took into account the new warnings about a change of heart in Egypt. On the other hand, it took seriously the fact that Egypt's military disadvantage had not changed, that Sadat knew it, and that many top-ranking Egyptian officials opposed it for that very reason. War, in other words, was taken to be unlikely but possible, and Israel had to prepare accordingly. Dayan, who took the most aggressive stance at the meeting, reiterated a few days later that although an Egyptian attack was not likely in the coming weeks, “it could certainly happen before the spring.”
⁷

The gap between the positions of the MI chief, who believed
the likelihood of an Egyptian crossing of the canal was “close to zero,” and the IDF chief of staff, who believed that the likelihood was low but not low enough to ignore, reflected a difference in their basic approaches. When Zeira took up his post, he was already committed to the
kontzeptzia
. Elazar's view was more nuanced. He had seen the original materials, supplied by Marwan, on which the
kontzeptzia
had been based. But from the day he replaced Bar-Lev as chief of staff on January 1, 1972, he viewed war as quite possible in the coming two years. So he was much more open than Zeira to changing his assessment based on new information that came in.

This difference of opinion had dramatic results. In the summer of 1972, before Sadat had decided on war, MI estimated that the Egyptians would not come to the conclusion that they had the necessary armaments to go to war before April 1973. At the same time, MI allowed for the possibility that, because of the pressure to show progress on the diplomatic front, Sadat would find it necessary to take military steps without first acquiring the equipment. Ironically, only after information started flowing from reliable sources suggesting that the time pressures were indeed becoming more critical for Sadat, MI's assessment of the possibility of war in the short term started going down rather than up. On January 20, 1973, some six weeks after the meeting of Golda Meir's kitchen cabinet, MI-Research issued its semiannual intelligence assessment, in which it declared that the possibility of war was “farther away than at any time in the past.”
⁸
This was based mostly on the belief that the dismissal of the Soviet air defense division in July 1972 had significantly weakened Egypt—even though Marwan had said otherwise. Indeed, it is hard to ignore the fact that everything Marwan had given Israel with regard to Sadat's decision for war in October 1972 appears to have left no impression whatsoever on Military Intelligence's assessment.

Elazar, on the other hand, was much more impressed by the
Angel's latest warnings. He had taken up his post about a year and a half after the end of the War of Attrition and against a backdrop of relative calm on all fronts. As a result, he was under intense pressure to cut the IDF budget. The government was trying to push through a new social agenda, diverting resources to absorbing tens of thousands of new immigrants who had begun arriving from the Soviet Union, and addressing the social inequities that had sparked demonstrations by the Sephardic “Black Panthers,” named after the American movement. Quiet borders and a general sense that there was no war in the offing, combined with the belief that Israel's superior military could swiftly repel any attack—all these made it possible, Israel's leaders believed, to shift the Treasury's priorities. Cuts had already begun in 1970 and were threatening to deepen.

Elazar, however, saw an Egyptian attack during his tenure as a real possibility, and he argued that these cutbacks were the gravest threat to Israel's future. The worst of them was a plan to reduce mandatory service by three months, which would dramatically reduce the number of active-duty troops, who would be crucial for holding off an Arab assault until reserves could be deployed. Elazar fought the plan tooth and nail, making use of Marwan's warnings to that end.
⁹
In effect, Ashraf Marwan's warnings prevented a situation in which the IDF would have been even less prepared than it was when war came the following October.

IN EARLY 1973,
Israel received further reports about Egypt. One batch added details to the October 24 meeting, telling of disagreements that arose because most of the participants were convinced that the Egyptian military was far from ready for war, and because of Sadat's decision to fire War Minister Sadek and others because of their “defeatist” attitude. This report also correctly reported the order of the new war minister, Ismail, to prepare a plan for crossing the canal using infantry divisions followed later by tanks (Granite II Improved),
and on the new wave of Egyptian military exercises preparing for the crossing.

A second group of reports came from Ashraf Marwan. On January 17, he reported that Sadat had ordered the army to prepare for attack without waiting for new weapons. At the same time, the same intelligence batch suggested that Egypt was not planning on crossing in a general way but preferred to launch open-ended static hostilities involving commando and air force raids in Sinai, as well as an air attack on Israel proper. According to what Marwan himself said, the Egyptian initiative would begin in May 1973 and would be carried out in coordination with Syria.

These reports, too, should have strengthened the belief that Sadat had changed his mind about attacking Israel. Yet, again, they fell on deaf ears at MI-Research. In a survey written in response to Marwan's report of January 17, the commander of MI-Research Branch 6 (Egypt) Lt. Col. Yonah Bandman wrote that it did not “testify to a decision that Sadat had made to open fire in the coming months; all the more so did the decision not reflect any operational plan whatsoever.” In Bandman's view, Marwan's reports reflected little more than Egyptian fantasizing, in an attempt to create an atmosphere of crisis in order to spur on the diplomatic effort; the military exercises, too, had been falsely interpreted as hostile purely because of the sense of crisis in the regime, which itself was engineered to put pressure on Israel.
¹⁰
Bandman's reflexive rejection of any report that contradicted Israel's now-outdated
kontzeptzia
found expression in other ways as well. Unlike his predecessor Meir Meir, Bandman did not meet Marwan once during his entire tenure in the position. And when the opportunity to meet with Dubi presented itself, either in London or in Israel, he never once took it.

EGYPTIAN WAR PREPARATIONS
continued apace during the first months of 1973. In addition to writing up plans and holding exer
cises, Egypt now began receiving a stream of arms from the Soviets as well. They included SA-3 and SA-6 surface-to-air batteries, SA-7 Strela personal antiaircraft missiles, Sukhoi Su-17 fighter planes, T-62 tanks, Sagger personal antitank missiles, additional artillery, and bridging equipment. At the same time, Egypt started getting Western aircraft that improved, if not dramatically, its attack capabilities deep in Israeli territory. These included British-made Hawker Hunters from Iraq, relatively old planes that gave Egypt little more than a boost in morale. They also started receiving the new Mirages that Libya had bought from France. During March and April, Egypt received eighteen of these, mostly IIIEs, which had a long enough range to attack Israeli air bases.
¹¹
It was still not enough to neutralize Israel's overall air superiority, but the combination of these planes with the scaling back of Egypt's war aims gave a better response than ever before to the vulnerability of Egyptian ground forces to attack from the air.

At the same time, war preparations were ramping up. Sadat held a series of meetings with the leadership of his Socialist Union Party as well as the cabinet, in which he made clear that in light of the diplomatic stalemate, there was no choice but to go to war, with the aim of “shattering the cease-fire.” As the spring approached, for the first time since the end of the War of Attrition, the Egyptians believed they were ready to take on the IDF.

IN EARLY APRIL
1973, the chief of Egyptian military operations, General Mohamed Abdel Ghani el-Gamasy, presented a number of possible dates of attack based on optimal conditions—such as when the currents in the canal would be slowest and tides would be ideal, the amount of moonlight, and which dates would be the most difficult for the IDF to organize a swift and effective response. The earliest of these was in mid-May. On April 5, Sadat met with his cabinet and explained the logic behind his decision to go to
war. The cabinet approved the decision unanimously. Several days later, the preparations were made public. Radio Cairo began broadcasting war slogans. The government began meeting in Center 10, the underground war room, and issued a call for volunteers to join the “people's resistance” if the IDF were to occupy territory west of the canal.

All of these preparations ran aground, however, as soon as the Syrians were brought into the picture. On April 23, President Hafez al-Assad came to Egypt for a secret two-day meeting with Sadat in Burj al-Arab on the Mediterranean coast. The Egyptians presented the Granite II Improved plan, which included the armored assault to capture the Mitla and Gidi Passes. The crossing of the Suez Canal was presented as a first stage toward the conquest of all of Sinai. For their part, the Syrians presented their plans for conquering the Golan Heights. But even though the two sides agreed to coordinate their attack, Assad was unwilling to pull the trigger: Neither Egypt nor Syria, he believed, was ready for war. The central problem, Assad said, was Syria's lack of surface-to-air batteries to protect its ground forces from aerial attack. The two presidents agreed to delay the entire operation until the late summer. A few days later, Assad flew to Moscow, where he signed a huge arms deal; within a few weeks, new weapons began flowing to Damascus.

THESE DEVELOPMENTS WERE
not lost on the Israeli intelligence community. As early as March, reports started coming in about Egypt's heightened war preparations. They all confirmed what Marwan had said in January—that the target date for war was in May and that Egypt was coordinating with Syria.
¹²
Once the war plans had concretized and specific dates were discussed, the intelligence flow became more intense.