The Angel (22 page)

In response, Gaddafi denounced Egypt and called for a popular revolution to root out the corruption and bureaucracy of Sadat's regime. Sadat, who wanted to focus on nothing other than preparing for war against Israel, capitulated. On August 29, 1973, after a lengthy negotiation, the two nations announced that on Septem
ber 1—the anniversary of the Libyan revolution—they would sign documents to begin the process of unification.
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This was enough to calm the choppy waters of Egyptian-Libyan relations for the time being. But it did little to sate Gaddafi's thirst for revenge.

In the often bizarre world of Middle Eastern politics, the Egyptian president's greatest fear was that a serious Libyan retaliation against Israel would trigger a new Israeli-Arab war, ruining any element of surprise Egypt may have had in its own plans to attack. In his contacts with Gaddafi, Sadat repeatedly emphasized that any Libyan action had to be fully coordinated with Egypt, both in planning and in carrying it out. Reluctantly, Gaddafi agreed.

The man Sadat appointed to handle the matter from the Egyptian end was his emissary for Libyan affairs, Ashraf Marwan.

In Muammar Gaddafi's moral worldview, the most fitting eye-for-an-eye response would be to shoot an Israeli airliner out of the sky. He said as much to Sadat in April when the latter visited Libya. When the Libyans and the Egyptians began plotting the revenge attack, around July, the first question was where and how such a plane could be downed. The planners quickly settled on Rome's main airport, Fiumicino International. As citizens of a former Italian colony, the Libyans knew Rome well. Fiumicino was notoriously lax on security, and the Italians were notoriously forgiving of Arab terror groups. On Marwan's orders, two senior Egyptian security officials traveled to Rome to learn the layout of the airport, the flight paths, and the best locations for attacking planes that were taking off or landing. They returned with blueprints and maps, and a plan was hatched for shooting down an El Al Boeing 747 passenger jet just after takeoff, using SA-7 Strela personal antiaircraft missiles that the Egyptians had just received from the Soviet Union. It was agreed that Egypt would take responsibility for delivering two missiles to Rome, where they would be picked up by Palestinians belonging to the Black September group—the
same organization that had murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the summer before.

The first part of the operation went off without a hitch. On August 29, Amin al-Hindi, the leader of the Black September squad, arrived in Rome to prepare the attack with four other members of his group. A few days later, on Marwan's orders and without involving anyone from the Egyptian military, two missiles and their launchers were transferred from army stockpiles to Sadat's office. They were packed in diplomatic baggage under the name of Marwan's wife, Mona. She had planned on flying to London on an unrelated matter, but at her husband's request, she agreed to meet up with him in Rome. Mona was completely unaware of both the plan and the contents of the bags.

As expected, the Italian authorities didn't open them. Because they carried the name of Nasser's daughter, the bags were taken directly from the aircraft to a waiting pickup truck, which transported them to the Egyptian Art Academy in Rome.

Marwan arrived in the city the following day. He put the bags in his private car and drove to the Raphael Salato shoe store at 149 Via Veneto, in the main shopping district. Al-Hindi was waiting in the store. He recognized Marwan from a photograph he had been given. He approached Marwan and said the code word—several times.

From there, however, things went slightly awry. Marwan told Al-Hindi that he and his men would have to take the missiles out of his car, transfer them to their vehicle, and take them back to the apartment Al-Hindi had rented in Ostia, near the airport, from where the attack would be launched.

The trouble was, they didn't have a car. They hadn't been told they would need one.

The resourceful terrorists would not be deterred. They found a carpet dealer down the street, bought a few rugs, and rolled up the
missiles and launchers into them. Then they carried them on their shoulders to the nearest subway station. They used public transportation to take the missiles to Ostia. Al-Hindi stayed in the apartment while the others headed for the Atlas Hotel, a downtown dive that doubled as a brothel.

None of it would matter. The Mossad was fully aware of the scheme from the early planning stages, thanks to Marwan. But unlike his other work for Israel, this time he wasn't really going against Egyptian interests. On the contrary, Sadat didn't want the plot to actually succeed, just a month before he was to launch his surprise attack. Shooting down an El Al plane would have triggered a massive regional crisis, and the discovery of SA-7 missile shrapnel among the wreckage would have implicated Egypt. Tensions would have risen dramatically, and Egypt would have lost the element of surprise. Such a scheme, in other words, could completely scuttle Sadat's plans for an attack on Israel.

Marwan knew Sadat's thinking. Sadat had learned to respect Marwan's stunning variety of talents, skills, and connections. He would know how to ensure the mission's failure, presumably by tipping off the Italians. But he never suspected that Marwan's contacts were Israeli.

In advance of the operation, Zvi Zamir arrived in Rome to update the local authorities on the plot and to oversee operations in the event that the Italians failed to stop it. In part, the Mossad chief was responding to the trauma of the previous summer, when German police had botched an attempt to rescue Israel's Olympic athletes. Zamir had stood by in the control tower at the Munich airport, helpless. After returning to Israel, deeply shaken, he realized that the Israelis could not rely solely on local forces to protect its citizens abroad.

Indeed, this time the Israelis did not count on the local security services alone. Upon learning about the planned terror operation,
more than two weeks before it was to take place, a Mossad team headed by Mike Harari, a senior and veteran operations officer, arrived in Rome. The team thoroughly searched the area around Fiumicino Airport, looking for hideouts that could be used to launch the missiles. Even more important, they followed Marwan when he transferred the missiles to the Palestinian terrorists in Via Veneto and, then, followed the terrorists who took the missiles to their hideout. Harari wanted to raid the apartment, but Zamir, who had already arrived in Rome, decided instead to tip off his Italian counterpart, with whom he had an excellent working relationship. Zamir's only request was that the Italians give the Israelis one of the Strelas, with which the Israeli Air Force was unfamiliar at the time.

From Zamir's perspective, the greatest proof that Marwan wasn't working with the Italians was the surprise he now heard in the voice of his Italian counterpart when he told him he was in Rome to prevent a large-scale terror attack. This time, the locals did their job well. They organized quickly, and in the early-morning hours of September 6, a large force of police entered the apartment in Ostia and arrested Al-Hindi. The other men were picked up downtown at the Atlas Hotel. Al-Hindi later testified that he was surprised by the size of the force, at first thinking they were Mossad. In reality the Mossad team under Harari was ready to intervene in case the local forces faced problems, but there was no need for that.

The five terrorists were arrested. The missiles were confiscated, and the 747 carrying four hundred passengers that had been the intended target of the attack went on its way without the passengers knowing what had happened. Zamir and his men returned to Israel. Although the Black September plotters were later tried, the Italians feared reprisals, and the men were released and allowed to leave the country.

When Marwan learned of the arrest of Al-Hindi and his men,
he headed straight for the airport. Zamir did not tell the Italians who his source had been. Publicly, the question of how the Italians found out about the planned attack remained unresolved—though the following headline appeared in one of the papers: “Italian Sources: Arrest of ‘Shoulder-Launched Missile Terrorists' Came After Hints from Israeli Intelligence.”

After the dust settled, Marwan's Israeli employers gave him a sizable bonus for having, yet again, proved his dedication to Israel's security.
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THERE WAS A
downside, however. Ashraf Marwan's involvement in both the planning and the disruption of the terror attack in Rome pulled him away from the center of decision making in Cairo and ended up affecting his ability to give a clear and timely warning of the war a month later. Whatever his distance from Sadat, he certainly knew that preparations for war had entered their final phase. And yet, between early September, when he told his handlers that Egypt intended to attack by year's end, and October 4—just two days before the attack—he gave the Israelis nothing.

Why? Three reasons may explain his silence. One is that Marwan was, for these crucial few weeks, largely out of the loop. He was taken by surprise when he learned on October 5 that the attack would be launched the following day. In his last update in September, he had told the Israelis that Sadat was disclosing less than ever before. Sadat did not let the Libyans or Saudis in on the secret of the attack's timing, so Marwan, whose job was to manage relations with those countries, had no reason to be in the know. Sadat likely took extra care with Marwan after the foiled Rome attack; Marwan was clearly well connected with foreign intelligence, and Sadat didn't want any leaks.

A second reason is that even the greatest spy in Israel's history, who handed over his own country's detailed war plans to the enemy,
may have hesitated when it came to this particular secret regarding the date of attack. This may seem unlikely given everything we know about his personality. And yet, a number of intelligence officers who knew him insisted that this should not be ruled out.
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The third reason is that Marwan may have believed that no further warnings were necessary—that he had already given the Israelis everything they needed in order to come to the right conclusions. He had told them what signs to look for as the final preparations for war were made, signs that appeared in black and white in the war plans he had handed the Mossad, like the stoppage at the Morgan oil field, which could not be kept secret. So when Marwan finally did give the unambiguous warning of war on October 5, he thought he was telling the Israelis something they already knew.

These explanations are not contradictory and could all be true. They help us understand the final weeks and days leading up to the war, and especially the fact that for all their preparations and extensive espionage efforts, the Israelis were caught unprepared. It is important to emphasize that even without Marwan's warnings of October 4 and 5, during September Israel had accumulated plenty of crucial indicators that Egypt and Syria were about to attack. Under normal circumstances, Military Intelligence should have sounded the alarm no later than October 2—giving the IDF commanders more than enough time to call up reserves and fully deploy for war. But at that moment in history, Israel's Military Intelligence was under the command of a group of officers whose commitment to a specific intelligence paradigm—the
kontzeptzia
—was unwavering, almost religious, even though it had been obviated by events almost a year earlier. As a result, they overlooked a mass of critical data that had only one reasonable interpretation: that Egypt and Syria were headed for war.

OF ALL THE
indicators, probably the most worrisome was the buildup of Syrian forces to the north. A reconnaissance flyover that showed the Syrian military in a full emergency deployment along the border, with redoubled artillery and the supporting armor of three infantry divisions advanced to their rear, troubled the IDF's northern commander. In a meeting of the IDF's top brass on September 24, Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi expressed his concern about a Syrian surprise attack. Dayan did not see a full-scale Syrian assault in the offing but possibly something more limited, like an attack on an Israeli settlement on the Golan Heights, which could claim many casualties. A limited action, rather than full-scale war, became Dayan's biggest worry.

Even the warning King Hussein gave Golda Meir in their secret summit on September 25 did little to change Israeli assessments. Jordan had received a tip from a Syrian general who was secretly working for the Hashemite kingdom. Hussein told Meir that the Syrians were at battle stations and likely to attack along with Egypt. At the same time, the Mossad chief, together with Col. Aharon Levran, received details from the Jordanians about the Syrian deployments and plans, including the intent to mount a full-scale assault with Egypt. Neither of the meetings gave a date for the attack. The prime minister was deeply unsettled by the meeting with Hussein and demanded a response from Military Intelligence. The MI chief, Zeira, answered that the information Meir had received was unreliable. Though the king's intelligence included new information about the Syrian deployments—including the high state of alert, cancellation of leaves, the call-up of reserves, and the impounding of civilian vehicles—Zeira still insisted that Syria would never launch a war without Egypt, and Egypt had no such intention.

Nevertheless, the IDF chief of staff ordered the partial reinforcement of the Golan Heights. Two tank squadrons from the 7th
Armored Brigade and one artillery battery climbed the escarpment to the Golan on September 26, the eve of Rosh Hashanah.

In the ensuing days, Israel received information about a heightened alert level in the Egyptian air force, as well as the movement of armored units from Cairo toward the canal. On September 26, a source that the prime minister had previously called “good”
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passed along a warning that Egypt intended to launch, very soon, an attack that included crossing the canal. MI ignored it, asserting that the Egyptians were moving their forces out of fear of an Israeli preemptive strike. At the same time, the CIA passed along a report that the Syrians were planning to attack, with the aim of recapturing the Golan Heights. This warning included an explicit plan of attack. The officers at MI-Research, who knew that the CIA's information was coming mainly from King Hussein, disseminated a report that included both the warning and the key points of the plan of attack but also their own opinion that the Syrian deployments were not offensive in nature. Nor did this opinion change when MI received reports from its own sources in Unit 848 that Syrian Sukhoi assault planes had been relocated to forward air bases, or that the 47th Armored Brigade, which was charged with the southern sector of the Golan front during a war, had left Homs in the north and was making its way to the Israeli border in the south. In early October, the Syrian army had completed its preparations and, in accordance with Soviet military doctrine, was now in a position to attack without any further action.