The Angel (24 page)

According to an interview Nusseir later gave to an Egyptian TV station, when Marwan heard the story he leapt up off the couch. “There's going to be a war,” he declared. “The war plans say that
we're worried about our planes getting damaged on the ground. Part of the plan is that we're supposed to reroute our planes to other countries.” Marwan went into the bedroom, made a few phone calls, and soon came back out, saying that war would be launched the following day. He told Nusseir that he had to get back to Egypt immediately and asked him to go to their mutual friend, Kamal Adham, and tell him to lend Marwan one of his private planes so that he could fly back to Cairo. It was midday Friday when Nusseir called Adham, who was unable to help Marwan, since the plane he usually kept in London had just taken off. Nusseir left Marwan's suite and went back to his family. What was clear to him, he later recalled, was that “Marwan knew every detail of the war plans because he worked in the President's Office, but he didn't know exactly when it would happen . . . the proof of this was the great surprise he showed when he heard my story. It was clear that he didn't know when the war would begin.”
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Most of the Israelis familiar with the war warning Marwan gave assumed that he was already fully aware when he left Egypt several days earlier that war would break on October 6. What emerges from Nusseir's account is that this assumption may have been simply false. In fact, Marwan learned that war will start on October 6 only on October 5 at midday, and only by accident.

In the entire debate about whether Marwan was actually a sophisticated double agent rather than the most important spy Israel ever had, no single question has been more decisive than Marwan's alleged “delay” in warning about the war. According to the double agent hypothesis, he knew all along that the attack would come on October 6; he gave the warning in order to maintain his credibility with the Israelis but withheld the information until it was too late for them to do anything useful with it. This, it emerges, is wrong on two counts: Marwan almost certainly didn't know about the timing until the day before the attack; and as we will see further
on, he really did give the Israelis enough time to deploy the regular army for war, to start calling up their reserves, and to launch a preemptive strike. That they did not take these steps is due largely to their own confusion—and, in the case of MI chief Eli Zeira and those he influenced, their unwillingness to take Marwan's warning seriously.

There were several reasons for Israel's spectacular intelligence failure, which allowed the Egyptian and Syrian forces to catch the IDF unprepared when they attacked on the afternoon of Saturday, October 6. But Israel also benefited from a stroke of luck. If the Egyptian aviation minister hadn't given the order to change the national carrier's flight schedules and reroute the airliners to Libya; if Mohamed Nusseir hadn't heard about it from the chief of EgyptAir's London branch; if he hadn't known that Marwan was in the city and then tracked him down at the Churchill to see what he might know about it—the outcome of the entire war may have been quite different. Only through the confluence of all these events was it possible for Marwan to tell Zamir that night that war was not just on the way but would be at hand the next day. If his warning had remained without a precise date, it is hard to believe that Zamir's report that night would have started a process that would end in the call-up of Israeli reserves, as well as additional crucial decisions made in the final hours before the attack.

Egyptian efforts to keep the date of attack a secret were both comprehensive and remarkably effective, adhering strictly to the principle of “need to know.” Foreign Minister Mohamed Hassan al-Zayat, for example, had no idea that war would break out on October 6 because he had been at the United Nations in New York and was out of the loop regarding military moves.
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Sadat was careful, moreover, to keep the date a secret from other Arab leaders, including King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, with whom he was closest, as well as Muammar Gaddafi, who had been no small
nuisance to him. If the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Libya didn't need to know, then neither did the man in the President's Office in charge of relations with those states. True, Marwan had excellent sources of his own who might have tipped him off. But even they may have been cut off or kept the information to themselves. Although more people in Sadat's office knew about it as the day of the attack drew closer, Marwan had left the country by October 3, when the number of people who knew was still relatively small. Only on October 3, for example, were the commanders of the infantry divisions at the front told that the attack would be launched three days later.

Other sources who reported to Israel in late 1972 and then again in the spring of 1973 that war was about to erupt, some even giving specific dates, gave no similar warning in the fall of 1973. The most likely reason is that Sadat did a much better job at keeping the secret this time around. Marwan's access was better than that of any other Israeli source in Egypt at the time, but even that was not enough to ensure that he'd know every secret. Moreover, he, too, had erred in the past, for example, when he reported in the middle of January 1973 regarding the supposedly upcoming hostilities the following May, that the Egyptians had no intention of crossing the Suez Canal; or when he reported in early September 1973 that the war would be pushed off to the end of the year.

It is thus far more likely that Marwan learned only on Friday, October 5, that war would break out the following day, and only as a result of the EgyptAir rescheduling. Israeli intelligence also picked up the unusual order given to the airline, but none of the intelligence reports presented on Friday mentioned it. It was fortunate for Israel that the news reached the Angel as well, who knew what it might mean, and whom to call for details. The result was that when he met Zamir that night, he had new, concrete intelligence to share—intelligence that would, once and for all, shatter
the paradigm that had, for so many months, frozen Israeli intelligence in the conviction that war was unlikely.

AT 5:45 A.M.
on Friday, October 5, IDF Military Intelligence sent out a report that, on the basis of reconnaissance air photography from the day before, presented Egyptian deployments along the Suez Canal. The final sentence said all that needed saying: “From the data we may conclude with clarity that the Egyptian military along the canal is arrayed in an emergency deployment the likes of which we have never seen before.” Defense Minister Dayan saw the report just after it went out. “One can get a stroke,” he said, “just from looking at the numbers.” This report, as well as other intelligence that continued to pour in about the unexplained evacuations of Soviets from Syria and Egypt, was the main topic of the meetings that took place on Yom Kippur Eve.

In the early morning hours, MI chief Eli Zeira held a meeting in his office. Zeira was apparently more worried about the Soviet evacuations than about the deployments along the southern front—deployments that included equipment for bridging the canal. During this meeting, the question was raised about whether to activate the “special means of intelligence gathering” that were under the sole and direct responsibility of the MI chief. Their specific nature remains a secret, but according to Howard Blum in his book on the Yom Kippur War, these were “a series of battery-operated devices attached to phone and cable connections buried deep in the sand outside Cairo.” They could pick up not only telephone and telegraph signals but also conversations taking place in rooms where the telephones and telexes were located. The problem was that ongoing activation would require the occasional replacement of batteries, a dangerous operation deep in enemy territory that MI was reluctant to undertake.
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According to an Israeli source, these devices had been planted on February 16–17, 1973,
in Jabel Ataka, west of the city of Suez, near the headquarters of the Egyptian Third Army, by a commando team that had reached the location by four American-made CH-53 helicopters.
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In the meeting on the morning of October 5, Zeira, who still believed war was unlikely, refused requests to activate the equipment.

At 8:25 a.m., a brief meeting took place in the office of the IDF chief of staff, David Elazar. In light of the new information about the Egyptian deployments and Soviet evacuations, Elazar decided to put the regular army on Alert Level 3, the highest alert level since the Six-Day War. He also put the air force on full alert, moved the rest of the 7th Armored Brigade up to the Golan Heights, and dispatched another tank brigade to the Sinai. To call up the reserves would require cabinet approval, and this was not yet possible. But Alert Level 3 meant that all the preparations were in place for a full call-up. Zeira at this point evidently still had not mentioned the warning Zamir had received from Marwan, and it is unclear whether Elazar knew about it when he made his decisions.

At 9:00 a.m., the weekly security briefing was held in the office of Defense Minister Dayan. Zeira presented an overview of the intelligence, again focusing more on the Soviet evacuations than on the offensive posture taken by the Egyptian deployment at the canal, which he saw as reflecting Egyptian anxiety about a possible Israeli preemptive strike like the one that had taken out Egypt's air force in the opening minutes of the Six-Day War. This was the meeting in which Zeira told the others present about Zamir's emergency trip to London, saying that they were waiting for his report that evening, and then “we will be wiser men.”

During the meeting, Dayan asked Zeira whether the special means of intelligence gathering had provided anything useful. Not only did Zeira fail to tell him that they hadn't been activated, but he also led Dayan to believe that they simply had failed to provide any indication of war. The effect of Zeira's misleading statement
was to allay Dayan's fears about an imminent attack. Because he believed that the equipment had been activated but gave no warnings, it was not unreasonable for him to conclude that Egypt was not on the verge of attacking. As for Chief of Staff Elazar, who was present as well and knew all about the special equipment, Zeira's words merely confirmed what he had already heard three days earlier, on Tuesday. Then, and possibly on Monday as well, Elazar had asked Zeira if he had activated the special equipment, and he had answered, falsely, that indeed he had.

This was no simple misunderstanding. Zeira was under pressure from top officers in MI to activate the equipment, and he had refused since he had not felt that the circumstances warranted its deployment, as there was, in his view, no imminent threat of war. In lying to his superiors, however, he directly and significantly contributed to both Dayan's and Elazar's serious underestimation of the threat at hand.
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During the meeting, Dayan gave his approval to the various decisions Elazar had made. He also decided that a message should be sent via Washington to Moscow, Cairo, and Damascus, to the effect that Israel had no hostile intentions but was fully aware of the actions being taken on the Arab side, and that if the Arabs attacked, they would find Israel ready for battle.

The issue of calling up the reserves was also raised at the meeting, and again at the next meeting, at 10:00 a.m. in the prime minister's office at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Here it was Elazar who took the lead, updating Prime Minister Golda Meir about the actions already taken to prepare for war. Elazar said there was no need for a full call-up yet, because if Egypt and Syria were about to attack, MI's intelligence-gathering capabilities, as well as those of the Mossad, would have given clear indications to that effect. “We'll prepare for war,” he concluded, “and hope that the indications come early enough.” Meir expressed her concerns but
accepted his position and approved the message Dayan wanted sent to the Soviets, Egyptians, and Syrians through Kissinger.

The fifth meeting that day involved a much broader forum—the full cabinet. This unscheduled meeting started at about 11:30 a.m., and it included all available government ministers. After the MI chief gave an overall survey of the intelligence picture, which did not mention Zamir's trip to London, the IDF chief of staff spoke. Elazar agreed with Zeira's assessment that Egypt's and Syria's offensive postures, combined with the absence of anything that would clearly prevent them from attacking, had forced the IDF's hand, requiring that measures be taken in response, including putting the army on Alert Level 3 and rushing reinforcements to the Sinai and the Golan Heights. “As for calling up the reserves and other measures,” he added, “we are waiting for further indicators” of war.

From Elazar's words, it was clear that his own position had evolved. If earlier that morning he believed that putting the military on full alert and deploying more forces along the fronts was sufficient to address the present threat, as the hours passed he started talking more and more about calling up reserves. In light of the possibility of a call-up during the Yom Kippur holiday, the cabinet formally empowered the prime minister and defense minister to make such a decision on their own, a decision that would normally have required the full cabinet's approval.

The final meeting of the day was an emergency meeting of the IDF General Staff, immediately following the cabinet meeting. There, Zeira told the IDF's top generals that “the likelihood of war initiated by Egypt and Syria is very low.” More likely, he estimated, was a limited Syrian attack on the Golan Heights, or limited Egyptian fire, possibly a helicopter assault along the Suez Canal. Least likely was a broad, joint assault by the Egyptians and Syrians together, including a crossing of the canal with the aim
of reaching the Mitla and Gidi Passes. This assessment, which was similar to the one he had given to the cabinet an hour and a half earlier, completely contradicted the assessment of MI's Research Department, where the IDF's top intelligence analysts were located. MI-Research had concluded that if Egypt were to attack at all, it would go for a full-blown assault on the canal rather than something limited, and that the present deployment by Egypt and Syria on both fronts pointed to just such an assault, in accordance with the Egyptian and Syrian war plans that had been in MI's possession for some time.