The Angel (25 page)

Elazar, however, was much more worried than Zeira. He still felt that the likelihood of war was not high, but it was certainly not “very low.” His own relatively mild optimism stemmed from his belief that “if in fact they intend to attack simultaneously from Syria and Egypt, we will get the warning.” This belief, it now seems, was based on his familiarity with Israeli intelligence's two strategic-level sources of information: the special means of intelligence gathering under the MI chief's authority, and the Mossad's Angel. But Elazar did not know that the special measures had not been activated. And though he had heard Zeira mention Zamir's trip to London, it was not presented with the urgency it demanded. Zeira hadn't told Elazar about the contents of his phone conversation with Zamir from the night before. As a result, the IDF chief of staff, according to the testimony of his own deputy, was unaware throughout Friday that Zamir had gone to meet the Angel because of a warning of immediate war. For the kind of warning that would justify calling up the reserves, Elazar's sights were set on the MI's “special intelligence-gathering measures.”

One bit of intelligence that could have turned the tide that day was picked up by surveillance equipment, though not of the “special” variety. At 5:00 p.m. on Friday, members of Intelligence Unit 848 intercepted a message from Iraq's ambassador in Moscow to
his own foreign ministry in Baghdad. The ambassador reported that he had checked with the Soviet Foreign Ministry to find out the reason for the emergency evacuations that had begun the day before and was told that Egypt and Syria had alerted the Soviets that they were about to attack Israel. Under normal circumstances, such a message would have been sent out within half an hour from the moment it reached MI-Research. But despite the IDF's being at Alert Level 3, most MI-Research officers were at home or in synagogues for Yom Kippur. The officer on duty hesitated, for he was reluctant to send out a message that might trigger a massive call-up on Yom Kippur. He began consulting with other officers and commanders, and after six full hours Zeira ordered that it be withheld because he was waiting for further information.
¹¹

THAT “FURTHER INFORMATION”
was, of course, the Mossad chief's report from his meeting with the Angel. At that very hour—11:00 p.m. Israel time, 10:00 p.m. in London—Zamir and Dubi were making their way to the rendezvous point. Zamir was unaware of the latest developments back in Israel. He didn't know about the reconnaissance photos from the day before showing the entire Egyptian military on a war footing. Neither was he aware of the string of meetings that took place that day in Tel Aviv, in which it became increasingly clear how badly the Israelis needed just one more piece of hard evidence showing that Egypt and Syria were about to attack, in order to bring the IDF chief of staff to seek government approval of a massive call-up of reserves on the holiest day in the Jewish religion. Neither was he aware that just such a piece of information had reached MI six hours earlier but hadn't been forwarded to the chief of staff; or that the latter was under the false impression that the special surveillance equipment was operational when it wasn't, and that he therefore had a completely misguided impression of the overall intelligence picture.

He did, however, know that back in Israel, there was serious concern about the possibility of war and that they awaited his word. But Zamir was not fully prepared for the dramatic news that Marwan brought.

It was close to 10:00 p.m. London time when Dubi and Zamir reached the apartment where the meeting would be held. Mossad agents, who had been in place for several hours, gave the area around the building a final once-over. Dubi and Zamir went in and waited. It was a long wait. Marwan had rarely been late before. Slightly after 11:30 p.m., they finally heard a knock on the door. Dubi opened it, and in walked the Angel.

Handshakes and formalities were exchanged. Dubi took a seat near the large dining table, notebook open and pen in hand. Marwan sat in an armchair by the coffee table, facing Zamir.

THIS WAS THE
first meeting between Marwan and his handlers since the failed attack on the El Al jet in Rome a month earlier. The Israelis wanted to make sure their source hadn't been compromised, and they wanted him to know they were concerned. This is why Zamir's first line of questioning was about whether any suspicions had been raised after the Italian forces raided the apartment in Ostia—a raid that clearly was based on advance warning—and whether Sadat had shown any interest in the question of how the Italians knew about the attack. Marwan reassured them that the episode had not caused him any trouble. Sadat probably figured that Marwan had tipped the Italians off; since the terror attack wasn't in Egypt's interest anyway, this in itself was unlikely to trouble the president. But nobody suspected he had said anything to the Israelis.

From the abrupt manner in which he deflected Zamir's questions, however, it was clear that Marwan had something more pressing on his mind.

Marwan was tense. “I have come here,” he announced, “to talk about the war, and nothing else. I came late because I have spent the entire evening at our consulate in Kensington. I've been on the phone with Cairo, trying to get the most up-to-date information. He [Sadat] intends to go to war tomorrow.” From the way Marwan expressed himself in what followed, one gets the sense that he thought the Israelis already knew about it. It was a belief held widely by the Egyptians that the Israelis would know about the attack two full days before it was launched. But it is also possible that he was trying to gloss over the fact that—despite presenting himself to the Israelis as the oracle of all knowledge worth knowing in Egypt—here he now was, less than twenty-four hours before the attack, having learned about it only a few hours earlier.

Zamir was taken by surprise. He had come to the meeting worried because from the latest information he had, especially the Soviet evacuations, he could see that Egypt and Syria were heading for war. But he had not imagined that the attack would be launched in less than twenty-four hours. And he was also worried that, just as with past warnings, this one, too, would prove a false alarm. So his immediate response was, “On what do you base your assertion?”

For Marwan, who had previously given false alarms of war, both his credibility in the eyes of the Israelis and his image as a central player in Cairo were obviously important. Nor is it clear where he got his information—to whom, in other words, he had made those phone calls throughout the evening. And because his information was based on telephone conversations rather than face-to-face meetings, it is fair to assume that what he heard had been phrased cautiously or even ambiguously. He had not spent the crucial days before the war in Sadat's presence, so he couldn't know what the atmosphere was like in the presidential offices, where there were people who already knew the secret. The dissonance
between the information he had received, in whose credibility he had no doubt, and his intimate knowledge of Sadat's psyche—the president had changed his mind many times about the date of attack—had its effect on him. The more Zamir pressed him to give his own independent take on whether war would in fact erupt the next day, the more Marwan grew agitated, at least once raising his voice. “How should I know?” he shouted. “He [Sadat] is crazy. He can march forward, tell everyone else to march forward, and then suddenly march backward.” Marwan was giving voice not only to his frustration at his inability to give a straight answer to the most important question of his career as a spy, but also to his personal aversion toward Sadat, his inclination to disrespect him and see him as unreliable.

Zamir was less worried about Marwan's inner conflict than about whether or not a war would start the next day. He had been a senior IDF officer in 1959, when a poorly thought-out military exercise involving an unannounced, emergency mass call-up of reserves instilled fear in an entire nation, triggered the call-up of reserves in Egypt and Syria in response, and ratcheted up tensions in the whole region. The affair, known as the Night of the Ducks, brought an end to the military careers of the commander of the IDF's Operations Branch, Maj. Gen. Meir Zorea, and the chief of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Yehoshafat Harkabi. Images of that episode flashed through Zamir's mind as he spoke with Marwan. The Night of the Ducks, he realized, would look like child's play compared with a mistaken emergency mobilization for war in the middle of Yom Kippur. He could see the worldwide reaction to the IDF pulling tens of thousands of reserve soldiers out of the synagogues and sending them to the front to await an Arab onslaught that never came. The price would be incalculable. Now was the time, Zamir knew, to press his source as hard as possible, to make sure the warning was well grounded.

Marwan's discomfort did little to quell Zamir's concerns. He quickly realized that he'd have to rely on his own experience, which was much greater than Marwan's, to formulate his own opinion. Zamir didn't know what had happened in Israel since his departure to London, but he had no reason to think that the reserves had already been called up. He understood that a clear warning that war would be launched the next day would leave the decision makers without any alternatives to a full-blown emergency call-up. And so, despite his being the chief of the Mossad and not the prime minister and her cabinet, he suddenly felt the full weight of the government's decision on his shoulders. But Zamir was himself a former general, having previously served as the chief of the IDF Southern Command, and he fully understood the implications of trying to fend off an Arab assault without calling up reserves.

By the end of the meeting, he had already made up his mind. He would send back to Israel an unambiguous warning that Egypt and Syria planned on launching a full-scale attack the next day.

This decision would alter the course of the Yom Kippur War.

But he wasn't finished with Marwan. Next, he grilled him about the war plans. Marwan hadn't brought any documents with him, but most of the key details of the latest battle plans were burned in his memory and had just been reconfirmed by his contacts in Cairo. Nothing had changed since the last time he'd passed the most recent version of the war plans to his handlers several weeks before. Egyptian infantry divisions would cross the Suez Canal and move farther east up to six miles. He went into some detail about the air and commando raids aimed at blocking IDF reinforcements heading for the front. Marwan also confirmed that the Egyptian air force would send its Tupolev Tu-16 bombers armed with Kelt missiles to strike the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. This, too, had appeared in the plans he had previously passed along.

Zamir also asked about the precise hour of attack (H-hour),
though he didn't consider it such a pressing question. In all of the Egyptian battle plans that Israel had seen for years, H-hour was precisely sunset—a time that left just enough daylight to carry out a major air assault on the Sinai, before darkness came to preclude an effective response by the Israeli Air Force. According to Marwan's report, that would be the plan this time as well. On October 6, 1973, the sun would set at 5:20 p.m. Israel time.

What neither Marwan nor his handlers knew, however, was that two days earlier, the Egyptian war minister had met with the president of Syria and had agreed to launch the attack at 2:00 p.m., as a compromise between Syrian and Egyptian operational needs.

The meeting lasted more than two hours. Marwan returned to his hotel, with Mossad agents keeping tabs on him. The next day, Saturday, he went back to Egypt. Zamir and Dubi, who had spent the whole meeting writing down every word, went directly to the home of the Mossad's London station chief, a ten-minute walk. On the way, Zamir wondered aloud what would happen if he sent a warning of immediate war and the war never came. He didn't need to wait for Dubi's answer, however. He had already made up his mind.

They reached the apartment of Rafi, the station chief, who was waiting for them. Zamir took a few minutes to carefully craft, longhand, the coded message that he would send to his chief of staff, Freddy Eini, who waited at home in Israel. Also present was Zvi Malhin, who was responsible for security for the meeting with Marwan. When Malhin saw the message Zamir had written, he reminded him of the Night of the Ducks of 1959, as if Zamir needed reminding, and what happened to those responsible. But Malhin, too, was convinced that war was coming: A few hours before war started, he called his wife in the Afeka neighborhood of Tel Aviv, and told her to find a neighbor's house with a bomb shelter where she could take cover. Their own house didn't have one.

Zamir called Freddy Eini. By 1973, direct dial had been introduced between London and Israel, and there was no need for an international operator. It was now close to 3:00 a.m., exactly twenty-four hours after Eini had called Zamir to tell him that the Angel wanted an urgent meeting in London to talk about chemicals. It was extremely important to Zamir that Eini now understand every word he said, and that he move as quickly as possible to implement what was included in the message. When Eini answered, Zamir first told him, “Put your feet in cold water”—that is, be wide awake, right now. Once Eini had assured him he was fully alert, Zamir dictated to him the message as he had written it down. It read as follows, in full:

            
The company, it turns out, intends to sign the contract today before nightfall.

                
It is the same contract, with the same conditions with which we are familiar.

                
They know that tomorrow is a holiday.

                
They think they can land tomorrow before dark.

                
I spoke with the manager, but he cannot put it off because of his commitment to other managers, and he wants to keep his commitment.