The Angel (34 page)

Two events, to be precise, brought it to an end. One was the Yehuda Gil affair. The other was the exposure of Marwan's secret life in the Israeli press.

IN LATE 1997,
after a prolonged investigation, one of the most revered intelligence officers in the Mossad admitted that for years he had been supplying false information from a top Syrian official whom he had supposedly been handling. The revelation about Yehuda Gil, who exceeded Graham Greene and John le Carré in the license he gave his imagination,
¹²
was a bombshell for the agency, triggering a maelstrom of investigations across the whole Mossad to make sure there were no similar cases.

When the story emerged, Dubi had been Marwan's handler for twenty-seven years. Since 1974, the year Gil had claimed to have recruited the Syrian officer, Dubi had been the only person in the Mossad—with the exception of a single meeting with Zamir's successor, Yitzhak Hofi—who had had any contact with Marwan. In the new, tense environment that now emerged in the wake of the scandal, this kind of relationship drew intense scrutiny. Many remembered how adamant Marwan's refusal to consider any replacement for Dubi or even to add a second handler had been. The pressure suddenly mounted on Dubi, who was considered a
straight shooter, meticulous, and reliable. While no one doubted the existence of Marwan or the quality of the intelligence he had given, the fear of future debacles like this one resulted in an intense effort to prevent anything like it from happening again.

It was decided, again, that Marwan needed another handler.

Dubi made it clear that in his opinion, if the Mossad pushed the point too hard, Marwan would prefer to cut off relations. But the Mossad's senior officers remained unconvinced, and on their orders Dubi prepared a new handler to meet Marwan. The meeting was to take place in one of the fancy hotels on Via Veneto in Rome. Dubi waited for Marwan in the hotel room as planned. He had the officer wait elsewhere for Dubi's green light indicating that Marwan was ready for him to join. But Marwan never showed. It was not the first time that he had stood Dubi up. His tight schedule and external, unavoidable pressures occasionally made it impossible for him to show, or even to notify him. Dubi waited in the room. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and the other officer entered without waiting for Dubi's signal. This was evidence of the level of distrust that had permeated the Mossad in the wake of the Yehuda Gil affair.

Given the failure to add a second handler, the new Mossad chief, Danny Yatom, gave the order to inform Marwan that their relationship had run its course. It was the first time, in nearly thirty years of contact, that either side had cut off ties.

Soon after that, when it became clear that the Mossad still needed a source at Marwan's level after all, and when Danny Yatom had been replaced in 1998 by Efraim Halevy, an attempt was made to restart the relationship. Halevy, who was close with Zvi Zamir, suggested that Zamir join Dubi for the next meeting with Marwan. Zamir agreed, but Marwan, for whatever reason, did not. So instead, Dubi was given a miniature tape recorder, which he carried in the front pocket of his jeans. The recorder worked fine until it
reached the end of the cassette—when it suddenly, inexplicably, began playing back their conversation at full volume. Dubi and Marwan sat uncomfortably for a few moments, not saying a word.

If Marwan understood what had just happened, he didn't show it. He had insisted that their conversations never be taped, for fear that the Mossad could later use the recordings to extort his continued cooperation even after he no longer wanted to give it. Dubi promised he wouldn't record them, and, with the exception of a single case early on, he kept his promise. Now Marwan discovered that the man to whom he had given his complete trust all those years had set some sort of a trap. And Dubi understood that he had just blasted a hole through the fabric of faith that had held them together. In that mortifying moment, Dubi excused himself, walked to the bathroom, and turned off the tape recorder. When he came back, Marwan acted as though nothing had happened, and they soon ended the conversation.

It was Marwan's last meeting with the Mossad.

This was how one of the most successful espionage operations in history came to an abrupt end. But all in all, it was a mutually acceptable end. Marwan, now in his mid-fifties, really had little need for the stimulation of spying, and he hadn't needed the money for nearly two decades. He no longer needed to feed his ego this way, and his importance to the Mossad clearly had dwindled. Danny Yatom's decision to cut ties with Marwan, and Halevy's attempt to reestablish them, were all the indication he needed that he was no longer nearly as important to the Mossad as he had once been. The incident with the tape recorder was really just the last straw.

By this point the Mossad was not terribly upset at the loss of Marwan's services. Leaving aside the problem of continuing with only one handler despite the Yehuda Gil affair, there were other reasons why calling it quits made sense. Efraim Halevy chafed at the thought of spying on Egypt at so high a level, now that the
two states were at peace: Any revelation could deal a major blow to relations. As Marwan's ability to provide high-value intelligence dwindled, the cost-benefit analysis kept shifting in favor of cutting ties. Halevy himself enjoyed good personal relationships with a number of Arab leaders, including Mubarak, with whom he had met in secret meetings at Mubarak's residence. That kind of scandal could ruin Halevy's career. So it was not a hard call to make.

In the years that followed, Dubi worked to stay in touch with Marwan by telephone; in practice, most of the contact was with Marwan's secretary, Azza. She knew him only as “Dr. Lord,” a friend of Marwan's who showed an abiding interested in her boss's health and well-being, and who joked with her about his bad habits like his habitual tardiness. Azza obliged Dr. Lord, telling him that Marwan's health was in fact not so good, about his bypass surgery and his cancer and the exhausting treatments he had undergone. Dubi understood that she was telling him all this with Marwan's full knowledge—and that Marwan preferred it this way. But even this limited connection came to an end. Late in 2002, when more and more details were coming out in the Israeli media about the mysterious Egyptian spy who warned Israel before the Yom Kippur War, and his identity was becoming clearer and clearer, Dubi called Marwan's office. Azza sounded very cold and was suddenly unwilling to speak to “Dr. Lord” about her boss. Dubi understood that Marwan had decided to break off contact once and for all. This was the end.

MARWAN'S DECISION TO
cut the tie with Dubi reflected not just a natural desire of an aging man to bring an end to the secret, dangerous liaison he had built with the Mossad, but also a sense of disappointment at the priest in whom he had confided for so very long. If the debacle with the tape recorder were not proof enough, a second issue loomed much larger: the gradual publication of his
identity in the Israeli press. He didn't care, nor even necessarily know about, who might have leaked his name or the battles between the Mossad and Military Intelligence. As far as he was concerned, it was a real threat to his life, and the confluence of events may well have convinced Marwan that the Mossad had decided to kill him. This was probably the reason he rebuffed repeated attempts by Dubi and even Zamir to contact him—attempts whose real aim was to try to protect him from the very real threats to his life that were, it turns out, coming from somewhere else entirely.

ASHRAF MARWAN LIVED
in a fifth-floor apartment on 24 Carlton House Terrace, a gorgeous cul-de-sac in Westminster, London. The limited traffic on the street, and its central location between Pall Mall and St. James Park, a five-minute walk from Piccadilly Circus, made it an ideal place to wind down a successful career in the City. When the weather was clear, Ashraf Marwan could take a fifteen-minute stroll to his office on Hill Street. But his health declined, and his heart weakened, and he could no longer make the walk. Instead, his limousine took him anywhere he needed to go.

The apartment itself included a large living room and three bedrooms, one of which—his own—opened onto a wide balcony. He also had a study and two full baths. The apartment was decorated with innumerable knickknacks and works of art, including a portrait of Mona's father, the great Egyptian leader, in profile against a backdrop of gold. The apartment was not large, but it was assessed at around £4.5 million because of its superb location. The balcony looked out over a wide private garden with its lush lawn and tall trees; in the late spring, yellow roses would bloom. The garden was restricted to the residents of the building only, and it is hard to imagine a better place in London to clear one's head. Marwan, whose declining health forced him to cut back his work hours, took full advantage of that garden. In 2004, when he was just sixty,
he began to consider retirement. According to Mona, he began spending more time with his grandchildren and other extracurriculars. Just a few years after he ended his espionage career, his business career drew to a close as well.

BUT HISTORY DID NOT
let Marwan retire in peace.

On December 21, 2002, the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram
published an interview with the London-based Israeli historian Ahron Bregman, in which the latter was asked, point-blank, whether the “son-in-law” about whom he had written in his new book, also known by the code name Babel, was in fact Ashraf Marwan. Bregman answered in the affirmative. It was the first time that the identity of the Mossad's greatest spy was revealed in public.

This revelation was quite damaging to Marwan, very likely resulting in his death. But the damage to the Mossad was sweeping as well. In an instant, the agency's ability to keep its agents secret and safe was called into question. And if the Israelis couldn't protect a man who had risked his life and that of his family to serve them, then one may imagine how much harder it would now become to recruit new agents. For a small and embattled country like Israel, the revelation was nothing less than a national security catastrophe.

So it is somewhat surprising to discover that in the aftermath of the leak, no immediate formal inquiry was conducted to find out who was responsible. It's even more surprising when it turns out that discovering the guilty party would have been very easy.

All the signs, after all, pointed to Eli Zeira.

The man whose entire legacy was marred by accusations that as Military Intelligence chief during the Yom Kippur War, he failed to abandon the
kontzeptzia
and to pay attention to the overwhelming intelligence predicting a surprise attack in October 1973, the man whose only defense was that Ashraf Marwan, the greatest source of that intelligence, was in fact a “double agent”—he was definitively
the man who, beginning in the early 1990s, made sure that people knew the agent's identity.

We can speculate as to the reasons why a career intelligence officer like Zeira would deliberately “out” the greatest spy in the last half century. But the evidence that he did it is overwhelming.

In the early 1990s, historians began publishing hints that twenty-four hours before the attack on October 6, 1973, Zvi Zamir received a warning of what was coming. Three different books appeared describing the history of Israeli intelligence, and all three made mention of a high-level source the Israelis had. Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv said that a “Mossad agent in Cairo” had warned Zamir, without giving any further details.
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Benny Morris and Ian Black expanded a bit when they described him, quoting a senior Israeli intelligence official, as “the best agent any country had during wartime, a miraculous source.”
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And Shmuel Katz, in his history of the IDF's military intelligence, described the source as “one of the Mossad's most valuable and secretive agents.” Katz did a bit of an end run around the military censor when he wrote in a footnote that although he was prohibited from disclosing the agent's nationality, “Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv indicate that the ‘valued' Mossad source originated in Cairo, suggesting that the agent was a high-ranking member of the Egyptian leadership.”
¹⁵

Yet in spite of these hints, it would not have been possible to deduce the identity of Ashraf Marwan were it not for Zeira's own book, which appeared in 1993.
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Even before it came out, a few people would have already seen Marwan's name on page 114 of the book's pre-censorship first draft—where he appeared explicitly as the only person who had been present at the August 1973 summit meeting besides Sadat and the Saudi king. The journalist Amnon Dankner, who in the early 1990s carried out research on the Yom Kippur War, laid his hands on that first draft through a member of the government committee who was supposed to approve its
publication. According to Dankner, from the context in which his name appeared, it was clear that Marwan was the Mossad's “miraculous source.” Dankner showed it to Brig. Gen. (res.) Yoel Ben-Porat, the commander of MI's Sigint unit during the war who had just published his own version of events, and he was furious.
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What was obvious to Dankner would have been relatively simple for anyone else who came into contact with that manuscript—typists, editors, and others—to deduce as well.

Senior Mossad officials warned against publishing Zeira's book because of the risk that the Angel's identity would be revealed. The military censor instead chose to allow it with only minor modifications. Marwan's actual name did not appear. Yet anyone familiar with the cast of characters could figure it out. In discussing a book by Jeffrey Robinson about the Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani, Zeira wrote that “the author of the book, Robinson, interviewed the only person who was present in the meeting between the Egyptian President and the Saudi King. According to that person's testimony, the purpose of Anwar Sadat's visit to Saudi Arabia was to let the king in on the secret and inform him that Egypt and Syria were about to launch a war against Israel in the very near future.”
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Anyone genuinely interested could have gotten a copy of Robinson's book and found that elsewhere he had explicitly mentioned that “Dr. Ashraf Marwan, President Nasser's son-in-law and now a London-based businessman, was head of Egyptian intelligence and the only other person in that meeting with Sadat and Faisal.”
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Given that two pages later in his own book, Zeira blamed the “informant” for keeping the Mossad in the dark about the purpose of the Saudi-Egyptian summit—which, he contended, was the crowning achievement in the Egyptian ruse
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—it is clear that the “informant” who should have told the Mossad about the meeting, and the person whom Robinson cited as being the only one present at the meeting other
than the leaders, were the same person. This, too, was the conclusion arrived at by Israeli Supreme Court Justice Theodor Orr who examined the materials later on.
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Zeira's claim that Marwan neglected to tell the Mossad about the summit meeting, upon which Zeira's entire “double agent” hypothesis turns, is simply false; Marwan reported on the meeting in full. Zeira's book was also the first published account that authoritatively pointed to the incredible quality of the materials given by the source, and the damage he did to Egypt and other Arab states.
²²