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Authors: Uri Bar-Joseph

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The next publication, which revealed Marwan's identity in other ways, was an article penned by Ronen Bergman in the
Haaretz
weekend supplement of September 17, 1999, titled “Tomorrow War Will Break.” The piece described, for the first time, how contact was first made with the agent in 1969 (though it was actually 1970), when he showed up at an Israeli embassy in Europe and offered his services. Bergman, too, detailed the source's activities and the high quality of the materials he provided, and raised the question of whether he was really a double agent. Seemingly without any connection to the subject at hand, Bergman then went on to describe the foiled terror attack in September 1973, mentioning only that the details appear in the memoir of the Egyptian military attaché in Libya at the time. Anyone who tracked down that memoir would discover Ashraf Marwan's central role in that plot. Both Zeira and Bergman used the same tactic to lead perspicacious researchers to Marwan's identity, by injecting a seemingly irrelevant external reference into a story and allowing intrepid professionals to put two and two together themselves.

The question of who was the key source in Bergman's article was answered by no other than Zvi Zamir, who said that Bergman showed him the draft of the article before it was published, and Marwan's name had appeared explicitly. Zamir, who was very surprised, asked Bergman where he'd gotten the idea that the source
was Marwan, and Bergman had responded that he got it “from Eli.” Both men knew whom he was talking about.

Nor was Bergman the only writer to whom Zeira apparently exposed Marwan's identity. About nine months before the
Haaretz
piece appeared, Zeira told a scholar named Ephraim Kahana that the Mossad's source was a double agent. Zeira also gave Kahana “identifying details, including the source's approximate age, and biographical details.”
23
In his article, which appeared in the summer 2002 issue of the journal
Intelligence and National Security
, Kahana refrained from publishing the key details of the source's identity and in a footnote added that they could not legally be revealed. But despite this, he still allowed himself to write that “the top source was a young Egyptian, who in 1969 was in his late twenties or early thirties. He was the right-hand man of President Nasser and, after his death, continued in the same position under President Sadat.” As to the source of his information, Kahana cited an interview he held with Eli Zeira in January 1999.
24
Kahana was, in many respects, unfortunate that he published his piece in an academic journal, with its very long lead times. Had it appeared two years earlier, he would have had the dubious honor of having outed Israel's top spy.

Another writer who covered the Yom Kippur War was Howard Blum, who investigated the double agent theory in detail. He, too, based everything he knew about Marwan on information he received from Zeira. On a personal note, Blum contacted me after my own book on the Yom Kippur War came out, as he was visiting Israel. It was May 6, 2002. We met for dinner in Tel Aviv, and he had just come from a meeting with Zeira at his home. According to Blum, Zeira was interested in one thing and one thing only: the “double agent” who tricked the Mossad. When he asked Zeira who that source was, he said that while he couldn't divulge the name, Blum should know that the source took part in the meeting
between Sadat and King Faisal in August 1973 and did not report it to the Mossad. Zeira further said that if Blum were to look on page 148 of the English edition of the memoir of the Egyptian army chief of staff, Shazly, he would find the name of the agent.

When Blum returned to the United States, he checked Shazly's book and found two different names on the page that could be relevant. He called Zeira in Israel. Zeira told him that he still couldn't say who it was, but recommended that he contact the historian Ahron Bregman in London, who knew the relevant details. Blum called Bregman, told him that he'd been referred by Zeira, and that he knew that the source was one of the two names he found in Shazly's book. He wanted to pin Bregman down as to which it was. Bregman, in an act of generosity rare for the field, risked losing his scoop and told him which one it was. Now Blum knew the name of the source, and he published it in his book that came out in 2003.

But by then, Marwan's name had already appeared in public as the greatest spy Israel had ever recruited. Ahron Bregman had broken the story.

BACK IN 1998,
Ahron Bregman published a book, together with Jihan el-Tahri, an Arab researcher and a director of documentary movies, surveying the fifty years of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
25
One of the book's key sources was Eli Zeira, who was interviewed by Bregman and described the war as he had personally experienced it. The book dealt heavily with Israel's intelligence failure preceding the war, but made no mention, explicit or implicit, of Ashraf Marwan. Two years later, Bregman published a new book, titled
Israel's Wars, 1947–93
. This time the story about the double agent played a central role in the plot. The book described the episode in some detail and revealed for the first time that the recruitment of the agent had taken place in London. Bregman also touched on
specific pieces of intelligence that the source had delivered, such as the minutes of the meeting that Nasser held with the Soviet leaders in Moscow in January 1970, and Sadat's letter to Leonid Brezhnev in August 1972, and he pointed out for the first time that the Mossad's source had been present in the Sadat-Faisal summit but had not told the Mossad about it. Finally, he revealed that Zamir's meeting with the source on the eve of the Yom Kippur War took place not just in any European capital, but in London.
26

Two years after that, Bregman published an article in the Israeli daily
Yedioth Ahronot
that was based on a chapter of his next book,
History of Israel
, which was about to appear in English. Although the article didn't draw much attention, it gently lay the noose fully around Marwan's neck. For the first time, the story included two details that clearly connected Marwan with the story: one, that the source was a family member of Nasser's; and the other, that he was known as the “In-Law” or the “Doctor.” In fact, he was not known in Israel by either of these monikers. But this was enough to get Azza, Marwan's secretary, to stop taking Dubi's calls.

When his book came out that October, Bregman revealed additional details, including the source's close relation to Nasser, his specific job under Sadat, and a detailed account of his role in the foiled terror attack in Rome in September 1973.
27
No doubts remained as to the source's identity. A process that had begun with the publication in Hebrew of Zeira's book, nearly a decade earlier, now had reached its moment of truth. An Egyptian paper called Marwan and asked if he had spied for Israel. Marwan replied that it was a “stupid detective story.” Bregman then met with a reporter for
Al-Ahram
and confirmed that Marwan was the spy. He also asserted that Marwan had been a double agent and had fooled the Israelis. A few days later, on December 22, the interview was published.

In 2004, Eli Zeira published a new edition of his book. It had
not gone through major revisions from the first edition, despite the passage of nearly a decade. But Zeira did go out of his way to explicitly name the source as Ashraf Marwan.

THE PUBLICATION OF
a new edition of Zeira's account of the intelligence failure of 1973 was a perfect opportunity for an hour-long television interview with one of Israel's most esteemed television journalists, Dan Margalit. Margalit gave Zeira free rein to plead his innocence for the intelligence failure. And then, in the second half of the interview, Zeira spelled out his theory that Marwan was a double agent—repeatedly mentioning him by name.

The following week, Margalit hosted Zvi Zamir on his show to offer his side of the story. On the subject of Zeira's exposure of Marwan, Zamir was explicit in his accusation—triggering an intense court battle in the years that followed. Zeira, he said, “needs to stand trial for having revealed sources . . . the man who was in a position to know was the head of military intelligence, and when
he
reveals a source, he breaks the first of the Ten Commandments of the Intelligence Corps.”
28

In response to this interview, Zeira sued Zamir for defamation. The two agreed to submit the suit to arbitration with retired Supreme Court Justice Theodor Orr, who ended up siding fully with Zamir—that, indeed, Zeira had leaked the identity of Ashraf Marwan:

            
The picture that emerges on the basis of everything cited above suggests that on different occasions, the plaintiff [Zeira] revealed the agent's identity. In the first edition of his book, in 1993, that revelation took the form of scattering details that could lead researchers and people in the know, including journalists and writers, to the agent's identity. In 1999, he revealed the name to Kahana and Ronen [Bergman]. In
May 2002 he revealed the agent's identity to Howard Blum as described in paragraphs 23–28 above. Dr. [Ahron] Bregman revealed the name of the agent explicitly in an interview with an Egyptian newspaper in December 2002. In the book he [Bregman] published in October 2002, he published clear hints as to the agent's identity. In this revelation, Dr. Bregman relied,
inter alia
, on the first edition of the plaintiff's book, as well as the response of Rami Tal to a conversation he had with him, in which the name of the agent was discussed. Rami Tal, it should be recalled, is the editor of both editions of the plaintiff's book. In 2004, in a television interview, and in the second edition of his book, the plaintiff evoked the agent's name explicitly.
29

The ruling that exonerated Zamir was handed down on March 27, 2007, and released for publication on June 7.

Less than three weeks later, Ashraf Marwan's body was found at the base of his apartment building in London.

Chapter 13
FALLEN ANGEL

J
une 27, 2007, was another overcast day in London. Summer had just begun, but a patient drizzle had soaked the city over the course of the past week, with temperatures never breaking out of the seventies. On that day, all eyes were on Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was scheduled to present his resignation to Queen Elizabeth at noon.

Neither the weather nor even the prime minister's resignation was of much interest to four men seated in a room on the third floor of the opulent Institute of Directors building at 116 Pall Mall in St. James's.

From where they sat, they had a clear view of the apartment building where Ashraf Marwan lived.

They were talking about the future of Ubichem, a small chemical company based in Southampton. It was no coincidence that they held the meeting next to Marwan's home; since the 1990s, Marwan had owned Ubichem, holding more than 80 percent of its stock. The location of the meeting was meant to make it easy for Marwan to take part. Neither was it a coincidence that Marwan owned the company. Ubichem's chief executive, Azzam Shweiki, was an Egyptian in his mid-fifties who was married to Azza, the
daughter of Fawzi Abdel Hafez, the private secretary of Sadat, and someone who had worked closely with Marwan when the latter had served in the President's Office. This is the same Azza who worked in Marwan's office for years as his assistant and press secretary.

Shweiki was upset. For about a year now, Marwan had been breathing down his neck. Not only had he threatened to fire his wife, but he had also started pressing for Shweiki himself to be replaced by the director of their Budapest branch, Jozsef Repasi. This pressure, which had started mild, had now increased to the point that it was nothing short of brutal. Some of the people who saw the process called it an obsession. Employees at Ubichem more than once saw Marwan's long black limousine arrive at the company's headquarters in Southampton, nearly a two-hour drive from his home in central London, and saw Marwan, whose failing health had become apparent, walk slowly, sometimes with a stick and always with a bag of medications, to a meeting of the board of which he was the chairman. During the meetings, he would repeatedly berate Azzam Shweiki to show how unfit he was for the job and why he had to be fired. Shweiki knew his career was in danger and that his replacement by Repasi would not be long in coming.

Everyone familiar with the story says that the criticism was not professional. The company was a small piece of Marwan's empire, and Marwan did not tend to intervene in the management of his companies even when his investment had been much greater. It was clearly personal—though exactly what it was about remains a mystery. His wife, Mona, claimed for years that Marwan had discovered that Shweiki had embezzled millions from the company. This, however, seems unlikely—not just because Shweiki's denials were so adamant, nor because Scotland Yard was so unimpressed with the charge that they refused even to open an investigation.
Rather the biggest proof that the charges were unfounded was the fact that the Egyptian weekly
Al-Ahram
, which published Mona Marwan's accusations in September 2007, published an apology about it a month later.

Whatever the reasons may have been for Marwan's antipathy for Shweiki, one thing is clear. Marwan's deep involvement in the management of the company's affairs, combined with his intention to fly that same evening to the United States, created a situation in which it was decided to hold a meeting of the board of directors, for the first time ever, right next to his residence, renting an office at the Institute of Directors building. Previous meetings had been held at the Southampton headquarters or at Heathrow Airport to make it easier for Repasi to fly in and out from Budapest. The unusual location of the meeting made it possible for several of the participants to witness the final moments in the life of Ashraf Marwan.

The four men in the room were Shweiki, Repasi, Ubichem founder John Roberts, and Michael Parkhurst, a representative of the Marwan family on the board who was not especially admired by the rest of the directors. It was already past noon, and Parkhurst informed the others that he had spoken to Marwan in the morning and that the chairman had sent word that he would be about an hour late because of various errands. Marwan also asked that they not begin the meeting without him. Now the hour had passed, and the busy executives in the room were getting edgy.

From the bay window in the meeting room, one could see the balcony of Marwan's fifth-floor apartment, not more than twenty yards away. Shweiki and Parkhurst were standing by the window when they saw Marwan walk out onto the balcony. According to Shweiki, they called to him and waved. Marwan waved back. Then they called him on the phone to ask if he was really planning on showing up. At first he answered that he was not but then imme
diately changed his mind and said he would be there within half an hour, once he had changed his clothes. Shweiki and Parkhurst kept looking out toward the balcony. They saw him turn around in a way that appeared to the two of them, who knew him well, as unnatural. He lurched to the left and right, looking repeatedly over the guardrail, down to the ground below. He then went back into the apartment for the last time.

Shweiki called him again to hurry him along. Marwan answered, annoyed at the pestering, and promised he was coming. But then he went back to the balcony and looked down again. When Shweiki called again, Marwan shouted at him that he'd changed his mind and wasn't coming after all. According to the witnesses, he looked behind him into the bedroom, and then, to the utter horror of Shweiki and Parkhurst, he climbed up onto the rail and threw himself over.

It was 1:40 p.m. when Marwan landed on the ground-floor veranda, half his body in a bed of yellow roses in full bloom. A woman who stood nearby screamed. Shweiki and Parkhurst ran to the scene. According to Shweiki, he found Marwan lying on the ground, with no pulse. Several minutes later, an ambulance arrived.

Only four witnesses—the men in the room at the Institute of Directors—saw Marwan fall. Shweiki, whose testimony received the greatest coverage, said that Marwan, who had been wandering about on his balcony for many minutes, looked behind him and then climbed up onto some objects on the balcony, climbed onto the rail, looked forward, stepped out into the air, and fell to his death. He said he saw no one else on the balcony. Parkhurst testified that he was standing next to Shweiki when Marwan fell. In his initial testimony, he backed up Shweiki's account, saying that he saw Marwan go to the railing. In a later testimony, however, he said all he saw was someone falling from the balcony. Parkhurst, like Shweiki, claimed he saw no one else on the balcony.

The two other participants of the meeting, Repasi and Roberts, saw nothing that happened prior to Marwan's fall. As soon as Repasi heard Shweiki and Parkhurst yelling, he ran over to the window just in time to see Marwan fall. Immediately afterward, when the other two ran to the courtyard, he saw in a flash what looked like a person moving inside Marwan's apartment. “I saw,” he later testified, “two men standing on the balcony. They did nothing, just looked down. Their calm was most unusual. A woman in the yard screamed, people ran to try and help out, or to call for help. But these two men just stood there.” He added that the men “wore suits and were of Middle Eastern appearance.” They looked down at Marwan's body from the balcony, then disappeared, and reappeared later on a different balcony, looking down again. Roberts said he saw them as well. Yet Repasi could not say with certainty whether they were in fact standing on Marwan's balcony, because he had only started watching after Marwan had fallen and didn't know which balcony was his. The police, for some reason, did not immediately take his statement or try to bring him back to the room where they watched, so that he could show them on which balcony the men had been standing. When they finally did take his statement, some two months after the event, they traveled to Budapest to speak with him. Repasi expressed his shock that they never asked him to come back to London and point out which balcony it was. This, it would turn out, was only one of many examples of frightful negligence on the part of Scotland Yard.

The investigators took Repasi's statement, and a short time later it was reported that two men had in fact been seen on a balcony, though there was no official word whether it was Marwan's. As far as is known, the identities of the two men have never been determined, and therefore the investigators were unable to draw any conclusions from the fact—even though it did increase the suspicion that foul play had been involved. In an interview he gave
in the
Sunday Times
, Repasi said that in his opinion, Marwan may not have been physically pushed, but it was clear that he was pressured into jumping to his death by someone else on the balcony or inside his apartment. Scotland Yard affirmed, several months later, that they could not rule out any of three possibilities: an accident, a suicide, or a murder. This indeterminate result signaled, more or less, the end of the inquiry.

Three years later, in July 2010, a three-day-long public investigation was launched in London to try to determine the cause of Marwan's death. This is a common procedure in cases where there is a suspicion of criminal behavior without sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment. The investigation was undertaken at the request of Marwan's family, and many witnesses were called to testify. Astonishingly, Jozsef Repasi, whose statement had been the clearest proof that Marwan died at someone else's hand, was not asked to participate. Neither was John Roberts, who may have never given a statement at all. At the end of three days of testimony, the special homicide investigator who had been appointed to handle the inquiry concluded that he could not rule out the possibility that Marwan had either committed suicide or been murdered. The possibility of an accident was, finally, abandoned.
1

THE RIDDLE OF
Marwan's death remains only one of the many unsolved mysteries that shrouded his whole life. Part of it has to do with what looks an awful lot like incompetence on the part of Scotland Yard. Not only was the key statement of Repasi taken just two months after the event, and not at all during the public inquiry, but it was also entirely unclear whether a statement from Roberts, who had been with Repasi when Marwan fell, was ever taken. These, however, are not the only parts of the investigation that were bungled. The shoes Marwan was wearing when he died were never found. If Shweiki and Parkhurst were telling the truth, that
he climbed up on the planter, and then on the air-conditioning unit, in order to get to the guardrail before jumping, then his shoes would have picked up dust, soil, or paint. The disappearance of the shoes leaves open the possibility that he never deliberately climbed onto the rail at all but was rather pushed over it.
2
Some people familiar with the investigation, who requested anonymity, raised the possibility that the repeated police failures in the investigation were quite deliberate. In their view, it is entirely possible that Her Majesty's Government had no desire at all to resolve the violent death of a high-ranking foreign citizen, which, though it took place on British soil, was far removed from British interests.

Another explanation, of course, has to do with the natural limitations of police investigations. The investigators used the means at their disposal, which do not necessarily include building an entire historical profile of the victim as we have done here. From their standpoint, so long as there were no clear indicators that Marwan committed suicide—such as a suicide note—they couldn't rule it out as such. Similarly, so long as there was no compelling evidence of a homicide, or even a suicide under duress, they couldn't go that way, either.

Historians, however, are not limited by the legal procedures of criminal investigations or the laws of admissible evidence. Naturally, whatever answers suggested by the evidence in this case are quite speculative, and probably wouldn't stand up in court. Little more than an educated guess, really.

The first question to be addressed is whether it was a suicide. Once it has become clear why such a suggestion seems highly unlikely, we will then turn to the question of who may have killed him: business rivals? the Mossad? the Egyptians?

IMMEDIATELY AFTER MARWAN'S
death, a number of speculations were raised about a possible suicide. From everything known about the
way he lived his life, however, it is hard to find any of the hallmarks of a man seriously considering taking his own life. He had no family history of suicides and did not suffer from depression, isolation, or a trauma such as losing his job or the death of a loved one. He did not use drugs, either, which is correlated with a higher suicide rate. The same is true for indicators of suicidal intentions. In the days preceding his death, no one ever reported hearing a word from him that he might harm himself—nor is there any indication that he looked for a means of carrying it out, such as accumulating sleeping pills or acquiring a weapon. Marwan exhibited no behaviors at all associated with someone suicidal, such as loss of hope, anger or vengeance, wanton carelessness, a feeling of entrapment, abuse of alcohol or drugs, distancing from family and friends, antisocial behavior, panic attacks, sleepless nights or oversleeping, mood swings, or extreme apathy.
3

From all accounts of the final days of Marwan's life, he behaved completely normally, even if he was under a certain amount of stress. Michael Parkhurst, with whom he was close, said that the day Marwan died, he met him in the late morning, and Marwan behaved utterly normally, chatting with him and asking after his children. The building's superintendent, who also saw him that morning, said that he seemed “completely normal,” even chipper. His friend Sharif Salah spoke to him by telephone the day before he died and testified that there was nothing in the conversation that suggested he had planned on harming himself. Marwan's sister Azza, who lived in the same apartment, told her friends that she had seen him two hours before his death, and he hadn't shown any worrisome signs. And his wife, Mona, testified that Marwan “was always sociable and expressed a joy of living despite his medical problems,” implying that she, too, had seen no suspicious signs in his behavior. In a conversation between them that morning, Marwan told her that he was packing for his trip, later that day, to the United States.

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