The Angel (36 page)

A more detailed account comes from the historian Ahron Bregman, who first revealed Marwan's identity as a spy to the general public but managed to stay in touch with him afterward nonetheless. According to Bregman, less than twenty-four hours before his death, Marwan left him a recorded message in which he identified himself according to an agreed-upon code name, saying he was calling “about the book.” He asked Bregman to call him back on his cell phone. Fifty-nine minutes later, he left another, similar message—and another one twenty minutes after that. In all the years of their contact, Marwan had never before left recorded messages. This fact, combined with the number of calls, suggests that he was in serious straits. When Bregman called him back, the two spoke about the report released by Justice Orr. A week earlier, Bregman had sent Marwan a collection of media items that had appeared in Israel following the Orr Report's publication, and had begun explaining what they were about. Marwan wanted to know the bottom line, and Bregman answered that the report had been printed, and his name had appeared in it. Marwan suggested they meet the following day, and they discussed when and where they would meet. They agreed that Marwan would call again to finalize. At the end of the conversation, Bregman asked Marwan, “Other than that, how are you?” Marwan answered, “Other than this headache?” Bregman understood that Marwan was saying he was fine, besides the current mess involving the publication of his identity as an Israeli spy. They ended their conversation. It was their last.

“It is clear to me, from my knowledge of him,” Bregman concluded in an interview with the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
, “that the fact that he called me three times in an hour and a half can be said to reflect a crisis. His tone was not as it had been. It didn't sound like the Ashraf Marwan I knew.” And yet, their conversation itself didn't strike Bregman as all that unusual—Marwan was characteristically curt and impatient, but polite. He also didn't strike
Bregman as having been under a lot of pressure during the conversation. In his opinion, which he expressed both immediately after Marwan's death and again three years later, Marwan was under pressure because of Justice Orr's report being seen by journalists—though he was not yet aware that the report had been published in its entirety on the Internet. In any event, according to Bregman, he had not detected anything in Marwan's behavior to suggest suicidal intentions.
⁴

From the weight of the evidence it seems that Marwan, who from the outset lacked any of the classic characteristics of the suicidal type, showed very little in the final twenty-four hours of his life to suggest that he had resolved to kill himself. Based on the circumstantial evidence, the British homicide investigator who conducted the public inquiry ruled that his behavior prior to his death was “normal and full of life,” and that “there is no evidence of mental or psychiatric disorder . . . no evidence of any intention to commit suicide.” He then added, “It is clear that Dr. Marwan had a great deal to be worried about and was stressed.”
⁵

Suicide, therefore, seems logically possible, but not more than that. If we rule out the possibility of suicide, however, then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that someone else caused him to fall. Then we face the same questions common to all unsolved murders: Who did it, and why? All of our evidence here, it should be stressed again, is circumstantial. But it is evidence all the same.

THREE POSSIBILITIES HAVE
been raised as to who might have caused the death of Ashraf Marwan: He was murdered by business rivals; he was murdered by Israelis in retribution for his having deceived them in 1973; or he was murdered by Egyptians who wanted to bring the saga to an end in such a way as to avoid his revealing what happened.

The possibility that Marwan was murdered by business rivals
seems nearly impossible. In 2007, his biggest battles were far behind him. It is true that Mohamed al-Fayed, his nemesis ever since the Harrods affair, was still prospering in London. But he had no reason to strike back at Marwan just now; and Marwan was no longer in a position to harm Al-Fayed. Moreover, Al-Fayed's business methods, which were sometimes very creative, did not include violence. Others have suggested that his death had something to do with his past as an arms dealer. Indeed, according to a sensational exposé by the Egyptian weekly
Rose al-Yusuf
in March 2012, President Hosni Mubarak allegedly dictated memoirs, in which he claimed that Muammar Gaddafi ordered Marwan's assassination because of disagreements concerning the sale of arms to an African nation. After the publication in
Rose al-Yusuf
, which is not known for its reliability, sources close to Mubarak denied that he ever wrote or dictated his memoirs. The Scotland-based Canongate Books, the purported publisher of the memoirs, denied that they even existed—although Canongate is scheduled to publish the memoirs of Mubarak's wife, Suzanne. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that any of Marwan's former arms-dealing contacts, whether in business or in government, had any interest in his elimination. Marwan himself had been long out of the arms-dealing business by 2007.

The possibility that the Israelis killed him also seems without serious evidentiary grounding. The people who have led the charge on this theory have been members of his family, especially his widow, Mona. They have their reasons. Several months after his death, Mona asserted in an interview with the weekly
Al-Ahram
that “the Israelis definitely had a hand in the cold-blooded murder of my husband.” In response to the testimony of Azzam Shweiki, according to which no one else was on the balcony when Marwan fell to his death, she said: “That man—Azzam Shweiki—embezzled millions from my husband's company, and I have decided to fire him from the company. . . . I am sure that the courts
will send him to prison. He is a liar who gave false testimony when he said my husband threw himself off the balcony. . . . Israelis were the ones who made up the story about my husband killing himself. They paid off people like Azzam Shweiki in order to back up the story.”
⁶
Three years later, just as the public investigation was getting started, Mona told the
Observer
that Marwan had said his life was in danger no fewer than three times during the final four years of his life, the last being just nine days before he died, when they were alone together in their London apartment. “He turned to me and said: ‘My life is in danger. I might be killed. I have a lot of different enemies.' He knew they were coming after him. He was killed by Mossad.” Later she said that on the day of the murder, the front door of the apartment had been left unlocked, and the housekeeper, who was present at the time, heard nothing. “I believe that the intruders took him to the bedroom, they hit him and they threw him out of the window over the balcony. Someone on a fourth-floor balcony who gave evidence to the police heard him scream before he fell. Do people committing suicide scream before they fall?”
⁷

Mona Marwan's unequivocal assertion that the Mossad murdered her husband has the advantage of serving both her interests and those of her family—for it makes him out as an Egyptian patriot who managed to pull one over on the all-powerful Mossad. Implicating the Mossad, of course, uses the same who-benefits logic that has been behind every conspiracy theory, without regard to evidence. But the alternative narrative—that Marwan was killed by the Egyptians in the wake of the publication of his role as a spy for the Mossad—is so potentially devastating to both Mona and the family that one cannot blame either her or other family members for doing everything in their power to make sure no one reaches that conclusion.

This does not mean that Mona Marwan is deliberately lying.
The fact is that she was the one who demanded that Scotland Yard carry out an investigation that, she believed, would prove her claim. Had she known the truth about who, most likely, killed Marwan, she would probably not have taken the risk.

Nor should we assume that her faith in her husband's patriotism is purely of her own invention. In all likelihood she heard her husband say more than once that his life was in danger, that the published rumors of his having spied for Israel were only a disinformation campaign by the Mossad aimed at getting him killed. Again, one of the reasons he kept working with the Mossad for so many years was his fear that if he stopped, they might try to kill him. In a conversation with Ahron Bregman in 2003, he said that after reading Howard Blum's book on the Yom Kippur War, he came to the conclusion that Eli Zeira believed that the Mossad would kill him.
⁸
Two years later, an article appeared in the Israeli daily
Yedioth Ahronot
by Ronen Bergman, claiming that Hosni Mubarak's warm embrace of Marwan on October 1, 2003, was proof that he was a double agent. In a phone call on the following day, Marwan told Ahron Bregman that the fact that the piece was published twenty months after the events described shows that certain Israelis had taken it upon themselves to get him into hot water with the Egyptians.
⁹

All this raises the possibility that the volatile Marwan really believed that the Mossad had an interest in divulging his identity and either killing him themselves or getting him killed. As far as he was concerned, this was the true motivation behind all the articles surrounding his involvement as a spy, particularly that of Ahron Bregman himself. Marwan, it should be emphasized, did not have a real understanding of the ins and outs of the Israeli security establishment, and he certainly could not have known anything of the personal motivations that may have stood behind Eli Zeira's leaks of the identity of the man previously known publicly only as
Babel. So from his perspective, the Mossad was out to get him. The distinction between the Mossad and Zeira, who was the former chief of Military Intelligence and the agency's bitter rival, was irrelevant to him. It is not surprising, therefore, that he also rebuffed repeated attempts by the Mossad at around this time to offer him protection.
¹⁰

There is another reason, however, why his wife and sons insist that the Mossad murdered Ashraf Marwan. They are under the impression that Marwan was on the verge of completing his memoir. As they understand it, he was going to describe how he hoodwinked the Israelis just before the war. The idea for the book came after the first revelations about Babel appeared in the Israeli press. Bregman suggested that he write up his memoirs, and “leave them with your children, for the next generation.” Marwan, Bregman reports, liked the idea, and fairly soon his writing became a central focus of their conversations—especially after he proposed to take Bregman on as an adviser for the project. Bregman thought the book should begin in 1969, the year he believed Marwan first offered his services to the Israelis, but Marwan wanted to start the story after May 1971, when he became Sadat's close adviser and began, as he would have it, the incredibly complex counterespionage operation that only he and Sadat knew about. Despite his direct involvement in the project, Bregman has not ruled out the possibility that behind all of Marwan's conversations with him—which were all via telephone except for a single meeting they held at London's InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane—lurked a very different motivation. In an interview with the weekly
Spectator
, he suggested that Marwan's real aim was to get information about what was being said and written about him in Israel, information that he desperately needed in order to plan his next moves.
¹¹

Did Marwan really write a book? The evidence is contradictory and inconclusive. According to some witnesses, he was nearly done
with it. The
Sunday Times
reported that three manuscript volumes, each about two hundred pages long, were removed from his apartment the day he died. In addition, cassette tapes with his dictations of the text went missing that day as well. According to the paper's sources, which included police who investigated his death and received details from family members and friends of Marwan, on the day he died Marwan was scheduled to fly to New York in order to begin writing the final chapter. The book itself, according to this claim, was scheduled to hit bookstores in October 2007, on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
¹²
According to another source, during an academic conference in 2006 in London commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Suez Crisis, Ashraf Marwan was seen in the audience with a thumb drive hanging on a lanyard around his neck. When asked about it, he had said it held a draft of his book, in which he would reveal the truth about his role in the Yom Kippur War, and that the book would be “explosive.”
¹³
There were also further indications that Marwan was engaged in a research project. About a year before he died, he paid at least two visits to George Washington University's National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., which specializes in declassified materials under the Freedom of Information Act, in order to learn more about the 1973 war. Marwan also hired a research assistant who collected materials about the war, including the translation of articles in Hebrew concerning his role in it.
¹⁴

At the same time, however, there is one salient fact that raises serious doubts about whether he ever actually wrote a book: To this day, not a single page of the manuscript has been found. In a digital age, it is hard to imagine that Marwan kept only one printed copy (the volumes taken from his apartment) and one digital copy (the thumb drive on the lanyard). And if Marwan was really so afraid his book would be stolen, why did he wear it so openly on his person, and why did he tell people what it was? No copies
were found in his safe, on his computer, with his family or close friends, or in any of the myriad places that were already available in what is today known as the “cloud.” There are other reasons to be suspicious of the claim as well. If he really had made recordings of himself dictating the text, that would suggest some kind of typist or other assistant who turned the recordings into written words. Why has no one come forward saying they worked on the project? Presumably such a person was loyal to Marwan and would have every reason to support the family's claim that he had written his memoirs. Another question: Where is all the research material, the photocopies of documents or other collected sources without which no author can actually write a book of this sort? And why, if it was near completion, is there nobody willing to say what exactly was in the book? If there really was an “explosive” book nearing completion, he would surely have told people what was in it, especially if it really supported the claim that most Egyptians anyway wanted to believe about him—namely, that he was a double agent.