1973, page 36
With regard to politics, Meir was determined to prevent any negotiations. Dayan once called her “one of those people that God has graced with a worldview in colors of black and white and has freed them from shades of twilight and quandaries about dusk. Her answer to a question was either-or.”43 For her, Sadat was the enemy and not to be believed. She did not investigate the seriousness of Marwan’s intentions.
Even when in April 1971 Israel discovered, apparently from Marwan, that Sadat was interested in a full peace agreement, with no conditions regarding the Palestinian issue. Meir did not clarify this. She considered communicating this information to Nixon and Kissinger, but immediately pulled back.44 She viewed such information as an opening that could lead to American pressure on Israel for moves that Israel was unwilling to make. The fact that Israel preferred even then to hide this information from the Americans hints that it was not only election considerations that motivated Meir to refuse Kissinger when he tried to advance negotiations in March 1973 on the basis of Sadat’s initiative.
This information from April 1971 could also be interpreted in two contrasting ways. Those who believe in Marwan’s credibility can find additional proof as to the high quality of the information he communicated about Sadat’s intentions without Sadat’s knowledge. Those who suspect him of being a double agent can identify more evidence that Marwan was serving the clear interests of Sadat, his real operator, in communicating messages to Israel.
The Defense Minister
Dayan was the central figure and sole determiner of Israel’s security and political conduct. He was the only person in Israel with full security and political information concentrated in his hands. His experience enabled him to construct an independent appraisal of the situation and his character determined that he did not justify this appraisal to others. His public and political status empowered him to direct security and political moves according to his assessments. He listened to the military intelligence analysis of the situation, but acted according to his own evaluations and guided the chief of staff to do so as well. The prime minister did not feel that she could disagree with Dayan unless he left her an opening.
Dayan insisted that he directly receive the raw material Marwan transmitted; he was aware of the availability of what defined as “very concrete intelligence information that we thought was the best that could be obtained.”45 This implies that although he respected its credibility and importance, he knew that it was only “the best that could be obtained”—thus, not always correct. In fact, Dayan never hesitated to maintain his own assessment, even when it conflicted with Marwan’s information.
Even before Kissinger accepted Ismail’s request to meet, Dayan reached the conclusion, inter alia on the basis of Marwan’s reports, that Sadat might renew the fighting. He reacted by making use of the political channel:
We must tell the Americans two things: 1. We have reliable information that the Egyptians are planning to renew hostilities at the beginning of 1973. 2. We have no intention of entering a new war of attrition, and if they renew the war we will hit them hard. We must be as one with the Americans. We must warn them [Egypt] and threaten and caution them against renewing fire.46
Dayan repeated this reaction throughout 1972 and until the war actually began. The prime minister accepted his advice.
In April, Dayan rejected Marwan’s warnings of war in May. He believed that the Egyptians could only initiate a war after that time. Political events indicated that they would not open fire before July, so he ordered war preparations for the second half of 1973. With regard to the Americans, he said:
Now it is too early [to talk of war], when we must tell them about our assessment and information and tell them that as far as we are concerned, the issue is in doubt…. Let’s say that there is information and if there is information from the field we will formulate an opinion and will let them know about it.47
In other words, not only did Dayan reject Marwan’s warning, he even refused to share it in full with the United States so the US government would not pressure Israel to participate in negotiations on the basis of Sadat’s initiative.
The information Marwan communicated in September, according to which Sadat would not initiate hostilities before the end of the year and which implied that this would take place only after the elections, supported Dayan’s thinking that Sadat preferred a political process which would begin before the end of the year, accompanied by American pressure on Israel. As mentioned, Dayan intended to visit Washington at the beginning of December, immediately after the formation of the new Israeli government.48 The military intelligence assessment of a low probability of war, based on completely different factors, did not add or subtract anything from Dayan’s considerations. The fact that, in contrast to the past and despite rising security tensions, Marwan did not transmit any new warnings suited Dayan’s perception of the situation.
This also determined the way Dayan related to Marwan’s final message on the last day of peace. Until the last moment, Dayan believed that Egypt would not initiate a war. In opposition to Zamir, who stressed the “yes” (war) in Marwan’s message in London fourteen hours before the war broke out; to Elazar, who demanded action in accord with this assumption; and to a certain extent even to Zeira, for whom the evacuation of the Soviets had cast doubt on his certainty of “low probability,” Dayan only feared a surprise attack by the Syrians and did not even want to mobilize the reserves for deployment at the southern front.
Dayan did not want war. He certainly did not want war before the elections. So he proposed ideas for a peace agreement with Egypt that would suit Sadat’s expectations. He communicated these ideas to the Americans as early as June and expressed them publicly in September. He planned to lead these moves and even thought that Sadat was aware of this, and thus would not be interested in initiating a war but was just creating pressure by raising military tension. Dayan preferred to remain skeptical about Zamir’s report of his meeting with Marwan. Sadat succeeded in surprising Dayan—and perhaps Ashraf Marwan as well.
Who Revealed Ashraf Marwan’s Identity?
Those who first wrote about 1973 mentioned Marwan only as an unnamed, authorized, and very reliable information source, or as one who knew Egypt very well. Naturally, as time went by, more identifiable details about him were whispered. At the end of the 1980s the question of the identity of the elite Egyptian spy aroused the curiosity of an inquisitive, diligent young newspaper reporter, Aluf Benn, today the editor-in-chief of Ha’aretz. The hints he had heard led him to search a news database for “Egypt,” “Great Britain,” and “businessman.” The search immediately led him to an article in the Financial Times that mentioned Ashraf Marwan, a name he remembered from Shazly’s book The Crossing of the Suez (1980). The article referred to Marwan as an advisor to President Sadat. The reporter understood that he had solved the riddle.
Books about the Yom Kippur War continued to appear, and they never omitted the role of the super-agent. His name, of course, was never mentioned. Among those books was the one published by Eli Zeira in September 1993, twenty years after the war. Zeira’s decision to write was influenced by his discussions with Moshe Vardi, the editor of Yedioth Aharonoth, and the newspaper’s military correspondent, Eitan Haber, who encouraged him to bring his version of events to the public. By the end of 1992, the manuscript was ready. Zeira’s argument that the “source of quality information” had actually been working to deceive Israel was a major focus of his book, Myth versus Reality (2004). He explained that his suspicions had increased after he read the books written by the two Egyptian chiefs of staff, Shazly (The Crossing of the Suez) and Gamasy (The October War), as well as Jeffrey Robinson’s book about the Saudi oil minister Yamani (Yamani: The Inside Story).
In his book, Zeira called Marwan “the information.” His name was not mentioned, nor were there any identifying details about him. The censor approved the manuscript. In April 1993, journalist Rami Tal of Yedioth Aharonoth was asked to edit the book, with the goal of publishing it in time for the twentieth anniversary of the war and to use its contents in the newspaper’s Jewish high-holiday seasonal magazines. The manuscript was also sent for approval to the ministerial committee, as required. It appears that, somewhere in this process, the manuscript was seen and read by others who were not involved in the publication process.
During the editorial work, Tal too was curious about who “the information” was. He read the books Zeira mentioned as having aroused his suspicions about the credibility of the source and concluded correctly that the man was Ashraf Marwan. Zeira later faced criticism that he should only have mentioned Robinson’s book in order to protect Marwan’s identity, even though the censor approved the manuscript. Was the decision by the censor and the ministerial committee correct in allowing an open discussion about whether the elite Egyptian agent was working to deceive Israel? This question is worth pondering. But after approval had been given for such a discussion, Zeira should not have been the lightning rod for arguments on the issue.
As mentioned, Zeira’s book was published in September 1993, in a form even more heavily edited than the one the censor had approved. During the following years, the book did not generate interest in the name of the Mossad agent. A few months later, in 1994, the Egyptian military attaché in Libya, Salah el-Saadany, published a book (most probably not in coordination with Zeira), Egypt and Libya from Inside, 1969–1976, that described relations between the two countries during these years. Marwan’s name appeared prominently in the story as someone who had been an effective Egyptian emissary. The book referred for the first time, extensively and in depth, to the story of Qaddafi’s attempt to down an El Al plane in Rome, the attack which was foiled by Marwan (see chapter 6).
On December 2, 1994, an article based on Saadany’s book was published in Ma’ariv by another young reporter, Oded Granot. His long article centered on Marwan’s character and featured a photo of Marwan’s picture, putting a ring on the finger of his wife Mona, Nasser’s daughter. It appears that Granot knew more than he wrote even then, as the final paragraph, which dealt with the thwarting of the attempt to down the plane, testified:
And only one question actually remains open and arouses curiosity: How was the terrorist cell exposed? And was it only the Israeli Mossad that was operating here, or did the Egyptians prefer to act so that the terrorist attack would not take place? The answer could be no less surprising than the affair itself.49
Aluf Benn, who had already solved the “riddle of the name” on his own years earlier and had kept the secret, met Granot (ironically, in Cairo), talked with him about his article, and learned that Granot had not chosen to complete his article as he did by chance. He knew who the hero of the story was—and his connection with the Mossad.
Five more years passed without additional details being exposed which might give Marwan’s identity away. In September 1999, as the Jewish high holidays were approaching, Hanoch Marmari, then editor of Ha’aretz, called a meeting in his office to brainstorm articles for the special holiday magazines. Aluf Benn suggested an article about the Mossad agent who communicated to Israel information about the opening of the Yom Kippur War. “He is now living in London and his story has never been exposed,” he said.50 “And you know who he is?” asked the surprised Marmari. Benn admits that he hesitated for a minute and then revealed the details to those present: “Yes. His name is Ashraf Marwan.”
There and then, they decided to ask reporter Ronen Bergman to prepare an article for the holiday magazine. To that end, Bergman requested an interview with Zeira. “As you know, most of the discussion will be about Marwan and about your argument that he was a double agent,”51 Zeira quoted Bergman’s opening remarks at the beginning of their interview. Zeira says that he replied, “In this discussion names will not be mentioned. That is the condition for its taking place. If not, it has just ended.” He states that he did not even ask Bergman how he knew the name. The discussion took place in line with Zeira’s conditions and the article was published in Ha’aretz on September 17, 1999, with no mention of Marwan’s name and no identifying details except to call him “a senior source operated by Israel in Egypt and one of the most important sources in general.”52 The article focused on whether the source was a double agent. Most of the details in the article that deviated from this question had already been published in the literature or in newspapers.
At the same time, at King’s College London, Ahron Bregman was writing a book about Israeli history. Two years earlier, in 1998, following his work on a BBC television series reviewing Arab-Israeli wars, he had published another book (War and Israeli Society Since 1948) dealing with Israel’s fifty years of war that included interviews with personalities such as Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Yisrael Tal, and Eli Zeira. The Yom Kippur War took its appropriate place in the book, but Marwan was not mentioned at all.
This time, for his new book, Bregman took up the challenge Oded Granot had posed in his Ma’ariv article in 1994―to investigate the connection between Marwan and the Mossad. With no special difficulty, he too found the answer Benn had discovered more than ten years earlier, followed by reporters from Yedioth Aharonoth, Ha’aretz, Ma’ariv, and perhaps other media outlets.
In May 2000, a long time before he completed his book, Ahron Bregman published an article in the weekend magazine of Yedioth Aharonoth based on the material he had accumulated. The article still did not mention Marwan’s name, but described him as “very close to President Nasser and later, the right-hand man of Nasser’s successor, Sadat.”53 This article also discussed the argument that a Mossad agent was actually working to deceive Israel.
Before the publication of the book, in September 2002, Bregman presented another article on the subject to the Yedioth weekend magazine. This article did not mention the name Marwan either—but this time, Bregman stated that in Israel the intelligence agencies had termed their agent “the son-in-law” because of his family connection to Nasser, as well as “the doctor.” Bregman knew that the assertions about the use of the terms were untrue, as he himself had originated the nickname “son-inlaw,” but he wished to publicly challenge the limitations on publication posed by censorship, and he succeeded. Even though these deliberate hints were clear enough, the censor approved the article. “They shrugged their shoulders,” stated the email Bregman received telling him that the article had been approved.54
Two additional researchers who tried to solve the name riddle in their research and writing about the Yom Kippur War were Dr. Ephraim Kahana from Israel (Ashraf Marwan, Israel’s Most Valuable Spy: How the Mossad Recruited Nasser’s Own Son-in-Law) and Howard Blum from the United States (The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War). Both of these researchers interviewed Zeira. Kahana also published an article “Early Warning versus Concept: The Case of the Yom Kippur War 1973” in summer 2002. His details about Marwan were those published two years earlier in Bregman’s article in Yedioth Aharonoth. Kahana had talked with Bregman, who claimed that in that first conversation, Kahana had already guessed the identity of the Mossad agent and that the discussion between them strengthened that assumption. About six years later, Kahana testified in an affidavit to Justice Theodore Or that he heard Marwan’s name and details about him from Zeira. Blum’s book was published in 2003, after Marwan’s name had become public knowledge. There is no disagreement that he learned Marwan’s identity from Ahron Bregman.
In 1998 a book called Who Killed Diana? was published following Princess Diana’s death in an automobile accident.55 It provided an expanded picture of Marwan’s deeds and affairs, as a business rival of the Egyptian tycoon Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Princess Diana’s boyfriend Dodi, who was killed with her in the accident. Whether the book’s information was true or false, it was later quoted as an inexhaustible source for writings about Marwan in the press and in literature. The book maintained, among other things, that Marwan had served as a secret agent for the intelligence organizations of a few countries, among them the Israeli Mossad.
In the meantime, the last barrier to revealing Marwan’s name had been breached. In May 2002, after the publication of the article in Yedioth Aharonoth, Ahron Bregman tried to contact Marwan but received no reply. Nor did Marwan react when Bregman sent him a copy of his soon-to-be-published book, with a personal dedication. But Bregman’s persistence finally bore fruit. A short time later, on December 2, 2002, in an article in the Egyptian newspaper Sawt al-Umma, Marwan described Bregman’s book as a “ridiculous detective story.”56 Bregman reacted in an interview with the reporter Khalud el-Gamal published in Al-Ahram on December 21, 2002, in which he confirmed that Marwan was the Mossad agent about whom so much had been written. For the first time, the agent’s full name had been revealed to the public.57 Eight days later, on December 29, Bregman sent Marwan a fax in which he detailed why he had disclosed his name.58 He added that in the coming year, many books would be published to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the war. Therefore, he wrote, as his name was already known to many, Bregman had no doubt that it would be published in the future. He preferred to be the first to do that and to highlight his own version, which held that Marwan had been operating for Egypt rather than Israel. Bregman also requested Marwan’s help in dealing with his own critics by answering the question of whether Nasser also knew of his ties with the Israeli Mossad. He explained that this point was the weak link in the double-agent thesis.
