What would you say if someone pulled you aside and said they were writing a movie script about how a son-in-law of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser became one of Mossad’s most valuable spies?
Impossible to believe? Guess again. This tale is fact not fiction. The spy in question, Ashraf Marwan, provided Mossad with valuable, accurate information pointing to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s growing commitment to attacking Israeli across the Suez Canal in late 1973.
Written by Uri Bar-Joseph, a former Israel Defense Forces intelligence analyst and now a world-renown expert on Israeli intelligence, this book won the 2016 Jewish Book Award for history.
It is both a biography of Ashraf Marwan, loathed son-in-law of Nasser and a trusted aide of Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat, and a thriller about how Mossad handled Marwan and the intelligence he provided to them in the months leading up to the Yom Kippur War.
Among the fascinating elements of the book is how Israel, armed with the best intelligence, could have been surprised by the double attack from Egypt via the Sinai Peninsula and Syria via the Golan Heights. In less than three weeks, the war overturned many long-standing assumptions about the Middle East and set in motion the steps that five years later led to the Camp David Accords.
Mossad called Marwan “The Angel.” Born into a respected, middle class family, he was bright, held a degree in chemistry from Cairo University, and was a second lieutenant in Egypt’s army. He met Mona Nasser at a sporting club. Her father was not pleased when she said she wanted to marry Marwan.
Nasser’s investigations revealed an ambitious man with a taste for the high life. Nasser repeatedly tried to make Mona change her mind. In the end, his daughter’s stubbornness defeated the “greatest Arab leader since Saladin.” The couple married in 1966.
Nasser and Marwan were a study in opposites. Nasser had grown up poor and hated the wealthy. He was adamant that no one who worked in his government take advantage of his position for personal gain. The Nasser family lived in the house Nasser bought when he was first married. His wife Tahia ran the household on her husband’s relatively modest government salary.
Marwan wanted power, influence and money. He wanted respect. While he moved up in the world after his marriage – to a post in the President’s Office -- he found himself in an oppressive situation. Nasser distrusted him and kept him well supervised by his Chief of Staff Sami Sharaf. Marwan’s position brought him close to people of great wealth both inside and out of Egypt; his father-in-law’s Spartan ethics made it impossible to become wealthy himself. Adding salt to his wounded ego, he was the lowest paid employee in the President’s Office, earning less than his wife.
Another fascinating element of this story is why Marwan, an Egyptian officer, working in the center of power in Egypt, would voluntarily help his country’s most despised enemy.
According to author Uri Bar-Joseph, the reasons are complex. Marwan certainly wanted money. He also wanted to be seen as an important person who could change the course of history. Mossad made sure he felt valued.
When Marwan decided to become a spy, he stepped into an iconic red London telephone booth, called the Israeli embassy and told the switchboard operator he wanted to talk to someone in Israel’s intelligence agency. He didn’t say he was Nasser’s son-in-law and he didn’t leave a phone number. His call was transferred to the office of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military attache, who took a message. Nothing further happened.
Five months later, Marwan was back in London and decided to try again. By then, Nasser had died of a heart attack and Sadat had replaced him as president in October 1970. Marwan was again transferred to an IDF attache (Maj. Gen. Shmuel Eyal), but this time Marwan left a phone number. Two months later, two senior Mossad officials came to London and were going with Eyal to a meeting at Heathrow, when Eyal happened to mention Marwan’s calls. The Mossad officials couldn't believe what they were hearing.
Mossad had been keeping an eye on Marwan. It was hard to know how to take his offer: Was he a double agent? Was the information he was offering accurate or intentionally misleading?
Over time, Marwan proved the accuracy and worth of his information. He was an important person in Sadat’s administration because he had the association with Nasser, yet none of the political connections that could be a threat to Sadat. Marwan sat in on meetings and saw documents that illuminated Sadat’s perspective clearly.
At the time, Israel, the world’s super powers and even military leaders in Egypt believed that Egypt would never attack Israel because it didn’t have the airpower to defend ground troops crossing the Sinai Peninsula. This belief, ironically, nearly blinded Israel to the information that Marwan was sharing that Sadat indeed was planning to go to war sometime before the end of 1973.
Sadat’s strategy had changed over time. He understood that Egypt couldn’t retake Sinai with its available weapons. He decided to change the game. His new objective became to create an incident that would motivate the world powers to pressure a diplomatic resolution that would return Sinai to Egypt.
Many in the Arab world and a few in Israel believe that Marwan was a double agent. For the Arabs, it’s a face-saving perspective; for the Israelis, it explains why Israel wasn’t fully expecting the Yom Kippur attack: Marwan didn’t give them the right information at the right time.
Marwan’s identity was kept secret for more than 30 years. In the late 1990s, several books about the Arab-Israeli conflict leaked information about Israel’s “Angel.” A court case arising from some of these leaks ultimately revealed Marwan’s name. Three weeks later, he was dead. He was seen apparently jumping off the railing of his fifth-floor luxury apartment in London by men waiting for him at a meeting in an adjacent building that overlooked the balcony. Before he jumped, he was seen looking back into the apartment as if he were not alone.
While most history books make the strategies and choices of leaders seem inevitable, this book gives a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes, showing just how complex and uncertain the course of history is.
The Author: Uri Bar-Joseph
Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor in the Department for International Relations of the School for Political Science at Haifa University. He specializes in national security, intelligence studies and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
His 2005 book, The Watchman Fell Asleep, was the first detailed academic study of the intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War. Additionally, he wrote The Best of Enemies: Israel and Transjordan in the War of 1948 and co-wrote Two Minutes Over Bagdad.
He earned a doctorate degree from Stanford University in 1990. His dissertation -- Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: The U.S., Israel, and Britain -- won the 1996 Choice's Outstanding Academic Books Award.
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