The Angel

by Uri Bar-Joseph

  At two thirty early Friday morning, the phone rang in the home of the Mossad chief. Zamir answered. His chief of staff, Freddy Eini, was on the line with an urgent message. The Angel had made contact. He was talking of war.

  Chapter 9

  SIGNING AT SUNDOWN ON SATURDAY

  Ashraf Marwan left Egypt four days before the outbreak of war. He went to Libya, where he told Gaddafi about the intention to go to war soon, and then continued to France.1 On Thursday, October 4, he was in Paris with an Egyptian delegation, making it difficult for him to operate freely, whether by telephone or to arrange a meeting with his Israeli handlers. Difficulties like these were not unusual for Marwan, however, who always found a way to overcome them. In the late afternoon on Thursday, he placed a call to the apartment of the woman in London who acted as the go-between between Marwan and his Mossad handler. He needed to speak with “Alex,” he told her, and he would call again later on. The woman alerted Dubi, who quickly made his way to her apartment and then waited. Soon the phone rang again. It was the Angel.

  Dubi could hear men speaking Arabic in the background. Marwan was clearly not alone and could not speak freely. And he was tense. He began by saying he couldn’t talk for long. Dubi understood. Then the Angel got to the point: He wanted to talk about “lots of chemicals,” and he needed to see the “General” urgently. Tomorrow he would be in London. They would meet.

  Dubi thought he heard the message loud and clear. As part of the protocol that was set up to allow Marwan to give advance warning of an attack, they had chosen code words he would use to clarify the specific nature of the threat. Because Marwan had studied chemistry, they decided that warnings would incorporate elements of the periodic table, mixed with statements that seemed like normal conversation. The general term for war was “chemicals,” but Marwan was also given more specific terms. If he wanted to tell them about a threat of immediate attack, he might have spoken of “potassium”; a less immediate warning might include mention of “iodine”; an air attack in the Sinai without crossing the Suez Canal could be called “sodium.”

  Some commentators have suggested that Dubi made a crucial mistake. He could have asked Marwan to name a specific element, rather than just “chemicals,” as the basis for bringing the Mossad chief—the “manager”—to London. Instead, he chose not to press the point. Dubi, however, was unaware of the tense situation developing, from hour to hour, back in Israel. All he knew was what he learned from the press, and there were no public reports about a possible war. Dubi also did not have much of a choice. He knew that Marwan was pressed for time and that there were other people near him. He also believed that if Marwan had more precise information, he would have used a different code word. Since he didn’t, Dubi concluded that the warning was not all that concrete. Finally, Dubi figured that in any event, Marwan would be more specific the next day when he met with Zvi Zamir.

  Dubi, in any event, followed protocol. When he got off the phone with Marwan, he quickly called the Mossad’s London bureau chief and then drafted a communiqué. Even though the immediate reason for sending a report was the warning he had just received from the Angel, the first paragraph dealt with other matters. Only farther down did Dubi write that the source wanted to see the director of the Mossad urgently about the “chemicals,” and mentioned a time for the meeting in London.

  The report was sent to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, where it arrived at around midnight Israel time. The officer on duty promptly sent a copy to the office of Zamir and a second copy to Military Intelligence.

  The woman on duty at Zamir’s office received the letter and called his chief of staff, Freddy Eini, at home. Eini drove to headquarters to read it himself. According to his testimony before the Agranat Commission—Israel’s national commission of inquiry that later investigated the events leading up to the Yom Kippur War—Eini took it with utmost seriousness. It was “a warning of the start of war. Nothing like this had ever happened.” These last words, he later recalled, referred not to the warning but to Marwan’s request to meet with the head of the Mossad. This was unusual because Marwan had always been kept in the dark as to whether Zamir would join their meetings, in order to keep the Egyptians, or any other hostile actors, from setting a trap for him. Given these extraordinary circumstances, Eini now felt he had to alert Zamir, who was at home, about the communiqué.

  It was now 2:30 a.m., Israel time, on Friday, October 5.

  Their conversation included at least one misunderstanding. Eini clearly thought he was calling Zamir to share a top intelligence source’s warning of war. Zamir, on the other hand, saw the call as something more mundane. Eini did tell him that the Angel wanted to meet him in London to discuss the “chemicals.” But because Marwan hadn’t used the code word denoting an immediate attack, Zamir failed to interpret it as a concrete warning of imminent war. He recalled that back in April, the same source had used the code word for an imminent attack; that had been a false alarm, and the Angel had quickly withdrawn the warning. This time around, the other indicators of war were much more serious, and as such, the less urgent implication of the word “chemicals” effectively lulled Zamir into concluding that war must be less imminent than he had feared.

  Zamir believed that the purpose of Eini’s call was to tell him about Marwan’s request to meet the next evening in London. It was, therefore, up to Zamir to decide whether to go. But a decision to meet Marwan would mean a rapid change of plans in order to catch the morning flight, which was El Al’s only flight to the United Kingdom on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday. He had to tell Eini right away whether to make the arrangements. For days, the Mossad chief had been deeply worried by the stream of reports of war—and by Military Intelligence’s insistence on downplaying them. Yes, he said, he would go to London. He told Eini to make the necessary arrangements for both the flight and the clandestine meeting, alerting local Mossad staff who would provide security and cover on the ground in London. With this, they ended their call.

  Minutes later, Zamir’s phone rang again. This time, it was the chief of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira. This was the first time Zeira had ever called him after midnight, and this alone convinced Zamir that the situation must be serious. The MI chief updated him about the Soviet evacuations in Syria and asked Zamir if he’d heard anything new. Zamir, who had yet to internalize the urgency of Marwan’s message about “chemicals,” didn’t mention the conversation he’d just concluded with Freddy Eini, and Zeira came away thinking that there was no news from the Mossad.

  At about 3:00 a.m., Eini called again. He updated Zamir on the details of the morning flight. Zamir told him about the MI chief’s call and the Soviet evacuations; Eini suggested that perhaps this dovetailed with Marwan’s sudden desire to meet. Only then did Zamir realize that Eini, who had seen Dubi’s communiqué, had understood Marwan to be delivering a warning of war. He told Eini he would immediately call back Zeira to tell him about it, and instructed him to alert the prime minister’s military secretary, Brig. Gen. Israel Lior, in the morning—both about the Angel’s warning and about Zamir’s plans to meet him in London.

  Zamir called Zeira back. By now, three hours had passed since Dubi’s communiqué had reached Mossad headquarters. According to the Agranat Commission report, Zamir now told the MI chief that “this is war. We don’t have the exact date yet . . . but it is imminent.”2 According to Zamir’s testimony, Zeira had agreed that yes, it was war.

  The MI chief recalled the conversation differently, however. In his testimony before the commission, he said that Zamir had told him he’d be getting more information within twenty-four hours and that Zeira, in response, told the Mossad chief to pass it on to him in the fastest way possible if it was really about war. Contradicting Zamir’s claim that the phone call was principally about an impending attack, Zeira claimed that he had not understood Dubi’s message to be about war at all. “This,” he told the commission, “I am now hearing for the first time.” He later repeated the claim, sayi
ng that “a clear warning sign, as I now understand it? This I am now hearing for the first time.”

  The commission preferred the Mossad chief’s testimony over Zeira’s. Its members confronted Zeira with his own words as recorded in the minutes of his meeting with the prime minister on Friday morning, October 5. There it was clear that he understood Zamir to be waiting urgently for clarifications about the warning of war. When challenged, Zeira softened his position. “Zvika [Zamir] may have said something about it.” Then he added: “I understood it, generally speaking, as a warning. Not something certain, not something imminent, not something clear. My sense is that such was the Mossad’s understanding as well.”3

  Eini picked up Zamir on the morning of Friday, October 5, from his house in the Tzahala neighborhood of Tel Aviv, and they made their way to the airport at Lod. On the way, they agreed that Zamir would update Eini by telephone right after the meeting that night. They also agreed on code words for Zamir to use while reporting. Zamir emphasized that the contents of Dubi’s message must be passed to the prime minister. Eini had no need for the reminder: The rules were very clear, and Eini, who always followed them, understood their importance.

  Zamir took off for London, and Eini drove to headquarters in Tel Aviv. He tried to reach Israel Lior, the prime minister’s military secretary, at his office but was told that Lior was meeting with the prime minister and couldn’t talk. Eini left a message to call him.

  Prime Minister Golda Meir received the information in a meeting that took place in her personal office at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. Other participants included Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, IDF chief of staff David Elazar, Zeira, and several of their closest aides. Zeira updated the prime minister about the Arab military preparations and the Soviet evacuations. He also mentioned the Mossad chief’s trip to London, relaying the message from Marwan that “something’s going to happen,” and that Zamir went to check it out. At this point, the defense minister already knew about the warning. About an hour earlier, in a one-on-one meeting with Zeira, he had first learned that Zamir “last night received an alert from the Angel. He gave warning that something is going to happen, and asked Zvika [Zamir] to come immediately for a meeting. He’ll see him tonight at 10 p.m.”4

  The matter-of-fact way that Zeira passed along what he heard from Zamir in their phone conversations the night before did little justice to the actual urgency of the warning. If Eini had called Lior immediately during the night (rather than the next morning), spoken to him directly (rather than leaving him a message), and told him in an unambiguous way what was in the communiqué Dubi had sent several hours earlier, the prime minister likely would have heard and absorbed the information differently. Instead, what resulted was, in effect, a game of telephone: Marwan’s warning was substantially diluted by the time it reached Golda Meir.

  The ambiguous wording of Dubi’s communiqué undoubtedly contributed to the misunderstanding surrounding Marwan’s war alarm—namely, it was not understood as a war alarm during the crucial day that passed between Zamir’s first hearing about it from Eini at 2:30 a.m. on Friday, and Zamir’s own report after meeting Marwan in London the following night. If Marwan, who had given such accurate information all along, had known Thursday that the attack would be launched two days later, he almost certainly would have said so to Dubi, as clearly as possible and as soon as possible. Yet if Marwan was ambiguous during the Thursday-night phone call, it is probably because he only learned about the actual timing of the attack after he had spoken with Dubi—and purely by chance.

  THE DELEGATION THAT had brought Marwan to Paris returned to Cairo on Friday morning. Marwan himself went to London. There he checked into a suite on the seventh floor of the Churchill, an upscale and relatively new redbrick hotel not far from Oxford Street. He lay on the couch that morning, reading.

  There was a rap on the door. It was Mohamed Nusseir, a friend Marwan knew from Cairo. The forty-six-year-old Nusseir had been one of Egypt’s first computer engineers. In 1967, at the request of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, he joined the staff of the Al-Ahram newspaper, established the paper’s data center and publishing house, and within five years turned it into one of the most impressive technological centers in the country. In 1972 he left the center and was now in a transitional phase; soon he would launch a career in computers and telecommunications that would make him one of the richest men in Egypt. He was married to the daughter of Abdel Latif Boghdadi, a member of the Revolutionary Leadership Council and vice president under Nasser. Through his wife, he had met Mona, Nasser’s daughter. Mona had introduced him to Marwan.

  Nusseir had a bizarre story to tell. That morning, he had spoken to the director of the London office of EgyptAir, the national airline, who told Nusseir that he, as well as his counterpart in Paris, had both received explicit, urgent orders from Cairo to reroute all the carrier’s planes in London and Paris to Tripoli, Libya. The order came without explanation.

  Neither Marwan nor Nusseir knew it, but the order sent to London and Paris was the result of a decision made by the Egyptian aviation minister, who had, without consulting anyone, told the CEO of EgyptAir to move all of his aircraft to friendly states. The minister had just found out the date of the planned attack and decided to take action to protect the planes. But when news of the order reached the command center of the Egyptian military (Center 10), the defense minister and the army’s chief of staff were stunned. Fearing that the sudden change in EgyptAir’s flight schedules would tip their hand to the Israelis, they told the company’s CEO to ignore the directive, and EgyptAir returned to its ordinary flight schedule during the morning of Friday, October 5.5 The head of the airline’s London office, who knew Nusseir, was calling him to see if he knew any reason for the sudden order and its reversal. Nusseir said he had no idea, but he thought he might know someone who did: his friend Ashraf Marwan, the president’s confidant, whom Sadat had personally sent on many sensitive diplomatic missions, and who would be arriving in London that same morning and staying at the Churchill.

  According to an interview Nusseir later gave to an Egyptian TV station, when Marwan heard the story he leapt up off the couch. “There’s going to be a war,” he declared. “The war plans say that we’re worried about our planes getting damaged on the ground. Part of the plan is that we’re supposed to reroute our planes to other countries.” Marwan went into the bedroom, made a few phone calls, and soon came back out, saying that war would be launched the following day. He told Nusseir that he had to get back to Egypt immediately and asked him to go to their mutual friend, Kamal Adham, and tell him to lend Marwan one of his private planes so that he could fly back to Cairo. It was midday Friday when Nusseir called Adham, who was unable to help Marwan, since the plane he usually kept in London had just taken off. Nusseir left Marwan’s suite and went back to his family. What was clear to him, he later recalled, was that “Marwan knew every detail of the war plans because he worked in the President’s Office, but he didn’t know exactly when it would happen . . . the proof of this was the great surprise he showed when he heard my story. It was clear that he didn’t know when the war would begin.”6

  Most of the Israelis familiar with the war warning Marwan gave assumed that he was already fully aware when he left Egypt several days earlier that war would break on October 6. What emerges from Nusseir’s account is that this assumption may have been simply false. In fact, Marwan learned that war will start on October 6 only on October 5 at midday, and only by accident.

  In the entire debate about whether Marwan was actually a sophisticated double agent rather than the most important spy Israel ever had, no single question has been more decisive than Marwan’s alleged “delay” in warning about the war. According to the double agent hypothesis, he knew all along that the attack would come on October 6; he gave the warning in order to maintain his credibility with the Israelis but withheld the information until it was too late for them to do anything useful with it. This, it emerges, is wr
ong on two counts: Marwan almost certainly didn’t know about the timing until the day before the attack; and as we will see further on, he really did give the Israelis enough time to deploy the regular army for war, to start calling up their reserves, and to launch a preemptive strike. That they did not take these steps is due largely to their own confusion—and, in the case of MI chief Eli Zeira and those he influenced, their unwillingness to take Marwan’s warning seriously.

  There were several reasons for Israel’s spectacular intelligence failure, which allowed the Egyptian and Syrian forces to catch the IDF unprepared when they attacked on the afternoon of Saturday, October 6. But Israel also benefited from a stroke of luck. If the Egyptian aviation minister hadn’t given the order to change the national carrier’s flight schedules and reroute the airliners to Libya; if Mohamed Nusseir hadn’t heard about it from the chief of EgyptAir’s London branch; if he hadn’t known that Marwan was in the city and then tracked him down at the Churchill to see what he might know about it—the outcome of the entire war may have been quite different. Only through the confluence of all these events was it possible for Marwan to tell Zamir that night that war was not just on the way but would be at hand the next day. If his warning had remained without a precise date, it is hard to believe that Zamir’s report that night would have started a process that would end in the call-up of Israeli reserves, as well as additional crucial decisions made in the final hours before the attack.