The Angel

by Uri Bar-Joseph

  Rowland, ever the clever one, found a way around this through a trick known in the City as “concert parties”—people who illegally coordinate business moves but do so without ever actually discussing it, or at least without leaving any paper trail, so as to make it nearly impossible to prove their collusion. Rowland had used Marwan as a concert party, but it was far from enough. To make his really big move on Fraser, he used a combination of tactics. First he diverted attention by making it seem as though his own financial difficulties had caused him to lose interest in the company. And then he started looking for a major businessman who would buy off Rowland’s entire stake, with the tacit understanding that the purchase was on some level fictitious. After selling off his portion, he could freely buy more shares on the open market, enough to combine with the old ones to give him a majority in the company. Such a man would need to be wealthy enough to make the purchase on his own, yet not wealthy enough to turn around and buy the other 20 percent needed for him to take over Fraser himself. The man who helped Rowland identify the right businessman was Ashraf Marwan.

  And the man Marwan found for him was Mohamed al-Fayed.

  MOHAMED AL-FAYED WAS born in 1933 to a middle-class Egyptian family. His first wife, Samira Khashoggi, to whom he was married from 1954 to 1956, was the sister of the multimillionaires Adnan and Essam Khashoggi, themselves alumni of Victoria College and personal friends of Ashraf Marwan. Samira was the mother of Al-Fayed’s firstborn son, Dodi, who died in 1997 in the same Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana.

  Mohamed himself was a successful businessman. In the 1950s he started a shipping company together with his brother, and in the 1960s he moved to Dubai where he built his fortune. In 1974 he relocated to England and shifted most of his dealings there, and to France. In Paris he bought the famed Ritz Hotel, which he renovated at great cost—an investment for which he received high honors from the mayor of Paris at the time, Jacques Chirac. In 1975 he was introduced to Tiny Rowland and briefly joined the board of directors of Lonrho. Although they hit a rough patch because of Rowland’s endemic inability to deal effectively with Arab businessmen, the two reestablished contact in 1983.

  Rowland’s biggest fear was that whoever became his new partner in the Fraser venture would take the opportunity to buy up another 20 percent and take over the company himself, instead of holding on to the 30 percent merely on Rowland’s behalf. Before approaching Al-Fayed, he had Marwan do a thorough check of his finances to make sure that he did not have the capacity to make such a move. Marwan was a natural choice, both because he was already in on the scam and also because he was Al-Fayed’s countryman, deeply connected in Egyptian intelligence, close with the Khashoggi brothers and therefore with intimate access to the details of Al-Fayed’s life. It didn’t hurt that Marwan had developed a reputation of being a man of mystery, all-powerful and all-knowing in Egypt. This reputation, which Marwan did everything to foster, accorded him much more power than he really had. A member of the British parliament expressed the typical exaggeration of Marwan’s qualifications when he described him as “the son-in-law of the late President Nasser, [who] had been head of security, intelligence and information in Egypt. He had been trained by the KGB. He was therefore a man of great skill in intelligence, counter-intelligence and disinformation techniques, and of the utmost influence and power.”3

  Mohamed al-Fayed and his brother Ali had worked hard to create the impression that they were vastly wealthy, although in practice their £100 million estate was mostly in hock to the local banks. In late June 1984, Rowland spoke with Al-Fayed about selling him his holdings in the House of Fraser, insisting that the profits would be significant. Al-Fayed loved the idea and wanted to close the deal immediately, but Rowland stalled. Then Al-Fayed invited Marwan for a chat, asking him to convey his intense interest in the deal. Marwan told Rowland that in his estimation, Al-Fayed was worth no more than £50 million. The implication was that while he might be able to pull together the necessary money to purchase Rowland’s stake, he wouldn’t be able to purchase anything beyond that to take over the company, which at the time had a market capitalization of about £600 million. And so, when the Al-Fayed brothers showed Rowland a letter from their bank affirming that it was putting £132 million at their disposal to purchase Lonrho’s stake in Fraser, both he and Marwan assumed that was pretty much all they could afford.

  They were wrong. For Mohamed al-Fayed had, precisely then, earned the trust of the sultan of Brunei, at the time the wealthiest man on earth. With his help, he created a fund in banks in England and Switzerland containing an additional £350 million. It would enable him to buy up the remaining shares he would need to take over the House of Fraser.

  On October 29, 1984, Rowland and Al-Fayed met together with Marwan, and together they agreed that Lonrho would sell its entire stake to Al-Fayed. It was further agreed that the deal would remain a secret until it was completed, that the payment would be in cash, and that Rowland would keep his position on Fraser’s board of directors.

  Three days later, the deal was officially announced. For the first time, the Al-Fayed brothers entered the spotlight, and they made a sterling impression on the British press. They had, after all, saved Harrods from the “unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.” It was enough to earn them dinner with the prime minister, together with the sultan of Brunei, at Number 10 Downing Street—a place where Rowland had been persona non grata for years.

  Violating the terms of the agreement, the Al-Fayed brothers suddenly demanded that Rowland relinquish his seats on the board of Fraser. Rowland sensed that something was afoot, and if he had any chance of acquiring Fraser, he had to move fast. He bought back many of the shares he had sold to smaller buyers, including Marwan’s stake. The battle against Al-Fayed was on, and it became a public one—though Rowland still didn’t know how much money his rival really had on hand.

  In the turmoil that ensued, Marwan played a key role, as go-between delivering messages from one tycoon to the other but also as chief sleuth working for Rowland. He discovered, for example, that the money the Al-Fayed brothers had used to purchase Lonrho’s shares in Fraser had come from the sultan of Brunei and not their own funds. Through his intelligence contacts in Egypt, moreover, he established that the Al-Fayeds had come from a middle-class family and that all the stories of their wealth were false. Marwan’s discoveries found their way to the press, which fed on them with abandon. But as opposed to Rowland, who battled with his adversaries—especially the management of Fraser—through threats and intimidation, the Al-Fayeds used soft persuasion, buying support in Fraser with promises of cooperation, of massive investment in Harrods, and of higher wages. During the Christmas vacation, when Rowland and Marwan traveled together to Acapulco, the Al-Fayed brothers held receptions for the executives of Fraser in their posh apartment in London, showing a compelling facade of vast wealth that convinced government officials to give their blessing for a complete takeover of the company.

  And indeed, on March 4, 1985, Mohamed al-Fayed publicly announced his intention to buy the House of Fraser. To Rowland and Marwan’s surprise, it turned out that he had £435 million at his disposal. The two flew off to the Spanish coastal town of Marbella, where they met Adnan Khashoggi, who insisted that all the stories of Al-Fayed’s vast family wealth from Egyptian cotton were false and that their father was a mid-level inspector in the Education Ministry. But when Marwan attempted to bring to the British authorities proof that Al-Fayed had lied about the source of the purchase, and that it was really the money of the sultan of Brunei, he was roundly ignored. Marwan’s reputation of being an untrustworthy manipulator had caused his pleas to fall on deaf ears.

  Rowland then turned to the press, mounting a public campaign to discredit Al-Fayed that would go on for seven years and cost him over £20 million. Hiring the services of lawyers, accountants, investigative reporters, and private investigators, he dug under every rock to uncover wrongdoings of the Egyptian family in Haiti,
Brunei, Dubai, Switzerland, France, England, and, of course, Egypt. His tactics included illicit wiretapping, bribery, and threats. And the man who directed and implemented the campaign was Ashraf Marwan. So effective had been Marwan’s projected image of mystery and dubious friends that he frightened the Al-Fayeds into investing increasing resources into defending themselves from the onslaught—including hiring personal bodyguards.

  In the first phase, Marwan tracked down copies of the Al-Fayeds’ birth certificates, which proved their middle-class origins and therefore undermined their claim that the purchase was made with family money. Though a translation of the certificates was published in the British press, no one seemed to care that much. The effort shifted to proving that Al-Fayed had illegally taken advantage of his signatory power over the sultan’s accounts. Rowland paid £2 million to an Indian guru frequented by the immensely wealthy, in exchange for a poor-quality recording of a conversation between him and Al-Fayed, in which the latter was purportedly caught admitting that the money had belonged to the sultan of Brunei. In eighteen hours of recordings, however, nothing really useful turned up. Marwan hired a private investigator to tap the home phones of Al-Fayed. He also offered the Haitian ambassador to London a sum of £2 million for embarrassing information regarding his dealings there, since Al-Fayed had fled Haiti after getting into an argument with the local strongman, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. But this effort, too, led nowhere.4

  Chris Blackhurst, an experienced journalist and a former editor of the Independent, shed some light on Marwan’s method of operation. According to one account, which he heard from Al-Fayed’s assistant, in late 1986 someone knocked on the door of the company’s offices and asked to speak with the Egyptian millionaire. When asked what his business with Al-Fayed was, he explained that he was a private investigator, hired by Ashraf Marwan to install surveillance devices in the investment fund’s telephones. The investigator had become terrified, however, when he learned the fate of someone else whose phones Marwan had hired him to tap: Gérard Hoarau, the exiled opposition leader of the Seychelles Islands who, just days earlier, had been gunned down at the entrance of his London home. The investigator was now asking Al-Fayed to protect him against possible threats from Marwan. Al-Fayed agreed to meet him, on condition that he tell him all the details of who had hired him. The investigator agreed, and a time was set. But before the meeting could take place, he was severely beaten in the Primrose Hill section of London. The meeting was canceled.5

  Blackhurst had his own creepy dealings with Marwan as well. In one case, Marwan granted him an interview, telling him to show up at Heathrow Airport with passport in hand. Without even going through border control, he was put on a private plane headed for the tiny island of Majorca, together with Marwan—who owned a luxury hotel there—and two other businessmen who spent the entire flight ignoring Blackhurst and speaking only in Arabic. When they finally arrived in Majorca, Marwan ignored him for the better part of a weekend, and when he finally did allow the interview, it was brief and trivial in its contents. Marwan did, however, take the opportunity to drop names of dubious and violent figures in the Arab world with whom he was well acquainted, including Gaddafi. Blackhurst’s impression was of a man bent on showing you that he wasn’t just any businessman of the City but rather mysterious and dangerous, someone who could take you out of your world and exercise complete control over your life. If he had just vanished that weekend, Blackhurst mused afterward, no one would have had a clue where to look for him. This is how Blackhurst began his piece:

  Ashraf Marwan frightens people. The Egyptian multi-millionaire who made a fortune trading shares in House of Fraser, Fleet and Extel is now stalking a sleepy Yorkshire company, Bridon. He won’t make a bid. He never does, but he might sell the shares to fellow predators such as Tiny Rowland—who will.

  Nobody knows where Marwan will strike next. The City can’t keep up, for he is always one step ahead—on the next deal, the next million. When he does make a move, he does not tell the City. He hates its stuffiness, its unwritten rules. . . .

  Mysterious, shadowy, and sinister are the favorite descriptions of Marwan elicited in the City. His choice of friends does not help. He is close to Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and his cousin, security adviser Ahmed Gaddafadam. “Just because I am their friend does not mean I am a terrorist.”6

  Marwan was also one of the few people in the City who was publicly known as a liar. John Griffiths, who was appointed to lead the formal inquiry regarding Tiny Rowland’s efforts to take over the House of Fraser, concluded in a March 1984 report that “Dr. Marwan’s evidence did not carry to me the ring of truth. I certainly felt I cannot rely upon it as the whole truth . . . he was not frank.” Tom Bower, who wrote unauthorized biographies of Al-Fayed and Rowland, asserted that this was Griffiths’s way of saying Marwan’s testimony was an outright lie.7 And so it was received at the time. No other witness among the many who appeared before Griffiths was described that way. Marwan clearly was trying to cover up the fact that he had purchased the shares of Fraser in order to help Rowland take over the company. He told Griffiths instead that he bought the stock after reading an article about the company in the Sunday Telegraph. For proof, he brought a copy of the article. But Rowland’s secretary testified that she had sent the article to Marwan on his request, and Griffiths concluded that the copy he held was a photocopy of the very clipping that Rowland had.8 It is worth noting, in this regard, that Rowland himself, in denying that he had asked Marwan to buy shares on his behalf, said that he “would not want to do business with Ashraf Marwan . . . who is totally unreliable when it comes to business. . . . In terms of business Dr. Ashraf Marwan is totally unreliable.”9

  IN THE LATE 1980s, the Harrods affair faded from the public eye, and so did Ashraf Marwan. His behavior helped this along. He never really involved himself in the London business world and had no English friends. As opposed to other London businessmen, who built themselves lush offices in the financial district, Marwan kept a relatively modest office on Hill Street in the aristocratic Mayfair district. Other than a few pieces of East Asian art, his office had just a desk with a computer screen ferrying financial data from one side to the other, mostly about equities on the London exchange. Even when he received visitors in his office, one eye was always following the numbers on that screen. He insisted that this was how he worked: He collected information, waited for opportunities, and made quick decisions. That was how he purchased the hotel in Majorca. As he told it, he was having dinner in Spain, and the hotel’s owner was describing the hotel, and mentioned he was interested in selling it. Marwan asked him how much he wanted and verified that that was the final selling price. The next morning, he called the owner up and closed the deal. In another case, in the late 1980s, he purchased 3.2 percent of the stock in the Chelsea soccer club after receiving a tip that a very wealthy businessman was looking to buy the team. He always kept abreast of developments on the team after that, and in 2003 he sold his holdings to the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in a deal that would later draw attention of the authorities. Marwan’s investment in Chelsea was unusual for the length of time he held it. Usually he tended to buy companies or real estate holdings, mostly hotels, not as “buy-and-hold” investments, but to realize a significant gain in a short period of time.10

  There is no doubt that Marwan became a rich man in London, but the information as to just how he did it, and just how wealthy he became, is far from clear. In the few interviews he granted, he claimed that he became wealthy from successful business deals, mostly in real estate, and chalked his successes up to a combination of wit and luck. Undoubtedly, the source of at least some of his wealth was in illicit weapons dealing undertaken together with top people in Libya, and presumably he knew how to take percentages on deals in which he served merely as broker rather than investor. Nor is there any clarity as to his net worth. According to reports whose provenance is unclear, by the time he left Egypt he had accumulated more than £300 milli
on, mostly from buildings and hotels he had acquired in London.11 But even if these reports are wildly exaggerated, he did not arrive in the UK penniless. Again, one inquiry in Egypt revealed that as early as 1972, he held equities on the London exchange valued at £2 million, and we may assume that his wealth only grew after that. His payments from the Mossad, through all the years, totaled about $1 million, and it seems clear that early on he used that money as a basis for making more money through various deals. In the summer of 1983, Marwan estimated, in testimony he gave in the context of the Fraser affair, that his net worth was around £20 million. After his death, the headlines consistently referred to him as “Billionaire Ashraf Marwan,” though there is no reason to take that literally.

  ALONGSIDE HIS PRODIGIOUS business efforts, Marwan continued, even if on a low profile, with his secret career as a senior source for Israeli intelligence. His connections with top Egyptian officials were never severed, and he made a point of spending some of his time in Cairo, where he continued nurturing his relationships among Egyptian elites, and where his wife and two sons continued living for some time as well. Neither did Marwan stop visiting Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states as well as Syria. In these visits, he met with top government officials, and he was always eager to gather new information that might be of interest to Israel.

  Despite the lower priority that Egypt held for Israeli intelligence in the wake of the peace treaty, Marwan still remained important to the Mossad. Because of the nature of his connections across the Arab world, most of the intelligence he could provide was of a nonmilitary, political variety. And yet, the lack of high-quality sources in the Arab political arena made him, even twenty years after he first called the Israeli embassy in London, one of the Mossad’s most highly regarded agents.