But even then, he would have had to show precisely how and when the plan was hatched and carried out. In so complex an intelligence world, a plan so impossible and unprecedented must have had others in the loop. If so, where are they? Nobody has yet turned up claiming to have been in on the secret—even though the Egyptians insist they are endlessly proud of having caught Israel by surprise.
Marwan was asked repeatedly to address the question of his double agency and often had difficulty answering. Howard Blum had a conversation with him after his identity had become known. Marwan repeatedly dismissed Ahron Bregman’s claim that he had been a spy for Israel, saying that “people can write or say whatever they want. . . . As far as I’m concerned, it all looks like something out of a detective story.” Blum pressed the point, asking if Marwan had been a double agent. Marwan asked for Blum’s fax number. Later that day, Blum received a fax with a copy of a piece from Al-Ahram dated March 22, 1976, which described the ceremony marking Marwan’s departure from his job at the President’s Office, in which Sadat gave him a medal for his special contribution to the war effort.15 The point, apparently, was to show Blum that he had in fact tricked Israel at the start of the war. But as we know today, that whole ceremony was meant as a sop to Marwan to make up for his being fired, and his “contribution to the war effort” was his successful procurement of the Mirages from France via Libya despite the weapons embargo. Even what he told Ahron Bregman in their telephone conversation in 2006 showed just how weak Marwan’s story really was. He cited the crisis facing the IDF, and the emotional crisis of Golda Meir who, he claimed, had considered killing herself when the war broke out, as proof that the Israelis had been tricked, adding that he had made his contribution as part of a team of forty people whose job it was “to feed the Israelis the kontzeptzia . . . it wasn’t just one double agent . . . it was Egypt.”16 This is a far cry from definitively asserting that he was a double agent, and certainly does not constitute hard evidence that he played a hand in fooling the Israelis. If this was the best he could do, it is no wonder he never wrote that book.
Three conclusions arise from the evidence at hand. First, it is fair to assume that Ashraf Marwan never wrote a memoir depicting his side of the story in the Yom Kippur War, because doing so would have forced him to deal with a contradictory, undeniable reality, one that would have falsified his claims and showed him to be a charlatan and, most definitively, a Mossad spy after all. Marwan had no real interest in putting his life in the hands of the judging public in this way.
A second conclusion has to do with the image Marwan crafted for himself as someone writing a book that would unveil the secrets of Egypt’s trickery, with himself as protagonist. This allowed him to rebuff demands, both in Egypt and elsewhere, that he respond to claims that he was a spy for the Mossad. At first Marwan tried to ignore them, but as time went on, the Israeli press published report after report revealing more and more details. Suddenly writers like Ahron Bregman, Ronen Bergman, and Howard Blum began calling Marwan for his side of the story. He retorted, conveniently, that he was about to tell all in a book.
Finally, a conclusion may be drawn about the family. The myth of the memoir serves them well, since it makes it easier to claim that Marwan was an Egyptian patriot who fooled the Israelis, and that the most decisive proof was lost when the Israelis not only killed him but also destroyed all existing copies of the book. Journalists eat up this sort of convoluted conspirational story. Nothing sells like murder and missing memoirs.
BUT THERE ARE far more compelling reasons to dismiss the theory that the Mossad killed Ashraf Marwan—reasons that only come to light when looking at the Israeli side of the events. A careful look at the internal dynamics of the Israeli intelligence community and its response to the revelation of Marwan’s identity will show that not only was the Mossad consistently and intensely interested in keeping him alive, but that after the fact, the agency saw his death as nothing less than a fiasco for the organization.
Soon after his identity was revealed, a public debate emerged in Israel about how to deal with the person responsible for the leak—and it was widely known who that was. Inside the Mossad, the debate went as follows. On one side was the Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, who believed that opening an investigation against Eli Zeira, or even making him stand trial, would constitute a formal acknowledgment that Marwan had spied for Israel, putting Marwan’s life at serious risk and, by extension, making the Mossad look incapable of protecting its spies. And so, until June 2007, Dagan opposed any action being taken against Zeira. On the other side were many of the senior officers who had built their careers in the Mossad, especially the man who had been the head of the Tzomet branch and was now Dagan’s deputy, who argued that by allowing Marwan’s name to reach the public, Zeira had violated the First Commandment of intelligence, profaning its holy of holies as it were, and had to stand trial.17 Dagan won that battle, and on his recommendation, the Israeli attorney general’s office declined to investigate.
Regardless of which side was right, the important point for our purposes is that this internal debate—with one side actively trying to keep Marwan alive, the other wanting to punish the man who risked his life—could not have happened if the Mossad had wanted him dead. On the contrary, both the Mossad and the Israeli government saw his death as a disaster. Zamir was the first to admit it. Interviewed on Israeli television, he said, “We have lost the greatest source in our history . . . and we lost him because of criminal negligence . . . and I failed to protect him.”18 In his memoirs published in late 2011, Zamir devoted a full chapter to Marwan, called “The Best of All Agents: Between Myself and Ashraf Marwan.” “Not a single day passes,” he writes, “without my torturing myself over the question of whether I could have protected him better.”19
But if the Mossad didn’t do it, and Marwan’s business rivals didn’t do it, the only reasonable option is that the Egyptians did it. Only here do we find both the motives that would have led them to kill Ashraf Marwan and also a clear common thread between his death and similar deaths of others who stood in the way of the Egyptian regime in the past.
ONE OF THE biggest questions arising from Marwan’s death was this: How is it possible that between the revelations of his identity as Babel in 2002 and his death in 2007, the Egyptian government made no effort to investigate his treachery or make him stand trial—that instead it even honored Marwan, inflating his contribution to the war in 1973? One answer is that the Egyptians really do believe the double agent story. But it is hard to imagine that Egyptian intelligence officers, who know a good deal about what went down on their own turf, would accept a version of the facts in which Marwan and Sadat collaborated on tricking Israel without letting anyone else in on it. It is fair to assume, as well, that Egyptian intelligence officials read everything that came out about the agent Babel in the Israeli press and were able to figure out who Babel was. They, like the rest of the world, discovered that Ashraf Marwan had been a Mossad agent. And if they read the literature about the days leading up to the war, they knew that Israel’s failures happened largely despite, not because of, Marwan.
The way President Mubarak approached Marwan after his exposure illustrates the complex and cautious way the regime addressed the problem. The two had known each other at least since the early 1970s, when Marwan ran the project to get the French Mirages for the Egyptian air force and Mubarak was the air force commander. They had been on good terms ever since.20 Their firstborn sons were close friends and business partners. Publicly, Mubarak embraced Marwan. In 2005, Egyptian media showed the two of them shaking hands in a public ceremony to mark the anniversary of the October War. The picture convinced at least one Israeli journalist that Marwan was indeed a double agent.21 But, according to Al-Ahram’s Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Mubarak was surprised to see Marwan at the ceremony and ordered his men to escort him out of Egypt immediately. The next morning Marwan was already on a plane back to London. Following this incident, Mubarak issued an order bar
ring Marwan from returning to Egypt.22
The Egyptian media also praised Marwan after his death. Mubarak called him “a true patriot,” and members of the political, military, and intelligence elites attended his funeral. But in September 2011, after the fall of the Mubarak regime, Rose al-Yusuf, the same weekly that would, six months later, claim that Mubarak had accused Gaddafi of having Marwan killed, reported that Mubarak personally ordered the assassination of Marwan. Given the magazine’s dubious record, the claim attracted little attention.
Whether any of these claims is true or false is not known. But it is clear that Mubarak and his men wanted to bury this embarrassing episode deep in the ground. No wonder that when Egypt’s most respected journalist, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, asked him to open a formal investigation into the Marwan case, Mubarak refused.23
Three complementary explanations account for the kid glove treatment that Marwan received after his identity as a Mossad spy became known. One is the centrality of the issue of shame in Arab society. Whereas in Western culture, much of a person’s worth in society turns on the question of guilt versus innocence, in Arab culture the question is much more one of shame versus honor. Shame reflects not just on the individual but also on the groups he associates with, including nuclear and extended families, tribes, and nations. If it were to turn out that a member of the upper elites of Egypt, no less the son-in-law of Nasser himself, the personal adviser and confidant to Sadat, one of whose sons is Jimmy Mubarak’s best friend and another married to the daughter of the former foreign minister and secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa—that this man was the greatest traitor in Egyptian history, it would bring shame not just on Marwan but also on Mubarak and the entire ruling elite, as well as deal a massive blow to the national pride of the whole country.
Closely related to the burden of shame is the powerful circling of wagons that characterizes the upper strata of Arab societies in general and Egypt in particular—the “one of us” factor. For the strongest men in the regime Marwan may have been a traitor, but he was also a friend and a respected member of their closed circles. As such, he merited protection.
The combination of the “one of us” factor and considerations of shame was powerful enough to drive a far more legalistic culture than Egypt’s to actively avoid bringing a similar traitor to justice. When, in the early 1960s, British MI6 received undeniable proof that one of its senior members, Kim Philby, now a journalist in Beirut, had in fact been a Soviet spy, the agency avoided formally charging him in London. Instead, his old friends in the service seem to have given him a way out, by allowing him to defect to the USSR and thus prevent the embarrassment involved in a judicial process that would reveal in detail how “one of us” had betrayed them.24 The Egyptian way of dealing with the problem was deadlier but not less effective.
Finally, there was also the fear of the damage that Marwan could cause had the regime initiated a legal process against him. More than forty years of being an integral part of the Egyptian elite and learning the intimate secrets of the most powerful men in Egypt had turned him into a real threat. Marwan himself was aware of it and made it clear that he would not hesitate to use his power. In a talk with Heikal in London in September 2006, he denied that Mubarak prohibited him from visiting Egypt and added: “He cannot do it. I can destroy him.” He also said he can destroy others, including Omar Suleiman, the strongman of the Egyptian Mukhabarat.25
For all these reasons, the public admission by Eli Zeira, both in his book and in subsequent television interviews in 2004, to the effect that Marwan worked for the Mossad, created for Egypt a new reality: there’s a big difference when such a claim comes from a journalist or historian and when it comes from the man who headed IDF Military Intelligence during the Yom Kippur War. And all the more so when a former Israeli Supreme Court justice issues a ruling on the subject, which could easily be interpreted as formal judicial affirmation of Marwan’s treachery.
In June 2007, the awareness that this affair could threaten the foundations of Egyptian rule, and of the need to neutralize that threat, were becoming more and more acute for the regime in Cairo. Something had to be done.
ALL OF THIS, however, only explains the motive—why in the immediate aftermath of the Orr ruling, the Egyptians had every reason in the world to have Ashraf Marwan killed. But motive alone is not enough. Are there other indicators suggesting that the Egyptians had a hand in his death?
There are—specifically, the method of his execution. By tossing him off the balcony and finding a way to make his shoes vanish, one can maximize the likelihood that suicide or an accident will never be ruled out. After Marwan’s death, Egyptian journalists raised a number of parallels, two of which bear a striking resemblance.
The first happened in 1973, when Gen. El-Leithy Nassif, whom Nasser had chosen to command the Revolutionary Guard, and who, under Sadat’s orders, had jailed leading opposition figures in May 1971, was murdered in London. The general, who had a reputation for being honest and ethical, had been reassigned out of the Guard in 1972. Sadat promoted him in rank and appointed him to a meaningless “advisory” position in the army. A year later, he was made ambassador to Greece, but before moving to Athens he stopped in London for a medical procedure. He stayed on the eleventh floor of the Stuart Tower, a residence in Westminster frequented by Middle Eastern visitors. On August 15, 1973, his body was found at the base of the tower, having fallen from the balcony of his suite. An autopsy revealed nothing suspicious, but his wife repeatedly claimed he had been murdered by Sadat’s men, who shoved him out of the shower and off the balcony, because he had been a secret Nasser man. In particular, she blamed a senior Egyptian intelligence officer who lived in the same building at the time. The officer owned the apartment where Nassif was staying and had a key to the front door. In Nassif’s home in Cairo, it was later learned, surveillance devices had been planted, and Nassif knew about them. Though it is far from clear why Sadat would have wanted him killed after he had been loyal during the Corrective Revolution, the general sense in Egypt was that this was no accident but an execution on the orders of the government.26
Twenty-eight years later, on June 21, 2001, an Egyptian movie actress, Soad Hosny, met a very similar death. Hosny, who had appeared in eighty Egyptian films and was dubbed the “Cinderella of Egyptian Cinema,” was found dead at the base of Stuart Tower, after falling from her balcony on the seventh floor. Hosny had suffered from chronic pain and was being treated for weight gain, but people who were close to her in her four years in London claimed that she showed no suicidal signs. Her personal physician also knew her closely; he testified that he had spoken with her a day before her death, and she had sounded optimistic, promising to see him soon. Another close friend, her personal assistant, testified that when she had entered the apartment, Hosny had been on the balcony, but then once the assistant was inside, she could no longer find Hosny. She walked out onto the balcony and saw Hosny’s body on the grounds below. But because the assistant had contradictions in her story, the British judge attempting to establish the cause of death concluded that she was an unreliable witness.
The mysterious death of Soad Hosny, one of the most revered movie stars in the Arab world, triggered a wave of rumors, some of which pointed fingers at Egyptian intelligence. According to what became the established narrative, she was planning on writing a memoir in which she would reveal how she had worked for Egyptian intelligence in the 1980s. Her story of her work as an agent—which likely included acts of seduction by the beautiful actress—got a boost when the head of the Mukhabarat at the time, Gen. Fuad Nasser, claimed in an interview for an Egyptian paper that Hosny had been murdered. No wonder, then, that many around the Arab world believe that she was killed by Egyptian government officials who feared the embarrassment that would be caused by the publication of her memoir.27 No wonder that according to the sensational Rose al-Yusuf weekly, Scotland Yard’s investigators of Marwan’s death concluded that the same team of three Egy
ptians—two men and a woman—committed the murder of both the movie actress and the Mossad spy.28 Probably a false story, it received no confirmation from Scotland Yard or any other knowledgeable source.
THE IMPRESSIVE FUNERAL and President Mubarak’s statement, according to which he did “not doubt at all the patriotism of Dr. Ashraf Marwan” and that Marwan “was not a spy for any organization at all,”29 convinced quite a few Western journalists and analysts that maybe the double agent hypothesis was right after all. Others, familiar with the tiniest details of the story of Ashraf Marwan during the war, remained skeptical. Israeli Brig. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilboa, himself a former head of MI-Research who went through all the material that Marwan had provided, gave his own take on the behavior of official Egypt. The pictures of the funeral in which senior government officials are shown comforting his bereaved widow and their sons, he said, reminded him “of a mafia film. The mafia takes somebody out. Then, when the widow and children are crying on his grave, the killers come and kiss her.”30
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