The Angel (14 page)

Some time after Sadat came to power, Marwan reported on a meeting with his top generals, who presented the president with their need for a warplane comparable to the Israeli F-4 Phantoms as a condition for going to war. From later reports, Israeli MI and IAF intelligence could follow precisely the evolution of the Egyptian views regarding the precise aerial forces required to neutralize Israeli air superiority. At a certain point, these assessments included the five fighter-bomber squadrons as the minimal condition for Egyptian action—precisely what the Egyptian war planners, we now know, were in fact saying.

More important is the fact that beginning in late 1972, the
assessments suddenly stop referring to the need for long-range fighter-bombers as a condition for going to war. Specifically, Marwan informed Dubi on June 3, 1973, about four months before war started, that the Egyptian generals ceased regarding the supply of such aircraft as a necessary condition for launching war. Instead, they now counted on their massive air defense layout west of the canal, the split of the IAF efforts between the northern and the southern fronts, and the achievement of surprise as the main means to overcome their air inferiority.

Although the Israelis were aware of the shift, they failed to grasp what it meant. MI-Research and IAF intelligence continued, all the way until the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, to believe that the Egyptians would not attack without the fighter-bombers. And so, for example, on September 24, 1973, less than two weeks before the war, Military Intelligence chief Eli Zeira asserted that the purchase of fighter-bombers robust enough to attack targets in Israel continued to constitute, from the Egyptian perspective, a necessary condition for going to war—and that at least until 1975 this condition could not be met.
¹⁷
This mistake would haunt Israeli intelligence analysts who, having developed their
kontzeptzia
largely on the basis of information Marwan had given them, refused to revise their thinking even when Marwan began painting a very different picture.

THE NEAR IMPOSSIBILITY
of procuring effective warplanes from the Soviet Union began to sink in with the Egyptians, forcing them to look for an alternative. MiG-17s, Sukhoi Su-7s, and even Sukhoi-17s, which arrived in small numbers about a year before the war, couldn't do the job. The only country other than the United States producing even vaguely relevant airplanes was France. Ironically, the French plane designed for ground assault was a variant of the Mirage 5J, tailored to specifications provided by the Israelis and in
tended for the IAF. But the French embargo on the conflict states halted the delivery of fifty such planes to Israel, and France was now looking for buyers for these as well as other models like the Mirage 5D, which had a low-altitude attack radius of 425 miles and a payload of two 1,900-pound bombs. These numbers didn't compare well with Israel's F-4s, but they were still better than anything the Soviets could offer.

But getting the Mirages was not so simple. The French embargo, after all, applied to Egypt no less than to Israel. And so, in November 1969, just months after a coup in Libya brought Muammar Gaddafi to power, negotiations began between Libya and France to purchase Mirages, ostensibly for the Libyan air force but in fact for Egypt. In January 1970, Libya and France signed an agreement to purchase 110 planes, half of which were 5Ds headed for Egypt. Delivery to Libya began in 1971, around the time that Sadat gave Marwan the Libyan brief. Naturally, all the information related to the deal, delivery via Libya, and integration of the planes into the Egyptian air force in July 1971—every detail was fully known to Israel. During the Yom Kippur War, Egypt's 69th Squadron would deploy forty-two Mirage 5s of different types out of its Tanta base. The number of Egyptian pilots trained to operate them was smaller—about twenty-five. These planes undertook the most important of Egypt's aerial missions in the first days of the war. Thanks to Marwan, Israeli intelligence knew everything there was to know about the squadron, who was commanding it, the names of its pilots, and the locations of its secret hangars.

The arrival of these aircraft did not change the persistent conception held by MI chief Zeira and his key staff. The 3,800-pound payload of each Mirage was less than a quarter of the 18,000-pound bomb payload of the hundred Phantoms that were in the service of the Israeli Air Force when the war began. Even if used to strike Israel's well-protected air bases, they could cause no serious
damage to the sheltered aircraft. Moreover, from the information that Marwan delivered it was clear that the Egyptians thought so, too. While they viewed the Mirage 5s as their best attack aircraft, they did not regard them as an effective means to neutralize Israel's air superiority.

SINCE THE YOM KIPPUR WAR
, a great deal of information has been released, mostly in the form of official memoirs and documentary research, about the long chain of events that led up to the war: the Egyptian perspective about what they needed in order to attack, the weaponry they received that made it possible, and the decisions surrounding the date of attack. From all of this it emerges, without a shadow of doubt, that the intelligence that Ashraf Marwan gave the Israelis proved consistently accurate, reflecting precisely what was happening in Egypt.

In examining the sources of Israel's massive intelligence failure in the days preceding the Yom Kippur War, one thing is clear: It resulted not from a lack of accurate information, but from the refusal of Military Intelligence to abandon the
kontzeptzia
even after it had clearly, irrefutably, been obviated by events. Thanks to Marwan, the Israelis understood precisely how the Egyptians saw both the necessity of war and the conditions necessary to launch it, through October 1972. But then, at around that time, Sadat changed his mind, deciding he would go to war without waiting for the weapons he would need to win. Ashraf Marwan, as we will see, reported this faithfully to Israel. MI, however, failed to adjust its assessments accordingly. This, and only this, led to Israel's failure to be ready when war struck.

MARWAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO
Israeli intelligence, however, was not limited to the creation, and eventual dissolution, of the
kontzeptzia
. Marwan's intelligence also proved incredibly accurate in everything
surrounding Egypt's specific attack plans. Here, too, MI benefited from a wealth of sources; Marwan's information, however, both raised the level of confidence in Israel's assessments and added rich, crucial details.

Since 1968, when the Egyptian military began its Tahrir exercises simulating the recapture of the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian moves had been followed closely by MI, especially through the vast surveillance apparatus of Unit 848, its Signal Intelligence (Sigint) unit.

The report issued by MI-Research after one exercise in early 1969 concluded, “In its exercise, Egypt addressed the conquest of the western Sinai and the creation of a defensive line to the east of the [Mitla and Gidi] passes within four to five days, at a strength of five infantry divisions, one to two mechanized divisions, and two armored divisions.”
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In the summer of 1971, Marwan gave Col. Meir Meir the details of a plan called Granite, which gave MI a more detailed and reliable picture of how the war would look from the Egyptian side. Another plan that Marwan gave them in early 1972, similar to the earlier plans, allowed MI-Research to issue a special forty-page intelligence survey on April 16, which also included maps detailing the Egyptian assault. The first phase of the war, which was supposed to take no more than twenty-four hours, was built on five infantry divisions crossing the canal at five different points, securing the crossing points and their immediate areas, and then moving two armored divisions, the 4th and the 21st, across to the eastern bank and capturing land up to the IDF fortifications. This could be done either in daylight or at night. Because of the IAF's limited capabilities at night, MI's best guess was that the Egyptians would attempt it under cover of darkness. To isolate the canal zone from the rest of Sinai, the Egyptians would airdrop, via helicopters, between seven and ten commando battalions at the eastern openings of the Mitla and Gidi Passes. A marine brigade, comprising one tank and two infantry battalions, would
land at Rumani Beach, and another brigade-size infantry force was to rendezvous with it by the eastern reef passage, with the aim of blocking the northern Sinai road to Israeli reinforcements. The Egyptian plan also included amphibious crossings at Lake Timsah and the Great Bitter Lake, along the line of the canal. All of these were to take place on the first day of battle.

On the second day, the armored divisions would advance to a depth of about eight miles into Sinai; on the third day they would take the passes, effectively conquering that portion of the Sinai along a parallel up until their eastern entrance. In the fourth and final phase, the Egyptian armies would complete their conquest of Sinai up to the Israeli border.
¹⁹

THE EXCEPTIONAL PRECISION
of the documents that Marwan delivered, combined with the impressive breadth of Egyptian activity that it covered, made him into what Mossad director Zvi Zamir called “the greatest source we have ever had.”
²⁰
Marwan, he said, “was a first-class source, because he could cover a whole area that was very hard to get to, and the level of reliability of what he said was high. There were others who gave us information here and there, which confirmed or complemented things that he said. But he knew it inside out. He could describe what things had been like in the past, how things developed. From this perspective he was unique.”
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Other people who knew about Marwan's contribution confirm Zamir's impressions. Brig. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilboa, who headed up MI-Research during the 1980s, carefully went over the materials Marwan had provided and concluded that there had never been a spy in Israel's history who had made Egypt transparent the way he did.
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Brig. Gen. (res.) Aharon Levran, who was deputy commander of MI-Research before the Yom Kippur War, concluded that the material Marwan had given Israel was “high-quality in
formation of the sort that intelligence agencies wish for all their lives, and only get to see once in many generations.”
²³
He called Marwan “the kind of source that lands on the intelligence community's doorstep once in a generation. Worth his weight in gold.”
²⁴

Intelligence officials were not alone in applauding Marwan. Years after the war, Moshe Dayan had the following to say:

            
The Concept was not the invention of some mad scientist at MI, or the MI chief or the defense minister. It came together for us on the basis of very concrete intelligence information that we thought was the best that could possibly be achieved. . . . I can say with absolute confidence that any intelligence agency in the world, any defense minister or army chief of staff, who received this material and knew how it was attained, would have come to the same conclusion.
²⁵

From all the people who came into contact with the materials that Marwan provided, there were only two who—after the fact—called into question his commitment to helping Israel. One was the head of MI-Research Branch 6 (Egypt) who replaced Meir Meir beginning in the summer of 1972, Col. Yonah Bandman. In his view, one serious problem with Marwan was the fact that he kept warning that Sadat was about to launch a war, and then it didn't happen. Bandman's take was that Marwan had been crying wolf, and that it was therefore reasonable to ignore his warnings leading up to the Yom Kippur War. Moreover, Marwan failed to give good answers to the questions Bandman had given Dubi to ask, questions that tried to get to the bottom of Sadat's behavior patterns. Instead, the answers he kept getting were technical, dealing with issues connected to Egypt's war plans. And though he never went as far as calling Marwan a double agent, Bandman clearly believed, in hindsight, that the information he passed along
was unreliable and that “for someone in his place in the hierarchy, there were certain things he should have known” that Marwan did not tell the Israelis.
²⁶

The other person who seriously doubted Marwan was Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, chief of Military Intelligence during the war. Zeira became far more extreme in his views than Bandman, arguing that Marwan was a double agent who served as the central pillar in Egyptian attempts to divert Israel's attention before the war. In order to support this claim, Zeira distinguishes between the materials Marwan delivered and his oral assessments:

            
Some of his “information” was spectacular, including verified data that was the dream of any intelligence agency in the world. . . . The “information” provided was, for the most part, copies of documents and minutes of meetings at the highest levels. As opposed to this, the warnings regarding the anticipated timing of the war usually came in the form of reporting, partly in writing and partly orally, but all of them came
without supporting documentation
. By October 1973, all of them had been revealed to be
inaccurate
.
²⁷
[emphasis in the original]

Although he never says it explicitly in his book, Zeira presents an array of arguments to show that Marwan was the point man in an elaborate con game that Sadat was playing on Israel leading up to the war. In Zeira's view, Marwan gave false alarms of war in late 1972 and April 1973 in order to lull the Israelis into dropping their guard—and then deliberately failed to raise the alarm in the months that preceded October 1973. When he finally did give a warning, it was vague and so late in the game that, in the Egyptians' view, it was already too late for the IDF to mobilize.
²⁸
In a televised interview promoting a revised edition of his book, Zeira
hesitated to put things in a cut-and-dried manner. True, he said, he had no proof. But he nonetheless believed that Ashraf Marwan duped Israel “at the behest of Sadat, and I think they worked it out together.”
²⁹