The Angel (2 page)

J
uly is a hot month in Cairo, and July 1, 2007, was no exception. The narrow streets were crowded with millions of sweaty pedestrians, the crowds swelling with children on their summer vacation. The Khan al-Khalili bazaar was flooded with housewives who hurried to make their daily shopping and with tourists who came to watch the magic of the famous oriental market. And Cairo's eighty thousand taxi drivers honked and honked as they struggled to cut a path through the city's congested streets.

Very little of this mess penetrated the Mosque of Omar bin Abdul Aziz in the city's modern suburb of Heliopolis. The hundreds of mourners attending a funeral being held in the mosque wore unusually formal suits and ties or military uniforms. They were the elite of Egypt's political, security, and business establishments. And they all had come to pay their last respects to a man who was one of them—a family member, friend, colleague, and business partner for many years: Dr. Ashraf Marwan.

Marwan died four days earlier, when he mysteriously fell from the balcony of his fifth-floor luxury apartment not far from Piccadilly Circus in London. In 1966 he married President Gamal Abdel Nasser's daughter Mona. Joining the presidential family paved his
way to the top echelon of Egyptian politics: first as an official in Nasser's presidential office; and later, after Nasser's death, as a close adviser to President Anwar el-Sadat. After he left public service he used his contacts in the Arab world in order to build a shady business career and had been living in London since 1981.

Marwan's body arrived in Cairo a day earlier. Dr. Zakaria Azmi, the head of the office of President Hosni Mubarak, and Ahmed Shafik, the minister of civil aviation, waited at the airport for the coffin. Now, at the mosque, Gamal (“Jimmy”) Mubarak, the president's son and heir apparent, was comforting Marwan's widow and her two sons. This was not merely an official gesture but a personal one as well: Gamal was a close friend of Ashraf Marwan's son, and the two frequently visited each other's homes. The Marwans attended Gamal Mubarak's spectacular wedding at Sharm el-Sheik at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula that had taken place less than two months earlier.

President Mubarak himself was participating in an African summit in Accra, Ghana, and could not attend the funeral. But he released an official statement describing Marwan as “a true patriot of his country.” Mubarak added that he was personally aware of the great service that the departed had rendered for his country. General Omar Suleiman, the strongman of Egypt's intelligence and military establishment, who attended the funeral, provided the official authorization to the presidential declaration of Marwan's unquestionable patriotism.

The legislative branch was represented by the Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament and the head of the upper house. Senior generals of the armed forces stood next to business tycoons, and academicians including the president of Cairo University were seen talking with senior journalists such as the head of
Al-Ahram
, Egypt's leading daily.

Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, the former grand mufti of
Egypt who in 1996 was nominated by Mubarak to be the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, the oldest institute of its kind in the Muslim world, led the religious ceremonies. Close by were Marwan's family members: The widow, Mona, was dressed in a dark, elegant dress, her head covered by a veil; the firstborn son, Gamal—who like many members of his generation was given Nasser's first name—stood next to her, and next to him stood her younger son, Hani. Hani was married to the daughter of Amr Moussa, Egypt's former minister of foreign affairs and, in 2007, the secretary of the Arab League. Moussa himself was not seen at the ceremony.

Despite a well-known animosity between Mona and the rest of Nasser's family, her brothers and sister came to pay their last respects. None of Anwar Sadat's family was present, however. This was quite a surprise, as some of Cairo's journalists noted, since prior to his assassination in October 1981, Sadat and his wife, Jehan, were known to be close friends of Ashraf and Mona Marwan.

Relatively speaking, however, the absence of Jehan Sadat and her daughters from the funeral was inconsequential. As some of the mourners surely sensed, the honor paid to their former colleague was no more than a facade covering up a very painful truth: that despite all the official recognition, the man they were burying was in fact no Egyptian patriot at all. He was, rather, the worst traitor in their nation's history.

SINCE THE EARLY
1990s, it had been known that the Israeli Mossad had “a miraculous source” at the heart of Egypt's strategic nervous system in the years that led up to the 1973 October war—the most intensive war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some people—such as Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, chief of Israel's Military Intelligence who published his war memoirs in 1993—claimed that the source was actually a double agent who betrayed the Mossad at the most critical moment, thus enabling the Arab armies to surprise
Israel on Yom Kippur, the most sacred Jewish holiday. But there were others, with firsthand knowledge of the events no less reliable than Zeira, who dismissed the double agent theory and firmly believed that without the source's last-minute warning, Israel would likely have lost the war.

As time passed, additional details concerning the identity of the spy and his activities had become known. In 2001 he was identified as being exceptionally close to both President Nasser and President Sadat and as the one who was allegedly nicknamed by the few Israelis who knew who he was, “the son-in-law.” Egyptian journalists actually asked Marwan if he was the famous spy. When Marwan denied the claim, Ahron Bregman, an Israeli historian at King's College in London who played a major role in exposing his identity, confirmed to an Egyptian journalist that “the miraculous Mossad source” was, indeed, Marwan.

Marwan himself kept denying the accusations. But in the wake of a court ruling in Tel Aviv on June 7, 2007, that affirmed that he was, indeed, the famous spy, Marwan began to feel the rope tightening around his neck. Three weeks later, he was dead.

At least a few who attended the funeral, such as Gen. Omar Suleiman, knew very well who gave the order to get rid of Marwan and why. After all, the violent death of Marwan saved the Egyptian leadership the embarrassment that would have been involved in putting him on trial and publicly admitting that a prominent member of the Egyptian ruling elite—a man whose wife was a daughter of the legendary Nasser, whose first son was a good friend and business partner of the likely heir of President Mubarak, and whose second son was married to the daughter of Amr Moussa—had been a Mossad spy at the height of the Egyptian-Israeli conflict.

Following the fall of the Mubarak regime in early 2011, the question of who gave the order to liquidate Marwan was answered as well. According to the Egyptian magazine
Rose al-Yusuf
, it was
none other than Mubarak himself, the man who, following Marwan's mysterious death, told reporters, “I do not doubt his loyalty.”

ON MAY 10, 2009,
CBS's
60 Minutes
investigated the rise and fall of Ashraf Marwan and the controversy surrounding his death. At the very end of the episode, titled “The Perfect Spy,” CBS's Steve Kroft summed up by posing the toughest question this way: “So in the end, who did Ashraf Marwan really betray? And who finally killed him? If the truth wasn't buried with him, it is most likely buried somewhere in a top-secret vault.”

This book unveils the truth. And in order to get to it, we have to go back to Cairo and to the year 1944, when it all began.

M
ohammed Ashraf Abu al-Wafa Marwan, known simply as Ashraf Marwan, was born on February 2, 1944, in the home of his family at 5 Al-Hakma'a Street in Cairo's Manshiyat al-Bakri district. It was then, and remains today, a middle-class neighborhood in the new section of the capital. Marwan's family came from the best Egyptian stock. On his mother's side, he was part of the Al-Fayyad clan, which owned property in the village of Sa el-Hajar in Gharbia Province, an agricultural district in the Nile delta north of Cairo. His father's family came from the village of Sohagha, in Minya Province, about 150 miles south of Cairo. The Marwan family was one of the most honorable clans in the region; many of its members continue to live there today.

It was Ashraf Marwan's grandfather, Muhammad Ahmed Marwan, who moved his branch of the family to Cairo. A graduate of Al-Azhar University, the oldest and most important school of Islamic law and theology in the Arab world, he rose to become the chief of the Sharia courts in Egypt. Ashraf Marwan's father, Abu al-Wafa Marwan, was a career officer in the Egyptian military. He started out as a junior-level officer in the army of King Farouk and worked his way up the military ladder until retiring, during the
1970s, with the rank of major general. In his final posting, he served as deputy commander of the Egyptian Republican Guard, an army division mostly responsible for internal security. Despite the fact that Ashraf Marwan and his family were in Cairo, they remained in contact with the village of their origins and would travel there for visits and family celebrations. According to villagers, it was Ashraf himself who ensured, during the 1970s, that Sohagha became the first village in the area to be connected to the electrical grid. For this, and for the warmth and support that Marwan's family gave the village over the years, they are grateful to this day.
¹

THERE WAS NOTHING
especially unusual about Marwan's upbringing. Together with his brother, Hani, and two younger sisters, Mona and Azza, he grew up in a typical middle-class home in Cairo. In July 1952, when he was eight years old, Egypt witnessed the revolution of the Free Officers Movement, which brought to power Gamal Abdel Nasser—the man who, in a few short years, would become the most revered leader in the Arab world. Though Marwan's father was a senior officer, he was in no way connected to the coup. But the family grew close to the new leadership nonetheless, because many of its leading figures came to live in their neighborhood shortly after coming to power. Nasser and his family had already lived in Manshiyat al-Bakri for a few years, and quite a few of the Free Officers now moved there as well. It quickly became known as the nerve center of political power in the new regime.

Throughout his childhood, Marwan attended schools in the same neighborhood: six years at the Manshiyat al-Bakri elementary school, three at the Alhalfaa middle school, and finally at Kubri al-Quba High School, where he majored in science. As was the norm in Egypt, schools were tuition-free, but the family had to pay for schoolbooks, as well as other expenses, such as health insurance. His high school studies were intensive: seven or eight hours per day, including seven weekly class hours of math, five of English,
four of French, and three each of chemistry, biology, and a third scientific discipline of his choosing.

Already at this stage many of Marwan's outstanding qualities became evident, especially the sparkling intellect that earned him notably high grades—grades that gained him admission into the army's elite academic reserve. That program allowed him to defer his military service and to enroll in a bachelor's degree program in chemistry at Cairo University in Giza. His studies included a special officer's training program, which he completed with the rank of second lieutenant. In 1965 he finished his degree and began serving as an officer and chemical engineer in the Egyptian military industry.

Despite his intensive course of study, Marwan found time to read prodigiously about subjects far outside his field—particularly economics, banking, and finance. People who remember him from that period describe him as tall, attractive, and friendly, someone who knew how to get the most out of life. Two close friends from his college days, Mohammed Fakhri and Essam Siam, studied with him in the academic reserves. Siam chose a military career and eventually attained the rank of major general. He also built a successful career as a soccer commentator and referee on the international level, and served for years on the soccer federations of Egypt and Africa. During their time together in the mid-1960s, the three regularly enjoyed the nightlife of Cairo; on Fridays, when there were no classes, they often traveled together to Alexandria, where they tanned on the beach, swam in the sea, and strolled the promenade.

Ashraf Marwan's best energies, however, were spent on the tennis court. He was an enthusiastic member of the Heliopolis Sporting Club, just half a mile from his parents' home. It was here, at the age of twenty-one, that he met the woman who would be both his wife and his springboard up the Egyptian hierarchy.
²

MONA ABDEL NASSER
was the president's daughter. She was born in January 1947, two years after her parents were married and a year after the birth of their first daughter, Hoda. Hoda's name, which is related to the Arabic word
hadiya
or “gift,” was given by her mother, Tahia, to express their gratitude for the baby despite the fact that they had wanted a son. After Mona, the Nassers went on to have three sons: Khaled, who would one day enter politics and be accused of conspiring to assassinate Israeli and American diplomats; Abdel Hakim; and Abdel Hamid. Mona was eighteen years old, studying at the American University in Cairo and still living with her parents, when she first met Ashraf Marwan.

Life in the Nasser household was far from simple. In the mid-1950s, when the Egyptian leader first blazed his way onto the political stage, he quickly became a kind of messianic figure for the masses who saw him as one of them and, simultaneously, as a wondrously talented leader who would take them out of their collective squalor and lead them into a new era of national pride and prosperity. His impressive early achievements—evicting the British from the Suez Canal in 1954; cutting a major arms deal with the Soviet Union in 1955; nationalizing the canal in 1956; and standing strong in the face of the “tripartite aggression” of the Israelis, French, and British during the Suez Crisis a few months after that—confirmed and entrenched his status at home and abroad. His agrarian reforms, begun shortly after he took office, as well as other initiatives suggesting a more equitable distribution of wealth, testified to his radical political worldview and gave his regime, beginning around 1960, a socialist overtone never before heard in the Arab world. Graced with a personal charm that appealed to leaders and ordinary folk alike, and guided by a pan-Arabist worldview coupled with his own impressive political and diplomatic insights that enabled him to deftly overcome both internal and external challenges, Mona's father turned himself, in just a few years, from an unknown Egyptian army officer into the
greatest Arab leader since Saladin. (The fact that the historical Saladin was not actually an Arab but a Kurd mattered little.)

WE CANNOT KNOW
just how much of Nasser's legendary status affected his family life or how it affected the way he raised his children. As opposed to other Arab rulers, especially his predecessor King Farouk, Nasser never took advantage of his status for personal gain. His family continued living in the same house they bought in Manshiyat al-Bakri immediately after he married Tahia in 1944, and Tahia continued to run the household on her husband's relatively modest government salary. The family continued driving the same little Austin that Nasser bought when he was still a teacher at the military academy. In 1954, when the car was on its last legs, they replaced it with a Ford they bought on installments.

In a society where graft was the grease that made the whole machine run, Nasser was a paragon of probity. At the same time, he clearly knew that his colleagues in the Egyptian leadership, especially his good friend Abdel Hakim Amer, had their hands in the till, and he saw their corruption as a weakness that he could take advantage of for his own ends. Nasser, moreover, felt a sincere revulsion toward the very wealthy. He once paid a visit to the al-Jezira Sporting Club, a preferred hangout for Egyptian aristocrats, but the atmosphere there was so repugnant to him that he refused ever to return. He also was unwilling to give his children any unusual privileges, and he always reminded them of their origins in the village of Beni Mur on the banks of the Nile. “I am very proud that I come from a poor villager family,” he told them, “and history will bear witness to the fact that Nasser was born to a poor family, and I promise that he will live and die as a poor man.” His elder daughter recalls that her life was “an ordinary life of an Egyptian girl of her generation.” His son Khaled insisted that he never received any special consideration in his own political career.
³

Of course, there can be no doubt that Nasser's children were acutely aware of their changed status when their father came to power. True, they continued to attend the Kawmeya school in Giza, where children of the new elites went, and to play with the same friends. But because Nasser preferred working at home and receiving foreign dignitaries there rather than at the palaces of Cairo, life in their house was anything but normal. They built additions to the house more than once, both to make room for their growing family and to make it easier for foreign leaders and their staffs to work effectively. The house soon gained a tennis court, a library, and more. On occasion, when the guests were especially interesting, Nasser's children met them as well. One photograph showing Khaled with the world boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, offers a snapshot of their life. Obviously their father's status had some impact on the children's lives, but clearly the impact was limited and varied from child to child. That emerges most clearly in the different experiences of Mona, Marwan's beloved, and her older sister, Hoda.

Hoda was, by all accounts, the more serious and intelligent of the two. Her schoolteachers, who on Nasser's orders denied her any preferential treatment, later recalled her innate smarts, dedication, and work ethic, which enabled her to finish at the top of her class. Hoda's life story took what must have appeared to many as its most natural course: a bachelor's degree in economics and political science, and then a doctorate in political science, from Cairo University. During her studies, she and her husband, Hatem Sadeq, started working at the Center for Strategic Studies established at the
Al-Ahram
newspaper in 1968. Her family ties clearly helped her get the job, but her personal achievements justified it as well. Because she was so talented, and because of the career path she chose, many saw her as a natural successor to her father—an Egyptian answer to Indira Gandhi. But Hoda, it turned out, had other
plans: She preferred the academic life, and her political potential was never realized.

Mona, on the other hand, was not as bright as her older sister, and a few people who knew her during that period remember her as a frivolous girl who, more than anything else, enjoyed a good party. She showed little interest in politics or anything requiring intellectual effort. As opposed to her sister, whose grades in high school cut her path to an academic career at the top university in Egypt, Mona's grades were mediocre. Nevertheless, after high school, she wished to join her sister and study economics and political science at Cairo University but did not have the required grades. Although the minister of higher education and the university's authorities agreed to accept Mona, Nasser rejected any favors for his daughter and sent her to study at the American University in Cairo.
⁴
He had little choice: During the 1960s, it was a private institution with a relatively poor reputation, and the students who enrolled there were those with parents of means but who lacked the grades needed to get into Cairo University. Nasser himself, so he claimed, had trouble covering Mona's tuition. Mona's habits changed little when she got to college. Friends of hers from that period recall that she spent at least as much time at the Heliopolis Sporting Club's tennis courts and in coffee shops as she did in class.

In the summer of 1965, after completing her first year of college, she met Ashraf Marwan. Within a year, they were married.
⁵

IT WAS NOT
a chance encounter. Marwan's younger sister Azza, with whom he was very close, was Mona's age and a good friend of hers, and she made the introduction after telling Mona all about her handsome and talented brother. According to the memoirs of Tahia, Mona's mother, they first met at the Heliopolis Sporting Club, which at the time was one of the most trendy meeting spots for Egyptian youths from good families.
⁶
According to Mona
herself, however, she met Marwan on the beach, apparently in Alexandria.
⁷
Wherever it was, two things are clear. First, Mona fell in love with Marwan right then and there. The girl's heart was swept away by his tall and trim figure, his fine features, and his expensive clothes.
⁸
Second, what attracted the handsome and ambitious young man was not Mona's looks, her wit, or any other personal qualities. It was, simply, her family. He was twenty-one years old, hungry and ambitious, and had set his sights on greatness. A marriage to the daughter of Nasser would put him directly on course to fulfill his destiny.
⁹
Yet while most of our sources see this as his main reason for dating Mona, there are those, however, who insist that Marwan genuinely fell in love with her.
¹⁰

Mona told her father about her new boyfriend not long after they started dating. She apparently did not hide her desire to marry and start a family with him. Nasser received by this stage many requests for the hands of his daughters from the sons of rich and noble persons. He refused them all.
¹¹
He suspected anyone who showed romantic interest in Mona, and he wanted to hear more. She told him about Marwan, about how he came from a “Saidi” family (that is, from the best Egyptian lineage), and that his father, Abu al-Wafa Marwan, was an army colonel.