The Angel (32 page)

Only one conclusion makes any sense. His role as a spy fulfilled some need, and he was reluctant to give it up. Perhaps it was the excitement and risk inherent in espionage. Once he had tasted it, going back to “normal” life was no longer an option. Somewhere in the recesses of his soul, he had a Hollywood-inspired passion for the life of a spy. At a certain stage he came to believe that if he stopped working for Israel, the Mossad would try to kill him. Exactly why he believed this is far from clear. But he continued to fear their vengeance many years later. Finally, part of the motivation may have had to do with a very special relationship he developed with Dubi, whom he still knew only as “Alex.” Even someone as crafty and deceitful as Marwan needed somebody, somewhere, in whom he could confide, someone steadfast. Dubi was the only person on earth who could provide this, and their
meetings became a kind of confessional for Marwan. Everybody, even the darkest criminals, needs a confessional. That is why he refused, repeatedly, the Mossad's efforts to replace Dubi with a different handler or even to add a second one.

The only occasion when Zamir's successor agreed to meet with Marwan was in order to convince him to agree to a second handler. Hofi explained that the new handler would stand in for “Alex” only when the latter was ill or unavailable for personal reasons. But Marwan was adamant that any effort to add anyone else to his operation would result in the Israelis' never seeing him again. Hofi capitulated, and Dubi continued to be Marwan's sole handler for years to come.

EVEN AFTER MARWAN
left public life, he never left the public eye. Sensing that he no longer had the president's backing, the Egyptian press went after him like sharks after blood, publishing endless reports, true or false, of his corrupt real estate dealings or wild exaggerations about his wealth. They reached their peak in 1981, when the businessman Osman Ahmed Osman published his memoir in Egypt. He was close with Sadat, even marrying off his eldest son to Sadat's daughter. In the book, Osman attacked Nasser's policies but also claimed that Ashraf Marwan and his wife, Mona, accumulated 400 million Egyptian pounds by illicitly taking advantage of their status as family members of the revered leader. Painting himself as defender of the Nasser family, Marwan flatly denied Osman's accusations. “If only God were to grant me a few hundred years to live,” he added, “could I struggle to earn one percent of that amount.” Marwan's efforts to debunk Osman's claims, as well as those that Musa Sabri published in
Akhbar al-Youm
, were futile. A rare and detailed interview conducted with Marwan for the paper was never run, despite Marwan's repeated pleas for Sabri to publish it.
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At the same time, and in spite of everything, Marwan contin
ued carrying on an informal relationship with Anwar and Jehan Sadat. He was seen more than once in their home, updating the president about various meetings he had held in the Arab world. On other occasions he accompanied Sadat on trips abroad. Part of this was due to the fact that Sadat clearly had a soft spot for Mona; according to some, he saw in himself a kind of father figure for her, perhaps because of the estrangement between her and the rest of Nasser's family. Ashraf certainly gained from the continued connection, if for no other reason than that it showed the world that he had not fully lost his influence. Dismayed that the connection between Sadat and Marwan had not been fully severed, Marwan's rivals feared that he might, one day, return to the political stage. And so they saw to it that articles attacking Marwan continued to appear in the press.
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Whether or not their fears were legitimate, the possibility of Marwan's return evaporated completely on October 6, 1981, when Sadat was gunned down during a military parade marking the eighth anniversary of the October War. Sadat, who had protected Marwan, promoted him, needed him, and never fully lost faith in him, was gone. He was replaced by Hosni Mubarak, neither rival nor friend. For Ashraf Marwan, a man whose thirst for wealth, honor, and success could never be fully slaked, Cairo had little to offer. He continued to keep a home there and spent quite a bit of time there, usually with his family. He did not neglect his business affairs in Egypt, especially in real estate. But Sadat's passing was, for him, a signal to begin again, to start a new chapter in his story. Soon after Mubarak was sworn in, Ashraf Marwan moved to London, which became the center of his new life.

E
ngland was not a foreign country for Ashraf Marwan when he moved there in 1981. London had been something of a second home for him ever since he first visited to pursue his master's degree in the late 1960s. For him it was a place of refuge, a vacation hub, and the base of operations for a number of his businesses. Of course, it was also the center of his life as a spy.

Yet despite his love for London, he did not immediately bring his family along. Mona and the children, now on the brink of adolescence, moved into a posh Paris flat that Marwan bought them on Avenue Foch, in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world, which counted the Rothschild and Onassis families among its residents. For the first few years, Marwan saw his family mainly on weekends.

The ensuing quarter century of Marwan's life was dedicated to building his wealth. Like other aspects of his life, this, too, remains shrouded in mystery and conflicting accounts. Even people closely familiar with the London business scene have a hard time explaining how Marwan made his money and how much he made. Part of it has to do with the character of the man and his dealings. But
it also has to do with the culture of “the City,” as the financial core of London is known, a culture that until the 1980s handled itself according to a strict code based on collegiality, discretion, restraint, and tradition—in contrast to the American business world with its excessive legalism and emphasis on hardball competition, rapid growth, and jostling for control at almost any price. The London business culture was, at its heart, aristocratic, in many ways reminiscent of cricket, a game where ineffables were no less important than rules. This meant, however, that until recently there was very little of what is today called “transparency.” Little was overseen by government, little known about what went down, because it was understood that the London business scene would keep its own tabs through its set of unwritten rules no less strict than the law itself.

Marwan was not part of this gentlemen's club. Even if he owned an apartment in the most luxurious part of town, even if he was driven around in a stretch limousine, he remained an outsider in the City. He had never attended the right boarding schools, but he knew full well how closed a world it was, with its clear share of racism as well. And so, when he did make his connections in the City, it was mainly with other outsiders like himself—people who, by virtue of being outcasts, felt no need to follow the unspoken rules of the game. This fact, while offering them both the limitations and the opportunities that others lacked, also makes it all the harder to reconstruct their moves decades later.

Marwan's first main link to the London business world was established before he left Egypt. In 1979 he purchased 40 percent of a small air-shipping company called Tradewinds. Founded in 1969, the company was sold in 1978 to one of the biggest concerns in Britain at the time, the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company, or Lonrho. The chairman of Lonrho was the British tycoon Roland “Tiny” Rowland—to whom Marwan had been
introduced back in 1971 by his close friends Abdullah al-Sabah and his wife, Souad. Another connection was Subhi Rushdie, the chairman of the Allied Arab Bank. The connection with Rowland became the core of his London business operations until Rowland's death in 1998.

Rowland and Marwan first met in 1970, when the former came to Cairo to inquire about Egyptian cotton. Introduced to Marwan by Sadat, Rowland was taken by the young Egyptian's connections throughout the Arab world, and the sense that Marwan knew how to get him anything he needed to advance his interests. The two quickly hit it off, based in part on their similar approaches to business reflecting their similar life stories. Both shared a limitless thirst for money and power, an extreme egocentrism, and a need for honor and the taking of risk. They both knew how to identify and take advantage of the weaknesses of others. They were both born outside of the UK (Rowland in a detention camp in India where his parents, Dutch-German nationals, were held by the British during World War I), and both were outsiders to the City who flouted its rules. Rowland, for example, offered to Sir Angus Ogilvy, who had previously owned Lonrho and was married to the queen's first cousin, that he join the company's board of directors. They agreed that certain remunerations that Ogilvy received would be transferred to a Swiss bank account, routed via Canada, so that Ogilvy could avoid paying taxes. From Rowland's standpoint, the whole point of this illegal transaction was to make sure that Ogilvy faithfully represented his interests on the board. But when it came to light that the company had violated British-imposed sanctions on the white regime of Rhodesia, the entire board, including Ogilvy, voted against Rowland. In response, Rowland leaked Ogilvy's tax evasion to the press—a shocking violation of the accepted code of conduct in the City, causing embarrassment not only to Ogilvy but to the royal family, which in turn made Rowland himself into
a pariah among the British aristocrats.
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Indeed, neither Rowland nor Marwan was a big fan of the rule of law. They had no problem either giving or taking bribes, making threats, or conducting business in flagrant violation of the law. So when Marwan moved to London after finding himself an outcast in Cairo, the two found each other to be convenient company.

It was at a luncheon meeting the two shared at the Ritz on May 10, 1983, that Marwan involved himself in what would eventually become the most controversial business scandal in the City's modern history. The affair centered around Rowland's effort to commandeer the House of Fraser, and would likely have been much less of a scandal if not for the fact that the House of Fraser was the parent company for the Harrods department store, which was the favorite shopping venue for the British elites—including the royals.

Tiny Rowland first tried taking over the House of Fraser in 1977. He took advantage of the difficult financial straits of its owner and chairman, Hugh Fraser, which had resulted from the latter's gambling debts, in order to buy via a number of channels 29.9 percent of the company. At that point the chain included sixty-two stores, most of which were in a bad way. After Lonrho took a few more steps that indicated its intention to take over the company, the British authorities got involved, specifically the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which decided to open an inquiry as to whether such a bid would put the public interests at risk. In March 1981, the commission concluded that while a merger between the two companies did not inherently pose such a risk, a takeover of Fraser by Lonrho would.
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Not long passed, however, before Rowland successfully engineered the ouster of Hugh Fraser from the position of chairman and resumed his takeover bid. This time he simultaneously made an offer to purchase the
Observer
. The Thatcher government ap
proved the purchase of the newspaper but not a takeover of Fraser, and because they were by now used to Rowland's antics, the trade minister ruled that Lonrho may not purchase any further shares in the House of Fraser. While the formal reason given for this was that Lonrho already owned a textile factory and that its purchase of the House of Fraser might unfairly discriminate against other manufacturers, everyone knew that the real reason had more to do with the reluctance of the British elites to allow the country's greatest chain store, patronized by princes, to fall into the hands of someone as disreputable as Tiny Rowland. His support for the regime in Rhodesia, coupled with extensive questionable dealings across Africa and the damage he had caused the royal family in the Ogilvy affair, created a sense that was summed up by Prime Minister Edward Heath, several years earlier, when he called Rowland and Lonrho “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.”

Rowland was far from deterred. Though he agreed not to buy any more shares of Fraser, even making a public announcement to that effect in September 1982, it was but a diversion. His next move was to find more clever use of his nearly 30 percent stake to convince shareholders to sell off Harrods, enabling him to buy control of the rest of the company. When efforts to persuade the other shareholders failed, he decided he would do everything he could to gain hold of a majority stake before the next meeting of the board of directors—in clear violation of the Trade Ministry's ruling. To make this happen, he needed the help of Ashraf Marwan.

A few days after their lunch at the Ritz, Marwan bought two million shares of the House of Fraser, and then another 1.2 million. Rowland helped Marwan fund the purchase. All told, by mid-June 1983, Marwan held about 2 percent of the company. At the same time, other people connected with Rowland made similar purchases. By the time of the board meeting, Rowland had enough shares under his belt to pass a vote in favor of selling off
the department stores. And yet, it was thwarted by various technical bylaws that opponents of the move had managed to pass.

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.”
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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.