The Angel (6 page)

Marwan's willingness to pass along information so sensitive about Egypt's military capabilities encouraged Dubi to ask more specific questions. For years, the Mossad had worried about whether Egypt would try to develop unconventional weapons. In the early 1960s, the agency had launched a controversial campaign to stop the operations of German scientists working with the Egyptians to develop biological and chemical weapons. In the mid-1960s, Egyptian forces used these chemical weapons in the civil war in Yemen. For Israelis, fresh memories of German gas chambers made the issue of chemical weapons being used against civilians especially sensitive. Thus, information about Egyptian chemical weapons development continued to be a high priority for the Mossad. They knew Marwan had a degree in chemistry and had served in the army as a chemist, and they wanted to know anything he could tell them about it. So Dubi asked. Specifically, he asked about activities taking place at Abu Za'abel, northeast of Cairo, an area where civilian and military chemical facilities stood side by side.

Marwan was surprised by the line of questioning. He failed to understand why the Israelis were so worried about this particular field. Though he had never worked at Abu Za'abel, he was able to give remarkably accurate information about the work being
done there. Dubi continued writing everything down. When he was done, Marwan handed him a manila envelope containing one final document. Dubi placed it in his briefcase without opening it. Marwan nodded his approval. To this day, no one recalls, or is willing to divulge, what exactly was in the envelope.

During the entire meeting, Marwan did not once raise the issue of payment. In the way of gentlemen, he and Dubi left such unpleasantries for another time. Yet clearly the Egyptian was not working for the Mossad on a volunteer basis. From his end, Marwan wanted to demonstrate the value of his contribution before raising the matter of a fee. Indeed, it was wise on Dubi's part not to risk spoiling the atmosphere. The two had quickly developed a sense of mutual trust. Dubi recognized Marwan's charisma, his good nature, his sense of humor. Marwan found in Dubi a cultured conversationalist, serious and believable. It is well known that the early relationship between a handler and his agent can have a huge impact on the source's long-term ability to contribute. In this sense, the Mossad's first encounter with the son-in-law of the former president of Egypt was a stellar success.

At the end of the meeting, Dubi reconfirmed that Marwan had the proper contact information to stay in touch by phone or mail. Marwan estimated that within a few weeks he would be back in London and promised to make contact when he arrived. He asked that at the next meeting, only “Alex” would attend. Dubi promised.

Marwan left the room first, took the elevator down to the lobby, and walked out of the hotel. Mossad agents watched as he hailed a cab and rode off. Dubi made sure he had all the materials in his case and followed a few minutes later. He took a taxi as well, giving the driver an address near, but not exactly at, the Israeli embassy.

When he reached his office, he found Shmuel Goren waiting for him. When Rehaviah Vardi and the Mossad bureau chief joined them, they were already plowing through the pages Marwan had
given Dubi. Goren looked up from the document he held in his hands and said, “Material like this, from a source like this—it's something that happens only once in a thousand years.”

THE REPORT MADE
its way to Tel Aviv the next day via diplomatic mail, landing on the desk of Zvi Zamir, chief of the Mossad. It described how Marwan contacted the embassy in London, the fortuitous way his message had reached the attention of senior Mossad officials heading to Heathrow, the meeting between Marwan and Dubi in the hotel, and Dubi's detailed account of the conversation. Mossad officials in London had translated into Hebrew most of the documents that Marwan had given Dubi, enclosing it in the same encoded communiqué.

By the time Zamir finished reading the report, he fully understood the potential Marwan held as an Israeli agent. By themselves, the original documents were invaluable. He called a meeting of relevant individuals, including Shmuel Goren, who was summoned from Brussels, and Rehaviah Vardi, who had returned from London.

It really did not trouble Zamir that the officers had made contact with Marwan without waiting for authorization. In 1968, when he first came to the Mossad despite lacking any background in intelligence, Vardi had been his mentor, teaching him everything he knew about working with human sources. Now Zamir had been in charge for over two years, and he saw Vardi as a man he could rely on. The situation was similar with Goren, whom Zamir had handpicked to head up operations in Western Europe. He knew them both well and had tremendous faith in their professional judgment about how best to take advantage of an enormous opportunity. Moreover, responsibility taking and improvisation had always been pillars of the agency's ethos. So the question of whether they had been authorized to initiate the meeting with Marwan didn't even
come up. The central concern in this meeting was what the next steps ought to be. The chief of the Mossad led the discussion.

ZVI ZAMIR WAS
born in 1925. Until he joined the Mossad in 1968, his entire adult life had been spent in the military. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine; by the end of the British Mandate he had spent ten months in a detention camp for illegally smuggling Jewish immigrants into Palestine across the Syrian border. During Israel's War of Independence in 1948, at the age of twenty-three, he was chosen to command the 6th Battalion of the Harel Brigade, which was tasked with keeping the route open from the coastal plain to besieged Jerusalem. After the war, he filled a number of senior positions in the newly created Israel Defense Forces, including chief of the training division and commander of the Southern Command. In 1966 he was appointed military attaché in Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries. In 1968, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol surprised him with the request that he replace Meir Amit as chief of the Mossad. The appointment came against the backdrop of Eshkol's increasing frustration with Amit, who, despite being formally under the direct command of the prime minister, had been showing an increasing loyalty to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, with whom Amit had worked closely in the IDF. Eshkol wanted a Mossad chief who was less politically invested and was referred to Zamir, who was considered more independent and politically impartial.

When Zamir started out at the Mossad, senior agency officials raised concerns that he had been brought in mainly to pave the way for the appointment of another man, Yosef Yariv, to the same position. Beginning in 1957, Yariv had been commander of the IDF's Military Intelligence unit 188, which was focused on running operatives deep in enemy territory. In 1963, when Meir Amit,
who served as the MI chief, was appointed to simultaneously head up the Mossad, MI's unit 188 was shifted into the Mossad, and Yariv went with it. When Zamir reached the Mossad in 1968, Yariv was the head of the Caesarea branch, the Mossad's main operations division that included both unit 188 and another unit headed by the future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Yariv saw himself as a candidate to head up the entire agency; his friendship with IDF chief of staff Chaim Bar-Lev and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon meant that he had a serious shot at it. But other senior Mossad officials did not think he was right for the job and came to believe that Zamir, an IDF major general and a friend of Bar-Lev and Allon, had been brought in in order to calm the opposition to Yariv and make it easier for him to become a Mossad chief later. Some of them, including Rehaviah Vardi, made it clear that they would leave the Mossad if that happened.

Zamir moved quickly to dispel the suspicions. As opposed to his predecessors, he did not appoint a deputy, a decision that reflected less a political calculus than his understanding of the job. The main purpose of a deputy, he felt, was to take over if something happened to the director. But as he explained to anyone who asked, the head of the Mossad was not at the front lines and therefore not at serious risk of assassination. So there was no need for a deputy who could complicate his own job by becoming a buffer between the director and his operational units.

Zamir spent much of his first year on the job systematically studying the central areas of the Mossad's activity. He spent hours going over the dossier of every Mossad operative, held ongoing consultations with Vardi and the heads of Tzomet branches, learned all about how sources were valued, recruited, and handled, their potential maximized, and more. He also went over the files of operatives who had stopped working with the agency and, in at least one case, convinced the people in Tzomet to reengage an agent, resulting in some very
high-value intelligence for Israel. Along the way, Zamir learned just how fragile the relationship between a handler and his operative could be, and how crucial was the handler's ability to recognize and meet the agent's psychological needs in determining the fate of their relationship. Money was, of course, a central motive for most of the agents who worked for the Mossad, but it was far from being the only one.

Zamir also ordered a shift in the Mossad's intelligence-gathering priorities. He wanted the agency to work harder on supporting the operational needs of the IDF. When he was IDF Southern Commander in the early 1960s, he felt that the Mossad had offered him no support whatsoever. Now with the War of Attrition heating up, the agency would dedicate its best efforts to helping the IDF, especially in getting reliable advance warning of attacks and gathering whatever intelligence would help the IDF take timely defensive action. In 1968, when Zamir first took the post, the question of a sneak attack was less urgent because the Arab armies, especially Egypt's, were still licking their wounds from the Six-Day War. The question became much more acute after the War of Attrition ended in 1970 and Sadat started publicly threatening to restart hostilities. MI estimated that this time the Egyptians wouldn't make do with a static war of attrition but would instead try to cross the Suez Canal and advance into Sinai.

A second major change in priorities concerned intelligence gathering from technological sources (Signal Intelligence, or Sigint) rather than just human ones (Human Intelligence, or Humint). From its inception, the Mossad had been created solely as a web of human intelligence sources. Under the direction of Meir Amit, the agency began employing various forms of technological surveillance, such as wiretapping and bugging. Now Zamir decided to take the emphasis on Sigint much further, including the creation of a division called Keshet (“Bow”). Even though this was, in es
sence, encroaching on areas that until now had been handled exclusively by MI, the close friendship between Zamir, IDF chief of staff Chaim Bar-Lev, and MI chief Aharon Yariv kept the relations among the intelligence branches on a healthy footing.

Before Zamir's arrival, successive Mossad chiefs had suffered from complicated relationships with Israel's prime ministers. Isser Harel was one of David Ben-Gurion's greatest admirers but he found himself clashing with Ben-Gurion and ultimately resigning his post in the wake of the affair of the German scientists in Egypt in 1963. In the years that followed, relations between Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Mossad chief Meir Amit were tense as well. The Mossad's problematic involvement, apparently without Eshkol's knowledge, in the kidnapping and killing of the leader of the opposition in Morocco, Mehdi Ben Barka, in 1965 made things even more difficult. With the establishment of Ben-Gurion's Rafi Party as Eshkol's greatest political rival, and the prime minister's concern that the Mossad chief was in cahoots with Ben-Gurion, Amit had little choice but to step aside.

As opposed to his predecessors, Zamir lacked any serious political entanglements. As a former Palmach officer, he did keep close ties to his brothers-in-arms from pre-statehood days, but both in his IDF career and in his position as Mossad chief, he cut himself off from party politics. Eshkol had met him a few times in a work context but could not have known from these alone that Zamir would be an especially comfortable Mossad chief for him. He had, however, been highly impressed by a report Zamir had written when he was the IDF's military attaché in Great Britain, in which he recommended cutting back on staff at the office there. When Eshkol, who was also serving as defense minister, saw the report, he held it up as an example of how a military attaché is supposed to function.

But Zamir scarcely had a chance to work with Eshkol, who
died in February 1969. His more serious relationship was with Eshkol's successor, Golda Meir. Meir scarcely knew Zamir before taking office, but he quickly won her confidence and effectively became her mentor in intelligence affairs. “It's very easy to work with Zvika [Zamir],” she once quipped, “as long as you're willing to do what he wants.”
³
At the same time, in broader security issues she relied almost exclusively on the judgment of her defense minister, Moshe Dayan.

This was not a problem, so long as Dayan was getting his intelligence assessments from MI chief Aharon Yariv, with whom Zamir worked well. But in October 1972, Yariv was replaced by Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, and the differences between the intelligence estimates of the two agencies grew. Dayan tended to rely on Zeira's assessments, and Golda Meir wasn't willing to challenge him on it. Zamir grew increasingly frustrated. It was his belief, based on a variety of sources of whom Ashraf Marwan was the most important, that Egypt was headed for war. Military Intelligence, and especially Zeira himself, saw things very differently. But since Dayan relied heavily on Zeira, and Golda Meir relied heavily on Dayan, Zamir was boxed out, and knew it.

Later on we will see just how devastating such a constellation was for Israel as a whole. For now, suffice it to say that by the end of 1970, Zvi Zamir had gained enough experience to lead the Mossad's discussions about whether or not to pursue the services of Ashraf Marwan.