The Phone Call That Saved Israel
Matti Friedman/The Wall Street Journal/August 07/16
Nasser’s son-in-law was Israel’s most crucial spy in the leadup to war in 1973.
In the late afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 4, 1973, a phone rang in London. On the line was a tense man who wanted to speak to “Alex” about “a lot of chemicals.” Alex’s name wasn’t Alex and there were no chemicals. What the caller was saying, in an agreed-upon code, was that a cataclysmic war was about to break out in the Middle East. By the end of the weekend thousands would be dead.
The man on the phone, Ashraf Marwan, was an official at the pinnacle of the Egyptian regime, an aide to President Anwar Sadat and the son-in-law of the late, revered leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was also a spy for Israel—one whose appearance was the kind of thing “that happens only once in a thousand years,” according to one of the Israeli consumers of his secret reports. The murky man in question, the nature of the game he was playing and the series of events that culminated with his fateful phone call on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, are the subjects of Uri Bar-Joseph’s eye-opening book, “The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel.”
Mr. Bar-Joseph, a professor of political science at Haifa University and an intelligence expert, picks up the trail of the elegant and ambitious young Marwan in the Nasserist Cairo of the 1960s, where he embarked on a promising marriage to Nasser’s daughter, Mona. From there we follow him to swinging London, where he was looking for money, excitement and possibly revenge against his humiliations by his powerful father-in-law, who seems to have considered Marwan a careless bon vivant unworthy of his daughter.
In the summer of 1970, he walked into a phone booth, dialed the Israeli embassy and offered his services. Years later, in 2007, his unusual life ended in a mysterious plunge from a London balcony. In between Marwan became, as Mr. Bar-Joseph writes, “one of the most important spies the world has seen in the last half century.” His handlers called him “the Angel.”
The narrative’s chronological hinge is the 1973 phone call and what happened two days later, on Oct. 6, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on two fronts on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Israel’s unpreparedness for that war was the country’s greatest intelligence failure, one that contributed to the deaths of more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers and destroyed the careers of many leaders, including the army chief of staff and Prime Minister Golda Meir.
In the years leading up to the war, Marwan had access to all the right information about Egypt’s preparations for battle and seems to have given most of it to his Mossad handler in exchange for American dollars. The material included precise battle plans (a 38-minute opening bombardment of the Israeli forts along the Suez Canal; five infantry divisions crossing the canal at five points along its length), as well as more general strategic insights. The most important of these was that Egypt wouldn’t risk a war before receiving better attack aircraft and missiles from the Soviets—a key condition that came to shape Israel’s calculus in the early 1970s. This idea, which became known as the “Concept,” convinced Israeli intelligence officers that no matter what other warnings they received, until Egypt obtained the new weaponry there was nothing to worry about. Marwan’s contribution to this idea was “decisive,” Mr. Bar-Joseph writes.
The Egyptians subsequently altered their plans and jettisoned that condition. But when Marwan reported the changes in late 1972, he was ignored, according to Mr. Bar-Joseph. Israeli intelligence instead clung to its outdated understanding of the enemy’s intentions, insisting the chances of war were “low” almost until the first troops swarmed across the canal.
What was Marwan’s direct impact on the outcome of the fighting? Mr. Bar-Joseph’s book makes a strong case that without the Egyptian’s phone call, Israel’s emergency call-up of the reserve army would have been delayed by at least four hours. That would have given the Syrians time to seize a key junction in the Golan Heights and decide the battle on the northern front in their favor. As it happened, rag-tag reservists in barely functional tanks arrived just in time to save the junction and force a Syrian retreat. “In retrospect, Ashraf Marwan was single-handedly responsible for enabling Israel to prevent the Syrian conquest of the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War,” Mr. Bar-Joseph writes. “Israel would have sustained not only far more casualties than it did, but also a greater loss of territory by the time a cease-fire was called.” That’s significant, even if it doesn’t quite make the Angel the “spy who saved Israel,” as the book’s subtitle has it.
“The Angel” is a lucid and compelling glimpse into the world of espionage and the functioning—or malfunctioning—of leaders at a perilous moment. Spy stories are great stories. But like all such stories, this one left me questioning how much any of this stuff really matters. Are spies really the covert movers of major events, as spies and their biographers tend to think? Or perhaps the British general W.H.H. Waters was on to something when he observed after World War II: “My view always was—and experience has only tended to confirm it—that the results of a secret service are usually negligible.”
Some intelligence is useful but most is inaccurate, irrelevant or misleading on purpose, and figuring out which is which is often possible only when it’s too late. Much of Marwan’s information was good, but at least some of it wasn’t. It’s true that he warned of war in October 1973, but he also warned of war a few times before, and when nothing happened it “lulled Israeli leaders and the IDF into a kind of complacency,” as the author puts it.
The “Concept” that the agent helped create about Egyptian intentions was accurate until it wasn’t, with disastrous consequences. Israel would probably have been better off not knowing about it in the first place. There remain some in Israel and Egypt willing to swear that the Angel was actually a double agent who worked for Egypt all along, and though the author convincingly disagrees, the charge does illustrate how muddy these waters really are.
Even without Marwan, we learn, Israel had “plenty of crucial indicators that Egypt and Syria were about to attack.” Aerial photos had been showing a dramatic enemy buildup for weeks, and intercepted conversations in Russian revealed that Soviet military advisers and their families were being flown out of Egypt in a hurry. If the intelligence men hadn’t believed they had secret insight into the minds of Egypt’s leaders, might they have been more willing to trust what their eyes and ears were telling them?
One wonders if Israel’s belief in angels ultimately helped anyone see more clearly in 1973. It’s quite possible that wiser decisions would have been made if those suitcases of Mossad dollars had been spent on something else—or if the country had no spies at all.
—Mr. Friedman is the author of “The Aleppo Codex” and “Pumpkinflowers.”
