Spies Against Armageddon (30 page)

It had been written by the port worker—the spy in Alexandria—violating his instructions to remain silent and communicating in such a risky way.

The message he penned was only personal regards to an invented person, but there was one sentence that seemed to be out of context. The junior officer realized that the phrase contained the agreed code for the “war indicator.” The Egyptian was reporting that his country’s fleet had just left its base in Alexandria.

The Mossad informed Aman, but senior military analysts were unimpressed. All they did was hand the report to the intelligence branch of the navy, which meant relegating it to a lower level.

“We have to prepare for war!” the head of naval intelligence said to officers of his and other branches. But this small unit was habitually ignored by the rest of the IDF, and the army’s top commanders stuck to their preconceived notion that Egypt was unable to attack Israel.

What can be said about a warning personally delivered by King Hussein, the pro-Western monarch of Israel’s eastern neighbor, Jordan?

His nation, an artificial creation by Britain in 1921, may not have been the most powerful. But, as a great survivor squeezed between the conflicts and contradictions of Israel, the Palestinians, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, Hussein had his finger on the pulse of the entire region.

The CIA considered him an agent of influence and put him on the Agency’s payroll in the late 1950s. In 1963, he started to have frequent, but secret, meetings with Israeli officials.

The king was not an Israeli agent, though. His grandfather, King Abdullah, had taken money from the Zionists, and he was assassinated for that relationship in 1951. Hussein’s loyalties were not to Israel, but to his own kingdom and the Hashemite royal family. It was all about survival, and that would continue to be his son Abdullah II’s priority after Hussein’s death in 1999.

Hussein made a huge mistake by joining Egypt’s Nasser in what became the Six-Day War against Israel. Jordan thus lost the holy sites in Jerusalem and all of the West Bank. Hoping that by talking he could regain territory and prestige, the king stepped up his encounters with top Israelis.

As arranged by the Mossad’s Tevel department, in charge of foreign liaison relationships, Hussein met eight times with Prime Minister Meir—usually on the Israeli side of the border, but occasionally aboard the royal yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea.

On September 23, 1973—when Israel’s leadership insisted on being blissfully unaware of looming dangers—King Hussein requested an urgent meeting with Meir. Two days later, Israeli helicopters flew him to the Mossad’s guest house, north of Tel Aviv, for his ninth rendezvous with the so-called “Old Lady,” who had become prime minister in 1969 at age 70.

Now she was 75, and the king was 37 years old. Perhaps there was a generation gap or a credibility gap, but Meir simply did not believe what he was saying.

Here was an Arab king, going well out of his way—in fact, risking his life—to tell the leader of the Jewish state that Egypt and Syria were going to attack Israel in the near future. The king did not specify any date for the attack, but he revealed that he had met recently with President Hafez Assad of Syria and Egypt’s Sadat, and he got the impression that both were fed up with the long impasse in Middle East diplomacy.

In the Arab leaders’ view, Hussein explained, they could no longer accept the limbo of no war and no peace, which they believed was good only for Israel.

Mossad analysts were, of course, listening to the conversation in a fully wired room in their agency’s guest house. But they were not buying what the king was saying.

He surprisingly volunteered the information that he was not only giving Meir his personal impressions. He felt very certain about Syria drawing up a war plan for sometime soon, revealing that the information was substantiated by a “good source” in that country. The Mossad would later learn that the source was a Syrian general, who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence as a spy in Damascus.

This was an amazing intervention, probably unprecedented in modern international relations. A leader of an enemy country—officially, Israel and Jordan had reached only a 1967 ceasefire deal through mediators—was warning of an imminent attack by his allies.

The Israeli political and military leadership—like the famous three monkeys—did not want to see, hear, or speak about the danger. They chose not to believe the intelligence data that were mounting up, preferring instead to adhere to their self-deluding detachment from reality.

It seemed that everyone had their brains manacled by what strategic experts in Israel called
ha-Konseptzia
—“the Concept.” This informal but forceful doctrine developed rapidly in the euphoria that followed the stunning victory of 1967. It held that the Arabs would never launch an all-out war, since it was so clear that they could not win.

The Concept went on to say that if the Arabs decided, despite everything, to start a war, it would have to be a joint effort. It seemed certain that neither Egypt nor Syria would dare go to war alone; the chances of them joining forces was deemed to be very, very slim.

In the unlikely event of war, the Israelis were utterly convinced that they could smash the enemy—as they did in 1967—and march on the Egyptian and Syrian capitals, Cairo and Damascus.

A non-stop stream of verbal hostility from those two capitals continued. President Sadat, on September 28—the third anniversary of his predecessor Nasser’s death—told his nation that “liberating” the Sinai from Israel was his top priority. Not unreasonably, Zeira and his Aman analysts had decided long before to ignore the flood of hyperbole heard from Arab politicians.

But should they have ignored what an Israeli intelligence officer reported, on October 1, from the IDF’s Southern Command? Lieutenant Binyamin Siman-Tov’s detailed report of attack preparations on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal would be remembered as a key clue that was stupidly neglected.

The Concept was in the driver’s seat, and the Concept decreed that any military activities by Arab armies near the borders or ceasefire lines were meaningless exercises. At most, Egypt or Syria might be perpetrating a hoax aimed at prodding Israel into ordering an expensive and disruptive mobilization of IDF reserves.

The Concept was convenient and reassuring, and it spread up and down the military, intelligence, and political chains of command.

Only 12 hours before the actual invasion did Israel’s intelligence chiefs accept that a coordinated attack on their country was imminent.

The eureka moment occurred after midnight on October 6 in London, at the apartment of the Mossad station chief. Zvi Zamir had flown to England for the precise purpose of hearing the latest information from Egypt—from the best “warning agent” the Mossad ever had.

The grim expressions on the faces of Zamir and his colleagues told the whole story. Sitting on soft sofas and armchairs were four Israelis: the top spymaster, the London station chief, a very accomplished katsa (case officer) identifiable only by his first name Dubi, and Zvi Malkin, who 13 years after kidnapping Adolf Eichmann was in charge of Zamir’s personal security.

All of them now realized how they—actually the entire intelligence-military establishment and, above them, the political echelon—had failed to understand what now seemed clear. But there was no time for soul searching.

Zamir now had to get to business. It was 2:30 a.m. in Israel on the most somber and quiet Jewish holy day, but prayers and atonement would have to wait. He telephoned his chief of staff in Tel Aviv, Freddy Eini, who naturally sounded sleepy.

“Put your leg in cold water!” Zamir ordered, meaning that Eini should make certain he was fully awake.

The Mossad chief then recited a short message he had just inscribed on a piece of paper, so as to be careful about what he said and did not say. Zamir used a few code words which he knew that Eini would understand: “the angel” and “chemicals.”

Angel was one of the codenames used by the Mossad for Ashraf Marwan, the agency’s supreme source in Cairo. He was married to one of the late President Nasser’s daughters and was an advisor to President Sadat. He had a Ph.D. in economics, but because his bachelor’s degree was in chemistry his code word for an imminent attack was “chemicals.”

Marwan was a highly ambitious man, born in 1944 to a well-off family in Cairo. His grandfather was the president of Egypt’s main Sharia (religious) tribunal. His father was a general in the army. Ashraf’s success at the Science University meant that he started in the army as a first lieutenant.

Everything in his life was going smoothly. A tall, handsome, and educated bachelor was sure to have a great time in the Cairo of the mid-1960s. He went to glamorous parties and played tennis at a prestigious sports club, where he met Nasser’s daughter, Mona.

Their wedding was huge, with Egypt’s most famous singers performing. His father-in-law did not seem to like him, yet Marwan was able to get a job in the president’s personal bureau, where he was privy to a huge amount of gossip—plus a wealth of political, military, and economic information. His government salary, however, was low.

The young couple moved to London in 1968, after the gloomy depression of the six-day defeat had made Cairo an unpleasant place. The swinging British capital seemed perfect for Marwan’s tastes.

He became a regular at the Playboy Club and other casinos, although he could barely afford the drinks and the gambling. Word filtered back to Cairo, where President Nasser shouted that his daughter should divorce him. She refused, but an arrangement was reached that had her living with her baby in Egypt, while Marwan would travel back and forth to continue his economics studies in Britain.

During one of those trips in 1969, he stepped into one of London’s famous red phone booths and placed a call to the Israeli embassy, which was located in a mansion near Kensington Palace.

The receptionist at the embassy later remembered hearing a man, in accented English, asking to speak “to someone from the intelligence.” For the receptionist, this was not so strange. Israeli embassies frequently get such calls, and the instructions are to transfer the calls to either a military attaché or to one of the officials at the “prime minister’s extension”—the term for the Mossad stations inside embassies.

Marwan found himself speaking to an attaché. He introduced himself by name and said that he was interested in working for Israeli intelligence. He left his hotel’s phone number and mentioned that he would be in London for the next 24 hours.

By pure chance, Shmuel Goren—the head of Tsomet, the agent-running department of the Mossad—was in London at the same time. He was told about Marwan’s phone call, recognized the man’s name, and became quite excited. Breaking the usual rule of doing a background check before having any face-to-face contact, he phoned the Egyptian at his hotel and made a date at a café. He and the station chief decided to send Dubi, then a young katsa, to the meeting.

The first chat went very well, but the Mossad could not eliminate all its suspicions. A walk-in volunteer could easily be a trap, or someone who will feed disinformation. Walk-ins are respected but also suspected. The Israelis were never certain about all of Marwan’s reasons for betraying his country. Getting back at his father-in-law? Needing money? His belief, perhaps, that he actually was helping Egypt by changing the course of history?

Zamir and other Mossad executives debated whether to work with this walk-in and decided that the opportunity was irresistible. They assigned Dubi, the original contact man, as the case officer.

The initial communication system had Marwan calling phone numbers belonging to “Anglo-Jewish Zionist” women: friends of Israel who were willing to jot down the few coded words that an unknown caller said. The women then had to call a phone number at the Israeli embassy and pass on the coded message. This was an oral version of a well-known espionage technique, the “dead drop,” a pre-set location where messages could be left between agent and handler.

The calls would invariably set the time and location for Marwan to meet Dubi. Their relationship would go on for almost 30 years, well past the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt signed in 1979. Marwan was paid a total of around a million dollars, and he was a huge part of Dubi’s life. Most any katsa wants to run an interesting agent, and that was certainly Dubi’s privilege.

Marwan cut off ties with the Mossad in 1998 when the Israelis tried to change handlers. A new policy aimed at preventing a katsa from becoming too close to a source. Marwan, however, had already declared that he would not work with any other Israeli—trusting only the man he had first met as “Misha.” While the walk-in agent never concealed his real name, Dubi did hide his.

Their meetings took place in London, Paris, or Rome, and in public the only nouns that an eavesdropper ever could hear were chemistry terms. Yet, in the privacy of closed-door talks, Marwan was able to provide information and unique insights on military and political topics. Thanks to him, Israel felt it was very well informed on what Soviet military advisors were doing in Egypt until their expulsion by Sadat in 1972.

Sadat had Marwan in his inner circle, and thus the Mossad was also told about the Egyptian leader’s sincere determination to launch a war if Israel refused to withdraw from occupied Sinai. Marwan was also able to provide details of the Egyptian army’s order of battle, a fairly specific outline of how Israeli forces in the Sinai would be attacked when the fateful day came.

On Thursday, October 4, two days before Yom Kippur, the Mossad received a message through the Englishwomen’s dead-drop telephone link. It said that Marwan wanted to meet with the “general”—which could only mean Zamir himself—in London the next day to discuss “chemicals.” That got the Mossad’s attention.

Zamir flew to London from Tel Aviv. Dubi was already in England. Marwan arrived at the Friday night rendezvous, explaining that the previous day he had been in Paris with an Egyptian delegation and could not say anything substantive until now. He told Zamir, in so many words, that the very next day Israel would be attacked by both Egypt and Syria.