The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War

Did this guy really save Israel? Why is he not more famous? What should have happended to him?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...y-who-saved-israel-in-the-yom-kippur-war.html

URI BAR-JOSEPH
EXCERPT08.08.16 10:00 PM ET

The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War

In the fall of 1973, Israel knew that Egypt and Syria were planning an offensive, but the date was unclear until an Egyptian spying for Israel gave the mother of all wakeup calls.
The Yom Kippur War, which began on October 6, 1973 and would become the most intense military clash in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, is usually thought of as a surprise attack. Yet for a full week before Egypt and Syria went to war, Israeli Military Intelligence (MI) had detected a dramatic increase in unusual military activity on Israel’s borders along the Golan Heights and the Suez Canal. Growing evidence that war was imminent, however, was dismissed by the director of MI, Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, who remained convinced that despite indications on the ground, Syria would never attack without Egypt, and Egypt would never attack without the weapons needed to neutralize Israel’s air superiority. As the chief interpreter of intelligence for Israeli decision-makers, he made sure his opinions were shared, emphatically, with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir.
And then, on Thursday, October 4, the USSR began an emergency airlift to evacuate thousands of Soviet officers and their families from Egypt and Syria. Israeli leaders held a series of emergency meetings in Tel-Aviv the following day—the eve of Yom Kippur—in which Golda Meir expressed her alarm about a possible Arab attack. Zeira, however, stuck to his guns. Believing that prior to any Arab attack they would get clear warnings, the cabinet reached a compromise: The regular army was put on its highest state of alert, but there would be no mobilization of reserves, who constituted 80 percent of the IDF’s ground forces. As the sun headed to the sea and thoughts turned to the coming day of prayer and fasting, Israel’s leaders hoped they had averted disaster.
They had not. Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the late Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser and aide-de-camp of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, had secretly provided intelligence to the Mossad since 1970. For some time now, he had been warning the Israelis that Sadat wasn’t bluffing about a massive coordinated attack. But after too many leaks of Sadat’s previous plans, Sadat had kept the precise day and time of the attack almost entirely to himself. Understanding that war was close, Marwan, who was traveling in Paris on Thursday, October 4, signaled to his handler in the Mossad, whom we know only as “Dubi,” demanding an urgent meeting in London with the chief of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir. Zamir took the first flight to London the next morning.

Marwan made his way to London as well. There he learned from a friend who worked for EgyptAir that the airline had received orders to reroute their civilian aircraft to safer locations—orders that were then abruptly rescinded. This was all Marwan needed to hear. From his hotel room he made a few calls to colleagues in Egypt, and by noon on Friday he was certain that the attack plans had finally been set in motion.
The secure arrangement of a meeting with the Mossad chief and Dubi, however, would take some time. The hours ticked away on Friday, October 5, into the night of Yom Kippur.
The Angel
Harper Collins
From The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel:
It was close to 10 p.m. London time when Dubi and Zamir reached the apartment where the meeting would be held. Mossad agents, who had been in place for several hours, gave the area around the building a final once-over. Dubi and Zamir went in and waited. It was a long wait. Marwan had rarely been late before. Slightly after 11:30 p.m., they finally heard a knock on the door. Dubi opened it, and in walked the Angel.
Handshakes and formalities were exchanged. Dubi took a seat near the large dining table, notebook open and pen in hand. Marwan sat in an armchair by the coffee table, facing Zamir.
This was the first meeting between Marwan and his handlers since the failed attack on the El Al jet in Rome a month earlier. The Israelis wanted to make sure their source hadn’t been compromised, and they wanted him to know they were concerned. This is why Zamir’s first line of questioning was about whether any suspicions had been raised after the Italian forces raided the apartment in Ostia—a raid that clearly was based on advance warning—and whether Sadat had shown any interest in the question of how the Italians knew about the attack. Marwan reassured them that the episode had not caused him any trouble. Sadat probably figured that Marwan had tipped the Italians off; since the terror attack wasn’t in Egypt’s interest anyway, this in itself was unlikely to trouble the president. But nobody suspected he had said anything to the Israelis.
From the abrupt manner in which he deflected Zamir’s questions, however, it was clear that Marwan had something more pressing on his mind.
Marwan was tense. “I have come here,” he announced, “to talk about the war, and nothing else. I came late because I have spent the entire evening at our consulate in Kensington. I’ve been on the phone with Cairo, trying to get the most up-to-date information. He [Sadat] intends to go to war tomorrow.” From the way Marwan expressed himself in what followed, one gets the sense that he thought the Israelis already knew about it. It was a belief held widely by the Egyptians that the Israelis would know about the attack two full days before it was launched. But it is also possible that he was trying to gloss over the fact that—despite presenting himself to the Israelis as the oracle of all knowledge worth knowing in Egypt—here he now was, less than 24 hours before the attack, having learned about it only a few hours earlier.
Zamir was taken by surprise. He had come to the meeting worried because from the latest information he had, especially the Soviet evacuations, he could see that Egypt and Syria were heading for war. But he had not imagined that the attack would be launched in less than 24 hours. And he was also worried that, just as with past warnings, this one, too, would prove a false alarm. So his immediate response was, “On what do you base your assertion?”
For Marwan, who had previously given false alarms of war, both his credibility in the eyes of the Israelis and his image as a central player in Cairo were obviously important. Nor is it clear where he got his information—to whom, in other words, he had made those phone calls throughout the evening. And because his information was based on telephone conversations rather than face-to- face meetings, it is fair to assume that what he heard had been phrased cautiously or even ambiguously. He had not spent the crucial days before the war in Sadat’s presence, so he couldn’t know what the atmosphere was like in the presidential offices, where there were people who already knew the secret. The dissonance between the information he had received, in whose credibility he had no doubt, and his intimate knowledge of Sadat’s psyche—the president had changed his mind many times about the date of attack—had its effect on him. The more Zamir pressed him to give his own independent take on whether war would in fact erupt the next day, the more Marwan grew agitated, at least once raising his voice. “How should I know?” he shouted. “He [Sadat] is crazy. He can march forward, tell everyone else to march forward, and then suddenly march backward.” Marwan was giving voice not only to his frustration at his inability to give a straight answer to the most important question of his career as a spy, but also to his personal aversion toward Sadat, his inclination to disrespect him and see him as unreliable.
Zamir was less worried about Marwan’s inner conflict than about whether or not a war would start the next day. He had been a senior IDF officer in 1959, when a poorly thought-out military exercise involving an unannounced, emergency mass call-up of reserves instilled fear in an entire nation, triggered the call-up of reserves in Egypt and Syria in response, and ratcheted up tensions in the whole region. The affair, known as the Night of the Ducks, brought an end to the military careers of the commander of the IDF’s operations branch, Maj. Gen. Meir Zorea, and the chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Yehoshafat Harkabi. Images of that episode flashed through Zamir’s mind as he spoke with Marwan. The Night of the Ducks, he realized, would look like child’s play compared with a mistaken emergency mobilization for war in the middle of Yom Kippur. He could see the worldwide reaction to the IDF pulling tens of thousands of reserve soldiers out of the synagogues and sending them to the front to await an Arab onslaught that never came. The price would be incalculable. Now was the time, Zamir knew, to press his source as hard as possible, to make sure the warning was well grounded.