Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor of political science at the University of Haifa and a former intelligence analyst in the Israel Defense Forces. His just published book, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, is the remarkable story of how Cairo playboy Ashraf Marwan betrayed his father-in-law, the most famous Arab hero of modern times, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Partly a spy thriller, The Angel is also an invaluable account of major historical figures like Nasser, his successor Anwar Sadat, as well as Israeli giants like Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan during a key moment in the making of the modern Middle East.
Recently, I spoke with Bar-Joseph about his book, the Middle East, espionage, and intelligence work.
Lee Smith: How did the story of Ashraf Marwan, code name "the Angel," first come to light?
Uri Bar-Joseph: During the late 1980s, it became known that a "miraculous source" had warned the Mossad shortly before the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1993, the man who had been Israel's Director of Military Intelligence during the war, Eli Zeira, published his memoirs, which contained many details about the source. Zeira claimed that the source had in fact been a double agent working for Egypt.
During the 1990s, two Israelis—one a respected journalist, the other a historian based in London—revealed additional details about the source. Relying on Zeira, they too claimed that he had been a double agent. In late 2002, his identity as Ashraf Marwan was revealed.
In 2004, Zvi Zamir, who had headed up the Mossad in the early 1970s and had personally participated in the handling of Marwan, accused Zeira of unlawfully leaking Marwan's identity to the press. Zeira sued Zamir for defamation. The lawsuit went to arbitration via a panel headed by a retired Supreme Court justice, and in early June 2007 Zamir was exonerated; Zeira had indeed, it was ruled, leaked Marwan's identity. Three weeks later, Marwan mysteriously fell to his death from the balcony of his posh fifth-floor London apartment.
LS: What makes someone spy on their own country?
UBJ: The classic motivations for betrayal are money, ideology, blackmail, and ego. In Marwan's case it was mostly money and ego. He yearned for the luxurious life of the successful, corrupt Arab playboy, and had married the daughter of Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt and leader of the Arab world. But Nasser, it turned out, did not allow corruption among his family members. This frustrated Marwan deeply. Spying for the Israelis also served his ego: He felt disrespected by Nasser, and disloyalty may have been a form of revenge. In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, working for Israel also put Marwan on the side of the Israeli winners rather than the Egyptian losers, giving him the sense that he influenced world politics, and allowed him to speak directly with the chief of the Mossad, who was also a famous general. It's worth adding that Marwan was a compulsive gambler, both in his business and in the casino. Spying for Israel met his emotional need for risk-taking.
**LS: I know the situations of the two men and their relationships to Israel are very different, but was what Ashraf Marwan provided Israel more valuable than what Eli Cohen, one of the great heroes of Israeli espionage, provided?**
UBJ: Eli Cohen was a Mossad "warrior," an Israeli who spied in Syria from 1961 to 1965 under the cover of a rich Arab businessman. The information he provided before he was caught was political and military in nature. It is claimed that he helped Israel win the 1967 War.
Marwan was in a different league. He was Nasser's son-in-law and, after Nasser's death, aide-de-camp to President Sadat. As such, he had unparalleled access to his nation's best-kept secrets. Starting in 1970, when Egypt began preparing for war with the aim of retaking the Sinai Peninsula, which it had lost to the Israelis in 1967, Marwan provided Israel with virtually everything there was to know about Egypt's war plans, military exercises, arms deals with the USSR, meetings of the high command, and Sadat's discussions with the Soviet leadership. His last-minute warning that "war will starttomorrow" saved Israel from a complete surprise when the October 1973 war started, enabling a call-up of the reserves in the hours before the attack and almost certainly preventing the fall of the Golan Heights to advancing Syrian tanks. Zamir regarded him as "the best source we have ever had."
**LS: Do you think Marwan admired Israel? I.e., he saw it as a strong actor and admired how it was capable of projecting power—or exacting revenge—against those who'd targeted it?**
UBJ: Much of Marwan's motivation to work for the Mossad involved his need to boost his ego, at least in part due to the humiliation he felt as an Egyptian after the defeat in the 1967 War as well as Egypt's smaller defeats in the War of Attrition that followed. The Israelis were well aware of this motivation. Accordingly, Zamir met him in person whenever he could, to pump his ego and deepen his commitment to the Mossad.
For this reason, his satisfaction depended in part on Israel continuing to be the strong horse. When the IDF suffered heavy losses in the first few days of the Yom Kippur War, Marwan showed some disappointment. In his meeting with Zamir two weeks into the war, he expressed frustration over the fact that Israel had been caught off guard.
**LS: Your portrait of Sadat is of a very formidable figure who knew what he wanted. Was there any way that Israel could've avoided the 1973 war had they entered serious diplomatic negotiations with him, or was war inevitable for Sadat to achieve his aims?**
UBJ: Sadat's first priority when entering office was to get back the Sinai Peninsula, which had been lost to Israel in 1967. But he was fully aware of Egypt's military inferiority. So he turned to diplomatic means, suggesting a partial Israeli withdrawal in exchange for a prolonged ceasefire, to be followed by a comprehensive peace agreement and the returning of the whole of the Sinai. His offers were dramatic but Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who did not trust his peaceful intentions, rejected them.
Sadat went to war only after realizing in early 1973 that diplomacy had failed. The fact that the Israelis were caught unprepared when war started was a pleasant surprise for Egypt, but it does not change the fact that Sadat went to war as a last resort.
LS: Why didn't the IDF military intelligence chief, Major General Eli Zeira, believe Marwan?
UBJ: An analysis of Zeira's personality on the basis of the available information indicates that he was a person with a very high need for cognitive closure. Such people find it difficult to live in ambiguous situations. They are unconsciously motivated to arrive at a solution to a problem (in this case the problem of whether Egypt would go to war) as soon as possible and hold to it for as long as possible.
Zeira entered office in October 1972, already convinced that Egypt would avoid war until it had received the necessary arms – primarily Scud missiles and long-range attack aircraft – that would allow it to neutralize Israel's air superiority. Despite numerous strategic warnings, especially from Marwan, as well as information that clearly showed Egypt and Syria were deployed for war, Zeira, who was responsible for providing a comprehensive intelligence assessment for the government, stuck to this paradigm until it was too late.
**LS: I believe that the book has solved something of a controversy regarding intelligence about the 1973 war. You've shown that the issue was that Zeira stuck to his understanding of the concept regardless of the evidence mounting against it. Does this tell us anything about intelligence work in general?**
UBJ: Many postmortems of warning failures show that prior to the attack all the relevant information was there but central estimators stuck to a mistaken belief that war would not come.
Prior to the 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR, Stalin received numerous warnings about the impending attack but remained convinced, until fighting commenced, that Hitler would never open a new front in the east before ending the war in the west. Similarly, in Korea in late November 1950, General Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence officer, rejected all indicators that the Chinese army had crossed the Yalu. He enthusiastically supported MacArthur's offensive north, straight into a massive Chinese ambush.
Stalin, Willoughby, MacArthur, and Zeira were types with a high need for cognitive closure and failed to process information that contradicted their beliefs. Their personal failures show the need for cognitive openness when estimating intelligence information.
**LS: Will Marwan's outing as a spy by an Israeli security official, and subsequent death perhaps at the hands of Egyptian intelligence, affect Israel's ability to recruit spies? Will it affect how Israeli officials treat the identities of the people who have worked to keep Israel safe?**
UBJ: Time will tell, but following the exposure of Marwan's identity, Mossad officials expressed concerns about the damage it would cause to recruitment. All in all, the Mossad and other intelligence agencies do a very good job of protecting their sources. But after the fiasco of Ashraf Marwan's exposure, there was a sense that more work was needed.
**LS: Does the book argue that human intelligence is the most important category in collecting intelligence, more important that signals intelligence, for instance?**
UBJ: The quality and the relevance of intelligence information is primarily a function of the type of threat and of the culture of the intelligence organization. The Soviet services were excellent in human intelligence and received high-quality strategic information from their spies. The Americans, who are far better in technology, rely far more on SIGINT (signals intelligence). Spies, especially when positioned close to the enemy's decision-makers, are more effective in exposing intentions, while technical collection is more effective in uncovering capabilities. Given that terror activities do not demand extensive resources and preparation, American weakness in preventing them becomes apparent.
In 1973, Israel had an excellent combination of human and technical means of collection and had all the necessary evidence to conclude that war was coming. The source of the failure was in estimating the evidence rather than the evidence itself.