THE ANGEL
THE EGYPTIAN SPY WHO SAVED ISRAEL
Author: Uri-Bar Joseph
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: $29.99
Pages: 372
For anyone who really knew Ashraf Marwan, it was probably not a surprise when he fell from his apartment balcony in June 2007 and tumbled five storeys through the London gloom into a garden near Piccadilly Circus.
What led to his death was the bigger mystery. Was it suicide? Or was he trying to escape the two men who some witnesses said were also on his balcony that day? And if it was murder, there were numerous possibilities. It might have been people he had ripped off in one of his many shady business deals. Or it could have been hit men from Egypt, Marwan's homeland, which he had betrayed for almost three decades as an invaluable spy for the Israelis.
Scotland Yard never cracked the case, and neither does Uri Bar-Joseph, a professor at the University of Haifa, in his trenchant, serpentine account of the Egyptian's years as a spy for Israel. But The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel is so packed with jaw-dropping and intimate details about the life of a man Mossad code-named "the Angel" that it seems only a minor failing that Bar-Joseph wasn't able to nail down the exact circumstances of how that life ended.
As an aide to both Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Marwan was perfectly placed to deliver a torrent of information to the Israelis. In the years leading up to the Yom Kippur war of 1973, he gave them specific Egyptian war plans and material on Cairo's weapons deals with the Soviet Union. He had numerous meetings in London over the years with his Mossad handler, a partnership that lasted until 1998.
As with many other master spies, Marwan's reasons for committing treason seem a complex mix of narcissism, boredom and the desire to live a more extravagant lifestyle than his government salary afforded. There may also have been some retribution in that mix - he had married one of Nasser's daughters, but the Egyptian president didn't fully trust his son-in-law and often tried to cut him out of important decision-making. Think Carlo in The Godfather.
So how was it that, with everything Marwan delivered to the Mossad, Israel was caught so off guard when the Egyptians and Syrians launched a surprise attack on Yom Kippur? Why were many soldiers fasting and in synagogue, and why weren't all of Israel's military reserves mobilised? Because elements of Israel's security apparatus felt sure that "the Angel" was a double agent sent from Cairo to peddle disinformation, and many continued to believe that President Sadat would never attack until Egypt was able to close its military gap with Israel.
Bar-Joseph goes to lengths to debunk the double-agent theory, and he does it convincingly. The book's undeniable villain is Eli Zeira, Israel's director of military intelligence at the time of the 1973 war. Zeira never thought Marwan was credible, and Bar-Joseph argues that this gross miscalculation led directly to Israel's military being so unprepared.
The narrative is at times flabby and repetitive, with some occasionally clunky prose. ("July is a hot month in Cairo, and July 1, 2007, was no exception," the book begins, inauspiciously.) Still, Bar-Joseph has done a laudable job synthesising the voluminous Israeli government information about Marwan, always keeping his eye for some of the outrageous - even absurd - turns of events in a high-stakes drama.
On that hot July day, a funeral was held for Marwan in Cairo, attended by Egypt's elites. President Hosni Mubarak, who was in Ghana participating in a summit, issued a statement calling Marwan "a true patriot of his country." Marwan's treachery was, by then, well known inside Egypt's government, but it was a source of such deep national embarrassment that he was buried a hero. His life was a lie, and his death a charade.
© 2016 The New York Times
