The great intelligence eclipse that occurred in the northeastern sector of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip sector, on Simchat Torah, Saturday, October 7, 2023, was preceded by an even more colossal intelligence eclipse exactly 50 years earlier, in the southwestern sector of the Sinai Peninsula, the Suez Canal sector. Then too it was a Saturday, Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973. As in 2023, a background factor played a disruptive role. Before the surprise attack in 1973, the close adviser to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Dr. Ashraf Marwan, served as an agent of Sadat and Egyptian intelligence, for the deception through which the dogmatic concept took shape, according to which Egypt would not attack Israel as long as its army had not achieved comprehensive force buildup that would enable it to carry out a deep conquest operation into the Sinai.
Similarly, before the surprise attack in 2023, Islamic Jihad, which attacked Israel repeatedly while Hamas remained silent, served as a front for Hamas and Iran, for a grand deception through which the dogmatic concept took shape, according to which Hamas would not attack Israel “because it is deterred”.
These two cardinal axes of intelligence deception were part of a multi-entity, multi-branch system that carefully planned a long-term attack strategy, operated in perfect coordination, and became the key factor in the occurrence of the two intelligence eclipses. During the Marwan period, I served in AMAN Research from January 1970 until September 1990.
The beginnings of the two deception axes date back at least 2 years before the final target dates, when the deception axes crystallized into military surprise attacks. The chronological outline showed that during the two years leading up to the attacks, the deception concept toward Israel was embedded. Once it succeeded, concrete planning of the attacks began, along with their actual rehearsal. This took the form of creating an “exercise routine” that severely eroded the alertness of Israeli intelligence, which was already captive in the deception trap it had been implanted with, in the run-up to and in the face of the real event. The erosion undermined the military’s overall resilience and readiness. The substantial similarity between the deception strategy developed into a full-fledged strategy between 1973 and 2023 raises the hypothesis that the latest attack is a deliberate reenactment of the success of half a century earlier, rather than a mere coincidence.
Heaps upon heaps of information and interpretations have accumulated over the past 50 years regarding Marwan, his actions, and his reports, both praising and condemning his contributions. I seek here to shed focused and concise light on problematic, not to say dark, aspects of Marwan’s conduct. I do not presume to verify the entirety of the information that points to Marwan as a double agent. At the same time, I do not doubt the credibility of those who reported this, among them Col. Yaakov Rosenfeld, at the time head of the military desk in the Egypt branch of AMAN Research, Major General Shlomo Gazit, and the investigative journalist Dr. Ronen Bergman. Beyond that, space does not permit detailing the academic and journalistic figures alike in Egypt, other Arab countries, and around the world who, in a substantive, independent, and disinterested manner, argue that Marwan in fact operated as a double agent. Conversely, it is entirely clear that there is a long list of arguments that ostensibly support the claim that Marwan was not a double agent, but rather a first-rate spy in the service of the Mossad. However, the balance clearly tilts toward his being a double agent.
A Suspicious Life Trajectory
Marwan’s portrait, particularly during his life, but also in his death and after his death, embodies a combination of too many exceptional characteristics and components to be regarded, as a whole, as an innocent coincidence. We will address the central events relevant to our discussion:
1968 – Marwan, married to President Nasser’s daughter, works in the presidential office with a high intelligence clearance.
1969 – Marwan and his wife temporarily relocate to London for advanced academic studies in chemistry.
1970 – Marwan approaches the Israeli Embassy in London and offers to spy for Israel. It is important to note that this approach may well have been entirely genuine. However, this does not rule out the possibility that he later became a double agent. The whole riddle, therefore, encompasses, in this context, at least three variants:
a. Marwan doubled himself at some point.
b. Marwan was double-crossed by Egyptian intelligence in full coordination with him.
c. Marwan was double-crossed by Egyptian intelligence with only partial coordination, meaning that Egyptian intelligence also used him at times without his knowledge.
September 1970 – Sadat is elected President of Egypt following Nasser’s death from a heart attack and draws Marwan very close as a personal envoy and adviser.
December 1970 – Marwan begins supplying the Mossad with information and shocks the system by providing documented, authentic, classified material in his possession. He emphasizes that this is only a sample from a vast spectrum of fields and aspects to which he has access within the Egyptian military. He adds that he would be willing to send warnings regarding any Egyptian intention to go to war.
1971 – Marwan reports a plan for a broad Egyptian attack involving crossing the Suez Canal and advancing into the Sinai up to the Gidi and Mitla passes. At the same time, Marwan took care to provide protocols of discussions, including from summit meetings between the leaders of Egypt and the Soviet Union, from President Sadat’s office, and from meetings of the Egyptian security leadership. These documents showed that Egypt did not see itself as capable of going to war as long as it did not receive from the Soviet Union long-range fighter aircraft, MiG-23, in quantities sufficient to strike Israeli Air Force bases, as well as a significant amount of “deterrent weapons”, Scud surface-to-surface missiles, that would threaten the Israeli home front. This was intended to deter the IDF from striking deep targets in Egypt. Indeed, these conditions were not fulfilled until October 1973. Yet Egypt did go to war.
1972 – The Egyptian army fundamentally changes the attack plan, now limiting it to crossing the Suez Canal and capturing only a narrow strip on its eastern bank, but Marwan does not report this. On this matter, contradictory versions emerged. The credible version of Yaakov Rosenfeld states that we did not know in advance of the existence of this plan in its new format.
June 1972 to July 1973 – Marwan repeatedly reports various and shifting dates for an Egyptian attack, doing so in a fickle manner, accompanied by his own personal assessments and without documentary backing or corroboration, as would be required.
August 1973 – Marwan reports on a Libyan plan to shoot down an El Al aircraft, thereby enabling Israel to thwart the Libyan operation. This followed Sadat’s choice of Marwan to supply Egyptian Strela missiles to the Libyans to down the plane. This report was highly valuable and enhanced Marwan’s standing among the intelligence agencies.
Mid-September 1973 – Marwan reports that at a meeting between Sadat and Assad held in August, it was planned that a joint Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack against Israel would be carried out at the end of 1973. This emerges from a quotation from a book published by the Mossad: “In September 1973, Marwan reported that the date set by Sadat for opening the war against Israel was the end of 1973, and Assad agreed to this.”
And here comes the most critical period of all. From this report until October 4, again in the dead of night, Marwan remained in resounding silence.
September 29, 1973 – Sadat convenes the National Security Council and informs its members of his decision to soon go to war. Marwan reports nothing about this. He also does not report in real time, but only with significant delay, that he himself “identified indications of an imminent war”, again according to a book published by the Mossad. The so-called “golden information” arrives with a critical delay, yet its timing is exact and serves Egypt’s interests optimally.
October 4, 1973 – With a warning of two days, ostensibly to artificially preserve his image of reliability, late in the day at 22:30, Marwan makes a general and vague notification of an urgent need to meet to report information regarding the opening of a war. However, it is not until more than a day later, on October 5 at 23:45, that his meeting with the head of the Mossad takes place in London. He reports that on October 6, toward evening, a timing that would prove false, a large-scale Egyptian attack would begin.
The information is transferred from London to Israel on October 6 at 03:00 in the morning Israel time, that is only 11 hours before the actual start of the attack, which broke out at two in the afternoon. This time frame does not allow Israel to prepare in a way that would prevent Egypt from crossing the canal and capturing its eastern bank, especially given that this was Yom Kippur and that Israel was facing two attacking armies simultaneously with great force: Egypt and Syria.
Absurdly, this report by Marwan was given the designation “the golden information”.
October 19, 1973 – At this critical point, some 260 IDF tanks were already west of the Suez Canal, and IDF forces began expanding their control on the western bank of the canal, clearing the area northward toward Ismailia and southward toward the Suez Cairo road. Marwan reports to Israel that 400 Scud missiles are aimed at Tel Aviv, a report that later proves groundless, but at the time was influential. He adds that if IDF forces reach the Nile Delta, the delta will be their cemetery. As a result, six days later, as Sadat and Marwan had hoped, an agreed ceasefire between Egypt and Israel came into effect. The very tangible advantage and threat achieved at great effort by the IDF deep inside Egypt went to waste as a consequence of this “intelligence contribution” by Marwan.
Moreover, throughout the entire period, Marwan simultaneously maintains contacts with additional intelligence agencies of various countries. He refuses to use a communications device that would allow the Mossad to contact him when necessary. He does not undergo a polygraph examination. While he generally provides documented, authentic, varied, and essential information, he conveys his assessments regarding the timing of the Egyptian surprise attack against Israel only verbally and incoherently.
In 2007, ten years after the relationship between Marwan and the Mossad had ended, Marwan met his death by falling from the balcony of his apartment in London. The circumstances of his fall, which appear to be the result of a slip, a push, or suicide, were never clarified. If it were a push, the obvious question arises: who had a good reason to carry it out, and why? In Egypt, Marwan was accorded a most elaborate state military funeral.
Efforts to Cover Up the Failure?
In a wholly exceptional manner, a way was found to honor and commemorate the work of Major General Zvi Zamir as head of the Mossad after his death, with particular emphasis on praise for the intelligence output produced by Marwan, who was run simultaneously by a regular case officer and by Zamir himself. In the Mossad-published book, there is also a conspicuous attempt to convince readers that Marwan was not a double agent, but the thesis employed to that end does not hold water. On the surface, the book lays out, at a factual, ostensibly objective level, the entire body of information regarding Marwan and his handling by the Mossad, in a manner intended to reassure readers of Marwan’s credibility and reliability. However, precisely in the context of Marwan’s supreme intelligence mission, providing warning of an Egyptian surprise attack against Israel, the book presents a chapter titled “The Issue of the Timing of the Receipt of the Warning” from Marwan, which, for the most part, is little more than farce and absurdity. This is due to a cumulative series of supposedly plausible circumstances by which, in the final analysis, Israel received warning of the Egyptian attack, whose timing was woven during the last week of September 1973, only 11 hours before the attack was carried out. This is a disgraceful failure in the test of results, tied to the mission of the Israeli intelligence community, real-time warning of a large-scale surprise attack. It was precisely here that the failure occurred, and not by chance. Not by chance at all.
That is to say, over a full 27 years, far too many years, during which the Mossad ran Marwan, there was a single year, the year preceding the Yom Kippur War, namely the most strategically significant year from an intelligence perspective, in which Marwan maneuvered, to put it mildly, to ensure that the Egyptian attack would indeed be a surprise attack that would succeed.
By the results, Marwan succeeded brilliantly. On the margins, if not at the very core of the matter, it should be noted that in the book published by the Mossad, it is highlighted that Mossad human sources knew and warned in September of an Egyptian surprise attack that would occur in October 1973. Therefore, it is highly puzzling how it came to pass that a source as high up as Marwan did not report this as they did, but instead reported in September “the end of 1973” as the time of the attack. Remarkably, “the end of 1973” means, by any account, early December at the very earliest.
Go and learn. The relationship between Zvi Zamir and Marwan was so close, not to say extreme, that it is impossible to expect that Zamir, or anyone else except a select few, could have perceived it as deception. This relationship directly radiated to the country’s leadership, as Golda Meir, then prime minister, was accustomed to ask with reverence from time to time, “And what does Tzvika’s friend say?” Urim and Thummim are quite paradoxical. It seems that the essence of the matter lies in the statement of Shlomo Gazit, head of AMAN from 1974 to 1979:
“We will yet learn on our own flesh of the disgraceful abuse inflicted by Marwan on Zvi Zamir and on the State of Israel.” Major General Gazit added that “Marwan was planted in the rear and deep within Israeli intelligence, recruited the head of the Mossad, Zamir, as a dupe, toyed with him at will, and in practice was the central cog of the Egyptian deception plan.” In other words, a grave and tragic humiliation, which required personal fortitude of the highest order on Zamir’s part to acknowledge, let alone to admit. The same applies to the case officer and others in the Mossad. Moreover, there is a quotation stating that Zamir, on September 24, 1973, in a special meeting of the General Staff forum, cited the Mossad’s assessment that a war was “not expected soon”.
In the background, it should be noted that Zamir’s biography highlights a distinguished and upright path in the Palmach and the IDF, before he is appointed head of the Mossad, but is devoid of any intelligence training or intelligence roles whatsoever.
From the book published by the Mossad about Zamir, it is also worth quoting that “the high-value information and the many precise details that Marwan transmitted from within senior leadership circles on various subjects went far beyond what was required to build the credibility of a double agent.” This is true, but the deliberate over-dosage of credibility was an inherent component of building him as a double agent, to, and in addition to, constructing his basic personal reliability:
a. That his reports, just like his failures to report, would constitute for Israel’s security system a solid support, in hindsight a broken reed, that would overshadow any information from other sources whatsoever that constituted a realistic and concrete warning toward the Yom Kippur War. This position of power held by Marwan even overrode a bold and credible warning from King Hussein of Jordan to Golda Meir, in a direct meeting between them on September 25 at the Mossad headquarters, ironically enough, regarding the impending surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. To such heights did Marwan’s influence soar, even vis-à-vis King Hussein, heaven forbid.
b. That his elevated status would be preserved even after the war actually broke out, and despite his utter failure to provide early warning of the target date of October 6, and thus he would continue to serve Egyptian interests during and after the war, from the same supreme intelligence position of power that he had already created for himself in such a sophisticated manner. Marwan therefore achieved great success in these two layers of activity as well, thanks to the over-dosage invested in building his credibility.
It must be emphasized that none of the above absolves AMAN Research and the head of AMAN, Major General Eli Zeira, of responsibility for the failure to provide early warning of the Yom Kippur attack, because there were independent reports and indicative signs that pointed quite clearly to the impending attack. The two stumbling blocks that caused AMAN not to provide a concrete warning in the week preceding Yom Kippur were the dogmatic concept mentioned above, which had become irreversibly entrenched, under Marwan’s inspiration, on the one hand, and the absence of a warning report from Marwan regarding the planned attack, at least several days before October 5, on which Marwan deigned, in his great kindness, to issue a warning, on the other hand—a relatively simple equation, after all.
The equation explains AMAN’s failure well, but does not justify it in any way. Beyond this, and this is the key point, it may be assumed, from a theoretical perspective, that were it not for Marwan’s existence, AMAN would, given all the other circumstances, have provided an adequate warning ahead of Yom Kippur 1973. The Mossad, as the body that responded to, ran, and cultivated Marwan, bore a very significant share of responsibility for the sweeping intelligence failure. After all, in the practical and narrow aspect of real-time intelligence collection, with all that this entails, in this case vis-à-vis Marwan and the timing of the Egyptian attack, full responsibility rests with the Mossad, for better or for worse. This is the essence of its role.
Did He Know, or Did He Not Know?
Accordingly, the two most piercing questions that ostensibly remain open are these. What is the likelihood that Marwan did not know, in real time or shortly thereafter, of the very substantial change, which would undoubtedly have neutralized the failing concept within AMAN, in the outline of the Egyptian attack, a change that occurred in 1972, whereby Egypt abandoned reaching deep into the Sinai? The likelihood that he did not know is negligible, if not nonexistent. In the Mossad book, this highly significant turning point in the Egyptian attack outline is presented in a rather vague manner. What is the likelihood that Marwan did not know, at the time of occurrence at the latest, that the moves of the Egyptian army that began on October 1, 1973, under the guise of a “periodic strategic exercise”, a large scale inter branch headquarters exercise, would end five days later with the crossing of the Suez Canal and the seizure of its eastern bank. The likelihood that he did not know is negligible, if not nonexistent.
He knew, but did not report. There is no doubt that Marwan was the most crucial agent run by the Mossad in Egypt, but his handling was afflicted by severe intoxication of the senses, which is precisely what he sought. Regrettably, it should be recalled that the handling of the Mossad’s most crucial agent in Syria, Eli Cohen, was also marred by a grave failure, as was clearly hinted at by Tamir Pardo, a former head of the Mossad.
