The Angel

by Uri Bar-Joseph

  But without neutralizing Israel’s air superiority, any Egyptian effort to advance into Sinai would run into a wall. Egypt’s main military achievement since the War of Attrition had been the deployment of massive antiaircraft batteries along the western bank of the Suez Canal, with Soviet help and in flagrant violation of the cease-fire agreement. These would provide an effective air umbrella for Egyptian troops and tanks crossing the Suez Canal. These SAM batteries, however, were fixed in place, creating a situation in which any Egyptian forces that remained under the antiaircraft umbrella—extending about six miles to the east of the canal—were safe from IAF attack; but the moment they tried to advance beyond that range, hell would rain down upon them. Under such circumstances, retaking the Sinai was impossible. And since in every attack plan the Egyptians produced through the end of 1972, the main objective was retaking a significant portion of the Sinai, Israeli air superiority continued to be the decisive consideration in determining the likelihood of war. Both to Israel and to Egypt, in other words, it was clear that unless something significant changed, Egypt could not attack.

  Marwan made two decisive contributions to Israel’s understanding of the conditions under which the Egyptians would launch an attack, and of how close the Egyptians thought they were to fulfilling them. His oral reports and the documents he provided confirmed Israel’s assessment that the air superiority issue was decisive. In conversations he had with Meir Meir when Marwan was still working for Sami Sharaf, only one solution was offered: After crossing the canal under cover of antiaircraft guns, the Egyptians would try to physically move their stationary antiaircraft sites eastward, gradually allowing the tanks to penetrate the peninsula, always under the umbrella, toward the Mitla and Gidi Passes. But from everything known at the time about Egypt’s war plans, it was clear that they had put far too much emphasis on designing and training for a ground assault and not nearly enough on the Achilles’ heel of IAF attacks. In 1970 the Egyptians did not yet have mobile SA-6 antiaircraft batteries, just stationary SA-2s and SA-3s. The SA-3s were manned by Soviet troops, and it was unclear that the Kremlin would approve their use if Egypt decided to launch an aggressive attack on a close ally of the United States. But even without this caveat, moving a SAM site across the canal was an extremely complex operation, and the small number they could successfully relocate would not have been enough to counter Israel’s massive air power—power that had been significantly augmented since the late 1960s, with the arrival of large numbers of F-4s and A-4s from the United States. So even if the Egyptians had plans for crossing, and were conducting exercises according to those plans, everybody knew they were impracticable.15

  But if the Egyptians knew they couldn’t launch a successful campaign with the weapons they had, what did they think they needed to make it possible? After Nasser’s death, and especially after May 1971, the Egyptians began looking at the problem of Israeli air power more realistically. Under the direction of the new minister of war, Mohammed Ahmed Sadek, a number of scenarios were worked out, and it became clear that the idea of gradually moving SAM batteries eastward wasn’t going to work. Neither could Egypt tolerate a resumption of the deep-bombing raids. The only real solution to both of these problems was well known: convincing the Soviets to sell them better weapons, including long-range bombers that could carry serious payloads to Israeli air bases, and air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles that could reach Israeli population centers, in order to deter Israel from launching deep-bombing raids on the Egyptian home front.

  From the details Marwan gave Israel about Sadat’s talks in Moscow in March and October 1971, it became clear that Egypt was most interested in weapons that could threaten Israel’s home front, in order to deter Israeli attacks on Egypt’s own home front. As recalled, by October 1971 the Soviets agreed to sell Egypt a squadron of Tu-16 bombers carrying Kelt missiles but still refused to sell them Scud surface-to-surface systems. Around September 1972, Marwan gave the Israelis a copy of a letter by Sadat to Nikolai Podgorny, president of the Supreme Soviet, in which Sadat complained about the Soviets’ continued unwillingness to give Egypt “weapons of retaliation that will deter the enemy from attacking Egyptian targets in the depth of our territory.” Sadat added that “it was and remains clear that if we do not have retaliatory weapons of this kind, we will be without any military options whatsoever.”16 The information that Marwan passed on later described in detail the next stages of the process, including the arrival of the Kelt missiles to Egypt in late 1972 and their becoming operational in 1973. Marwan was also the first source who told Israel about the Soviets’ change of heart regarding the Scud missiles in late May 1973, and their delivery—along with Soviet personnel to man them—in August 1973.

  The matter of the long-range fighter-bombers was a tougher nut to crack, mainly because the Soviets didn’t have any. The Egyptians pinned their hopes on the MiG-23, but by 1971 the plane had not yet entered mass production. An interceptor version of the MiG-23 became operational in the Soviet air force in June 1972, and a ground-attack version for export to third-world countries went into production in 1973. The earliest possible date for their becoming operational in the Egyptian air force was 1974—and as far as Sadat was concerned, waiting that long was not an option, especially since there was no guarantee that the planes would really be ready by then. The Egyptian war planners determined a minimum need of five attack squadrons (between sixty and seventy-five warplanes) for effectively attacking Israeli air bases.

  Some time after Sadat came to power, Marwan reported on a meeting with his top generals, who presented the president with their need for a warplane comparable to the Israeli F-4 Phantoms as a condition for going to war. From later reports, Israeli MI and IAF intelligence could follow precisely the evolution of the Egyptian views regarding the precise aerial forces required to neutralize Israeli air superiority. At a certain point, these assessments included the five fighter-bomber squadrons as the minimal condition for Egyptian action—precisely what the Egyptian war planners, we now know, were in fact saying.

  More important is the fact that beginning in late 1972, the assessments suddenly stop referring to the need for long-range fighter-bombers as a condition for going to war. Specifically, Marwan informed Dubi on June 3, 1973, about four months before war started, that the Egyptian generals ceased regarding the supply of such aircraft as a necessary condition for launching war. Instead, they now counted on their massive air defense layout west of the canal, the split of the IAF efforts between the northern and the southern fronts, and the achievement of surprise as the main means to overcome their air inferiority.

  Although the Israelis were aware of the shift, they failed to grasp what it meant. MI-Research and IAF intelligence continued, all the way until the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, to believe that the Egyptians would not attack without the fighter-bombers. And so, for example, on September 24, 1973, less than two weeks before the war, Military Intelligence chief Eli Zeira asserted that the purchase of fighter-bombers robust enough to attack targets in Israel continued to constitute, from the Egyptian perspective, a necessary condition for going to war—and that at least until 1975 this condition could not be met.17 This mistake would haunt Israeli intelligence analysts who, having developed their kontzeptzia largely on the basis of information Marwan had given them, refused to revise their thinking even when Marwan began painting a very different picture.

  THE NEAR IMPOSSIBILITY of procuring effective warplanes from the Soviet Union began to sink in with the Egyptians, forcing them to look for an alternative. MiG-17s, Sukhoi Su-7s, and even Sukhoi-17s, which arrived in small numbers about a year before the war, couldn’t do the job. The only country other than the United States producing even vaguely relevant airplanes was France. Ironically, the French plane designed for ground assault was a variant of the Mirage 5J, tailored to specifications provided by the Israelis and intended for the IAF. But the French embargo on the conflict states halted the delivery of fifty such planes to I
srael, and France was now looking for buyers for these as well as other models like the Mirage 5D, which had a low-altitude attack radius of 425 miles and a payload of two 1,900-pound bombs. These numbers didn’t compare well with Israel’s F-4s, but they were still better than anything the Soviets could offer.

  But getting the Mirages was not so simple. The French embargo, after all, applied to Egypt no less than to Israel. And so, in November 1969, just months after a coup in Libya brought Muammar Gaddafi to power, negotiations began between Libya and France to purchase Mirages, ostensibly for the Libyan air force but in fact for Egypt. In January 1970, Libya and France signed an agreement to purchase 110 planes, half of which were 5Ds headed for Egypt. Delivery to Libya began in 1971, around the time that Sadat gave Marwan the Libyan brief. Naturally, all the information related to the deal, delivery via Libya, and integration of the planes into the Egyptian air force in July 1971—every detail was fully known to Israel. During the Yom Kippur War, Egypt’s 69th Squadron would deploy forty-two Mirage 5s of different types out of its Tanta base. The number of Egyptian pilots trained to operate them was smaller—about twenty-five. These planes undertook the most important of Egypt’s aerial missions in the first days of the war. Thanks to Marwan, Israeli intelligence knew everything there was to know about the squadron, who was commanding it, the names of its pilots, and the locations of its secret hangars.

  The arrival of these aircraft did not change the persistent conception held by MI chief Zeira and his key staff. The 3,800-pound payload of each Mirage was less than a quarter of the 18,000-pound bomb payload of the hundred Phantoms that were in the service of the Israeli Air Force when the war began. Even if used to strike Israel’s well-protected air bases, they could cause no serious damage to the sheltered aircraft. Moreover, from the information that Marwan delivered it was clear that the Egyptians thought so, too. While they viewed the Mirage 5s as their best attack aircraft, they did not regard them as an effective means to neutralize Israel’s air superiority.

  SINCE THE YOM KIPPUR WAR, a great deal of information has been released, mostly in the form of official memoirs and documentary research, about the long chain of events that led up to the war: the Egyptian perspective about what they needed in order to attack, the weaponry they received that made it possible, and the decisions surrounding the date of attack. From all of this it emerges, without a shadow of doubt, that the intelligence that Ashraf Marwan gave the Israelis proved consistently accurate, reflecting precisely what was happening in Egypt.

  In examining the sources of Israel’s massive intelligence failure in the days preceding the Yom Kippur War, one thing is clear: It resulted not from a lack of accurate information, but from the refusal of Military Intelligence to abandon the kontzeptzia even after it had clearly, irrefutably, been obviated by events. Thanks to Marwan, the Israelis understood precisely how the Egyptians saw both the necessity of war and the conditions necessary to launch it, through October 1972. But then, at around that time, Sadat changed his mind, deciding he would go to war without waiting for the weapons he would need to win. Ashraf Marwan, as we will see, reported this faithfully to Israel. MI, however, failed to adjust its assessments accordingly. This, and only this, led to Israel’s failure to be ready when war struck.

  MARWAN’S CONTRIBUTION TO Israeli intelligence, however, was not limited to the creation, and eventual dissolution, of the kontzeptzia. Marwan’s intelligence also proved incredibly accurate in everything surrounding Egypt’s specific attack plans. Here, too, MI benefited from a wealth of sources; Marwan’s information, however, both raised the level of confidence in Israel’s assessments and added rich, crucial details.

  Since 1968, when the Egyptian military began its Tahrir exercises simulating the recapture of the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian moves had been followed closely by MI, especially through the vast surveillance apparatus of Unit 848, its Signal Intelligence (Sigint) unit.

  The report issued by MI-Research after one exercise in early 1969 concluded, “In its exercise, Egypt addressed the conquest of the western Sinai and the creation of a defensive line to the east of the [Mitla and Gidi] passes within four to five days, at a strength of five infantry divisions, one to two mechanized divisions, and two armored divisions.”18 In the summer of 1971, Marwan gave Col. Meir Meir the details of a plan called Granite, which gave MI a more detailed and reliable picture of how the war would look from the Egyptian side. Another plan that Marwan gave them in early 1972, similar to the earlier plans, allowed MI-Research to issue a special forty-page intelligence survey on April 16, which also included maps detailing the Egyptian assault. The first phase of the war, which was supposed to take no more than twenty-four hours, was built on five infantry divisions crossing the canal at five different points, securing the crossing points and their immediate areas, and then moving two armored divisions, the 4th and the 21st, across to the eastern bank and capturing land up to the IDF fortifications. This could be done either in daylight or at night. Because of the IAF’s limited capabilities at night, MI’s best guess was that the Egyptians would attempt it under cover of darkness. To isolate the canal zone from the rest of Sinai, the Egyptians would airdrop, via helicopters, between seven and ten commando battalions at the eastern openings of the Mitla and Gidi Passes. A marine brigade, comprising one tank and two infantry battalions, would land at Rumani Beach, and another brigade-size infantry force was to rendezvous with it by the eastern reef passage, with the aim of blocking the northern Sinai road to Israeli reinforcements. The Egyptian plan also included amphibious crossings at Lake Timsah and the Great Bitter Lake, along the line of the canal. All of these were to take place on the first day of battle.

  On the second day, the armored divisions would advance to a depth of about eight miles into Sinai; on the third day they would take the passes, effectively conquering that portion of the Sinai along a parallel up until their eastern entrance. In the fourth and final phase, the Egyptian armies would complete their conquest of Sinai up to the Israeli border.19

  THE EXCEPTIONAL PRECISION of the documents that Marwan delivered, combined with the impressive breadth of Egyptian activity that it covered, made him into what Mossad director Zvi Zamir called “the greatest source we have ever had.”20 Marwan, he said, “was a first-class source, because he could cover a whole area that was very hard to get to, and the level of reliability of what he said was high. There were others who gave us information here and there, which confirmed or complemented things that he said. But he knew it inside out. He could describe what things had been like in the past, how things developed. From this perspective he was unique.”21

  Other people who knew about Marwan’s contribution confirm Zamir’s impressions. Brig. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilboa, who headed up MI-Research during the 1980s, carefully went over the materials Marwan had provided and concluded that there had never been a spy in Israel’s history who had made Egypt transparent the way he did.22 Brig. Gen. (res.) Aharon Levran, who was deputy commander of MI-Research before the Yom Kippur War, concluded that the material Marwan had given Israel was “high-quality information of the sort that intelligence agencies wish for all their lives, and only get to see once in many generations.”23 He called Marwan “the kind of source that lands on the intelligence community’s doorstep once in a generation. Worth his weight in gold.”24

  Intelligence officials were not alone in applauding Marwan. Years after the war, Moshe Dayan had the following to say:

  The Concept was not the invention of some mad scientist at MI, or the MI chief or the defense minister. It came together for us on the basis of very concrete intelligence information that we thought was the best that could possibly be achieved. . . . I can say with absolute confidence that any intelligence agency in the world, any defense minister or army chief of staff, who received this material and knew how it was attained, would have come to the same conclusion.25

  From all the people who came into contact with the materials that Marwan provided, there were only two wh
o—after the fact—called into question his commitment to helping Israel. One was the head of MI-Research Branch 6 (Egypt) who replaced Meir Meir beginning in the summer of 1972, Col. Yonah Bandman. In his view, one serious problem with Marwan was the fact that he kept warning that Sadat was about to launch a war, and then it didn’t happen. Bandman’s take was that Marwan had been crying wolf, and that it was therefore reasonable to ignore his warnings leading up to the Yom Kippur War. Moreover, Marwan failed to give good answers to the questions Bandman had given Dubi to ask, questions that tried to get to the bottom of Sadat’s behavior patterns. Instead, the answers he kept getting were technical, dealing with issues connected to Egypt’s war plans. And though he never went as far as calling Marwan a double agent, Bandman clearly believed, in hindsight, that the information he passed along was unreliable and that “for someone in his place in the hierarchy, there were certain things he should have known” that Marwan did not tell the Israelis.26

  The other person who seriously doubted Marwan was Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, chief of Military Intelligence during the war. Zeira became far more extreme in his views than Bandman, arguing that Marwan was a double agent who served as the central pillar in Egyptian attempts to divert Israel’s attention before the war. In order to support this claim, Zeira distinguishes between the materials Marwan delivered and his oral assessments:

  Some of his “information” was spectacular, including verified data that was the dream of any intelligence agency in the world. . . . The “information” provided was, for the most part, copies of documents and minutes of meetings at the highest levels. As opposed to this, the warnings regarding the anticipated timing of the war usually came in the form of reporting, partly in writing and partly orally, but all of them came without supporting documentation. By October 1973, all of them had been revealed to be inaccurate.27 [emphasis in the original]