Elazar, however, saw an Egyptian attack during his tenure as a real possibility, and he argued that these cutbacks were the gravest threat to Israel’s future. The worst of them was a plan to reduce mandatory service by three months, which would dramatically reduce the number of active-duty troops, who would be crucial for holding off an Arab assault until reserves could be deployed. Elazar fought the plan tooth and nail, making use of Marwan’s warnings to that end.9 In effect, Ashraf Marwan’s warnings prevented a situation in which the IDF would have been even less prepared than it was when war came the following October.
IN EARLY 1973, Israel received further reports about Egypt. One batch added details to the October 24 meeting, telling of disagreements that arose because most of the participants were convinced that the Egyptian military was far from ready for war, and because of Sadat’s decision to fire War Minister Sadek and others because of their “defeatist” attitude. This report also correctly reported the order of the new war minister, Ismail, to prepare a plan for crossing the canal using infantry divisions followed later by tanks (Granite II Improved), and on the new wave of Egyptian military exercises preparing for the crossing.
A second group of reports came from Ashraf Marwan. On January 17, he reported that Sadat had ordered the army to prepare for attack without waiting for new weapons. At the same time, the same intelligence batch suggested that Egypt was not planning on crossing in a general way but preferred to launch open-ended static hostilities involving commando and air force raids in Sinai, as well as an air attack on Israel proper. According to what Marwan himself said, the Egyptian initiative would begin in May 1973 and would be carried out in coordination with Syria.
These reports, too, should have strengthened the belief that Sadat had changed his mind about attacking Israel. Yet, again, they fell on deaf ears at MI-Research. In a survey written in response to Marwan’s report of January 17, the commander of MI-Research Branch 6 (Egypt) Lt. Col. Yonah Bandman wrote that it did not “testify to a decision that Sadat had made to open fire in the coming months; all the more so did the decision not reflect any operational plan whatsoever.” In Bandman’s view, Marwan’s reports reflected little more than Egyptian fantasizing, in an attempt to create an atmosphere of crisis in order to spur on the diplomatic effort; the military exercises, too, had been falsely interpreted as hostile purely because of the sense of crisis in the regime, which itself was engineered to put pressure on Israel.10 Bandman’s reflexive rejection of any report that contradicted Israel’s now-outdated kontzeptzia found expression in other ways as well. Unlike his predecessor Meir Meir, Bandman did not meet Marwan once during his entire tenure in the position. And when the opportunity to meet with Dubi presented itself, either in London or in Israel, he never once took it.
EGYPTIAN WAR PREPARATIONS continued apace during the first months of 1973. In addition to writing up plans and holding exercises, Egypt now began receiving a stream of arms from the Soviets as well. They included SA-3 and SA-6 surface-to-air batteries, SA-7 Strela personal antiaircraft missiles, Sukhoi Su-17 fighter planes, T-62 tanks, Sagger personal antitank missiles, additional artillery, and bridging equipment. At the same time, Egypt started getting Western aircraft that improved, if not dramatically, its attack capabilities deep in Israeli territory. These included British-made Hawker Hunters from Iraq, relatively old planes that gave Egypt little more than a boost in morale. They also started receiving the new Mirages that Libya had bought from France. During March and April, Egypt received eighteen of these, mostly IIIEs, which had a long enough range to attack Israeli air bases.11 It was still not enough to neutralize Israel’s overall air superiority, but the combination of these planes with the scaling back of Egypt’s war aims gave a better response than ever before to the vulnerability of Egyptian ground forces to attack from the air.
At the same time, war preparations were ramping up. Sadat held a series of meetings with the leadership of his Socialist Union Party as well as the cabinet, in which he made clear that in light of the diplomatic stalemate, there was no choice but to go to war, with the aim of “shattering the cease-fire.” As the spring approached, for the first time since the end of the War of Attrition, the Egyptians believed they were ready to take on the IDF.
IN EARLY APRIL 1973, the chief of Egyptian military operations, General Mohamed Abdel Ghani el-Gamasy, presented a number of possible dates of attack based on optimal conditions—such as when the currents in the canal would be slowest and tides would be ideal, the amount of moonlight, and which dates would be the most difficult for the IDF to organize a swift and effective response. The earliest of these was in mid-May. On April 5, Sadat met with his cabinet and explained the logic behind his decision to go to war. The cabinet approved the decision unanimously. Several days later, the preparations were made public. Radio Cairo began broadcasting war slogans. The government began meeting in Center 10, the underground war room, and issued a call for volunteers to join the “people’s resistance” if the IDF were to occupy territory west of the canal.
All of these preparations ran aground, however, as soon as the Syrians were brought into the picture. On April 23, President Hafez al-Assad came to Egypt for a secret two-day meeting with Sadat in Burj al-Arab on the Mediterranean coast. The Egyptians presented the Granite II Improved plan, which included the armored assault to capture the Mitla and Gidi Passes. The crossing of the Suez Canal was presented as a first stage toward the conquest of all of Sinai. For their part, the Syrians presented their plans for conquering the Golan Heights. But even though the two sides agreed to coordinate their attack, Assad was unwilling to pull the trigger: Neither Egypt nor Syria, he believed, was ready for war. The central problem, Assad said, was Syria’s lack of surface-to-air batteries to protect its ground forces from aerial attack. The two presidents agreed to delay the entire operation until the late summer. A few days later, Assad flew to Moscow, where he signed a huge arms deal; within a few weeks, new weapons began flowing to Damascus.
THESE DEVELOPMENTS WERE not lost on the Israeli intelligence community. As early as March, reports started coming in about Egypt’s heightened war preparations. They all confirmed what Marwan had said in January—that the target date for war was in May and that Egypt was coordinating with Syria.12 Once the war plans had concretized and specific dates were discussed, the intelligence flow became more intense.
Ashraf Marwan was far from alone in supplying information to Israel, but he was the most important source. On April 11, he gave Dubi a detailed account of Egypt’s intentions to launch an attack in the middle of May. The opening assault would include a thirty-eight-minute-long artillery barrage to soften Israel’s frontline defenses. Simultaneously, 178 warplanes would attack both military and civilian sites (mainly oil fields) in the Sinai, and another 40 Mirages would attack targets in Israel proper. After that initial assault, five infantry divisions stationed along the canal would begin crossing at five different points. The Egyptians would use the cover of darkness, making it difficult for the Israeli Air Force to respond effectively while Egypt began laying the bridges across the canal and moving the bulk of its infantry to the eastern bank. The infantry would have hundreds of Sagger antitank missiles to help them handle the Israeli armor. At the same time, the Egyptian navy would deploy sea mines and two destroyers to block the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, to prevent trade from reaching Israel. Before the attack, Egypt would taper off its pumping from the Morgan oil field west of the Gulf of Suez, and eventually stop it completely, out of fear that Israel would attack the field and set it on fire.
Six months later, on October 6, 1973, Egypt would indeed attack. After thirty-eight minutes of shelling, five infantry divisions would cross the canal at the known points using the darkness to lay the bridges and send over the forces. The infantrymen would carry Sagger missiles and devastate the Israeli tanks—which would not be in position and whose teams would be taken completely by surprise. Egyptian warplanes in the first as
sault would number around two hundred, though they would not attack Israel proper, with the exception of a single attempt to shoot two Kelt missiles at Tel Aviv from a Tu-16 bomber. This change of plans probably resulted from the fact that they only had twenty-five Mirages operational rather than the planned forty, so they were diverted to the assault on Sinai.
In other words, almost every detail Marwan gave the Israelis on April 11 ended up being carried out by the Egyptians on October 6.
In the meantime, however, additional information confirmed Marwan’s estimate of a mid-May attack. Some sources specifically mentioned May 19, explaining the Egyptian considerations. But Marwan showed his remarkable quality as an intelligence source when he reported in early May (that is, a week after Sadat and Assad decided to push off the attack) that the date had been pushed off and was now closer to late May or early June. Three weeks later, he informed Dubi of further delays, of about a month. The Soviets, he reported, had put pressure mostly on Syria to hold off an attack that might create a sense of crisis in advance of the Nixon-Brezhnev summit scheduled for June 18 to 25 in the United States. Marwan added that there was some hope in Egypt that the summit would result in progress on the diplomatic front, making the war unnecessary.13 Here, too, additional sources confirmed Marwan’s information.
Marwan, moreover, was also one of Israel’s main sources regarding Syria’s war plans. At its center stood an assault by three infantry divisions that would advance, under cover of darkness, about six miles into the Golan Heights. At dawn the next morning, the Syrian 3rd Armored Division would push its way west to the 1967 border in order to occupy the entire territory that was lost in the Six-Day War. It later emerged, however, that Syria preferred to attack at first light rather than last, and after wrangling with the Egyptians, a last-minute compromise was reached putting the H-hour, or time of attack, at 2:00 p.m. The armored assault in October also ended up involving two divisions rather than one, because by October the Syrians had added another armored division, making it possible to use two in the assault. But other than these adjustments, the Syrian assault in October ended up being almost identical to the one Marwan described back in April.
The information that continued to come in about Egyptian and Syrian maneuvers confirmed the reports that Sadat had indeed planned to attack on May 19 but had shifted course after meeting Assad. The Egyptian army began amassing forces in the canal area in March, and in early April a reconnaissance flyover photograph showed the number of artillery pieces positioned at the front to be higher than ever. In late April, MI reported that the Third Army, which held the southern sector of the canal front, was preparing for a major exercise from May 20 to 24; at the same time or slightly beforehand, a combined-forces military exercise would be held under the navy’s auspices. Exercises, of course, are often just a cover for a real attack, and MI estimated that during such an exercise, the Egyptians would raise their alert level, move forces toward the front, cancel officers’ leave, and take other security precautions—the same steps that would be taken in the event of an actual war. In early May, MI reported on the call-up of reserves in every branch of the Egyptian military. At around the same time, Marwan reported on a massive movement of troops, including the 6th and 23rd Mechanized Divisions, toward the canal. But then, about a week after the decision was made to push off the war, the signs began to abate. During the second week of May, it was learned that the divisions that had been preparing to leave Cairo and head for the canal had stayed put, and along the canal itself there were no signs of the troop deployments that the Israelis were expecting based on the war plans Marwan had given them. Similar changes were seen on the Syrian front. Despite reports of intensive war preparations, the Syrian army, which regularly reinforced its front with the onset of spring, refrained this time, and even scaled back its deployments.
From all of this, it emerges that during the months of April and May, IDF Military Intelligence had all the data it needed in order to fully understand what was happening on the Arab side and why. But despite this, MI consistently got its assessments wrong, rejecting out of hand the possibility that Syria and Egypt were getting ready for war. A special intelligence survey distributed on May 11 was supposed to assess the likelihood of war, but instead it simply ignored the multiple warnings and clung unblinkingly to the belief that Egypt would never attack without first procuring long-range fighter-bombers and Scud missiles. The report mentioned the arrival of the eighteen Mirages, calling it a “significant step” that could suggest a change in Egypt’s approach, but then added that “it is doubtful that this addition would give the Egyptian leadership the wrong impression that Egypt can hold its own on the aerial front in a conflict with Israel.”14 Once again, the analysts in MI-Research, especially the head of Branch 6 (Egypt), Lt. Col. Bandman, who had been more than willing to embrace the kontzeptzia back when Marwan had first presented it to the Mossad, were now unwilling to recognize a large number of indicators, including those provided by Marwan himself, that strongly suggested that it was no longer viable. And when forced to address the warnings arriving from the best sources in Egypt, these officers chose any explanation that would let them continue believing in it. Exercises in Egypt were explained away as internal propaganda “whose aim was to lend credibility to the regime’s declaration that their country was heading for a general conflict.” The warnings themselves, which were described as a “wave of reports, some of which predict offensive Egyptian action and even named tentative dates,” were dismissed as flowing “from the atmosphere of preparations for a ‘general conflict’” that Egypt had undertaken. Years later, Bandman would explain that he never gave credence to the Mossad’s sources, believing that they simply had mistaken preparations for an exercise as preparations for war.15
It is not clear, however, just how much of an impression all this left on the country’s top decision makers. On April 18, in the wake of one of Marwan’s warnings, Golda Meir convened her kitchen cabinet in her residence, at the request of the head of the Mossad, who had been concerned about the evidence that his agency had accumulated. The aim of the meeting was to assess the likelihood of war and how to prepare for it. For this reason, Zamir participated as well, even though formally his agency had no role in preparing overall intelligence assessments.
All the participants had been in on the Khotel reports. With the exception of MI chief Zeira, all of them assessed that Egypt was intent on war, possibly in the coming months. “I believe that they are going to war,” said Defense Minister Dayan, setting the tone. It is clear that he no longer held fast to the kontzeptzia and was more focused on Sadat’s political dilemma that might force him to attack before his army was ready. The IDF chief of staff, Elazar, said that “there is an inner logic that favors war . . . they could develop a [new] concept according to which war can get them out of their bind.” Zamir emphasized that the conditions were ripening, in the Egyptians’ own mind, for an attack. He said that the arrival of the Mirages was a major development and, apparently based on reports from Marwan, that the Egyptians believed more jets were on the way; at some point they would reach a critical mass that would allow them to attack IAF bases. And though Zamir, too, was still thinking within some version of the kontzeptzia, in the sense that he was still wondering what weapons the Egyptians thought they needed in order to attack, his version of it was far more flexible than that of his counterpart at MI. Zamir spoke of Egypt’s improved SAMs, their new bridging equipment, new electronics, and improved home-front defenses as making war far more realistic from Sadat’s standpoint—and quietly added his belief that war was on its way.
This contrasted dramatically with Eli Zeira’s assessment. The MI chief rejected the possibility that Sadat would, under current conditions, launch a war. He dismissed the warnings and focused only on the actual preparations for conflict. And though he conceded that “this time there are a few more signs of concrete preparations than there were in the presentation of November–December 1972,” he quickly dismisse
d them, saying that any “logical analysis of the situation will show that Egypt would be mistaken to go to war.” He was willing to accept the possibility of an Egyptian error, and therefore clarified that MI would continue to search for additional indicators. “The truth is,” he concluded, “we see more indicators that [Sadat] has no intention of acting than that he does plan on going to war, but it is still too early to establish this.” Given the fact that these words were stated in the thick of Egypt’s war preparations, when reports about the reinforcement of Egypt’s battle ranks at the canal front continued to stream in to MI, and at a time when Israel’s best intelligence sources were warning that Sadat intended to launch a war within a month, Zeira’s statements at this time seem increasingly far-fetched.
In the discussion that followed, the prime minister, as well as her adviser, Galili, inclined toward the view that a combined Egyptian-Syrian assault was a real possibility in the coming months; a consensus formed around this view.16 The following day, Elazar ordered the IDF to prepare itself for a sudden attack on two fronts. A month later, Dayan held two meetings of the IDF general staff, and it was concluded that from then on, the IDF would work under the assumption that over the summer, the Egyptians and Syrians (but not the Jordanians) might launch a war. “Be ready for the summer,” Dayan told the military brass. “It begins a month from now.” This was the beginning of what became known as the Blue-White Alert, which included a rapid buildup of forces and preparations for a war that was just months away.17
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