The Angel

by Uri Bar-Joseph

  Zamir was less worried about Marwan’s inner conflict than about whether or not a war would start the next day. He had been a senior IDF officer in 1959, when a poorly thought-out military exercise involving an unannounced, emergency mass call-up of reserves instilled fear in an entire nation, triggered the call-up of reserves in Egypt and Syria in response, and ratcheted up tensions in the whole region. The affair, known as the Night of the Ducks, brought an end to the military careers of the commander of the IDF’s Operations Branch, Maj. Gen. Meir Zorea, and the chief of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Yehoshafat Harkabi. Images of that episode flashed through Zamir’s mind as he spoke with Marwan. The Night of the Ducks, he realized, would look like child’s play compared with a mistaken emergency mobilization for war in the middle of Yom Kippur. He could see the worldwide reaction to the IDF pulling tens of thousands of reserve soldiers out of the synagogues and sending them to the front to await an Arab onslaught that never came. The price would be incalculable. Now was the time, Zamir knew, to press his source as hard as possible, to make sure the warning was well grounded.

  Marwan’s discomfort did little to quell Zamir’s concerns. He quickly realized that he’d have to rely on his own experience, which was much greater than Marwan’s, to formulate his own opinion. Zamir didn’t know what had happened in Israel since his departure to London, but he had no reason to think that the reserves had already been called up. He understood that a clear warning that war would be launched the next day would leave the decision makers without any alternatives to a full-blown emergency call-up. And so, despite his being the chief of the Mossad and not the prime minister and her cabinet, he suddenly felt the full weight of the government’s decision on his shoulders. But Zamir was himself a former general, having previously served as the chief of the IDF Southern Command, and he fully understood the implications of trying to fend off an Arab assault without calling up reserves.

  By the end of the meeting, he had already made up his mind. He would send back to Israel an unambiguous warning that Egypt and Syria planned on launching a full-scale attack the next day.

  This decision would alter the course of the Yom Kippur War.

  But he wasn’t finished with Marwan. Next, he grilled him about the war plans. Marwan hadn’t brought any documents with him, but most of the key details of the latest battle plans were burned in his memory and had just been reconfirmed by his contacts in Cairo. Nothing had changed since the last time he’d passed the most recent version of the war plans to his handlers several weeks before. Egyptian infantry divisions would cross the Suez Canal and move farther east up to six miles. He went into some detail about the air and commando raids aimed at blocking IDF reinforcements heading for the front. Marwan also confirmed that the Egyptian air force would send its Tupolev Tu-16 bombers armed with Kelt missiles to strike the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. This, too, had appeared in the plans he had previously passed along.

  Zamir also asked about the precise hour of attack (H-hour), though he didn’t consider it such a pressing question. In all of the Egyptian battle plans that Israel had seen for years, H-hour was precisely sunset—a time that left just enough daylight to carry out a major air assault on the Sinai, before darkness came to preclude an effective response by the Israeli Air Force. According to Marwan’s report, that would be the plan this time as well. On October 6, 1973, the sun would set at 5:20 p.m. Israel time.

  What neither Marwan nor his handlers knew, however, was that two days earlier, the Egyptian war minister had met with the president of Syria and had agreed to launch the attack at 2:00 p.m., as a compromise between Syrian and Egyptian operational needs.

  The meeting lasted more than two hours. Marwan returned to his hotel, with Mossad agents keeping tabs on him. The next day, Saturday, he went back to Egypt. Zamir and Dubi, who had spent the whole meeting writing down every word, went directly to the home of the Mossad’s London station chief, a ten-minute walk. On the way, Zamir wondered aloud what would happen if he sent a warning of immediate war and the war never came. He didn’t need to wait for Dubi’s answer, however. He had already made up his mind.

  They reached the apartment of Rafi, the station chief, who was waiting for them. Zamir took a few minutes to carefully craft, longhand, the coded message that he would send to his chief of staff, Freddy Eini, who waited at home in Israel. Also present was Zvi Malhin, who was responsible for security for the meeting with Marwan. When Malhin saw the message Zamir had written, he reminded him of the Night of the Ducks of 1959, as if Zamir needed reminding, and what happened to those responsible. But Malhin, too, was convinced that war was coming: A few hours before war started, he called his wife in the Afeka neighborhood of Tel Aviv, and told her to find a neighbor’s house with a bomb shelter where she could take cover. Their own house didn’t have one.

  Zamir called Freddy Eini. By 1973, direct dial had been introduced between London and Israel, and there was no need for an international operator. It was now close to 3:00 a.m., exactly twenty-four hours after Eini had called Zamir to tell him that the Angel wanted an urgent meeting in London to talk about chemicals. It was extremely important to Zamir that Eini now understand every word he said, and that he move as quickly as possible to implement what was included in the message. When Eini answered, Zamir first told him, “Put your feet in cold water”—that is, be wide awake, right now. Once Eini had assured him he was fully alert, Zamir dictated to him the message as he had written it down. It read as follows, in full:

  The company, it turns out, intends to sign the contract today before nightfall.

  It is the same contract, with the same conditions with which we are familiar.

  They know that tomorrow is a holiday.

  They think they can land tomorrow before dark.

  I spoke with the manager, but he cannot put it off because of his commitment to other managers, and he wants to keep his commitment.

  I’ll update you on all the conditions of the contract.

  Because they want to win the race, they are very afraid that it will be made public before the signing, for there may be competitors, and then some of the shareholders will think twice.

  They have no partners outside the region.

  In the Angel’s opinion, the chances of signing are 99.9 percent, but then again, he is like that.12

  Meanwhile Dubi prepared a communiqué about the meeting. When he was done, he went to the Israeli embassy at Palace Green in central London in order to send it via the code room. According to some accounts, because of Yom Kippur no one was on duty in the code room, and they had to wait for someone to show up. In truth, however, the station chief was there waiting for him, and the report was sent to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv during the early morning hours. The communiqué repeated Zamir’s alert that war would commence later that day and added that the source had said that Sadat might change his mind at the last minute. Beyond this, the main message was that the Egyptian war objective was limited only to capturing territory up to six miles east of the Suez Canal, and that at this stage there was no intention to advance to the Mitla and Gidi Passes.

  DUBI WENT BACK to his apartment. His wife, Ronit, was waiting. She was used to his unpredictable schedule, but his long absence in the middle of the night of Yom Kippur was unusual even for him, and it suggested something serious. She didn’t have to ask many questions. With her, he could be explicit. “It’s war. The bar mitzvah’s off.”

  Their son Ofer had come of age, and his bar mitzvah celebration, which was supposed to take place soon after, was one of Israel’s first, if least painful, casualties in the conflict that would begin in just a few hours. Later that morning, utterly exhausted, Dubi finally went to bed.

  Ronit woke him shortly after 1:00 p.m. The war had begun.

  Zamir, on the other hand, hadn’t gotten any sleep at all. From the moment he’d finished his phone call with Eini, he had been overwhelmed with tension. When he heard that the Egyptians had attacked at 2:00 p.m. Israel time, he
“leapt through the roof,” he later recalled. In part, his relief was because he was confident that Israel would achieve an easy victory. But mainly it was because he could breathe easy now that his warning hadn’t proved false. He stayed in London until Sunday, when he flew to Cyprus, and then was taken back to Israel by an airplane sent specially for him. He knew nothing about how the war was going and remained convinced that his message had allowed the Israelis a proper response. Only when he met Nahum Admoni, a senior Mossad officer who came to meet him at the airport, did he discover just how wrong he was.

  Chapter 10

  DOVECOTE: WARNING AND WAR

  Freddy Eini didn’t need coffee to get him going after hanging up with Zamir. He quickly began going down the list of calls he needed to make. As he’d promised the night before, the first was to the MI chief, Eli Zeira. Because MI was the central clearinghouse for all intelligence gathered by Israel’s different branches, it made sense that its director should be the first to receive the message. Zeira listened carefully and told Eini to immediately call the head of MI-Research, Brig. Gen. Arieh Shalev, and to read it to him word for word. Before doing that, however, Eini continued down the list. He called Golda Meir’s military secretary, Israel Lior, as well as the assistant to the defense minister, Arieh Braun. Then he called Arieh Shalev, as Zeira had told him. Years later, Eini would recall how Shalev, who was none too pleased about being woken up, told him to refer it to MI’s reporting and dissemination center, and they’d take care of it. Clearly the head of MI-Research still hadn’t recognized the magnitude of the crisis. After a brief and, from Eini’s perspective, rather aggressive exchange, Shalev got the picture and wrote down the message that Eini dictated to him.

  The IDF chief of staff was not on Eini’s list. Instead he got the message from his aide-de camp, Avner Shalev, who had heard it from Brig. Gen. Yehoshua Raviv, the defense minister’s military secretary. Both Dayan and Lior called Eini back to hear the message a second time. By 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, the entire decision-making echelon of the Israeli government was wide awake and getting ready for an attack they expected to come the following evening.1

  TO WHAT EXTENT did Ashraf Marwan’s warning, the clearest warning of war that Israel ever received ahead of time, really succeed in dispelling the paradigm according to which Egypt would never launch a war so long as it didn’t have long-range warplanes and operational Scud missiles? This is not merely an academic question. As the events of that day unfolded, every main player acted strictly according to his or her own view about how seriously to take the Angel’s warning—sometimes even to the point of ignoring direct orders.

  Beginning early in the morning of October 6, key Israeli decision makers and their aides held intensive meetings in the respective headquarters of the IDF chief of staff, the defense minister, and the prime minister—three buildings located just a few yards apart from each other at the defense complex in Tel Aviv known to Israelis as “The Campus” (hakirya). Two questions dominated their discussions. The first concerned an emergency call-up of reserves; the second was about a preemptive strike to be launched by Israel’s air force, in order to keep the military initiative in Israel’s hands, just as had happened so successfully with the start of the Six-Day War in 1967.

  As far as IDF chief of staff David Elazar was concerned, Marwan’s warning removed all doubt about war. From the moment his assistant woke him up at four thirty that morning, Elazar prepared for a conflagration that was to begin later that day. Within an hour and a half, he ordered the commander of the air force to ready a preemptive strike to be launched at 11:00 a.m., approved a partial call-up of reserves for the air force, made the necessary preparations for a broader call-up of army reserves, and ordered further preparations for war, both at the front lines and on the home front. At 6:00 a.m., he walked into his first meeting, with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. There he made his case for approval of what he saw as two absolutely critical moves under the circumstances: a preemptive strike and a mass call-up of reserves.

  Elazar, however, ran headlong into the skepticism of Dayan regarding the validity of Marwan’s warning and the likelihood of war. As opposed to Elazar’s fast pace of action, Dayan insisted on taking things more slowly. When their meeting began, Dayan first addressed less pressing matters, such as the evacuation of children (in the form of a “field trip”) from the civilian settlements on the Golan Heights, and the Civil Defense Corps’ preparations for the possibility of Egyptian Scud missile attacks. Only afterward did he turn to Elazar’s two requests. He flatly turned down the preemptive strike and agreed to only a very limited call-up of a single reserve brigade to reinforce the northern front. The back-and-forth between him and Elazar, who demanded that at least four divisions be called up, reminded one of the people present in the meeting of the bargaining session between God and Abraham on the question of how many righteous people God would need to find in Sodom and Gomorrah to refrain from destroying the cities. In the end, Elazar and Dayan couldn’t bridge the gap, and they agreed to let the prime minister decide.

  Why did Dayan rebuff Elazar’s requests? The reasons he gave were telling. He rejected a preemptive strike, he said, because “on the basis of the information we have right now, we cannot do it.” In other words, what distinguished Dayan from Elazar wasn’t the question of whether such a strike was necessary to thwart the Arab attack but whether that attack was actually coming or not. Elazar had concluded that war was a sure thing, and a preemptive strike was therefore unavoidable. Dayan saw it as just one of many possibilities, so he opposed the strike. The same was true for calling up the reserves. Dayan was a very cautious man, and he didn’t believe Israel could win a war with the standing army alone. Rather, his denial of Elazar’s request came from his assessment that the likelihood of war was still too low to justify a broad call-up. “You can’t call up the whole system,” he told him, “just because of a few messages from Zvika.”2

  Dayan’s skepticism about the war was based in part, apparently, on the assessments of Eli Zeira. Zeira joined the meeting at 7:00 a.m. and reported that, despite further indicators that Egypt and Syria were headed for a military initiative, he was still not prepared to accept that war was likely and added that from a strategic-political standpoint, Sadat had no need for it. About fifteen minutes later, at the beginning of a hastily assembled meeting of the IDF General Staff, Zeira restated his thesis that starting a war would be irrational for the Egyptians and Syrians, even though their deployments justified the IDF’s taking measures of its own. And in the meeting with the prime minister that began just after 8:00 a.m., Zeira reiterated his belief that even though Egypt and Syria were ready for war from a technical and operational standpoint, Sadat had no compulsion to launch an attack and knew that if he did attack, he would lose.

  From all these statements it emerges that despite the fact that Marwan’s warning (as well as additional developments) may have led him to raise his assessment about the likelihood of war to some degree, the MI chief still clung to the same set of beliefs that he had held since taking his post a year earlier, and continued to doubt whether there would be a war that day. In this he was relying, in part, on the contribution of the head of Branch 6 (Egypt) of MI’s Research Division, Lt. Col. Yonah Bandman, on whose expertise and judgment regarding Egyptian intentions Zeira continued to rely until the very last minute. In the late morning of that day, Bandman believed that the Egyptians saw no reason to go to war, and even refused an order from the chief of MI-Research to prepare a report saying that the likelihood of war was high. In the end, that report was prepared by another officer, while Bandman wrote a dissenting report of his own, explaining why war was unlikely. Zeira, who received Bandman’s report, considered having it distributed as well, but in the end chose not to. The very fact that he considered it, however, shows that in spite of everything, he still thought that war that day was far from certain.3

  Elazar, on the other hand, took the Mossad chief’s warning at face value. In his vi
ew, there was no time to waste. At about 7:45 a.m., after conducting the meeting of the IDF General Staff, he spoke for a few minutes, privately, with the commanders of the Southern and Northern Commands, Maj. Gen. Shmuel Gonen and Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi, respectively. He ordered them both to ready their officers for a war that would begin later that day.

  For her part, Prime Minister Golda Meir was not buying either Zeira’s or Dayan’s hesitation. Like Elazar, she expressed her complete faith in Zamir’s message about his meeting with Marwan, and saw the question of war coming that day as a closed one. After arriving at her office in IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, she asked to see the defense minister immediately. At first he refused to meet her before 10:00 or 11:00 that morning, and only agreed to meet earlier after she insisted.

  The meeting in Golda Meir’s office began just after 8:00 a.m. Elazar and Dayan each presented their positions. Again Dayan dawdled, raising issues of civilian evacuations and home-front preparations. Elazar, on the other hand, did not mince words about the possibility of war. “I read the message from Zvika [Zamir]’s man,” he said. “The message is authentic. For us, this is very short notice.”4 He demanded that immediate and decisive moves be made.

  Meir was quick to make her decision. She accepted Dayan’s position rejecting the proposed preemptive strike, out of fear that the world, and especially the United States, would see Israel as the aggressor. This, she believed, would make it harder for the United States to help Israel during the conflict, a significant loss that would outweigh any tactical gains.

  On the matter of calling up the reserves, on the other hand, Meir accepted Elazar’s position. According to the minutes of that meeting, she did not mention Ashraf Marwan explicitly, but in the days that followed, she said several times that her assessment had been based on the message from “Zvika’s friend.”5