A few days later, against the backdrop of spiraling hostilities between Israel and Syria and a concern that a full-scale war would flare up again, Marwan arrived in Damascus. His goal was to impress upon the Syrians that if they restarted the war with Israel, they would do so on their own.9 But there was something else on his agenda, which very few knew about. Marwan had been asked by the Mossad to find out what Assad was really thinking about renewing fire. After returning from Riyadh to Cairo, he had proposed to Sadat—who himself did not know what Assad was thinking—that he go to Damascus, and Sadat agreed. Assad received Marwan and spoke with him openly, convinced that his words would not go beyond the two of them and Sadat. But Marwan’s report quickly reached Israel.
In Tel Aviv, the report was greeted with wild approval, mainly because it represented an honest, clear, and authentic view of the Syrian leader’s thoughts about war with Israel—thoughts that were far less belligerent than the Israelis had believed. The skirmishes with Syria came to an end, and on May 31 the two governments signed a disengagement pact at the Golan Heights, bringing the Yom Kippur War to its formal conclusion.
MARWAN’S ROLE IN the negotiations reflected his rising position in the Egyptian leadership. When he wasn’t on a mission sent by Sadat, he was by the president’s side. One unforgettable example took place on January 18, 1974, when Kissinger met Sadat at his residence in Aswan, carrying a personal letter from Golda Meir, in which she expressed her longing for peace. When Sadat had finished reading it, Marwan walked in and whispered into his ear that representatives of Egypt and Israel had just reached a disengagement agreement at the negotiations tent at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road. Sadat was visibly moved. He stood up, kissed the secretary of state on both cheeks, and said, “Today I take off my military uniform. I do not expect to wear it again except on formal occasions. Tell her that this is my answer to her letter.”10 Kissinger reported back to the Israelis—and so did Marwan. Although Marwan’s report only confirmed Kissinger’s, this in itself was no small matter. “Governments, like anyone else,” John le Carré has his character George Smiley telling his students, “trust what they pay for, and are suspicious of what they don’t.”11 If nothing else, Marwan’s report raised Kissinger’s credibility in the eyes of Israeli leaders.
Marwan’s position improved on a formal level, as well. On February 14, 1974, he was made secretary to the president of the republic for foreign relations, a new position that turned him into a direct competitor to Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi. The already tense relations between the two worsened in the months that followed, especially in light of reports that Sadat had been disappointed by Fahmi’s failure to improve the complicated relations between Egypt on the one hand, and Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization on the other. Reports from “diplomatic sources in Beirut”—often a code word for one high-level figure or another in the Middle East—said that he was also disappointed by Fahmi’s failure to find an effective balance for Egypt between the two superpowers, stirring dissatisfaction among leftists in Egypt who wanted to see a greater Soviet role in the country. Given the fact that both Sadat and Marwan were sharply anti-Soviet, the idea that Marwan would be promoted at Fahmi’s expense in order to improve relations with Moscow seems unlikely. Yet there he was, Sadat’s right-hand man, the rising star in the Egyptian political arena, climbing the ladder.
On August 18, 1974, he took another step up when he was appointed to head up a new department in the President’s Office dealing with Arab affairs. In the wake of this move, which formally excised some of the functions of the Foreign Ministry and transferred them to Marwan’s office, “diplomatic sources in Beirut” reported that Sadat was planning on firing Fahmi in the near future and appointing Marwan in his place.12 This never ended up happening, but there can be no doubt that Marwan’s position in the Egyptian pantheon was on the rise—at Fahmi’s expense.
Marwan’s centrality to Egyptian diplomacy was reflected in a string of sensitive missions he carried out for Sadat to advance an interim agreement with Israel. As opposed to Fahmi, who was much more interested in the favor of the Arab world than in advancing his own president’s policies, and therefore continued to oppose any agreement with Israel, Marwan was relatively independent and had a clear pro-American attitude, which made it much easier for Sadat to work with him. Marwan’s closest friends in the Arab world, people like Kamal Adham, were similarly interested in ridding the region of the Kremlin’s influence, and together they created a whole sphere in which active opposition to the Soviets could be expressed and put into practice.
And so, Marwan found himself taking a leading role in the most sensitive, minute, manipulative diplomatic dances that defined the Middle East in the 1970s. One of the most interesting of these brought together two complex relationships, that of the Israeli-Arab conflict and that of Iran and Iraq. In 1974, at the height of American-Egyptian efforts to reach a new interim agreement with Israel, Kissinger and Sadat tried to garner Iraqi support, which they saw as critical in the face of ardent Syrian opposition to an agreement. Like other Arab states, Iraq publicly took a fiercely anti-Israel position. But beneath the surface, the Iraqis had other interests, and by playing on those interests they believed it was possible to effect a change in Iraq’s stance. The most obvious of these was Iraq’s need to stop the Kurdish rebellion in the country’s north, which had been going on for years and had already claimed heavy casualties in the Iraqi military. The Kurds received both financial and logistical support from Iran and the United States, and a sizable contingent from the Mossad had spent years training the Kurdish fighters to take on the Iraqi army. After repeated failed attempts to quash the rebellion by military means, Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein had secretly turned to the shah of Iran and other leaders to try to end the rebellion through diplomacy. Kissinger and Sadat thought that if Egypt and the United States were to agree to get Iran to stop helping the Kurds, Iraq might be convinced to support an interim agreement with Israel in exchange.
Ashraf Marwan, who was perfect for these kinds of sensitive negotiations, traveled to Tehran and Baghdad in September 1974 to sound out the leaders on such a deal. In at least some of the talks, as with the shah of Iran on September 2, there were also top-level Saudi officials taking part, including Crown Prince Saud, as well as Kamal Adham. The three of them expressed their sense that Saddam wanted to ratchet down Soviet influence in Iraq, so there was a good chance he’d be willing to agree to a deal if it included the Americans displacing the Soviets in helping the Iraqi military.
The mission was a success. By the end of it, Iran announced it was willing to stop helping the Kurds in exchange for Iraqi territorial concessions in the Persian Gulf. Iraq, for its part, let it be known that it would tone down its anti-Iranian policies and give its tacit support to an interim agreement between Egypt and Israel, in the process isolating Syria as the only major opponent. And indeed, Iran brought an effective end to the Kurdish revolt in Iraq in 1974.13
In other cases, Marwan took part in strategic initiatives that, even if they didn’t bear fruit, nevertheless still underscored his growing status. On August 13, 1974, he and Fahmi met with Kissinger at the State Department. They covered a range of subjects, including American economic aid to Egypt, military aid to Egypt despite internal opposition in the United States, the price of oil, and the interim agreement with Israel. They also talked about tensions between Egypt and Libya. Kissinger asked why, despite Gaddafi’s hostility toward Egypt’s peace strategy that led to Libyan border provocations, Egypt had not gone to war against Libya—and even promised that America would support such a move. Marwan, who was known as a friend to the Libyan leadership, offered no opposition to Kissinger’s idea and even went as far as declaring the Libyan military to be a paper tiger, which, despite having thousands of Soviet tanks, had only enough manpower to field a single tank brigade. Yet he nonetheless repeated that there was no point in discussing such a move before signing a new interim agreement with Israel, wh
ich would both stabilize the region and spell the end of Soviet involvement in Egypt.14
THE SOVIETS WERE not going quietly, however. The combination of Marwan’s ascent and the rise of anti-Soviet policy in Egypt led the Kremlin to conclude that the president’s aide had to be neutralized. According to Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign affairs division who defected to Britain in 1992, taking with him a large portion of his archive, what most angered the Soviets were reports of a secret visit to Cairo by CIA chief William Colby. The KGB’s central command decided to take “active measures” against Marwan, who Moscow believed held overall responsibility for Egyptian intelligence, including relations with the CIA. The KGB’s Section A prepared a psyops campaign painting Marwan as an American spy. This operation was given high priority, and the agency even sent the head of its North African division, Vladimir Kazakov, to Cairo in May 1975 to oversee the final preparations.
In the operation, KGB officers prepared a series of articles to be planted in newspapers in Lebanon, Syria, and Libya, portraying Marwan not only as working for the CIA but also as having taken massive bribes and kickbacks in Egyptian deals with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The KGB’s Cairo station also spread rumors that Marwan had a romantic affair with Jehan Sadat—and that the president knew about it.
The fact that Ashraf Marwan, a young, handsome, and successful man, was close with the Egyptian republic’s first lady, was well known; sometimes he even accompanied her when she traveled abroad with her daughters. In one such case, when she stayed at the George V in Paris, he asked the Mossad to bug her suite so that he would know what she said about him. The Mossad agreed but Jehan hardly spoke about him.
Marwan’s sensitivity to his relations with the first lady was also connected to her marital life. Many people knew that the Sadats’ marital relationship was far from ideal. Sadat did not trust his wife, who, as we have seen, tended to intervene in affairs of state even against his will. Sadat rarely stayed at his official residence in Giza, so the couple lived apart most of the time.15 So while we may not have any evidence that Ashraf and Jehan actually had an affair, there was nonetheless fertile ground for the growth of these rumors. They definitely embarrassed Sadat and began driving a wedge between him and the man who only recently had been his most trusted aide.
Even after Marwan was dismissed from his role in the President’s Office in March 1976 and installed to lead an industrial consortium far away from Sadat’s inner circle (a development for which the Soviets, typically, took undeserved credit), the KGB continued to see him as a major threat. Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who later defected to the West and wrote his memoirs, reported that he heard hallway conversations about the possibility of assassinating Sadat. Though there is no evidence that the KGB ever planned such an attack, there were a number of Soviet-linked organizations that did. In December 1977, Gordievsky learned that in a secret meeting in Damascus between leaders of Syrian intelligence and members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), plans for killing Sadat were discussed—plans that also included killing Ashraf Marwan. As far as we know, the KGB never tried to advance the plan but also did nothing to stop it.16
But aside from Marwan’s pro-American stance and excellent relations with leading American officials—especially Kissinger—the Soviets may have had another reason to see him as a serious threat. Marwan’s name was linked to a secret multilateral project aimed at limiting the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East and especially in Africa. This project, known as the Safari Club, was named after a Parisian nightclub where its members often met. According to the best account we have of how the group worked, including interviews of Kamal Adham and his successor as head of Saudi intelligence, the Safari Club was established by Count Alexandre de Marenches, who was at the time the head of the central French intelligence agency, the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), and was known as an anti-Soviet hawk. The initiative came at the heels of two specific developments. One was the spread of Soviet influence in Africa, especially in Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, and Somalia; the other was a series of scandals in Washington, especially the Watergate affair that brought about the resignation of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, as well as the congressional hearings on the activities of the CIA in 1975, which significantly weakened the agency’s ability to address Soviet expansion. Against this background, Marenches, with the support of French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, turned to the leaders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco, asking that each take upon itself some of the responsibility for halting the spread of communism in Africa and the Middle East. The four leaders agreed, and the Safari Club was formally launched on September 1, 1976.
The organization’s command center was located in Cairo, and it included both planning and operations branches. France provided the technical means, including secure communications, and Saudi Arabia provided principal funding. Professional parleys were held in France, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, in which the main operations were coordinated in three major areas: financial and military aid to anti-Soviet forces in Africa; intelligence cooperation; and covert or “black” operations, such as psyops or assassinations. As part of the Safari Club’s operations, which continued up until the Iranian revolution in 1979, Morocco and Egypt sent, with logistical help from France, an expeditionary force to Zaire in an effort to help its pro-American leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, fend off external threats to Katanga, the country’s richest mining strip. At the same time, members of the club assisted the anti-Communist rebels in Angola and Mozambique who fought their pro-Soviet regimes, and supported Djibouti in its effort to prevent Ethiopia from invading it and to help stabilize the Horn of Africa. The club acted under the constant watch, and approval, of Washington.17 According to some sources, the close congressional oversight of the CIA beginning in the mid-1970s required that the Saudis effectively fund the covert operations of an organization built by ex-CIA officials outside of American soil and, therefore, beyond congressional supervision. The organization carried out activities that would never have been approved for the CIA—some with direct CIA cooperation.18
Marwan was chosen by Sadat to represent him in the Safari Club.19 Otherwise, very little is known about his involvement in its activities. What is certain, however, is that by the time the Safari Club was founded in September 1976, Marwan was already out of Sadat’s inner circle, no longer in the President’s Office or carrying out his “special” missions. It is entirely possible that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the group—and that all the rumors to the contrary were just KGB propaganda. Despite the overwhelming number of such rumors connecting Marwan to global-scale anti-Soviet events, it is very hard to know how seriously to take them. It is, however, fair to assume that the KGB did see him as someone worthy of neutralizing or at least reducing his effectiveness, not so much because they thought his activities would, for example, bring the downfall of Mozambique’s socialist president, Samora Machel, or rock the balance of power between Ethiopia and Djibouti, but rather out of their desire to weaken the anti-Soviet camp in Egypt itself.
THE KGB’S DEPICTION of Marwan as a CIA spy was fundamentally inaccurate; although he had excellent relations with the Americans, especially Henry Kissinger, he did not actually work for them before the mid-1980s. But their portrayal of him as corrupt, on the other hand, was quite close to the truth. Marwan began accumulating his wealth through graft soon after his rise to prominence in the wake of the Corrective Revolution in 1971. By the mid-1970s, when the Soviets started propagating reports of his corruption, he was already quite wealthy. Some of his money came from the Mossad, but the Soviets didn’t know that. Most of it came from other illicit sources, especially percentages on various deals he brokered, taking full advantage of his political status. In other cases, Marwan used his position to get better prices on profitable purchases of his own. One example was the June 1974 purchase he made of a parcel of land, in his wife’s name, in th
e town of Kardassa, on the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria. To secure it, he sent a request to the Egyptian minister of agriculture, claiming that the act reflected the will of the president. In a later investigation, it emerged that Sadat knew nothing about it. Similarly, the question was raised as to where Marwan got the money for the purchase.20 In other cases Marwan needed no capital at all to make his money. His closeness to Sadat was far more useful. This was most evident in an affair involving the Coca-Cola Corporation.
Since 1968, when Coca-Cola began bottling operations in Israel as a result of pressure in the United States, it was a target for the Arab boycott, an organized effort of the Arab states, beginning in 1948, to refuse to deal not only with Israel directly but also with any company that did business with Israel (the “secondary boycott”). In 1974, Coca-Cola began a campaign aimed at removing its products from the boycott list. Egypt, the leader of the Arab world and a fledgling ally of the United States, a country whose leader spoke openly about ending the conflict with Israel, was the natural target of the company’s efforts. The campaign was led by Sam Ayoub, a senior Coca-Cola executive who was a native of Alexandria, Egypt, and knew his way around the Arab world. When he looked into the question of who could influence Sadat into removing Coca-Cola from the boycott, the man he found was Ashraf Marwan. Marwan turned to Sadat, and Sadat opened the doors to the Egyptian market. Part of the payment came in the form of investments that the company made in the Egyptian economy; but according to Ayoub, Marwan earned a heavy financial benefit in exchange for greasing the wheels.21
Other questions surround Marwan’s academic achievements. Alongside his intensive diplomatic efforts, his wealth-building efforts, and his espionage efforts, Ashraf Marwan also claimed to have found the time to complete his doctorate—an effort that, according to his friends, he had begun immediately after finishing his master’s degree. He claimed that in 1974 he submitted his thesis to his adviser, Dr. Ahmed Mustafa, who later became Egypt’s science minister.22 This seems highly unlikely. From the time he purportedly completed his master’s studies, around 1970 or 1971, until 1974, he was incredibly busy with affairs of state, business, and treachery. The man was admittedly talented; yet it is very difficult to imagine his adding a major act of scholarship into the mix. And though for the rest of his life he brandished the title of “Doctor,” quite a few people called his degree into question. Muhammad Tharwat, for example, in his biography of Marwan, wrote that he failed to complete his studies because of his intensive involvement in Egyptian politics. According to another source, Marwan paid his adviser off, and the latter not only approved the doctorate but also wrote it. Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman who became one of Marwan’s most bitter rivals in the 1980s, claimed that Marwan never wrote the dissertation and received the degree only because his father was the president of Cairo University. Fayed, who could spin a yarn with the best of them, was wrong about Marwan’s father, who was an army general and never held that position. But he may have been right in challenging the legitimacy of the degree.
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