ON MARCH 1, 1976, a presidential order decreed the termination of Ashraf Marwan’s service in the President’s Office, and his appointment to the position of chairman of the Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI)—a new international consortium aimed at establishing an independent Arab arms industry. On the face of it, this was a promotion, giving him responsibility over a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and factories employing thousands of workers. In practice, Marwan had been sacked. It was more or less the end of his political career.
The same factors that underlay previous attempts to bring Marwan down four years earlier became the cause of his downfall now. One was jealousy. Marwan succeeded, in just ten years, in becoming one of the closest people to Sadat, a key player in the leadership, and a realistic candidate for foreign minister. In a society like Egypt’s, where age and experience mean so much, his youth (he turned thirty in 1974) and rapid rise were enough to earn him many enemies. His crass behavior and his transparent contempt for colleagues only fanned the flames. The fact that he carried out the most sensitive of Sadat’s missions without bothering to alert the diplomats alienated much of the Foreign Ministry, as well. His most important rival was Foreign Minister Fahmi himself. They had been close when Marwan was just starting out, and Fahmi had invited him to exclusive dinners with leading Americans, including Kissinger. But as Sadat’s upstart aide took on ever greater responsibility in Egyptian foreign affairs, increasingly keeping Fahmi out of the loop, the foreign minister grew more and more alarmed.23
Another group of rivals were the remaining Nasserites who still held positions of power in Egypt. Marwan’s assistance in helping Sadat eviscerate the “centers of power” in 1971, as well as his anti-Soviet stance and his influence on Sadat’s new foreign policy—all of these turned him into a red flag in the bullish eyes of anyone who still revered Nasser’s legacy, especially Nasser’s own family. To this group were added, over time, various figures in the President’s Office, in the military, and in the media. Some had been personally offended by Marwan; others were worried about his rise to power because of his debauchery and the stench of corruption that seemed to follow his every move. He was young, he had family connections, he was brazen, and he seemed to accumulate and squander his wealth with breathtaking speed. He seemed incapable of keeping his mouth shut. And to top it all off, the KGB ran a vast and effective smear campaign against him.
“Friends may come and go,” the old saying has it, “but enemies accumulate.” As time passed, an ever-widening circle of influential Egyptians saw Marwan’s elimination from the public arena as a critical interest.
And so, after a hiatus of two years, a series of articles appeared cataloging his corruption. These triggered repeated appeals for an investigation. Sadat eventually capitulated and, as discussed earlier, he appointed Marwan’s nemesis in the President’s Office, Ahmad al-Masiri, to lead the inquiry. Al-Masiri was faithful to his mission. The investigation revealed, among other things, that Marwan had many millions of dollars invested in London. Neither Marwan nor his wife could offer a plausible explanation for the money. The findings were brought to Sadat and left little room for maneuver. Sadat announced that Marwan was out. From now on, the president’s former right-hand aide would take charge of an entirely new organization, far removed from political power.24
THE ARAB ORGANIZATION for Industrialization was founded in April 1975 as a typical expression of the Arab world’s attempts, throughout the mid-1970s, to reinvent itself. The oil crisis precipitated by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) during the 1973 Yom Kippur War brought tremendous profits to oil-producing states, especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. These helped fund cooperation within the Arab world in order to make it a dominant player not just in the global energy market but also in other key areas, including the production of arms. The AOI was meant to lay the groundwork for an Arab military-industrial complex that would supply the lion’s share of the region’s arms through its own independent production of weapons and munitions. Participants in AOI included the governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, which offered funding; and Egypt, which offered the human capital and industrial capability required to produce weapons, an infrastructure Egypt had been developing since the 1960s. With an opening budget of over a billion dollars, AOI employed more than 18,000 people at its height. The project was overseen by Ashraf Marwan, who was chairman of the board, and the defense ministers of the four member states.
Given his age and lack of relevant experience, Marwan was not a natural choice to head up so huge and ambitious an operation. Yet the field was not entirely alien to him: He had a degree in chemistry and had gained some work experience in the production of explosives; more important, Marwan had become a master at weapons procurement, not just before the war—when he played a key role in helping Egypt acquire fighter planes via Libya—but also afterward. In the fall of 1975, for example, he held talks in France about a plan to build a factory in Egypt to assemble Mirage F1 planes for Marcel Dassault, and to provide maintenance for Mirages in the Saudi and Kuwaiti air forces, a negotiation that had resulted from a conversation initiated with Giscard d’Estaing, in which he also brought him up to date about efforts to reach a diplomatic agreement between Egypt and Israel.25
So Marwan’s experience was in fact more relevant than it may have seemed on paper. And yet, it did not justify choosing him over experienced managers of major industrial concerns. The decision was obviously political, a result of pressure brought by Marwan’s friends in the oil-rich states who wanted to make sure the project would be run by someone who understood their needs; and of Sadat’s own need to find a new job for his former aide that would smooth his transition out of the President’s Office and make his dismissal less embarrassing to Sadat. The president sweetened the package by awarding Marwan, just days later, a medal for his “wondrous achievements for Egypt in the most critical phases of the October war.”26 Marwan’s public status, if not his political career, had been preserved.
The result, however, was that while many of his rivals were satisfied by his disappearance from Sadat’s circle, quite a few others worried that the move gave Marwan a step up the ladder rather than down. “The marriage of Ashraf Marwan to Mona Abdel Nasser was the first step to [Marwan’s] success,” said one Egyptian politician, “and Sadat’s desire that Arab states would provide their own weapons was the second.”27
The consortium was headquartered in a modern office building in a suburb of Cairo. The building appeared on no maps, and its massive, dark, one-way windows, state-of-the-art air-conditioning, closed-circuit television, and uniformed guards carrying chrome-plated pistols made it stand out starkly against the Cairo cityscape. It was, for all intents and purposes, an imitation of industrial headquarters in far wealthier places in the world. The consortium’s managerial methods were also taken straight from the Western capitalist playbook. In sharp contrast to the Egyptian norm, AOI ran a fairly tight ship, freed from government bureaucracy and other external constraints. One of Marwan’s first moves upon entering the position, a decision in which he took pride, was laying off sixteen hundred nonessential workers—almost unthinkable in the socialist climate of Egypt at the time.
Yet despite all this, AOI was a flop. In its first years, the infrastructure was built and contacts made with Western weapons manufacturers to attain licenses and know-how for building critical weapons systems in Egyptian factories. According to one contract with Westland Helicopters and Rolls-Royce of Britain, the consortium was supposed to start producing Lynx helicopters in a factory in the Helwan region. Another contract with the British aerospace industry arranged for the production of Swingfire antitank missiles; still another, with various French companies, called for the production of air-to-air and ground-to-ground missiles in factories in a Saudi military complex being built near Riyadh. Another contract, worth $2 billion, was signed with Dassault and the German company Dornier to assemble Alpha Jet training
planes in Egypt. Longer-term plans called for the assembly of France’s most sophisticated fighter jet, the Mirage 2000, which was supposed to compete with the American F-16. The consortium signed a contract with American Motors for the production of twelve thousand jeeps per year in Cairo. In an interview Marwan gave to BusinessWeek a short time before Sadat publicly announced his intention to visit Jerusalem and reach a peace agreement with Israel, Marwan guessed that the consortium had signed something like $4 billion or $5 billion worth of contracts with Western weapons manufacturers for the production of arms in Egypt.28
But the true value of almost all these contracts, in the end, was little more than the paper they were written on. In late 1977, after hundreds of millions of dollars had been spent, AOI’s total revenues amounted to $41 million. The only actual armament it produced was a West German armored personnel carrier capable of carrying ten soldiers a distance of four hundred miles. It is unclear exactly how many of the APCs were produced, or whether they were ever deployed in any army.
One of the central problems with the project was the poor state of manufacturing in Egypt. Experts assessed that the country lacked the qualified personnel needed to carry out AOI’s ambitious plans. Marwan failed to prove otherwise. But what finally brought AOI down was the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. In the wake of Sadat’s initiative in October 1977, Egypt found itself suddenly isolated in the Arab world—and all the more so after the Camp David Accords were signed in 1979. In March 1979, Egypt’s partners in the consortium announced their decision to cease all funding for the project—resulting in the immediate layoff of sixteen thousand employees in Egypt.
Marwan was not one of them. He had already quit in October 1978. Not, of course, because of the failure of the consortium or of his poor performance. On the contrary—he proved himself more than capable as a manager, and had the backing of the Saudis and the others. Rather, the reason was, as always, the incessant efforts of his rivals in Egypt and abroad to bring him down. And as always, it was his appetite for corruption that gave them exactly the ammunition they needed.
THE MEN WHO led the decisive battle against Ashraf Marwan were Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi and Musa Sabri, editor of Al-Akhbar and one of Sadat’s most ardent supporters and longtime friends. They were joined by a number of other important players in Egypt, including journalists who published accounts of Marwan’s affronts and who were deeply worried about the prospect of his continuing to play a major public role—or even returning to the political arena.
Some of the charges were probably unwarranted. One day, for example, the editor of the newspaper Akhbar al-Youm placed a call to the foreign minister on a certain matter. Fahmi told him that instead of asking about that, he should be focusing on a story about the theft of diamonds worth tens of thousands of dollars from a certain hotel in London where, as it happens, Marwan was staying. Fahmi’s aim was to foment a scandal by making it seem that Marwan, the public servant, was wealthy enough to have the diamonds in his hotel room. He told the editor to publish the item, adding that it came from a “secret and official” source. The report appeared not only in Akhbar al-Youm but in a number of other papers as well, and even though Marwan’s name was not mentioned explicitly, there were enough hints to make it clear who was implicated. The affair, which became known as the fadikha, or “scandal,” was brought to the attention of Sadat, who insisted on being told precisely whom it was about. When Musa Sabri identified Marwan, Sadat ordered a thorough investigation.
This time, the charges turned out to have been completely fabricated.29 But that didn’t stop the rumor mill from putting more and more pressure on Marwan. One of AOI’s main offices was in London, and Marwan traveled there often. Rumors soon reached Cairo about weapons deals being hatched by Marwan and his old friend Kamal Adham. In some cases, Jehan Sadat’s name was mentioned as well. Marwan, it was said, had an apartment in London and had lost a fortune playing roulette at the Playboy Club. It was also said that Marwan worked hard to close a huge deal in which EgyptAir purchased airliners from Boeing, knowing that Adham would get a sizable fee for every plane sold. At the same time, there were published reports that Marwan gave expensive gifts, including color televisions, to senior figures in the Egyptian government and in the military industry in order to dampen the accusations against him.30
This string of revelations, many of which originated with people most loyal to Sadat, increased the pressure on the president to remove Marwan from his position as head of AOI. Sadat resisted, offering a number of excuses: Marwan was irreplaceable in carrying out important and sensitive missions abroad on behalf of the president; his special relationship with the leaders of the Libyan regime had enabled him to solve the thorniest crises between Libya and Egypt; and the Saudi monarchy regarded him as a highly effective link to Egypt, especially in delicate business, thus making it possible for Sadat to conduct a productive dialogue with the king. And then there was the debt Sadat owed Marwan for his important contribution to the war effort, especially the acquisition of Mirages from France via Libya.31
But the pressure on Sadat continued to mount. If, in the past, it had been relatively painless for him to accept Marwan’s flat-out denials and claims that Nasserites were looking to do him in, this time the clamor for Marwan’s head was coming from Sadat’s own friends, including Sabri and the media moguls, the brothers Mustafa and Ali Amin. When media pressure combined with intelligence reports describing Marwan’s behavior, Sadat realized that he had to act. What probably tipped the scales was not just the incontrovertible evidence of Marwan’s corruption, but recordings of his conversations with various Gulf potentates, in which he sounded dismissive of Sadat, even antagonistic. And the moment Marwan appeared disloyal, he became a sitting duck. Soon thereafter, he complained to Sadat that his office had been bugged, and Sadat ignored the complaint. Marwan heard the president’s message loud and clear. Sadat had decided to remove the protective cover that had kept Marwan safe for so long, and he wanted Marwan to know it.32
As on so many other occasions in the life of Ashraf Marwan, the announcement on October 12, 1978, that he was leaving his position at AOI was accompanied by drama. Sadat wanted to play down the whole affair. Yet the decision reached the ears of Musa Sabri, and his Al-Akhbar paper ran a story with the headline, “An End to the Legend of Ashraf Marwan: Presidential Order to Fire Him from the Arab Organization for Industrialization and Transfer Him to the Foreign Ministry.”33 This angered Sadat—not least because within a few hours’ time he found himself standing before Marwan’s wife, Mona, in tears, who claimed that the articles implied that Nasser’s daughter was married to a thief. Sadat called Sabri and insisted that he bury the story. And indeed, in the paper’s later editions on the same day, Marwan was described as having “resigned” and being given a senior appointment at the Foreign Ministry. Not long after, Sadat sent him on several new diplomatic missions, in order to make it look as though Marwan still had his favor. Sabri wound up feeling more than a little hurt by it all—a feeling that certainly increased when it turned out that Sadat, his longtime friend, had stopped taking his calls and refused to meet. Sabri, in response, announced his own resignation as editor of Al-Akhbar, and though he eventually was persuaded to withdraw his resignation, relations between the two never fully recovered.34
And as with the last time Sadat found himself dismissing Marwan, this time, too, he gave his former aide all the pomp and honor due a national hero. In a public ceremony covered widely by the media, he gave Marwan the highest medal of the Republic of Egypt and emphasized the man’s achievements during the October War. Thanks to Marwan’s efforts, Sadat concluded, “our air forces could complete their battle missions as necessary.”35 Later on Marwan made good use of his two medals to prove his loyalty to Egypt and, before the press, to bolster his claims that he had been a double agent working for Egypt against Israel.
Outside of Egypt, Marwan’s dismissal was taken as a significant development in the Egyptian political
leadership. Several days earlier, before the annual military parade on October 6, it was announced that another major figure, the army’s chief of staff, Mohamed Abdel Ghani el-Gamasy, had also been retired. So Marwan’s departure was taken to signify an effort on Sadat’s part to clean house in a way that showed balance among competing camps in the regime.
The man who benefited most from the shake-up was Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, whose two main competitors had suddenly been eliminated.36
EVEN BEFORE MARWAN had been booted from the Egyptian public arena, his status with the Mossad had begun to decline. There had been no rupture in the relationship, and he continued passing information to his handlers whenever he traveled to Europe. During negotiations with Israel over the disengagement of forces following the Yom Kippur War, for example, Marwan gave over crucial information that led to the successful conclusion of the armistice on the southern front. And when Israel needed to conclude a similar agreement with Syria months later, Marwan, as we have seen, provided an invaluable portrait of the Syrian president.
The Angel Page 26