Did he fall or was he pushed?

The curious case of the spy who fell to his death

James Forsyth

15 August 2007

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The death of a double agent raises many questions

But Marwan’s business dealings are only a small part of his story. The real drama came in October 1973 when he warned Israel that Egypt and Syria might attack, just hours before the Yom Kippur war began. Marwan was a Mossad agent, but he may also have been an Egyptian double agent. And the great unsolved mystery of Marwan’s life and, perhaps, the key to understanding his death is whether, when he warned Israel, he was acting as a Mossad agent or to preserve his credibility as a double agent, thinking that he was leaving Israel too little time to prepare for war.

Marwan had volunteered to work for Mossad in 1969 and the then president’s son-in-law became one of the agency’s most important spies. After Sadat succeeded Nasser Marwan became an even more pivotal figure in Egypt, but he continued to help Mossad. He apparently warned Israel that in May 1973 it would be attacked, a tip-off that prompted Israel to mobilise. But no attack came. Then, on 5 October 1973 in a meeting he had requested with the director of Mossad, Marwan disclosed that an attack would be launched on Israel the next evening. The assault began the next day at two in the afternoon.

The initial hours of the war are the nearest that Israel has ever come to being destroyed by Arab arms; and it rattled Israel’s national confidence. Eli Zeira, then head of Israeli military intelligence, was blamed and consequently lost his job and left the army. Zeira did not take this well. He brooded over how and why the legendary Israeli security establishment could have failed, and he came to the conclusion that it had been duped. In Myth Versus Reality, a book first published in 1993, Zeira argued that a double agent had been responsible for Israel’s failure to see the war coming.

It wasn’t difficult to work out who Zeira thought this double agent might be. Ahron Bregman, an Israeli historian, deduced Marwan’s identity after talking to Zeira’s editor and began dropping hints in books and articles. In 2002 Marwan responded with an outright denial in an Egyptian newspaper. Bregman then challenged Marwan to prove that he wasn’t the agent in question. News of the spat was reported in the Israeli press and so for the first time Marwan was named as a spy in Israel.

Now comes the plot twist that even the most audacious writer of fiction might balk at: Marwan made contact with Bregman and the two men met in person for the first time, on 23 October 2003 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Park Lane. Bregman recalls that Marwan asked him for his help in writing a book called October 1973 — What Happened. However, Bregman does not think that this was Marwan’s principal reason for meeting him.