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

Zvi Zamir, the head of Mossad at the time of the Yom Kippur war, had claimed that Zeira had leaked Marwan’s name, and fingered him as the double agent. Zeira served a libel writ in 2004 and the matter was sent to arbitration. Marwan was keeping a nervous eye on the result of the case and Bregman thinks that, ‘What Marwan really wanted me to do for him — and this was clear — was to keep an eye on developments in Israel regarding this case. He needed to know about such developments in order to plan his next moves.’ Such as whether he could travel to Egypt or not. Bregman recalls that after this meeting Marwan ‘would often phone to ask general questions about the Israeli–Egyptian war of 1973 and about new books on the subject and so on. But there would always be the “side question”, regarding his case in Israel.’

Eventually, a few weeks before Marwan’s death, Theodore Or, a former Israeli Supreme Court Justice, dismissed the suit and concluded that Zeira had revealed Marwan’s identity. For an Israeli judge to decide against Zeira cast doubt on the whole double agent thesis and suggested that Marwan might have been just a Mossad spy after all.

Bregman sent Marwan press clippings about Or’s decision. On 26 June this year the two men agreed to meet the next day; it would have been only the second time they had met in person. Bregman has no doubt that Marwan was sincere about these plans: ‘it was clear to me when we talked on the 26th that there’s going to be a meeting. He very carefully wrote down my office telephone number and asked to repeat it, and he then repeated it himself; then asked for my mobile number and wrote it down carefully (he had it anyway).’ Several times on 27 June Bregman popped up from his office to get mobile reception to see if Marwan had called. But Marwan was busy, meeting his maker.

So we still don’t know whether Marwan was a double agent. Some of the events after his death seem to suggest that he was: he was buried in Egypt with the president’s son in attendance and Hosni Mubarak, the current president, went out of his way to praise him