Spies Against Armageddon (31 page)

Zamir immediately telephoned the IDF chief of staff—keeping in mind that the Yom Kippur holy day had already begun, staffing levels at most every job were at minimal levels. Many Israelis had just been at Kol Nidrei prayers and were preparing for more synagogue time on Saturday.

Aman analysts were immediately informed, and they were told that the high-level Egyptian source did not know what time the attack would commence. They had reason to guess that it would occur at sundown, because they had intelligence about Egyptian and Syrian officers discussing that matter in theory some time earlier.

Word went out to the Northern and Southern Commands, at about 4:30 a.m. on Yom Kippur morning, that enemies were expected to attack at 6:00 in the evening. A general mobilization would require at least two or three days, but forces at the frontiers were able to brace for an attack.

The Mossad and Aman did not know that, just a few weeks earlier, Egyptian and Syrian military planners had moved what they called H-hour to 2:00 in the afternoon.

The standard Israeli playbook, exemplified by the success of June 1967, would have had the air force staging preemptive strikes as soon as possible on that day. For political reasons, however, Prime Minister Meir decided not to attack first. She made sure to inform the United States government of that decision, believing that would win her some points with Richard Nixon’s administration, but only after first checking with Moshe Dayan to ascertain that Israeli troops could absorb a first blow by the enemy.

The coordinated attacks on Israel’s forces did, indeed, begin at 2:05 that day. The results were misery, blood, and an unaccustomed retreat.

The four-hour difference between the actual H-hour and the guess based on Marwan’s tip was enough to cause a deep division within Israeli intelligence.

The Aman commander, Eli Zeira, accused the principal Egyptian source—not naming him at the time—of misleading his Israeli handlers by telling them of the October 6 attack plan so late. Zeira and other intelligence officers in an emerging anti-Marwan camp further charged that the Egyptian let the Israelis think that the attack would come at dusk, and thus the 2:05 surprise was worse than it might have been with an accurate warning.

Almost twenty years after the war, Zeira made a point of meeting foreign journalists and researchers and telling them that Nasser’s son-in-law had been a double agent who deceived Israel. Many who met with Zeira were shocked that he was exposing the Egyptian. His obvious goal was to cleanse himself and Aman from responsibility for failing to act on a series of intelligence warnings in the weeks before Yom Kippur.

Instead of studying and adequately considering the observations sent in by sources so painstakingly planted by Israeli intelligence over the years, Zeira—at a meeting as late as October 3 with senior officials—had dismissed the notion of an Egypt attack with two laconic words: “low probability.”

In the years after the 1973 war, Zeira also sought to blame his rival, Zamir, for the intelligence failure. After all, it was the Mossad that was running Ashraf Marwan.

The debate was renewed in 2007, when Marwan was found dead in London. He had plunged from the balcony of his elegant apartment, and some witnesses thought they had seen other men on the balcony looking down after the Egyptian fell. There was no reason to think that he would have committed suicide, at age 63. A manuscript he was believed to be writing—his tell-all memoir—vanished on the day of his death.

Were the Egyptians homicidally angry at him? Perhaps they learned of his disloyalty only because Zeira had named him? There was certainly no public sign of anger, as Marwan’s funeral in Cairo was attended by very senior Egyptian officials. They all spoke of the marvelous services rendered clandestinely by Marwan over the years.

Did the Mossad conclude that he was a double-crosser, and Israeli assassins settled a score by throwing him off his balcony? Myth-makers in Egypt and Europe propagated such tales, but most intelligence officials in Israel showed no sign of feeling they were betrayed by Marwan.

The strongest clues might be in his chosen career: as a high-level weapons dealer, buying and selling on behalf of various Arab governments. He might have made some murderous enemies over the years, and Egyptian sources said they suspected that Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was angry over a deal and ordered Marwan’s murder.

In Mossad headquarters, however, analysts reached the conclusion that Egyptian intelligence probably killed him to avenge his betrayal. It was supposed to look like suicide, and British police simply left this in a file full of unsolved cold cases.

The Mossad analysts, with great bluntness, believed that Zeira’s big mouth led to the demise of the best agent they ever had in Egypt. Never in the annals of Israeli intelligence had the identity of an agent been deliberately revealed, and by no less than the chief of military intelligence. Some officials called for Zeira to be prosecuted, and Israeli legal authorities said for several years that they were investigating the matter.

In the Yom Kippur War, IDF foot soldiers and tank crews had to pay with life and limb for the mistakes made by their country’s intelligence services and political leaders. Israelis lost ground on the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, and on the eastern side of the Suez Canal in Sinai.

Dayan, one of the heroes of the 1967 war, panicked. On the third day of the 1973 war, he muttered darkly about the possible destruction of “the Third Temple” of Israel. Jewish history tells of a first holy temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC, and a second temple that was demolished by the Romans in 70 AD. The third temple was the contemporary State of Israel, and Dayan rated its chances of survival as very low.

There was talk among Israeli generals and political leaders of using “unconventional” weapons. Serious consideration was given that week, for the first time, to the possible use of Israel’s nuclear bombs as a last act of almost suicidal defense. On Dayan’s orders, Jericho missiles and special bomb racks on Phantom aircraft were prepared for the possible launch of atomic weapons.

The defense minister’s despair weighed heavily on Meir’s spirit. She seemed to be considering suicide, as her secretary and confidante Lou Kaddar recalled: “I never saw her so gray, her face as in mourning. She told me, ‘Dayan wants us to discuss terms of surrender.’ I thought that a woman such as she would never want to live in such circumstances. So I prepared it for both of us. I went to see a doctor, a friend of mine who would agree to give me the necessary pills so that she and I—we both would go.”

Meir pulled herself together; and with her army chief of staff, Lieutenant General David (Dado) Elazar, who was strong as a rock, she directed the counterattacks that eventually helped Israel to stop the Egyptian advance and to defeat the Syrians. The short-term damage from the 20-day war represented an extremely heavy price for Israel: 2,700 soldiers killed—equivalent, by proportion of population, to 170,000 dead Americans. In a nation of just over three million people, the loss was traumatic.

The long-term damage was that the entire State of Israel lost confidence in its once legendary intelligence community. It was not just a feeling. It was in writing. Prime Minister Meir reluctantly commissioned an official inquiry into the Yom Kippur War and the
Mechdal
, or “Neglect”—the instantly coined euphemism for the intelligence blunder that made the war a near-total surprise.

The commission, led by the chief justice of Israel’s supreme court, Shimon Agranat, cleared Meir and Dayan of “direct responsibility” for the Mechdal. It criticized senior IDF generals and scathingly destroyed the careers of Aman commander Zeira and three of his assistants.

They were instantly replaced, and Major General Shlomo Gazit became the head of military intelligence. He created a small new unit within Aman named the Revision Department—which staff members dubbed the Devil’s Advocate Department. They were tasked with questioning and doubting the assumptions and consensus beliefs of other intelligence analysts. The unit’s top officer was given the unusual right to send his reports directly to the prime minister and a key parliamentary committee.

Meir and Dayan technically survived the Agranat Commission’s findings, but they could not take the heat of sharp public criticism. In April 1974, they both resigned.

Yitzhak Rabin became Israel’s new leader. As the army chief of staff in the 1967 war and then ambassador to Washington, Rabin was no stranger to intelligence reports. In fact, he constantly asked Aman and the Mossad for extremely detailed raw data and seemed to worry that something important may have been missed.

He did have his pick as head of the Mossad. Zvi Zamir felt absolutely fine about retiring in 1974, after five years marked by the Munich Olympics massacre, a new tactic of fighting back with assassinations, and the humiliation of not doing enough to warn before the Yom Kippur War.

The new Mossad director was Yitzhak (Haka) Hofi, a major general whom Rabin knew and trusted.

One notable emergency that suddenly erupted was handled with great skill and good fortune. On June 27, 1976, a mixed band of Arab and German hijackers took over an Air France Airbus 300 flying from Athens to Paris. Because the flight had originated in Tel Aviv, many Israelis and Jews were among the 248 passengers.

The hijackers, announcing that they were with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, forced the plane to fly to Entebbe airport in Uganda, where the mercurial, violent, and reputedly cannibalistic dictator—Idi Amin—sided with the pirates.

Chillingly, Jewish and Israeli passengers were separated from the others. The non-Jews were released. In Paris, they were questioned by French and Israeli intelligence officers who learned as much as possible about the hijackers and where the remaining hostages were being held.

The Mossad quickly explored options for taking action, even at that great distance from Israel. Invisible relationships in neighboring Kenya helped with reconnaissance efforts, and a Mossad operative was able to fly a private Kenyan plane over Entebbe to photograph the layout of the buildings and runways there. Thanks to David Kimche and other “alternative diplomats” who had advanced Israel’s cause in Africa, Nairobi was consistently a center of cooperation for projects both overt and covert.

Uniformed commandos of Sayeret Matkal executed the rescue mission on July 4 with stunning speed and courage. Large transport planes landed in near silence, Israeli soldiers and vehicles that rolled out of them gave the impression that they were Ugandans as they approached the terminal, and the assault itself resulted in a quick gun battle that left all seven hijackers dead. At least 30 of Idi Amin’s soldiers were also killed.

Entebbe was a glorious success, but there were casualties on the Israeli side: Four hostages lost their lives, as did the commander of the operation. He was Yoni Netanyahu, the younger brother of the future prime minister who himself would serve in the Sayeret unit.

Israelis never felt better than that evening, when military transport planes delivered the rescued hostages to Tel Aviv. The world admired what Israel was able to accomplish, and that it had the courage not to surrender to hijackers.

Yitzhak Hofi would lead the Mossad until 1982, but Rabin was long gone by then. In the election of May 1977, Israeli voters rejected the Labor Party, which had led the country since independence. The right-wing Likud bloc won the election, and the new prime minister was Menachem Begin.

Begin was a completely new figure: a member of the right-wing pre-state underground movements opposed to David Ben-Gurion, never an army general, an ideologue who could barely tolerate Israel having friendly relations with ex-Nazis in West Germany, and a man seemingly opposed to any concessions to Arabs.

At the Mossad, Hofi offered to resign. So did the Shin Bet chief, Avraham Ahituv. But Begin told them to stay. He liked the job they were doing. In fact, he loved hearing a lot of details of intelligence work, as it reminded him of his days in the militant Irgun underground.

Begin was out to change history, and he was going to use Israeli intelligence to do it. To defy his critics, who branded him a warmonger, Begin was determined to be a great peacemaker. One step was to make Dayan, a Labor stalwart, his foreign minister. Another step was to send Hofi on a secret mission to Morocco.

That North African country was, for an Arab nation, fairly friendly to Israel. King Hassan, when asked by Hofi to arrange a meeting for him with senior Egyptians, was only too happy to oblige.

Two senior officials from Egypt flew to Morocco in the summer of 1977, showing that Sadat—after restoring some of his nation’s pride during the 1973 war—was ready for a transformation. Hofi and the Egyptians, with a minimum of disagreement or drama, spoke of their sincere desire to end the long conflict between their countries.

Dayan had a follow-up meeting in Morocco with a senior aide to Sadat, and they agreed that future meetings should not be in secret.

President Sadat, delighted by developments, went on CBS television to tell Walter Cronkite that if he were invited by Begin, he would go to Jerusalem and address the Knesset—Israel’s parliament—to show that he wanted no more war. Begin immediately told CBS that he was inviting Sadat.

History was made—no,
shattered
—on Saturday night, November 19, 1977, when Egypt’s president stepped out of his official jet at Ben-Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv.

Within 17 months, Begin and Sadat were signing a peace treaty on the White House lawn, with President Jimmy Carter—who had worked very hard to mediate the deal—as the smiling godfather.

The truth is that Israel’s intelligence community was again taken by surprise. It did not predict that the election of a hard-line prime minister in Israel would provoke a peace offer from the country’s biggest enemy.

Even when contacts began, intelligence analysts were skeptical about Sadat’s sincerity. They had misread him before the 1973 war, and they now misread him again.