The Angel (26 page)

                
I'll update you on all the conditions of the contract.

                
Because they want to win the race, they are very afraid that it will be made public before the signing, for there may be competitors, and then some of the shareholders will think twice.

                
They have no partners outside the region.

                
In the Angel's opinion, the chances of signing are 99.9 percent, but then again, he is like that.
¹²

Meanwhile Dubi prepared a communiqué about the meeting. When he was done, he went to the Israeli embassy at Palace Green
in central London in order to send it via the code room. According to some accounts, because of Yom Kippur no one was on duty in the code room, and they had to wait for someone to show up. In truth, however, the station chief was there waiting for him, and the report was sent to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv during the early morning hours. The communiqué repeated Zamir's alert that war would commence later that day and added that the source had said that Sadat might change his mind at the last minute. Beyond this, the main message was that the Egyptian war objective was limited only to capturing territory up to six miles east of the Suez Canal, and that at this stage there was no intention to advance to the Mitla and Gidi Passes.

DUBI WENT BACK
to his apartment. His wife, Ronit, was waiting. She was used to his unpredictable schedule, but his long absence in the middle of the night of Yom Kippur was unusual even for him, and it suggested something serious. She didn't have to ask many questions. With her, he could be explicit. “It's war. The bar mitzvah's off.”

Their son Ofer had come of age, and his bar mitzvah celebration, which was supposed to take place soon after, was one of Israel's first, if least painful, casualties in the conflict that would begin in just a few hours. Later that morning, utterly exhausted, Dubi finally went to bed.

Ronit woke him shortly after 1:00 p.m. The war had begun.

Zamir, on the other hand, hadn't gotten any sleep at all. From the moment he'd finished his phone call with Eini, he had been overwhelmed with tension. When he heard that the Egyptians had attacked at 2:00 p.m. Israel time, he “leapt through the roof,” he later recalled. In part, his relief was because he was confident that Israel would achieve an easy victory. But mainly it was because he could breathe easy now that his warning hadn't proved false. He stayed in London until Sunday, when he flew to Cyprus, and then
was taken back to Israel by an airplane sent specially for him. He knew nothing about how the war was going and remained convinced that his message had allowed the Israelis a proper response. Only when he met Nahum Admoni, a senior Mossad officer who came to meet him at the airport, did he discover just how wrong he was.

F
reddy Eini didn't need coffee to get him going after hanging up with Zamir. He quickly began going down the list of calls he needed to make. As he'd promised the night before, the first was to the MI chief, Eli Zeira. Because MI was the central clearinghouse for all intelligence gathered by Israel's different branches, it made sense that its director should be the first to receive the message. Zeira listened carefully and told Eini to immediately call the head of MI-Research, Brig. Gen. Arieh Shalev, and to read it to him word for word. Before doing that, however, Eini continued down the list. He called Golda Meir's military secretary, Israel Lior, as well as the assistant to the defense minister, Arieh Braun. Then he called Arieh Shalev, as Zeira had told him. Years later, Eini would recall how Shalev, who was none too pleased about being woken up, told him to refer it to MI's reporting and dissemination center, and they'd take care of it. Clearly the head of MI-Research still hadn't recognized the magnitude of the crisis. After a brief and, from Eini's perspective, rather aggressive exchange, Shalev got the picture and wrote down the message that Eini dictated to him.

The IDF chief of staff was not on Eini's list. Instead he got the message from his aide-de camp, Avner Shalev, who had heard it from
Brig. Gen. Yehoshua Raviv, the defense minister's military secretary. Both Dayan and Lior called Eini back to hear the message a second time. By 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, the entire decision-making echelon of the Israeli government was wide awake and getting ready for an attack they expected to come the following evening.
¹

TO WHAT EXTENT
did Ashraf Marwan's warning, the clearest warning of war that Israel ever received ahead of time, really succeed in dispelling the paradigm according to which Egypt would never launch a war so long as it didn't have long-range warplanes and operational Scud missiles? This is not merely an academic question. As the events of that day unfolded, every main player acted strictly according to his or her own view about how seriously to take the Angel's warning—sometimes even to the point of ignoring direct orders.

Beginning early in the morning of October 6, key Israeli decision makers and their aides held intensive meetings in the respective headquarters of the IDF chief of staff, the defense minister, and the prime minister—three buildings located just a few yards apart from each other at the defense complex in Tel Aviv known to Israelis as “The Campus” (
hakirya
). Two questions dominated their discussions. The first concerned an emergency call-up of reserves; the second was about a preemptive strike to be launched by Israel's air force, in order to keep the military initiative in Israel's hands, just as had happened so successfully with the start of the Six-Day War in 1967.

As far as IDF chief of staff David Elazar was concerned, Marwan's warning removed all doubt about war. From the moment his assistant woke him up at four thirty that morning, Elazar prepared for a conflagration that was to begin later that day. Within an hour and a half, he ordered the commander of the air force to ready a preemptive strike to be launched at 11:00 a.m., approved a partial
call-up of reserves for the air force, made the necessary preparations for a broader call-up of army reserves, and ordered further preparations for war, both at the front lines and on the home front. At 6:00 a.m., he walked into his first meeting, with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. There he made his case for approval of what he saw as two absolutely critical moves under the circumstances: a preemptive strike and a mass call-up of reserves.

Elazar, however, ran headlong into the skepticism of Dayan regarding the validity of Marwan's warning and the likelihood of war. As opposed to Elazar's fast pace of action, Dayan insisted on taking things more slowly. When their meeting began, Dayan first addressed less pressing matters, such as the evacuation of children (in the form of a “field trip”) from the civilian settlements on the Golan Heights, and the Civil Defense Corps' preparations for the possibility of Egyptian Scud missile attacks. Only afterward did he turn to Elazar's two requests. He flatly turned down the preemptive strike and agreed to only a very limited call-up of a single reserve brigade to reinforce the northern front. The back-and-forth between him and Elazar, who demanded that at least four divisions be called up, reminded one of the people present in the meeting of the bargaining session between God and Abraham on the question of how many righteous people God would need to find in Sodom and Gomorrah to refrain from destroying the cities. In the end, Elazar and Dayan couldn't bridge the gap, and they agreed to let the prime minister decide.

Why did Dayan rebuff Elazar's requests? The reasons he gave were telling. He rejected a preemptive strike, he said, because “on the basis of the information we have right now, we cannot do it.” In other words, what distinguished Dayan from Elazar wasn't the question of whether such a strike was necessary to thwart the Arab attack but whether that attack was actually coming or not. Elazar had concluded that war was a sure thing, and a preemptive strike
was therefore unavoidable. Dayan saw it as just one of many possibilities, so he opposed the strike. The same was true for calling up the reserves. Dayan was a very cautious man, and he didn't believe Israel could win a war with the standing army alone. Rather, his denial of Elazar's request came from his assessment that the likelihood of war was still too low to justify a broad call-up. “You can't call up the whole system,” he told him, “just because of a few messages from Zvika.”
²

Dayan's skepticism about the war was based in part, apparently, on the assessments of Eli Zeira. Zeira joined the meeting at 7:00 a.m. and reported that, despite further indicators that Egypt and Syria were headed for a military initiative, he was still not prepared to accept that war was likely and added that from a strategic-political standpoint, Sadat had no need for it. About fifteen minutes later, at the beginning of a hastily assembled meeting of the IDF General Staff, Zeira restated his thesis that starting a war would be irrational for the Egyptians and Syrians, even though their deployments justified the IDF's taking measures of its own. And in the meeting with the prime minister that began just after 8:00 a.m., Zeira reiterated his belief that even though Egypt and Syria were ready for war from a technical and operational standpoint, Sadat had no compulsion to launch an attack and knew that if he did attack, he would lose.

From all these statements it emerges that despite the fact that Marwan's warning (as well as additional developments) may have led him to raise his assessment about the likelihood of war to some degree, the MI chief still clung to the same set of beliefs that he had held since taking his post a year earlier, and continued to doubt whether there would be a war that day. In this he was relying, in part, on the contribution of the head of Branch 6 (Egypt) of MI's Research Division, Lt. Col. Yonah Bandman, on whose expertise and judgment regarding Egyptian intentions Zeira continued to rely until the very last minute. In the late morning of that day,
Bandman believed that the Egyptians saw no reason to go to war, and even refused an order from the chief of MI-Research to prepare a report saying that the likelihood of war was high. In the end, that report was prepared by another officer, while Bandman wrote a dissenting report of his own, explaining why war was unlikely. Zeira, who received Bandman's report, considered having it distributed as well, but in the end chose not to. The very fact that he considered it, however, shows that in spite of everything, he still thought that war that day was far from certain.
³

Elazar, on the other hand, took the Mossad chief's warning at face value. In his view, there was no time to waste. At about 7:45 a.m., after conducting the meeting of the IDF General Staff, he spoke for a few minutes, privately, with the commanders of the Southern and Northern Commands, Maj. Gen. Shmuel Gonen and Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Hofi, respectively. He ordered them both to ready their officers for a war that would begin later that day.

For her part, Prime Minister Golda Meir was not buying either Zeira's or Dayan's hesitation. Like Elazar, she expressed her complete faith in Zamir's message about his meeting with Marwan, and saw the question of war coming that day as a closed one. After arriving at her office in IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, she asked to see the defense minister immediately. At first he refused to meet her before 10:00 or 11:00 that morning, and only agreed to meet earlier after she insisted.

The meeting in Golda Meir's office began just after 8:00 a.m. Elazar and Dayan each presented their positions. Again Dayan dawdled, raising issues of civilian evacuations and home-front preparations. Elazar, on the other hand, did not mince words about the possibility of war. “I read the message from Zvika [Zamir]'s man,” he said. “The message is authentic. For us, this is very short notice.”
⁴
He demanded that immediate and decisive moves be made.

Meir was quick to make her decision. She accepted Dayan's
position rejecting the proposed preemptive strike, out of fear that the world, and especially the United States, would see Israel as the aggressor. This, she believed, would make it harder for the United States to help Israel during the conflict, a significant loss that would outweigh any tactical gains.

On the matter of calling up the reserves, on the other hand, Meir accepted Elazar's position. According to the minutes of that meeting, she did not mention Ashraf Marwan explicitly, but in the days that followed, she said several times that her assessment had been based on the message from “Zvika's friend.”
⁵

By 9:00 a.m., the first order went out. By 10:00 a.m., phones were ringing in the homes of thousands of reservists. The call-up would gain momentum over the next few hours.

ONE MIGHT THINK
that Zeira's opinion became moot as soon as the broad call-up of reserves had begun. But a careful look at the transcripts of the Agranat Commission's hearings, as well as other sources, suggests that in one immensely important matter—namely, the deployment of the regular army forces at the Suez Canal—his mistake had deadly and decisive consequences.

The IDF's regular-army tank division in the Sinai, the 252nd Armored, was caught unprepared when the assault came at 2:00 p.m. Only one tank squad, which was regularly stationed at Fort Orkal at the northern reaches of the canal, was at battle stations. The other tanks of the front-line 14th Brigade were in various stages of preparing to deploy for battle, while the other two tank brigades, the 401st and 406th, were heading to their forward meeting points.

The division had been on high alert since the day before, and its commander, Maj. Gen. Albert Mandler, believed, on the basis of the intelligence available to him, that war was likely. If he had been given the order to prepare for battle immediately after Elazar had given it to his commander, Southern Commander Maj. Gen.
Gonen, Mandler would have gotten his tanks into position opposite the Egyptian crossing points in time. Just how much this would have changed the outcome on the Suez front is a matter for speculation, but there is no doubt that it would have been vastly preferable, from the Israeli standpoint, to what actually ended up happening, which was that almost all of the Israeli tanks engaged the fight while they were rushing to the front, and reached the canal only after the Egyptians had already crossed and set themselves up on the eastern bank.

In the first phase of the crossing, 32,000 Egyptian infantrymen were ferried in 720 boats, each one making twelve round-trips across the canal over a six-hour period. The result of the 252nd Armored's tanks not being in position was that the Egyptians crossing the canal met with no Israeli tank fire or any serious and concerted counterattack.

Elazar gave the order to Maj. Gen. Gonen to prepare for war that day, with the assumption of a 6:00 p.m. H-hour. The order was given at 7:45 a.m. About twenty minutes later, Gonen called Mandler, the commander of the 252nd, and ordered him to prepare to carry out a plan called Dovecote, which would allow him to defend the line at the canal using regular-army forces, but not to move the forces from their positions. After 10:00 a.m., he spoke to Mandler again. In direct violation of Elazar's orders, according to which Gonen was supposed to prepare his forces for a war that would begin at 6:00 p.m., Gonen said to Mandler: “What does [the H-hour] mean? Is it the end of their big exercise? Opening fire? Relaunching the War of Attrition? Maybe a full-scale invasion—but that seems unlikely.” In other words, Gonen scuttled Elazar's order, leaving the forces in the field with a mixed message as to what, exactly, they were preparing for. Even worse, Elazar's orders spoke of getting the entire Southern Command ready for war that very day, while Gonen ordered the brigades of the front line “not
to break routine before 1600 hours.” The result was that when the attack was launched at 2:00 p.m., out of the division's three hundred tanks only three, at Fort Orkal, were in position.
⁶

The Egyptian forces therefore crossed the canal virtually untouched. One exception was at Fort Budapest, where two tanks that were supposed to defend it reached their posts just minutes before the Egyptians launched their ground assault. They managed to destroy the Egyptian tanks and armored personnel carriers that were preparing to storm the fort, dispersed the troops arrayed to attack, and prevented the fort from being overrun.
⁷

Because of the failure to implement the Dovecote plan, the Egyptians were able to carry out the most critical part of their assault, crossing the canal, with virtually no opposition or casualties. When the Israeli tanks approached their “swim fins,” forward positions from which they were supposed to launch raids north or south along the canal to intercept Egyptian forces crossing as well as those still on the western bank, they discovered that many of these positions had already been taken by Egyptian commandos, who assaulted the tanks with antitank missiles. Scores of Israeli tanks were taken out during the night, as they tried to redouble the fortresses that were already surrounded by Egyptian troops. The final outcome of the initial battles was that by dawn on Sunday, Egypt had managed to cross the canal and establish itself on its eastern bank with almost no losses, while the 252nd Armored Division of the IDF lost fully two hundred of its three hundred tanks without having achieved any of its operational goals.