The Angel (30 page)

Marwan was chosen by Sadat to represent him in the Safari Club.
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Otherwise, very little is known about his involvement in its activities. What is certain, however, is that by the time the Safari
Club was founded in September 1976, Marwan was already out of Sadat's inner circle, no longer in the President's Office or carrying out his “special” missions. It is entirely possible that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the group—and that all the rumors to the contrary were just KGB propaganda. Despite the overwhelming number of such rumors connecting Marwan to global-scale anti-Soviet events, it is very hard to know how seriously to take them. It is, however, fair to assume that the KGB did see him as someone worthy of neutralizing or at least reducing his effectiveness, not so much because they thought his activities would, for example, bring the downfall of Mozambique's socialist president, Samora Machel, or rock the balance of power between Ethiopia and Djibouti, but rather out of their desire to weaken the anti-Soviet camp in Egypt itself.

THE KGB'S DEPICTION
of Marwan as a CIA spy was fundamentally inaccurate; although he had excellent relations with the Americans, especially Henry Kissinger, he did not actually work
for
them before the mid-1980s. But their portrayal of him as corrupt, on the other hand, was quite close to the truth. Marwan began accumulating his wealth through graft soon after his rise to prominence in the wake of the Corrective Revolution in 1971. By the mid-1970s, when the Soviets started propagating reports of his corruption, he was already quite wealthy. Some of his money came from the Mossad, but the Soviets didn't know that. Most of it came from other illicit sources, especially percentages on various deals he brokered, taking full advantage of his political status. In other cases, Marwan used his position to get better prices on profitable purchases of his own. One example was the June 1974 purchase he made of a parcel of land, in his wife's name, in the town of Kardassa, on the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria. To secure it, he sent a request to the Egyptian minister of agriculture, claiming that
the act reflected the will of the president. In a later investigation, it emerged that Sadat knew nothing about it. Similarly, the question was raised as to where Marwan got the money for the purchase.
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In other cases Marwan needed no capital at all to make his money. His closeness to Sadat was far more useful. This was most evident in an affair involving the Coca-Cola Corporation.

Since 1968, when Coca-Cola began bottling operations in Israel as a result of pressure in the United States, it was a target for the Arab boycott, an organized effort of the Arab states, beginning in 1948, to refuse to deal not only with Israel directly but also with any company that did business with Israel (the “secondary boycott”). In 1974, Coca-Cola began a campaign aimed at removing its products from the boycott list. Egypt, the leader of the Arab world and a fledgling ally of the United States, a country whose leader spoke openly about ending the conflict with Israel, was the natural target of the company's efforts. The campaign was led by Sam Ayoub, a senior Coca-Cola executive who was a native of Alexandria, Egypt, and knew his way around the Arab world. When he looked into the question of who could influence Sadat into removing Coca-Cola from the boycott, the man he found was Ashraf Marwan. Marwan turned to Sadat, and Sadat opened the doors to the Egyptian market. Part of the payment came in the form of investments that the company made in the Egyptian economy; but according to Ayoub, Marwan earned a heavy financial benefit in exchange for greasing the wheels.
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Other questions surround Marwan's academic achievements. Alongside his intensive diplomatic efforts, his wealth-building efforts, and his espionage efforts, Ashraf Marwan also claimed to have found the time to complete his doctorate—an effort that, according to his friends, he had begun immediately after finishing his master's degree. He claimed that in 1974 he submitted his thesis to his adviser, Dr. Ahmed Mustafa, who later became Egypt's science
minister.
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This seems highly unlikely. From the time he purportedly completed his master's studies, around 1970 or 1971, until 1974, he was incredibly busy with affairs of state, business, and treachery. The man was admittedly talented; yet it is very difficult to imagine his adding a major act of scholarship into the mix. And though for the rest of his life he brandished the title of “Doctor,” quite a few people called his degree into question. Muhammad Tharwat, for example, in his biography of Marwan, wrote that he failed to complete his studies because of his intensive involvement in Egyptian politics. According to another source, Marwan paid his adviser off, and the latter not only approved the doctorate but also wrote it. Mohamed al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman who became one of Marwan's most bitter rivals in the 1980s, claimed that Marwan never wrote the dissertation and received the degree only because his father was the president of Cairo University. Fayed, who could spin a yarn with the best of them, was wrong about Marwan's father, who was an army general and never held that position. But he may have been right in challenging the legitimacy of the degree.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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