Uri Bar-Joseph - The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel

J uly is a hot month in Cairo, and July 1, 2007, was no exception. The narrow streets were crowded with millions of sweaty pedestrians, the crowds swelling with children on their summer vacation. The Khan al-Khalili bazaar was flooded with housewives who hurried to make their daily shopping and with tourists who came to watch the magic of the famous oriental market. And Cairos eighty thousand taxi drivers honked and honked as they struggled to cut a path through the citys congested streets.

Very little of this mess penetrated the Mosque of Omar bin Abdul Aziz in the citys modern suburb of Heliopolis. The hundreds of mourners attending a funeral being held in the mosque wore unusually formal suits and ties or military uniforms. They were the elite of Egypts political, security, and business establishments. And they all had come to pay their last respects to a man who was one of thema family member, friend, colleague, and business partner for many years: Dr. Ashraf Marwan.

Marwan died four days earlier, when he mysteriously fell from the balcony of his fifth-floor luxury apartment not far from Piccadilly Circus in London. In 1966 he married President Gamal Abdel Nassers daughter Mona. Joining the presidential family paved his way to the top echelon of Egyptian politics: first as an official in Nassers presidential office; and later, after Nassers death, as a close adviser to President Anwar el-Sadat. After he left public service he used his contacts in the Arab world in order to build a shady business career and had been living in London since 1981.

Marwans body arrived in Cairo a day earlier. Dr. Zakaria Azmi, the head of the office of President Hosni Mubarak, and Ahmed Shafik, the minister of civil aviation, waited at the airport for the coffin. Now, at the mosque, Gamal (Jimmy) Mubarak, the presidents son and heir apparent, was comforting Marwans widow and her two sons. This was not merely an official gesture but a personal one as well: Gamal was a close friend of Ashraf Marwans son, and the two frequently visited each others homes. The Marwans attended Gamal Mubaraks spectacular wedding at Sharm el-Sheik at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula that had taken place less than two months earlier.

President Mubarak himself was participating in an African summit in Accra, Ghana, and could not attend the funeral. But he released an official statement describing Marwan as a true patriot of his country. Mubarak added that he was personally aware of the great service that the departed had rendered for his country. General Omar Suleiman, the strongman of Egypts intelligence and military establishment, who attended the funeral, provided the official authorization to the presidential declaration of Marwans unquestionable patriotism.

The legislative branch was represented by the Speaker of the Egyptian Parliament and the head of the upper house. Senior generals of the armed forces stood next to business tycoons, and academicians including the president of Cairo University were seen talking with senior journalists such as the head of Al-Ahram, Egypts leading daily.

Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, the former grand mufti of Egypt who in 1996 was nominated by Mubarak to be the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, the oldest institute of its kind in the Muslim world, led the religious ceremonies. Close by were Marwans family members: The widow, Mona, was dressed in a dark, elegant dress, her head covered by a veil; the firstborn son, Gamalwho like many members of his generation was given Nassers first namestood next to her, and next to him stood her younger son, Hani. Hani was married to the daughter of Amr Moussa, Egypts former minister of foreign affairs and, in 2007, the secretary of the Arab League. Moussa himself was not seen at the ceremony.

Despite a well-known animosity between Mona and the rest of Nassers family, her brothers and sister came to pay their last respects. None of Anwar Sadats family was present, however. This was quite a surprise, as some of Cairos journalists noted, since prior to his assassination in October 1981, Sadat and his wife, Jehan, were known to be close friends of Ashraf and Mona Marwan.

Relatively speaking, however, the absence of Jehan Sadat and her daughters from the funeral was inconsequential. As some of the mourners surely sensed, the honor paid to their former colleague was no more than a facade covering up a very painful truth: that despite all the official recognition, the man they were burying was in fact no Egyptian patriot at all. He was, rather, the worst traitor in their nations history.

SINCE THE EARLY 1990s, it had been known that the Israeli Mossad had a miraculous source at the heart of Egypts strategic nervous system in the years that led up to the 1973 October warthe most intensive war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some peoplesuch as Maj. Gen. Eli Zeira, chief of Israels Military Intelligence who published his war memoirs in 1993claimed that the source was actually a double agent who betrayed the Mossad at the most critical moment, thus enabling the Arab armies to surprise Israel on Yom Kippur, the most sacred Jewish holiday. But there were others, with firsthand knowledge of the events no less reliable than Zeira, who dismissed the double agent theory and firmly believed that without the sources last-minute warning, Israel would likely have lost the war.