The spy who fell to earth – the greatest espionage mystery

On the day Tony Blair resigned as prime minister, Dr Ashraf Marwan, the billionaire son-in-law of Egypt’s President Nasser, fell to his death from the balcony of his London home. The coroner would return an open verdict – it wasn’t clear whether he jumped, fell or was pushed.

Five years earlier, an Israeli historian, Ahron Bregman, had revealed that Marwan was a spy who had played a crucial role in the 1973 October War. The revelation sent shockwaves through the Middle East and thrust Bregman and Marwan into the centre of one of the most provocative espionage sagas of modern times.

Marwan’s legacy is as ambiguous and contradictory as the man himself. Whether he had been Israel’s most highly prized intelligence asset or a double agent loyal to his Egyptian homeland is still uncertain. He is considered a national hero in both countries. Whether he was murdered in retribution for his duplicity is still unknown.

Ashraf Marwan, a charming, ambitious young man, had married President Nasser’s daughter, Mona, in 1966. The young couple moved to swinging 60s London. Nasser never trusted his son-in-law, suspecting that the prestige of the Nasser name was the real reason he had wed Mona. When word of Marwan’s playboy lifestyle reached Egypt, a furious Nasser ordered the couple back to Cairo. Marwan was given a humbling job as a government clerk.

For reasons that remain obscure, Marwan made contact with the Mossad during a visit to London in 1969. The Mossad, understandably, thought this was too good to be true. Nasser’s own son-in-law was offering to betray his country to its mortal enemy. But the top-secret documents Marwan handed over suggested he was serious. The Israelis realised they had hit the jackpot.

“Few agents in history provided such splendid information – out of this world” admitted a former head of research for the Israeli Defence Force. Following Nasser’s death in 1970, Marwan became the trusted right-hand man of Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s successor. As such, Marwan was an invaluable fly-on-the-wall, relaying the thoughts and fears of Egypt’s leaders to his Israeli handlers, together with hordes of sensitive military and political documents.

He was codenamed “The Angel” and would be paid over $1 million by the Israelis for his services, a vast sum in the 1970s. Marwan’s espionage culminated in a last-minute tip-off that Syrian and Egyptian forces were planning to launch a surprise attack against Israel on 6 October 1973. The warning, apart from the precise hour at which the offensive would begin, proved correct, giving Israel a few crucial hours to mobilise its forces and prevent a military calamity.

The October War shifted the geopolitical balance of power in the Middle East. The surprise attack on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur in 1973 shattered the widespread sense of Israeli invincibility following its rout of Arab armies in the Six Day War six years earlier. While the military gains of the Arab states were small, the war restored the injured pride of the Arab world and would eventually lead to the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Following the war, a public inquiry was launched in Israel to investigate why its intelligence agencies had failed to foresee the attack which remains a scar on the Israeli psyche to this day.

Thirty years later, Ahron Bregman would reveal Marwan’s identity to the world. Bregman is a lecturer in the War Studies department at King’s College London. I was one of his students. Affable and expressive, with a wry sense of humour, Bregman was a brilliant teacher who revelled in the contradictions and dark absurdities of Middle Eastern politics. “If it makes sense then you haven’t understood it” was one of his favourite lines.

Bregman’s book, The Spy Who Fell to Earth, was turned into a documentary of the same name last year. The film gives a first-hand account of Bregman’s involvement in the Marwan affair. In the years after the war it was known that an anonymous “superspy” had supplied the Israelis with crucial intelligence. Bregman had become obsessed with the spy’s identity. After years of archival detective work and inquisitive conversations with those in the know, he finally zeroed in on none other than Nasser’s son-in-law.

Confident enough in his discovery to drop an unsubtle hint in one of his books, Bregman leaked Marwan’s name into the public sphere in 2002. This was a big risk for Bregman. If he was wrong then Marwan would certainly sue and his reputation would be ruined. Bregman’s investigations had led him to believe that Marwan had been a double agent – an Egyptian plant. His book made this clear.

The revelation was explosive, filling newspapers across the Middle East. But both Israel and Egypt claimed Marwan as their man and the narrative that gained traction was that Marwan’s true masters were in fact the Israelis. Though Marwan publicly denied the allegation that he was “The Angel” he did not threaten legal action.

Things became stranger when, the day after Bregman’s discovery featured in the Egyptian press, Marwan, then in his late 50s, made contact with the man who had unmasked him. The abstract and distant suddenly became very real: “As long as he was ‘the son-in-law’ with no face I did not care about him as a human being” Bregman confesses in the film.

The two men arranged to meet and a peculiar friendship developed. They took to speaking regularly on the phone. Marwan even asked Bregman to work him with him on his memoirs. But over the coming months and years, as Marwan became increasingly agitated and paranoid, Bregman began to realise the consequences of unmasking a living spy. Marwan was to leave Bregman answer phone messages claiming his life was in danger in the days preceding his death. Bregman is explicit about his sense of personal responsibility. “His death” he admits “was my failure to protect him.”

Bregman’s sympathy with the controversial, minority view about Marwan’s true loyalty was initially informed by Eli Zeira, the disgraced former director of Israeli military intelligence who had dismissed Marwan’s warning of war. Zeira’s theory is that Marwan carefully manipulated Israel’s intelligence agencies into trusting him before deceiving them at the crucial moment by telling them that the surprise attack would occur later than it actually did. This handed the advantage to the attacking Arab armies while maintaining Marwan’s reputation with the Israelis.

The Egyptian government’s position echoes Zeira’s theory. “Sadat wanted a very convincing agent to feed information to the Israelis” says Abdallah Hamouda, an Egyptian journalist. “Ashraf Marwan was the best actor to play the part.” Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak threw his weight behind this version of events in May last year, claiming that in 1973 President Sadat had told Mubarak, then head of the Egyptian Air Force, that he was about to send Marwan on a covert mission to pass the Israelis misleading information.

However, the Israeli political scientist Uri Bar Joseph’s comprehensive work, The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, provides the cornerstone of the case that Marwan in fact betrayed Egypt. Bar-Joseph is emphatic in his dismissal of Zeira’s theory as an attempt to exonerate himself from the blame that was laid squarely at his door by the Israeli establishment after the war.

The author painstakingly catalogues and examines the intelligence Marwan passed to the Israelis, the quality and quantity of which far exceeded what would have been necessary to convince them of his bona fides. The chronology of events in the immediate lead up to the war, together with well-founded scepticism that the Egyptian security services were capable of running such a complex double agent operation, help to make a convincing case for Marwan’s treachery.

The accusation levelled at Bregman is that he’s been duped by a self-serving narrative and clings to it despite compelling evidence to the contrary. Bregman’s documentary is an attempt to defend his actions by putting his own version of events out there. But while he admits to harbouring doubts about the double agent theory, he doesn’t concede that he’s made a mistake.

Whenever the class would ask Bregman about Marwan, he’d lose his usual ebullience and become pensive. He admitted he wasn’t sure about the spy’s true allegiance. It was clear that his academic neutrality was being tugged at by the emotion of personal involvement. I was left with the feeling that, deep down, he knew that Marwan wasn’t a double agent. But a mixture of guilt, pride and loyalty to the spy he unmasked made this alternative narrative more appealing, possibly because it allows Marwan to die a patriot.

The consequences of Marwan’s espionage played out on the international stage. But at the centre of the saga is the highly personal story of a man still haunted by the role he played in the death of the Middle East’s most notorious spy.