EXTRACT 10 FROM MY MEMOIR

The Spy Who Fell to Earth: My Relationship With the Secret Agent Who Rocked the Middle East

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CHAPTER 6: MARWAN IS DEAD

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26 JUNE 2007

IT IS A THURSDAY, and I am stopping by at home on my way to pick up my little boy from school. The telephone answering machine’s light flashes, and I quickly press the button to check out the messages. There are three. I listen to the first message, and when I hear Ashraf Marwan’s voice, my heart sinks. `Hello, hi, I am [phoning] about your book. If you could call me back on my mobile. Thank you.’ I have known Marwan for nearly five years now, and this is the first time he has left a message on my answering machine. It is not his style to leave messages. He has a strong notion of telephone security. He is so careful on the phone. He is a real spy with the soul of a spy, and spies do not often leave messages on answering machines unless it is absolutely essential. I grab a chair and sit down, trying to give some order to my running thoughts. By then, the answering machine is playing the next message, which was received fifty-nine minutes after the first one. `God,’ I can hear myself saying out loud. `It’s him again!’ It says: `Please, hallo, can you call me about our book? Thank you.’ And then, the third message received just twelve minutes later: `Hello, hi, good afternoon. If you can call me, I am the subject of your book. Thank you.’ Holding my head in my hands, I sit there, my heart racing. `Ma Kara lo,’ I hear myself uttering in Hebrew. `What’s happened to him?’ I run the trio of messages, all recorded within the space of seventy-one minutes, listening attentively to his tone, which I know so well, and I immediately realize that, particularly in his second message, he sounds concerned; the tone of his `Please’ reveals it all. Something is going on. But what?

The week before, I had sent Marwan an envelope containing articles about a legal battle that had ended in a libel suit filed by the former head of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira, against Mossad’s former director, Zvi Zamir, both of whom served before and during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In media interviews, Zamir blamed Zeira for publicly exposing Ashraf Marwan’s identity, revealing Marwan’s name to me, thereby revealing top state secrets, breaking intelligence etiquette, and endangering the spy’s life. In retaliation, Zeira sued Zamir for libel - and lost. The judge found that Zeira had disclosed top secret confidential information, and the judge then produced a long report, which was published in the Israeli press and put on the Internet too. In it, Ashraf Marwan’s name was mentioned many times, which meant that his identity as a spy had become a matter of public - official - legal record. While I had placed Marwan in some danger by exposing him as a spy, this was still only the word of a historian; no higher power had offered confirmation of the fact. Now, with the high-profile court case between two senior Israeli officers and the judge’s ruling, this was all official; for the first time, a judge named Marwan as a spy.

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In the car back home from his school, my little boy is quiet; he is a perceptive lad, and he can see that I am miles away. When we get home, I put him in front of the television, close the door, and climb up to my study, where I take out my old tape recorder, slip a fresh tape into the machine, and check that it works properly. I had never before recorded my conversations with Marwan, knowing full well that if he realized that I was doing so, he would, at once, cut off all contact with me, as he had done with Dubi Asherov, his Mossad controller. But now it is all different. Something had happened or was about to happen, and my gut feeling was that I was reaching the climax of my relationship with Ashraf Marwan - and anyway, I will only record myself talking to him, only my end of the line, so that I can later reconstruct our conversation.

I position the tape recorder on the desk and grab my notebook. In stressful and difficult situations, and I remember it from my Lebanon war experience, I often become calm and quieter; but now, as I dial Marwan’s number, I can see that my finger is shaking, and I feel my pulse in my temples. His phone rings, and he picks it up at once. `My friend,’ I say, relieved to hear his voice, `how are you?’ `I’m okay,’ he replies, `and how are you? I received your envelope.’ He is referring to the envelope with articles on the Zeira-Zamir legal battle; apparently, mistakenly, I had sent this envelope to 80 Park Street, W1, which was his old London address, and so it took almost a week for it to reach him. Now, he is extremely concerned about his name being mentioned in the judge’s report and in the press, which is why he had tried to catch me and left the messages. A few minutes into our conversation, Marwan suddenly asks me to call him back in two minutes, which I do, but he does not answer. I persist in phoning him every two minutes, and on the fourth try, he picks up, apologizing that the line is faulty, and we continue our conversation.

I explain the judge’s report to Marwan, but he interrupts me and cuts straight to the heart of the matter: `What’s the bottom line’? he asks. `The bottom line is that the judge also published your name,’ I reply. I ask him whether he has seen the report but he has not. `I have his report here,’ I say to Marwan, `but I can’t give it to you. I don’t want the authorities in Israel to blame me for doing things that maybe I am not supposed to do.’ I myself gave evidence before the judge, and he had been very clear in his warnings to me not to say anything about the proceedings: the questions I was asked, my answers - nothing at all. `I understand’, Marwan says.

I tell Marwan that I am traveling to Switzerland on Sunday to do some summer teaching there, and so he hastens to ask: `Where are you tomorrow?’ `Tomorrow I will be in town … at King’s College,’ I say, whereupon Marwan suggests: `So, shall we meet tomorrow?’ I give him my mobile number (which he has already got), and he takes the number down very carefully and then asks me to repeat it so that he could ring me the next day to arrange a time for our meeting and together we could go over the judge’s report. When we are done, I ask Marwan: `Otherwise, you are fine? You’re OK?’, to which he replies: `Just fine, apart from the headache’ - by which he means the judge’s report.

I feel better after the conversation. He sounds all right, in spite of his `headache.’

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27 JUNE 2007

My office is in the War Studies Department at King’s College London, and I await a call from Marwan, as arranged the day before, to tell me where we could meet. Judge Or’s report is in my bag, and occasionally, I dig it out to go over the sections I would discuss with Marwan. I am waiting and waiting with growing irritation, but he fails to phone, and it is getting late. During our five-year relationship, I grew used to Marwan’s capricious behaviors. `Agents aren’t airplanes,’ I remind myself, recalling John Le Carre’s words. `They don’t have schedules.’ But when it passes midday, I pop up from my office to check mobile reception - reception is poor in my basement office, where I work - to see if he has called. But no, not a word from him.

Around this time, a few miles from my office, an ambulance has been called to 24 Carlton House Terrace. When it gets there, the paramedics are directed to a little private rose garden at the back of a building, where a man is lying among the roses, still breathing, his face to the ground. He utters a few words, and then he dies. It is Ashraf Marwan. He tumbled off his balcony to his death - either he was pushed off, or he jumped.

Ashraf Marwan fell to his death from the fifth floor of this London building. His body landed in a little rose garden under his balcony

Marwan’s mysterious death sends shockwaves through Egypt and across the Middle East, including Israel. The region is a constant rumor mill - and speculation is rife that this was no accident but murder. Marwan is the third Egyptian living in London to die in similar circumstances. In June 2001, the Egyptian actor Soad Hosny fell from the balcony of Stuart Tower, a block of flats in Maida Vale, after she approached a publisher offering to write her memoir. In August 1973, El-Leithy Nassif, former head of the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s presidential guard, fell from a balcony in the very same tower. He, too, was writing his memoir. All three victims had links to the Egyptian security services. Was Marwan’s death another stitch in a pattern whereby Egyptians are thrown to earth from high-rise London buildings?

The funeral of Ashraf Marwan in Cairo

TO BE CONTINUED …