EXTRACT 2 FROM MY MEMOIR

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

THE END…

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THERE ARE MOMENTS IN A man’s life which are imprinted on his mind and which he carries with him to the end. For me one such moment is remembered in particular; that was when I learned of the brutal death of Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian who worked as a Mossad spy.

His name was top secret until I unmasked him in December 2002. But what at first seemed to be a moment of glory and the pinnacle of my professional career - being the first historian to reveal and write in detail on Israel’s most senior spy ever, and perhaps the most important spy in the history of modern espionage - turned out to be a sheer nightmare, as a few years later he died in mysterious circumstances. Even now, years after the event, I can still - almost physically - relive the moment I was told of his death. My mobile phone rings. An overseas telephone call, and then a short exchange:

`Have you heard what has happened?’

`Heard what?’

`He’s dead’

`Who’s dead?’

`Marwan … Ashraf Marwan … he fell off a balcony … he was either pushed or jumped.’

I am standing in the middle of a field, my usual shortcut on my way home from work, my head spinning, and I am stunned to the core, struggling to collect myself. That day I was due to meet up with Marwan in town. He phoned the day before. Something was wrong; he sounded anxious and shaken. We arranged to meet up near King’s College London, where I teach. But when he failed to phone again as we’d arranged the day before - to see where and when exactly we would meet - I gave up waiting for him and returned home. And now the dreadful news!

For a long time now friends would enquire why I did not write the story of my relationship with Ashraf Marwan; after all, it was stranger than a tale of fiction, for soon after I had unmasked him as a top Mossad spy, Marwan made contact and we then kept in touch for almost five years. We met face to face, and spoke frequently on the phone; he even made me his consultant on a memoir he was writing, which, as I would learn, mysteriously vanished on the day he plunged to his death.

Why, of all people, Marwan chose to become friends with me - the man who had exposed him as a spy in the first place - is still a mystery even to me, though I do have some thoughts about it which I will discuss later. As the Marwan affair turned out to be so traumatic for me, I was, for years, reluctant to touch it. But now - at fifty-seven - I realize just how close I am to Marwan’s age when he plunged to earth and died, and I am starting to acknowledge my own mortality.

Putting the story of my relationship with Marwan on paper has not been difficult. From the day he picked up the phone and spoke to me for the first time, I realized that instead of being merely a historian whose task it is to record events, I somehow had become an active participant in them; though, as I would soon learn, it is easier to write history than to make it, even in such a mild way as mine. I, therefore, kept recording my dealings with Marwan by summarizing our significant telephone conversations, keeping faxes I had sent to him and recordings of two significant - indeed extraordinary - telephone calls: one, a tape with three messages Marwan had left on my answering machine the day before he died, and a subsequent telephone conversation I made with him and which I secretly recorded. This material is now deposited at the Liddell Hart Archives at King’s College London; much of it has been used to write this book.

Ashraf Marwan around the time I met him for the first time

COMING SOON:

CHAPTER 1, WHO WAS ASHRAF MARWAN?