Who Killed Ashraf Marwan? 
By HOWARD BLUM, New York Times Op-Ed Contributor

THE billionaire's body tumbled over the railing of his apartment's fourth-floor balcony and landed hard on the London sidewalk. And like so much in the complicated life of Ashraf Marwan - a 62-year-old Egyptian who had been the most effective spy in the history of the Middle East - the mysterious circumstances of his death two weeks ago provoked further speculation. 

As Scotland Yard investigates the suspicious fall, and as newspapers and bloggers throughout the world wonder whether any of several intelligence services played a role in his death, a debate continues over whether Mr. Marwan was a well-connected and resourceful Israeli spy or a brilliantly manipulative Egyptian double agent.

Mr. Marwan's death has also brought a new and chilling significance to a long-running legal battle in Israel involving the unauthorized leaking of his name to journalists. And in the aftermath of the discovery of his broken body on a sidewalk in the St. James neighborhood on June 27, I cannot help but wonder if I had a small part in the events that led to Ashraf Marwan's death. 

Mr. Marwan's story - a tale overflowing with the suspense and ruthless duplicity of a spy novel - began to take shape in the spring of 1969. He had come to London, ostensibly to consult a Harley Street doctor about a stomach ailment. He chose to be examined by a doctor whose offices had been used previously for a covert meeting between King Hussein of Jordan and the general director of the Israeli prime minister's office. 

Along with his X-rays, Mr. Marwan handed the doctor a file crammed with official Egyptian state documents. He wanted them delivered to the Israeli Embassy in London.

The Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, determined the documents to be genuine. Still, a rapidly formed working group of Mossad wise men debated the risk in dealing with a walk-in, a volunteer who shows up bearing gifts. If he's not a double - an agent spreading disinformation - then he's uncontrollable. It was decided, however, that this walk-in's credentials were worth the gamble. 

Mr. Marwan, the excited vetters discovered, was married to a daughter of Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was also President Nasser's liaison to the intelligence services. Not even 30, he was an intimate of the leaders who determined Egypt's future.

Three days after meeting with the doctor, Mr. Marwan was contacted by the Mossad as he walked through Harrods, the London department store. His operational life as a spy began.

From the start, Mr. Marwan delivered. He yielded so many top secret Egyptian documents it was as if, as one Mossad agent put it, "we had someone sleeping in Nasser's bed." Based on this trove of secrets, Israel developed what became an article of faith for the nation's political and military leaders: "the Concept." With biblical certainty, the Concept held that until (1) Egypt possessed missiles and long-range bombers and (2) the Arab states united in a genuine coalition, a new war with Israel would not take place.

Running the agent, who was given code names including "Angel," "Babylon" and most frequently "the In-Law," grew into a small industry. For face-to-face meetings with his handler and often the head of the Mossad, a safe house was purchased in London not far from the Dorchester Hotel. It was wired to record every conversation, every aside. A special team of clerks turned the tapes into transcripts for the prime minister, the army chief of staff and a handful of other top Israeli officials. Mr. Marwan received �50,000 at each meeting, but this was only a minor expense compared to the estimated $20 million spent over the first four years of Mr. Marwan's operational life. 

Israel's leaders felt this was money well spent: They knew what their enemies were thinking.

Then in April 1973, the In-Law sent a flash message to his case agent using the word "radish." This was the code for an imminent war. Zvi Zamir, the head of the Mossad, rushed from Tel Aviv to the London safe house. The In-Law revealed that on May 15, Egypt and Syria would launch a surprise attack.

Israel called up tens of thousands of reservists and deployed additional brigades and support equipment in the Sinai and the north. The alert dragged on for three months and cost $35 million. But it was a false alarm. The In-Law had been wrong.

Six months later, on Oct. 5, 1973, the In-Law sent another flash message with the code word "radish." Mr. Zamir was awoken at 2:30 a.m. with the news. The next morning, he took the first El Al flight to London.

Syria was massing tanks and missiles in the north. Egypt was conducting military maneuvers near the Suez Canal. Russia had begun evacuating families from the region. Yet that afternoon Gen. Eli Zeira, the head of Israeli military intelligence, announced at a staff meeting that a coordinated attack by Egypt and Syria was "low probability - even lower than low."

Only before midnight, London time, the In-Law appeared at the safe house. He spoke to Mr. Zamir for less than an hour and then left.

Mr. Zamir phoned an aide at 3:40 a.m. on the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish religious calendar. The Egyptians and Syrians, he said, will attack simultaneously on both fronts at sunset.

At an Israeli cabinet meeting that morning, the In-Law's warning was not considered persuasive. The last time he had promised war would break out, nothing happened except the expenditure of $35 million. Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense, lectured the army chief of staff, "On the basis of messages from Zvika you do not mobilize a whole army." 

Nevertheless, it was decided that at 4 p.m. - two hours before the In-Law said the attack would be launched - armored brigades would move into position along the Suez Canal. Until then, there would be only three tanks in position to hold off any invasion.

At 2 p.m., the Arab armies went to war. Egypt crossed the Suez Canal in the south and Syrian tanks charged from the north. Their armies overwhelmed the surprised and unprepared enemy. After three days of fighting, General Dayan worried openly about the "destruction of the third Temple," the state of Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir was given a bottle of suicide pills; she preferred to die rather than witness the destruction of the Jewish state. 

Israel's outnumbered forces fought back and recovered their key positions. After being rearmed by airlifts of weapons and supplies from the United States, they attacked. Before the month's end, Israel won the war.

Still, the Yom Kippur War was an Israeli intelligence disaster. Decades later, the Mossad and military intelligence continued to argue over who was to blame. General Zeira, who lost both his job as head of military intelligence and a good deal of his reputation, spent years sifting through the events leading up to the attacks. 

He wondered: Who had spread the false Concept? Who had "cried wolf" in May 1973 and persuaded Israel to call up its reserves? Who had been wrong about the time of the invasion? The answer, General Zeira was certain, was that Israel had been deliberately and artfully misled. From the start, the In-Law had been a double agent.

The Mossad formed a special committee to examine the In-Law's role. Its conclusion: Mr. Marwan was not a double.

But General Zeira was unconvinced. He began to talk to journalists about his theory. I was one of those he spoke to. He never told me the spy's name, but he pointed me in a direction that made it easy - less than a half hour of searching the Internet - for me to deduce his identity. I used Mr. Marwan's name in a 2003 book about the Yom Kippur War. 

Not long after its publication, Zvi Zamir called General Zeira a "traitor" for divulging Mr. Marwan's identity. Mr. Zamir petitioned the attorney general for an investigation. But there was no official inquiry, and General Zeira sued for slander. Last month, an Israeli Supreme Court justice ruled in arbitration that General Zeira had in fact revealed Mr. Marwan's identity.

Now with his unexplained death, the many enigmas of Ashraf Marwan's complex life have grown even murkier. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and possible successor, and Omar Suleiman, the head of the Egyptian intelligence service, attended Mr. Marwan's funeral. Sheik Mohammad Seyed Tantawi, Egypt's highest-ranking imam, led the prayers over the coffin, covered with an Egyptian flag. On the following day, in response to reporters' questions, President Hosni Mubarak called Mr. Marwan "a patriot," according to Egypt's official Middle East News Agency. "He carried out patriotic acts which it is not yet time to reveal," the president added.

In Israel, an angry Mr. Zamir told the newspaper Haaretz, "I have no doubt that reports published about him in Israel caused his death." The former Mossad chief again called on the attorney general to indict General Zeira.

In London, Mr. Marwan's sister was described as saying she saw him in good spirits only hours before his death. But another unidentified friend said Mr. Marwan, in declining health, lost his balance and fell. And there were reports that he made many enemies through his activities in selling armaments. A coroner's inquest is expected to announce its findings in mid-August. 

And now I am reminded of my last telephone conversation with Ashraf Marwan.

"Are you afraid?" I asked.

"Why should I be afraid?" he replied. "I was a soldier." 

Mr. Marwan promised to reveal more about which country he was fighting for when we were to appear together on a news program in the United States. But two days before the taping, he called to tell me he would not speak in public until he had finished a book about the war. 

I never heard from him again. Now Scotland Yard - and, I suspect, other agencies - is trying to find the manuscript he said was writing at the time of his death.

Howard Blum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War."  [Blum/NewYorkTimes/13July2007]

Limping Lady Begins Spy Career in Early 1940's. Perhaps one of the most spectacular stories of unprecedented bravery and commitment to the defeat of the Axis threesome of Germany, Japan and Italy in World War II is the story of Virginia Hall. Ms. Hall began life most unspectacularly in Baltimore, Md., April 6, 1906, as the youngest daughter of Edwin Lee Hall. She attended Radcliffe and later Bernard College from 1924 to 1926. When not pursuing her academic interests in foreign languages (French, Italian and German), she picked up free movie tickets for herself and friends from her father who owned several movie theaters in Baltimore. Virginia soon tired of the social clime in Baltimore and looked around for something more exciting. 

In 1931, Virginia began what she thought would become a life-long career in international relations. She took a clerk's position with the American Embassy in Warsaw at a salary of $2,500 per year. Over the next few years she would serve in Tallinn, Estonia; Vienna, Austria and Izmir, Turkey. At Izmir she would suffer an unfortunate accident that would impact her life and career significantly. While hunting, her shotgun slipped from her grasp. When she grabbed for it, the gun discharged and pellets struck her foot. By the time medical help arrived, gangrene had already developed. The surgeon amputated her leg to save her life. She was fitted with an artificial limb that she in later years would call 'Cuthbert'. Her future friends in the French underground would refer to her as 'la dame qui boite' or 'The Limping Lady'. 

The accident ended Virginia's plans for a long career with the State Department. Not only did the State Department personnel chiefs have a closed mind about women in the career service but there also existed a regulation that disallowed employment of anyone with "any amputation of a portion of a limb." Displeased with the response she received from the U.S. State Department, Virginia resigned her clerk's position in May 1939. When war broke out later that year she was in Paris and joined the French Ambulance Service Unit as a private second class. The fall of France in June 1940 prompted her to flee to England. It was here, while working as a code clerk for the military attach� in the U.S. Embassy, she was recruited by British Special Operations Executive.

The British SOE opened Hall's eyes to a very different world. The organization had been created by the British government on July 16, 1940, to undertake sabotage, subversion and the formation of secret military forces in German occupied Europe. It would essentially function as an intelligence gathering agency first and foremost but in the words of Winston Churchill, he wanted it "to set Europe ablaze." As a new SOE recruit, Virginia received training in weaponry, communications and security. Because of her fluency in French, Hall's first assignment saw her setting up resistance networks in Vichy, France, beginning in August 1941. Her cover was that of being a reporter for the New York Post. In Vichy, Hall sent in her reports freely without interruptions from the government headed by General Henri P�tain, France's World War I hero. She described Vichy as a small town increasingly beset with shortages and deteriorating living conditions including the absence of butter and milk. By early 1942 her reports indicated that people were near starvation which curiously occurred simultaneously with the tightening of German control. 

In early 1942, she relocated to Lyons and began espionage work out of an apartment. Here she established contact with the French underground and began assisting in the return to England of downed American aircrews and escaped prisoners. While doing this Hall continued to write stories but when America entered the war she became an enemy alien and then had to conduct business clandestinely from bistros and restaurants, being constantly vigilant to avoid Vichy and Gestapo officers. The aftermath of the invasion of North Africa in November 1942 brought a torrent of German troops into Vichy. Their sudden presence forced Hall to leave the country. She crossed the Pyr�n�es mountains in the dead of winter on foot with help from a Belgian Army captain, two Frenchmen and a Spanish guide. Following a brief incarceration in the border town of San Juan de Las Abadesas by Spanish authorities, she was soon released at the behest of the American consul and after a brief rest resumed her career as a spy.

After what she called a dulling few months in Madrid operating under the cover of being a reporter for the Chicago Times, Hall asked SOE to transfer her back to France where she could be more help in the war effort. She was sent back to England where she received training as a wireless operator. Once trained she was moved to the American Office of Strategic Services headed by the "Wild Bill" Donovan. Hall, soon to operate under the code name of Diane, began her second tour as a spy in France and joined the resistance in the Haute-Loire region of central France. Here she worked in setting up sabotage and guerrilla groups and then supplying them with money, arms and rations. For several weeks before D-Day, Hall and her accomplices relocated frequently to avoid being pinpointed by Nazi radio direction finders. In early May 1944, she operated from the attic of a home owned by Col. Fernand Vessereaux, head of the local police and once chief of protocol in Edouard Deladier's cabinet. From there she donned a disguise as a peasant. To hide her bad leg, she wore heavy woolen clothes and added filler to her skirts and dresses to make her look much larger than she really was. In this garb and disguise, she herded her goats up and down the roads near the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon and very carefully reported on German Army activities and troop movements.

Hall would relate years later that her life in Haute-Loire was very difficult. She had to be constantly on the alert for the Gestapo who was intent on capturing the lady with a limp. Indeed, the Gestapo hierarchy regarded her as the most dangerous allied agent in France. Despite this, she maintained regular contact with London and was the first to report that the German General Staff had relocated their headquarters from Lyons to Le Puy, about 100 kilometers north of Marseilles. On August 15, 1944, as part of Operation Anvil, French troops landed at their country's Mediterranean cities of Marseilles, Saint Tropez and Saint Rapha�l. At this juncture, an American and a French officer and an American radio operator strengthened Hall's operation. Working under the code name Jedburgh, the team began organizing, training and arming three battalions of Forces Francaises d' Interieur that later took part in eminently successful sabotage operations against the retreating Germans. Hall and her team provided daily intelligence reports as the battle lines changed almost every day as the German Army retreated back to their homeland. The team became particularly adept at destroying enemy communication lines.

Hall, never trained in guerrilla warfare because of her physical condition, became a superb manager. In the final days of the German occupation of France, her teams destroyed four bridges, derailed several freight trains headed for Germany, downed key telephone lines, killed more than 150 enemy soldiers and took more than 500 prisoners. The German retreat was anything but smooth and without incident thanks to Hall's groups and others like them. Hall's career in World War II ended with a last assignment to Innsbruck, Austria. For her protection, her code name was changed to Camille. For her cover she became Anna Muller, a German subject born in Turkey. The assignment was to focus on the discovery of last-ditch Nazi efforts to resist allied forces. The collapse of the German forces, however, caused the cancellation of the mission.

At the conclusion of the war, Col. J. Russell Forgan, the OSS commanding officer in the European theater of operations, nominated Hall for the Distinguished Service Cross, the army's highest military medal after the Medal of Honor. Hall picked up her citation quietly and according to one observer, did not seem to be impressed she had been awarded such a high honor. After all, she had just done her job. Hall's citation, however, quickly made it to OSS chief Bill Donovan's desk in Washington. On May 12, 1945, he sent a memo to President Truman recommending he present the award. Hall declined on the grounds that she was still employed and active in intelligence work. President Truman acceded to her wishes and Bill Donovan presented her the medal in a private ceremony in his office.

In 1951, a 45 year-old Hall started work for the CIA in Washington. She began her CIA career as part of the Office of Policy Coordination and became an intelligence analyst on French paramilitary affairs. One year later she became one of the first women operations officers in the new Office of the Deputy Director of Plans. In this capacity she prepared political action projects, interviewed exiles, and planned resistance and sabotage nets to be used against the Soviet Union in the event of war with that country. Hall accepted several overseas assignments with the CIA but spent the last years of her career as a GS-14 in Washington, D.C. At the mandatory retirement age of 60, she turned in her agency badge in 1966 and found new passions in gardening and French poodles.

Toward the end of her life Hall had to deal with bad health. She died in 1982 at the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, Md. The Baltimore Sun reported that the simple funeral services contrasted remarkably with the drama of her earlier life during World War II when life from one day to the next often hung in the balance. Regarded as one of the true heroines of the war, Virginia Hall, or The Limping Lady, rests today in the Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Md., not far from her birthplace. [Casey/HQAIA] 

Section III - BOOK PREVIEWS, OBITUARIES, AND COMING EVENTS