Date: Wednesday, 14 October 2020
A former Mossad agent recounts the actions of Agent “Fix” — and reveals how Israel was able to call the Soviet Union’s bluff, but not act on it in the Yom Kippur War.
On October 13, 47 years ago, an Egyptian spy transmitted the “golden report” that enabled the Israel Defense Forces to repulse a major Egyptian attack in Sinai and to prevent Israel’s defeat in the Yom Kippur War. The spy was an officer in the Egyptian army who several years earlier, after the Six-Day War, agreed to work for Israeli intelligence after arriving in Israel under circumstances that cannot be publicized.
The officer underwent briefings in Israel, and his questioners treated him respectfully and politely, organized tours for him throughout the country, and hosted him for meals and meetings in the private homes of Israeli officers. In light of that he was persuaded to spy for Israel, and in return received hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.
As is usual in such cases, the source was given several code names, including “Koret” (“Woodcutter”) and “Fix.” At first he was handled by Brig. Gen. Aharon Levran, a member of Unit 154 for operating Military Intelligence agents, and afterwards by other intelligence officers who served in MI. In 1970, when the Egyptian officer was able to travel to Europe, his handling was transferred from MI to the Mossad, to to Benny Zeevi, a senior and highly appreciated case officer of the Mossad. That enabled the Mossad to give him a coded communications device, which made it easier for him to communicate with MI in real time.
Koret or Fix was one of Israel’s two most important and high-quality agents in Egypt in the years between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. The second was of course Dr. Ashraf Marwan, the close adviser of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who also had several code names – and was known mainly as “the Angel.” He was operated by D. from the Mossad. Mossad. Both the Egyptian officer and Ashraf Marwan were agents trained to provide strategic information with alerts and warnings in case a war was approaching, and both were greatly appreciated in real time and after the war as well, by the entire intelligence community.
About 20 years after the Yom Kippur War Maj. Gen. (res.) Eli Zeira, the head of MI during the war, began to cast aspersions against Marwan, systematically, deviously and with great sophistication, in order to misrepresent him as being a double agent.
Zeira, who did so in order to evade responsibility for the intelligence failure of 1973, found groupies among several journalists and former officers from the intelligence community, who as they aged became firm believers in Zeira’s lies. One of those who in his old age cast doubt on Marwan was Zeira’s successor, Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit, who passed away last week at the age of 94.
In those days Israel had several more Egyptian sources who provided mainly tactical information. Such information dealt, among other things, with unusual movement of Egyptian navy vessels – one of the designated signs of an approaching war. Israel’s naval intelligence took the information seriously, but Zeira and the head of his research department, Brig. Gen. Aryeh Shalev, dismissed it, as they ignored most of the information that flowed from hundreds of sources, both overt and covert, as well as aerial photos, and IDF wiretapping and observations.
All this wealth of information, as claimed by former Mossad officials David Arbel and Uri Neeman in their book “Unforgivable Delusion,” clearly indicates that the Yom Kippur War was not an intelligence surprise. Israel simply surprised itself.
Fortunately, after the failure in the first days of the war, came the golden report transmitted by the Egyptian officer that saved Israel. According to the report, the next day (October 14) the Egyptian army would launch a massive new attack in order to advance its forces along the entire length of the front, beyond the line of the Sinai passes (the Gidi and the Mitla), in order to capture additional territory and to destroy as many IDF forces as possible.
Based on this information, the IDF prepared in time, waited patiently for the attack and then crushed a large part of the Egyptian force. On October 14 the second largest tank battle in history was fought (second only to the Battle of Kursk between the Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1943), with the participation of 1,500 tanks from both sides. The IDF repulsed the attack and the Egyptian Army lost about 250 tanks in a single day. The success of the operation paved the way to the Israeli counterattack that led to the crossing of the Suez Canal and the end of the war.
“Golda asked, so we must”
The Yom Kippur War can be divided into three key dates: October 6 – the crossing of the canal by the Egyptian army and its capture of territory in Sinai; October 14 – the repulsion of the Egyptian attack in the direction of the passes; October 24 – the second cease-fire declaration by the United Nations Security Council, after Israel violated the first one in an attempt to improve its positions.
On that day the Soviet Union sent an ultimatum to the United States to the effect that if Israel didn’t stop the fighting, it planned to send forces that would coerce it to do so. Moscow backed the ultimatum with a massive military deployment. Almost 100 ships and one aircraft carrier were concentrated in the Mediterranean; seven airborne divisions and Soviet forces that were posted in East Germany were placed on alert. There was a great fear that the tension between the two superpowers could boil over to the brink of a nuclear war, as had happened in the Cuban missile crisis.
The report of the Soviet ultimatum shocked the Israeli government and presented it with a dilemma: Should they hold fire or further violate the UN decision again in order to improve positions and subdue the besieged Egyptian Third Army, thereby completing the victory.
“On October 24 Prime Minister Golda Meir contacted Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and asked for the Mossad’s assessment. Was the Soviet Union intending to carry out the threat or was it an attempt to apply pressure,” says Arbel, who had been accepted to the Mossad about five years previously and at the time was serving as the head of the research department, which covered the countries on the periphery (the Horn of Africa, East Africa, Turkey and Iran).
“Zamir replied that the Mossad had no research organization that covered the Soviet Union and he didn’t have the knowledge to assess its military capabilities and certainly not the Kremlin’s intentions. Golda replied that she knew that and still insisted on receiving the Mossad’s assessment. ‘I’ve lost my faith in the assessments of MI,’ she told Zamir.
“Zamir turned to the head of the staff department, Shlomo Cohen Abarbanel, and delegated the task to him,” adds Arbel, who is talking about this for the first time. “Shlomo reacted in a manner similar to Zamir’s response to Golda, claiming that he didn’t have the necessary knowledge and tools to assess the intentions of the Soviet Union. ‘You must, it’s an order from the prime minister,’ Zamir told him.”
Arbel was summoned to the office of Cohen Abarbanel, who wanted to assign the task to him, but Arbel refused, claiming correctly that the department he headed didn’t cover the Soviet Union. “There’s no choice,” replied the department head to Arbel. “We have to fulfill the request of the prime minister. Write something and show it to me.”
A great deal has been written about the Yom Kippur War, but less about the confrontational strategy adopted by the two superpowers at the time,” says Arbel, noting that during the 19 days of combat, there were daily consultations between Washington and Moscow with the objective of formulating a joint policy as to how to end the fighting. He says that it was important to Moscow that its “clients” in Cairo and Damascus would achieve a victory, at least a partial one.
U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on the other hand, estimated already during the first days of the war that an Egyptian victory would be interpreted as a Soviet victory achieved thanks to the arms and the diplomatic support it provided to Egypt and Syria. He believed that an Egyptian defeat would make it possible to promote one of the supreme interests of the United States – removing the Soviet influence and presence in the Middle East.
Arbel, who eventually was promoted to the job of head of the training division in the Mossad and chief of the Mossad stations in Paris and Washington, also researched the Marwan affair, and like many others reached an unequivocal conclusion that he was not a double agent but a valuable super-agent. In a paper he wrote for Cohen Abarbanel, Arbel estimated that the Soviet Union would not carry out its threat. He claimed that all the major crises in the past between the satellite countries of the two superpowers had ended without a direct military confrontation between them. That was the case in Berlin in 1948 and 1961, in Cuba in 1962 and in the Six-Day War in 1967.
“What all the past crises between the two superpowers share in common is that not a single one of them threatened to harm an existential interest of the other in a manner that justifies a war that is likely to develop into a nuclear confrontation. Therefore we can reasonably assume that they’ll find the way to reach a compromise in this crisis too.” Arbel had no knowledge and information because, as mentioned, the Mossad had none. He based his assessment on common sense – and he was right.
When the Soviet Union discovered that the United States was supporting Israel, after Israel had violated the cease-fire and refused to withdraw to the lines where it was positioned at the time of the Security Council resolution, it sent the ultimatum. In an attempt to reduce the tension, Kissinger agreed to a cease-fire at the lines where the Israeli and Egyptian forces were positioned that day, and as a result Moscow stopped conditioning the cease-fire on a demand for the IDF to withdraw. When Arbel sent his assessment to his commanders, it turned out that the Soviet threat has already been removed.
“From that moment the common interests of Israel and the United States diverged. Kissinger believed that Washington had achieved its objectives,” stresses Arbel. He says that was the reason why the U.S. secretary of state decided, to the chagrin of Golda Meir, to prevent the IDF from defeating the Third Army. Israel held its fire and the war ended.
Israeli and Egyptian officers began talks at the 101st kilometer, which later led to a prisoner exchange, agreements on the separation of forces and Israeli withdrawals from Sinai, leading up to the signing of the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries – a treaty that has been in force for 41 years.
*IDF tanks heading toward the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.Credit: David Weisfish/IPPA
