The Angel Read Free Page A

volunteers could be in 1962, when a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko offered his services to the CIA, and then defected to the United States two years later. James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s head of counterespionage, soon became convinced that Nosenko was a double agent, having been sent by the KGB to quell suspicions that Lee Harvey Oswald had been trained and sent by the Soviets to assassinate President Kennedy. Others in the CIA and the broader American intelligence community rejected Angleton’s theory, seeing Nosenko as a genuine defector whose informationshould be considered reliable. The flap went on for years, disrupting a major part of the agency’s operations in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. 2
    The Mossad knew all about the Nosenko affair. Angleton was, after all, not only in charge of counterespionage but also the point man on Israel for the entire American intelligence community. Both Mossad and CIA officials saw him as Israel’s best friend at the agency, and there can be little doubt that in the ongoing conversations between Angleton and Mossad representatives in Washington, Nosenko was a major topic of discussion. Goren, we may assume, was thoroughly versed in the affair as well. While Egyptian intelligence agencies were not nearly as sophisticated as the KGB, there was still room to wonder whether they were setting a trap. The last thing Goren and Vardi needed was for the British MI5 to discover Mossad operations taking place in central London after being tipped off by Egyptian intelligence. Even worse was the possibility that an Arab intelligence agency or Palestinian terror group would try to kill Mossad agents who showed up at a meeting with someone claiming to be Ashraf Marwan. But against these fears stood a heavy countervailing consideration: The prize was so enormous, the potential intelligence boon so great, that it pushed aside other considerations.
    All these questions resolved into a single quick decision as the four men made their way to Heathrow. They stopped the car, and the Mossad station chief got out and headed back to the embassy.
    It was not long before the telephone at the number Marwan had left was ringing. He was told that a meeting would be arranged soon and was given a number in London to call whenever he wanted to make contact with Israeli intelligence. He was asked to stand by near his phone until he received a call with details of the rendezvous. Meanwhile the Mossad team in London got to work setting it up.
    The hour had grown late, and they decided to push the meetingoff to the next day. It would take place in the lobby of a major hotel in central London. If everything went as planned, Marwan and his handler would talk in the lobby for a few minutes and then head up to a room that had been reserved on one of the upper floors, where they could speak openly.
    The short notice put significant pressure on those charged with securing the location, but the London Mossad station quickly pulled together the necessary arrangements. All that was left was to decide who, exactly, would attend the meeting. In a brief conversation between Goren and the station chief, they settled on a man named Dubi (his last name remains an official secret). He was the London station’s number two man and had been gathering intelligence in London for a few years. In his midthirties, a native Israeli whose grandparents had arrived in Palestine from Europe at the turn of the century, Dubi looked European but spoke fluent Arabic. This was an important consideration for the simple reason that nobody in the Mossad’s London station could say how well Marwan spoke English.
    The meeting was set for the evening hours. London-based Mossad operatives took up positions outside the hotel to make sure it wasn’t a trap. Goren sat on a couch in the lobby, pretending to read a newspaper as he kept his eye on the entrance. The paper hid from view a photograph he was holding of Ashraf Marwan.