Free The Angel by Uri Bar-Joseph

president. Marwan’s access to the most closely guarded secrets of the Egyptian regime was now almost unlimited. Nasser’s death, in other words, took the greatest source of intelligence Israel had ever had and made him suddenly far, far better.
    FOR ASHRAF MARWAN, the death of his father-in-law presented both new dangers and new opportunities. The greatest danger was that he would lose whatever privilege he had gained from being a member of the president’s family. This threat quickly abated. If anything, Nasser’s status only grew after his death, and the family he left behind would gain a patina of royalty both under Anwar Sadat and, later, under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. At the same time, Ashraf Marwan had always been something of a black sheep. There were more than a few people among the ruling elites who knew exactly what Nasser had thought of his son-in-law. They knew that less than a year before his death, the president had demanded that his daughter divorce Marwan, and that only Mona’s stubbornness prevented this from happening. With Nasser’s death Marwan knew there was some chance that the new regime would feel less impressed by Mona’s passion than her father was, and would cast Marwan out.
    At the same time, Marwan had reason to feel immense relief. Although he assumed that regime officials like Sami Sharaf would continue keeping tabs on him, none of them would hold him to Nasser’s standard, according to which members of the family were forbidden from taking advantage of their status. On the contrary,for these officials, profiting from one’s status was perfectly normal. Suddenly, the chances of Marwan triggering a scandal like the one involving Souad al-Sabah had shrunk dramatically. Nasser’s death cleared the way for Marwan to significantly improve his financial situation.
    Much harder to tell, however, is whether the president’s passing had any impact on Marwan’s motivation to work for Israel. Nasser was still alive when Marwan made his first moves. But we have no reason to think anything changed when Nasser died. The financial impetus might have become less of a factor, in light of all the new opportunities that now would present themselves. His need to get back at Nasser for slights to his honor might have lost some of their edge once Nasser was dead. But the fact is that Marwan never displayed any hesitation in helping Israel whatsoever, neither before nor after the president’s death. Once he had crossed the line of making that first phone call to the embassy in July 1970, calling again the following December seemed that much easier.
    Nasser’s successor was his deputy, Anwar el-Sadat, one of the less noteworthy members of the Egyptian leadership following the Free Officers revolution in 1952. Most people in the know, both in the Arab world and in Israel, believed Sadat would not hold power for long. But over the next few months, he solidified his position, outmaneuvering his opponents and keeping his nose above water. The period between Nasser’s death in September 1970 and the climactic purge of pro-Nasserite elements that Sadat undertook the following May, which he called the “Corrective Revolution,” proved his mettle as a political survivor and impressed observers around the world. Marwan’s own political gymnastics over the same few months drew far less attention—except among Israel’s intelligence chiefs. Like Sadat, Marwan displayed a breathtaking ability to seize opportunities while deflecting threats to his position. A close alliance emerged between Sadat and Nasser’s young and ambitiousson-in-law—an alliance that came about through no small amount of luck. The end result was that by May 1971, when Sadat had finally stabilized his rule over Egypt, Ashraf Marwan enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Egyptian hierarchy.
    And thus Egypt became an open book for Israeli intelligence.
    ANWAR EL-SADAT WAS