Accused of being a double agent, there may be more to the death of Ashraf Marawan than meets the eye, writes Mohamed Salmawy That Ashraf Marawan handled communications concerning the national security of Egypt, and also Israel, is not in dispute. That he was a spy or a double agent, as some news reports naïvely claimed, runs counter to everything we know about the man's life, up to his tragic death. I knew Marawan since the 1960s. We were never close friends, but would run into each other, as we were both part of the same young crowd at the Gezira Club. He seemed normal enough, interested mainly in all the things young people of his age were interested in. So his marriage to Mona, the youngest daughter of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1966, came as a bit of surprise, and told us something about the man's ambitious side. After Nasser's death, Marawan started working as an aide for former president Anwar El-Sadat, then moved on to the Arab Industrialisation Authority, and then became involved in some sensitive intelligence work. He was at the other side of the political spectrum as far as I was concerned. While he conferred with kings and heads of state as Sadat's personal envoy, I was suspended from work in 1973, imprisoned in 1977, and suspended again in 1981. Marawan became a full-time businessman after Sadat's death. I got to see him occasionally at various social functions in Cairo and London. In 1996, my play Al-Ganzeer, or The Chain, was getting good reviews. President Hosni Mubarak came with Oman's Sultan Qabus to one of the performances. All of a sudden, Marawan called me from London. He had heard that the play was about to be performed in Paris and wanted to bring it to London, so that the Egyptian Expatriates Society, of which he was chairman, would have the chance to see it. For purely organisational reasons, this didn't work out. But the phone call restored a measure of friendliness between us that had been discontinued in Sadat's time. I had over the years developed close friendships with members of the late Nasser's family. His wife attended my plays regularly. Hoda Abdel-Nasser and her husband, Hatem Sadeq, were close friends. Hoda even came to visit me when I was detained in Istenaf Prison. I was also close to Nasser's sons: Khaled, Abdel-Hakim, and Abdel-Hamid. I saw Marawan a few years back in Paris. Then-information minister Mamdouh El-Beltagui had just undergone brain surgery and Marawan and his wife, Mona, decided to throw a party for him at a well-known restaurant. Marawan invited me to that dinner, and he was a changed man by then. Little remained of the dashing young man I knew in the 1960s. Marawan was a very rich and a very ill man. I saw him again from a distance at a party in Cairo last month. He was as thin as a skeleton and needed a cane to walk. My relation with Marawan was one neither of hate nor love, so I can take an objective view of the facts surrounding his life. One fact is that all developed countries have their national security services communicate with those of other countries. Secret and constant channels of communication develop that have nothing to do with espionage per se. And those who operate in those channels are not spies, for a spy is someone who hides things from his employers. In the case of Marawan, both the Egyptian and Israeli sides knew that he was in touch with the other side. Reports that Marawan was a double agent all came from Israeli sources. Israel clearly wanted to tarnish Marawan's reputation. So obviously the Israelis didn't like what he did to them. The second fact is that after the 1973 War, Sadat decorated Marawan for his services to the nation, services of which Sadat spoke highly. A third fact is that Israeli sources themselves admit that Marawan deceived Israel as to the nature and timing of the Egyptian military strike of 6 October 1973. The 1973 War plan was largely based on deception, and Marawan played a key role in providing Israel with disinformation. The fourth fact is that everything Marawan did since the early 1970s remains secret. Two Egyptian administrations saw no reason to question Marawan's loyalty. It was only when classified Israeli documents concerning the 1973 War were released -- 30 years later -- that the attack on Marawan in the Israeli media began. The attack was reported by our press in an unquestioning and sensationalist manner. Why didn't Marawan answer the accusations against him? The question needs rewording: was it possible for Marawan to answer those accusations without compromising the country's national security? Egyptian security services have never questioned Marawan, which goes to show that they had no problem with him. By contrast, Israeli services have acted with vengeance towards Marawan. It remains to be seen whether his death was in anyway related to that vengeance.
