The Angel by Uri Bar-Joseph Page B

around Sharaf’sorders—before adding that “I no longer knew what to believe.” Perhaps she said this because, according to one of the conspirators, Marwan was given the order to deliver the letters at 8:00 p.m. 6 At this moment, according to Jehan, Marwan’s role ended and El-Leithy Nassif’s role began. Sadat ordered Nassif to jail everyone on the list immediately.
    Sadat and his wife both describe Marwan as having mostly played the role of messenger. From their accounts it is unclear whether he came to them on Sharaf’s orders, in order to create the impression of bureaucratic propriety in delivering the mass resignations aimed at destroying the regime; or at Marwan’s own initiative, as an ally to Sadat in the President’s Office who brought them the letters, albeit belatedly, which they were not supposed to know about until after the announcement. Other sources, however, describe Marwan not only as having decided on his own to deliver the letters but having risked his life to get his hands on incriminating evidence against Sadat’s opponents and then bring it to the president—handing Sadat the tools he needed to destroy his enemies.
    Nasser, apparently, kept two secret safes in his house. In the larger one he held cash that was used to pay for top-secret projects. In the smaller one he kept ultrasensitive documents about the intelligence and security agencies. After Nasser’s death, his widow, Tahia, gave the keys to the safes to Sami Sharaf. On May 13, Sharaf sent his personal secretary, Muhammad Said, to take the documents from the smaller safe to a different hiding place. According to two accounts, Marwan heard about it and tracked Said down. He saw him leaving Nasser’s house with the documents in hand and then starting to drive off. Marwan pulled up, took out his gun, and started shooting. Said stopped the car, and Marwan took the documents and brought them to Sadat. 7 They included founding documents of the Socialist Union Party, which was the central base of power of the conspirators, personal papers of SamiSharaf and other opposition leaders, and bank account information where, presumably, they kept their bribe money. According to one account, certain documents also showed that Sami Sharaf and Ashraf Marwan had been bad-mouthing Sadat—and Marwan took the time to destroy them before bringing the rest to the president. 8 A different account contradicts this, however, saying that Marwan brought Sadat everything that Said had taken.
    In yet another version of the events, the CIA played a central role in preventing the coup, discovering the conspiracy through their wiretapping of some of the conspirators, and also via Vladimir Sakharov, an officer in the local KGB office who was secretly working for the Americans. The deputy director of the CIA’s Cairo station, Thomas Twetten, who would later become the agency’s director of operations, passed the incriminating evidence to Marwan, who gave it to Sadat that evening. 9 A similar account has the Mossad passing information to James Angleton, head of counterintelligence in the CIA and key Israel liaison, about an intended coup that included Sadat’s assassination at the hands of pro-Soviet elements in Egypt. The information was passed to Twetten in Cairo, who gave it to Marwan, who warned Sadat. 10
    As against all these accounts, there is also Sami Sharaf’s own description of the events. He claims that on the evening of May 13, he gave Marwan the order to take the letters of resignation to Sadat. Nasser’s son-in-law refused and offered his own resignation instead. Sharaf refused the resignation and insisted that he remain in his post until someone more loyal could be found to replace him. When Marwan, having no choice, agreed to do the job, Sharaf told Said to give Marwan three leather suitcases full of documents relating to people connected to Nasser, not including government ministers,