In a gripping feat of reportage, The Angel exposes—for the first time in English—the sensational life and mysterious death of Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian senior official who spied for Israel, offering new insight into the turbulent modern history of the Middle East

As the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a close advisor to his successor, Anwar Sadat, Ashraf Marwan had access to the deepest secrets of the country’s government. But Marwan himself had a secret:He was a spy for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. Under the codename “The Angel,” Marwan turned Egypt into an open book for the Israeli intelligence services—and, by alerting the Mossad in advance of the joint
Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur, saved Israel from a devastating defeat.

Drawing on meticulous research and interviews with many key participants, Uri Bar-Joseph pieces together Marwan’s story. In the process, he sheds new light on this volatile time in modern Egyptian and Middle Eastern history, culminating in 2011’s Arab Spring. The Angel also chronicles the discord within the Israeli government that brought down Prime Minister Golda Meir.

However, this nail-biting narrative doesn’t end with Israel’s victory in the Yom Kippur war. Marwan eluded Egypt’s ruthless secret services for many years, but then somebody talked. Five years later, in 2007, his body was found in the garden of his London apartment building. Police suspected he had been thrown from his fifth-floor balcony, and thanks to explosive new evidence,

About the Author

Uri Bar-Joseph is a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, Israel, and a world expert on Israeli intelligence. He has written numerous scholarly works on intelligence, strategy, and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and served for fifteen years as a reserve-duty intelligence analyst in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) Intelligence/Research Division. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. Translator David Hazony is the editor of The Tower Magazine, and the author of The Ten Commandments: How Our Most Ancient Moral Text Can Renew Modern Life. His writing has appeared in the New Republic, Commentary, Policy Review, and The Forward. He lives in Washington, DC.