نيويورك تايمز : براءة رئيس المخابرات الاسرائيلي الذي كشف هوية اشرف مروان كعميل مزدوج بين مصر وإسرائيل

The general, Eli Zeira, is 84 years old. His chief accuser, Zvi Zamir, the former head of the Mossad, is 87. The alleged spy, Marwan, is dead. His broken body was found five years ago on a sidewalk in London, after a fall from the balcony of his home. Did he jump or was he pushed?
Zamir believes that Israel — specifically Zeira himself — failed to protect the identity of its most valuable source, the man who gave the country a chance to make last-minute defensive moves before the Yom Kippur War. Zeira says he didn’t leak Marwan’s name but that in any event the man was a double agent.
Such a tale, such drama. In 1969, Marwan — the son-in-law of President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and later an adviser to Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat — contacted Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, thereby beginning a long relationship with Zamir. Still, Zeira and other military intelligence officers didn’t think Sadat would dare attack and ignored signs to the contrary, including those provided by Marwan via Zamir.
Years have passed since then, but this war over that war — which Israel eventually won but only after devastating initial defeats — refuses to subside. Last year, Zamir published “Eyes Wide Open,” an account of Israel’s failure to anticipate the Yom Kippur War, which starts with his description of flying back to Israel from his fateful meeting with Marwan on the eve of the October 1973 attack. (Disclosure: I oversaw the editing of the book.) In Zamir’s tale, catastrophe could have been averted if Marwan’s warning had received a more serious hearing earlier.
Zeira, for his part, has been trying to convince journalists and researchers that he is not solely responsible for Israel’s intelligence failures in the lead-up to the war. He claims that Zamir fell pray to Marwan’s trickery: Marwan’s warning came at the last minute precisely so that Israel wouldn’t have time to adequately protect itself while allowing him to maintain his cover as a valuable source.
Marwan’s name was first publicized in 2002 in somewhat elliptical references in a book. After he denied being the nameless spy mentioned, the author of the book confirmed that he was. In 2004, Zamir blamed Zeira for leaking Marwan’s identity. Other former intelligence officers demanded an investigation and filed a complaint with the office of the attorney general, claiming that the leak was a serious breach of national security.
Some five years later, the current attorney general is basically arguing: this matter is old by now, as is Zeira, and it should have been handled many years ago; better to leave it to historians.
I called Zamir on Tuesday. He was mostly angry. If a general can get away with leaking the name of Israel’s most sensitive source, he asked me, how can secrecy be demanded of lower-ranking officers?
As Zamir vented, I thought: on principle, he’s right. But also I had to admit to myself that I’m more relieved than irritated that the battered Zeira will be left alone and that I might just be too young to understand the anger so many Israelis still feel about the way the 1973 war was handled. When Zeira and Zamir had to decide whether to take Marwan’s warning seriously, I was five years old.