XIV

 

Middle East 1970

 

 

s 1970 began, the gods of war were inspecting their armaments, for it was clear they would soon be needed. There was daily combat along the Suez Canal. Then in January Israel began “deep penetration” air raids with bombing attacks around Cairo and the Nile Delta, designed to demonstrate Nasser’s impotence and force an end to the so-called war of attrition. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted as telling visitors she could not say when peace would be possible so long as Nasser ruled Egypt. On the Jordan front the vicious cycle of fedayeen raid and Israeli reprisal accelerated. Israel and Syria clashed in the Golan. Finally, at the end of January, Nasser suddenly paid a secret visit to Moscow. Thereafter, the problems of the Middle East began increasingly to merge with the relations of the superpowers.

 

The United States was handicapped at this stage by a serious disagreement within our government on the nature of the problem. The perception of the State Department was that the root of our difficulties was the Arab-Israeli conflict over territory. Once that was resolved, the experts held, the influence of the radical Arabs would dwindle and with it the Soviet role in the Middle East. These views had guided our diplomacy throughout 1969 and had caused us to put forward increasingly specific proposals for comprehensive settlements.

 

I had grave doubts about these assumptions and the course they seemed to suggest. My assessment, as I explained to the President in a memorandum, was that Arab radicalism had five sources: Israel’s conquests of territory; Israel’s very existence; social and economic dissatisfactions; opposition to Western interests; and opposition to the Arab moderates. Only the first of these components would be affected by a settlement. The others would remain. Western capitalism would remain anathema to the radicals. Arab moderate regimes would continue to be unacceptable. The causes of social and economic unrest would persist. Israel would still be there for the Arab radicals to seek to erase. And the Israelis understood this. It was precisely because the issue for them was the existence of Israel, and not its particular frontiers, that they were so reluctant to give up their conquests.

 

Nor was I convinced that Soviet influence would inevitably be diminished by a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Much would turn on the manner and detail of the settlement. A comprehensive approach involving all the parties would inherently favor the radicals by giving the most intransigent governments a veto over the entire process. If a settlement then appeared to result from Soviet pressure or blackmail, the radical regimes with their anti-Western and pro-Soviet orientation would be strengthened. Territories would be seen as returning to Soviet clients.

 

We needed to work not just for any solution but also to demonstrate that progress could be achieved best by our friends; that, in other words, the moderates held the key to peace in the Middle East. I was convinced that we were in a strong position to teach this lesson. “The advantage to us,” I advised Nixon in early February, “is that the Arabs will come to realize that it is the U.S. and not the USSR that holds the key to what they want.” And at a meeting of the Senior Review Group on February 25 I observed: “At some point it will become apparent that time is not working for the Soviets. If they cannot get Arab territory back, the Arabs may well come to us.” Therefore, we should not yield to blackmail; we should not be panicked by radical rhetoric; patience could be our weapon. By the same token, once the breakthrough had occurred and the moderate Arabs had turned to us, we had to move decisively to produce diplomatic progress.

 

But I was in no position to carry out such a strategy. Nixon had assigned the Middle East to Rogers. The President was reluctant to intervene even when he had second thoughts. Nor was he—at this stage—convinced that my strategy was correct. He still believed that the Soviet Union had been the political victor of the 1967 war. He had not abandoned some vague notion of a trade-off with the Soviet Union between the Middle East and Vietnam. He considered himself less obligated to the Jewish constituency than any of his predecessors had been and was eager to demonstrate that he was impervious to its pressures. He also had his doubts as to whether my Jewish faith might warp my judgment. Normally I would have shaped his strategic options and given tactical guidance to the departments. But I was precluded from doing this in Middle East policy until late in 1971.

 

Thus, in the Middle East our policy lacked the single-minded sense of direction that Nixon usually demanded and I normally imposed. He let matters drift, confident that with my help he could always take over before matters got out of hand. He permitted a range of discretion to the State Department unthinkable in any other area. But because when all was said and done his convictions were closer to mine than to those of Rogers, he applied the brakes just often enough to prevent a coherent application of the State Department approach.

 

In the process we had to learn the painful lesson that events can be dominated only by those with a clear set of goals. A nation gets no awards for confusion masquerading as moderation. For the adversary may mistake goodwill for acquiescence and confuse restraint with weakness. He may be genuinely surprised—indeed, feel tricked—when after much travail we finally and grudgingly turn to the defense of our interests. The result is a crisis.

 

From the perspective of a decade I do not doubt that our desire to avoid further showdowns in the year of Cambodia and domestic turmoil, and compulsive eagerness for solutions unrelated to the psychological necessities of the MidEast parties, tempted Soviet probes. I believe, too, that it was our ultimate decision to resist these probes that provided the basis for the eventual turn toward negotiations, both in the Middle East and with the Soviet Union generally.

 

<<Contents>>

 

* * * *

 

The Kosygin Letter

 

n January 31, 1970, Ambassador Dobrynin delivered a letter from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to the President at my basement office in the White House. Normally, this would have made it part of the special Channel. On this occasion, however, we were informed that similar communications were being sent to Prime Minister Wilson and President Pompidou. Since the British and French were certain to consult with us, we thus had no choice but to put it into regular channels on our side. Obviously once the exchange had grown so formal it was bound to become public.

 

Kosygin’s letter warned that Israel had in effect resumed military operations against the Arab states. The Soviet Union was studying to what extent Israel’s operations had been coordinated with the diplomatic actions of “certain powers”—a not very subtle hint that our innocent 1969 peace proposals had been a cover for Israeli deep penetration air raids. If Israel’s attacks continued, the letter said, “the Soviet Union will be forced to see to it that the Arab states have means at their disposal, with the help of which a due rebuff to the arrogant aggressor could be made.” Kosygin called on the Four Powers to “compel” Israel to cease its attacks and to establish a lasting peace beginning with the “speediest withdrawal of Israeli forces from all the occupied Arab territories.”

 

Forwarding this letter to Nixon, I pointed out that this was the first Soviet threat to the new Administration. While Kosygin stopped short of threatening any specific action, “the position that Israel must withdraw before other issues are settled is a return to the Soviet position of 1967, which seems to negate much of the progress made in the US-USSR talks last summer.” At the same time I saw the Kosygin letter as part of the process through which our stronger position in the Middle East was being demonstrated:

 

Our policy of holding firm creates the following dilemma for them [the Soviets]: If they do not agree to our proposals, they get nothing, the onus for escalation falls on them and their client will lose if the escalation leads to a major clash. If they do agree, they would have to deliver their client on our terms. The strategy of our reply that I propose is to come down very hard on the Soviet threat; to relate Israeli observance of the cease-fire to corresponding observance by the other side, including irregular forces; to press the Soviets to spell out their views on what the Arabs would commit themselves to if Israel withdrew.

 

For once our government was at one on how to respond. Rogers and Sisco agreed that we needed a firm reply. A Presidential response was sent on February 4. It firmly rejected the Soviet allegations. It pointed out that the cease-fire was being violated by both sides; it had been Egypt that early in 1969 deliberately initiated the cycle of escalation by beginning the war of attrition. Nixon’s reply warned that the Soviet threat to expand arms shipments, if carried out, could draw the major powers more deeply into the conflict: “The United States is watching carefully the relative balance in the Middle East and we will not hesitate to provide arms to friendly states as the need arises.” The message concluded by rejecting the Soviet position that Israel would have to withdraw before any other peace issues could be settled.

 

On the same day I sent the President further reflections on the Soviet note. I considered the note an odd maneuver and therefore disturbing:

 

It should not have taken much intelligence to expect at least the US (if not France and the UK) to reply that it favors restoration of the ceasefire on a reciprocal basis… Thus the upshot of the Soviet move will be to place the onus for getting the ceasefire restored on Nasser and the Arabs, and through them on the Soviets themselves, rather than on us and the Israelis.

 

Two days later, in a long analysis for the President of basic issues of Middle East strategy, I reiterated my view: “Now that he [Nasser] has turned to Moscow to lean on us to press Israel to stop the bombing, he is about to demonstrate Soviet inability to get him out of his box.”

 

Precisely because Kosygin’s letter seemed so diffuse and asked for nothing that could in fact be done, I began to be convinced that it could not be an isolated move; it had to be part of a larger scheme, almost certainly the precursor of some concrete action in the military field. Its vagueness might be explained by the desire to discourage a response that might interfere with decisions already made. From the autobiographies of Anwar Sadat and Mohamed Heikal we now know in fact that while Nasser was in Moscow in late January a decision had been made to send Egypt the most advanced Soviet antiaircraft missiles. The Kosygin letter was not a warning but a smokescreen.

 

In the first week of February, indications appeared that the Soviets might send new arms to Egypt. I expressed to Nixon my doubts that military equipment alone would be of use. If the new arms simply augmented the existing arsenal, they would be destroyed by the Israelis; if they were more sophisticated, the Egyptians would not be able to operate them. This raised a more ominous possibility: If the Soviets sought to do something effective against Israeli attacks, “this would almost certainly seem to involve Soviet personnel.” Reading my analysis, Nixon wrote in the margin: “I think it is time to talk directly with the Soviets on this. Acheson’s idea—‘let the dust settle’—won’t work. [This was a reference to a letter from Dean Acheson in January urging that we deal with the Middle East by “intelligent neglect.” At that time Nixon had indicated his general agreement with Acheson’s approach.] State’s ‘negotiate in any forum’ won’t work. We must make a try at a bilateral talk to see if a deal in our interests is possible.”

 

To carry out Nixon’s wishes I moved on two fronts. Our Ambassador in Moscow, Jacob Beam, was instructed by the State Department to tell Foreign Minister Gromyko that the United States was prepared to work for restoration of the cease-fire and to discuss arms limitation on both sides. Not unexpectedly, Gromyko’s response to Beam on February 11 was noncommittal. The USSR, he said, could not consider a cease-fire unless Israel first stopped its deep penetration raids. He was not against discussing arms limitations, but not so long as Israel occupied Arab lands; in other words, Israel would have to withdraw from all territories occupied in 1967. All this could be settled in the Two-Power talks, which the Soviet Union was prepared to resume.

 

One reason for Gromyko’s evasiveness was undoubtedly that the Soviet Union was already examining a more authoritative statement of the American position. For the day before, on February 10, I met with Dobrynin on behalf of the President, and by the time Beam had his interview with Gromyko the Soviets could not have completed their analysis of my message. I told Dobrynin that “we want the Soviet leaders to know that the introduction of Soviet combat personnel in the Middle East would be viewed with the gravest concern.” We chose this method of communication because we did not want to make a formal confrontation. At the same time, reflecting Nixon’s instructions, I told Dobrynin of our willingness to begin bilateral discussions on the Middle East in the special Channel.

 

Dobrynin never wasted a meeting even when he was clearly without instructions—as was the case here. He fell back on his litany of complaints about American actions; experience had taught him that in the Washington Establishment there was an inexhaustible reservoir of masochism eager to assume the blame for every impasse. Appealing to this trait, he objected to the publicity surrounding the Kosygin letter (which of course the Soviets had triggered by simultaneous demarches in Paris and London) and to the public position of the State Department, which, he argued, had erroneously interpreted Moscow’s December reply to our proposals on borders (the “Rogers Plan”) as a rejection. This latter revelation had clearly escaped everyone who had read Moscow’s December note, including me. Nor had the Soviets previously contested the interpretation that they had rejected our formulations.

 

Nothing more was heard from the Soviet leaders for nearly a month. I sought to use the interval for contingency planning in anticipation of some significant Soviet move—almost certainly involving the introduction of military personnel in the Middle East. The various meetings of the WSAG once again exposed the divisions that had bedeviled the internal debate in 1969. My view was that if the Soviets introduced military personnel we had no choice but to resist, regardless of the merits of the issue that triggered the action. We could not accept a new Soviet military presence unless we were prepared to see the radical Arabs given a perhaps decisive momentum. I wanted a review of our plans in case the Soviets threatened Israel with retaliation. I also asked for measures to prevent the attrition of the Israeli air force should the Soviets introduce sophisticated equipment manned by their own personnel.

 

The departments were less than enthusiastic. Most in the government blamed the impasse on Israeli intransigence. All (except myself) were convinced that new large-scale aid to Israel would, at that juncture, “blow the place apart.” As for contingency plans, no one could think of a plausible excuse to resist the effort to think ahead, but it was clear that implementation of any military counter to any major Soviet move would face massive bureaucratic opposition. The Defense Department submitted a formal memorandum stressing that it preferred political options—which meant, as in Vietnam, that some other department should carry the burden and risk. It did not explain just how we were going to bring about total Israeli withdrawal (which happened to be the only political option on the table) or how, if Soviet combat personnel showed up, the withdrawal would not appear to be the result of Soviet pressure.

 

Nixon’s attitude was ambivalent, colored by both international and domestic considerations. He agreed with my geopolitical analysis. On one of my memoranda he instructed: “ ‘Even Handedness’ is the right policy—But above all our interest is—what gives the Soviet the most trouble—Don’t let AraB-Israeli conflict obscure that interest.” At the same time he leaned toward the departmental views that Israel’s policies were the basic cause of the difficulty, and he doubted whether demonstrations of Soviet impotence to produce progress would really disenchant the Arabs. He noted on a memorandum in which I had suggested this possibility: “I completely disagree with this conclusion—The Soviets know that Arabs are long on talk—We have been gloating over Soviet ‘defeats’ in the MidEast since ‘67—& State et al said the June war was a ‘defeat’ for Soviet. It was not. They became the Arabs’ friend and the U.S. their enemy. Long range this is what serves their interest.”

 

The problem, of course, was how to reconcile Nixon’s two notes; how we could give the Soviets trouble while letting them emerge as the dominant force in the region by acquiescing in the introduction of combat personnel. Nixon never settled such issues in the abstract, preferring to wait for a need for decision to arise. His usual ambivalence in the face of disagreements among his subordinates—at once fueling them and reacting only when they spilled over into his office—applied as well to the domestic implications of the Middle East crisis. The President was convinced that most leaders of the Jewish community had opposed him throughout his political career. The small percentage of Jews who voted for him, he would joke, had to be so crazy that they would probably stick with him even if he turned on Israel. He delighted in telling associates and visitors that the “Jewish lobby” had no effect on him.

 

Unfortunately for his image of himself, Nixon rarely had occasion to demonstrate this theory in practice. For on almost all practical issues his unsentimental geopolitical analysis finally led him to positions not so distant from ones others might take on the basis of ethnic politics. He would privately threaten dire reprisals to any constituency he thought was thwarting him. He would make gestures to demonstrate—in part to himself—that he was free of the traditional influences that had constrained other Presidents. But at the end of the day, when confronted with the realities of power in the Middle East—after much anguish and circuitous maneuvers—he would pursue, in the national interest, the same strategy: to reduce Soviet influence, weaken the position of the Arab radicals, encourage Arab moderates, and assure Israel’s security. So Nixon and I often traveled different roads for part of the way, but at the points of decision in the Middle East we met, agreed, and acted in mutual support.

 

During February the annual Israeli shopping list of military assistance requests was being considered in our government. In 1970 it amounted to twenty-five F-4 Phantom jet fighter-bombers, one hundred A-4 Sky-hawk attack bombers, and a substantial number of tanks and armored personnel carriers, all to be paid for by various forms of American credit. The consensus of the departments was that Israel could maintain its military superiority for the next three to five years without substantial new deliveries. This was buttressed by an interagency appraisal based on the arcane insights of systems analysis that remarkably paralleled the policy preferences of the heads of the agencies. (As events turned out, the 1973 Middle East war demonstrated that even after the fairly substantial military deliveries of 1970-1973 the military balance in the Middle East had become more precarious than any of our analysts had predicted.) The general reluctance in our bureaucracy to undertake new arms deliveries for Israel was reinforced by warning letters from our friends in the Arab world, such as the King of Morocco and the King of Jordan.

 

The government’s deliberations were thus tending toward a minimum response when an event occurred that, while not directly relevant to the issue, triggered a resolution of it. At the end of February, President Pompidou was on his State visit to the United States, to which Nixon attached great importance. Insensitive to the likely domestic reaction in the United States, probably indifferent to it, Pompidou had in January completed an arms deal with the new revolutionary government of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi to sell Libya more than a hundred Mirage aircraft over four years. There was no rational Libyan need for such numbers of aircraft; indeed, at that time there were only a few pilots in all of Libya capable of flying high-performance aircraft. Clearly, these planes were intended for use by other Arab countries, probably Egypt. Predictably, supporters of Israel in the US Congress protested strongly. There were demonstrations in every city that Pompidou and his wife visited. A particularly egregious incident occurred in Chicago, where some demonstrators were especially offensive to Madame Pompidou. Pompidou abruptly cut short his Chicago visit and returned to New York. For a few hours it appeared that he might also cancel his New York sojourn and emplane for France. Pompidou never got over this inexcusable incident; it mortgaged his attitude toward the United States ever after.

 

Nixon was beside himself. He reacted in two ways, one generous, the other petty. The generous gesture was to fly unexpectedly to a dinner in New York on March 2 in honor of Pompidou where he delivered a speech that was as graceful as it was warm. The vindictive reaction was a Presidential order directly to State via Joe Sisco—apparently to avoid going through me—to defer consideration of the Israeli arms package indefinitely. Had I been consulted I would surely have emphasized the inadvisability of punishing a foreign country for the actions of an American minority and tempting the Soviet Union with the prospect of a free ride.

 

These were, in fact, the points I made when, characteristically, Nixon had second thoughts within hours of his order to Sisco. He had Haldeman tell me in effect that this was not a final decision and he would work things out on the plane to New York for the Pompidou dinner. When Haldeman was assigned to such a task, one could be certain that the President meant business; Haldeman’s studiedly cultivated disinterest in substance precluded debate. Still, Haldeman performed a therapeutic role; he provided a channel for protest but no means to implement it. Unable to reach Nixon, I warned Haldeman that the President’s action had increased the chance of a Middle East explosion; to cut off Israel would head us into a simultaneous confrontation with the Soviets and the Israelis. Israel could scarcely avoid panic and might preempt; the Soviets were bound to be emboldened by our visible dissociation from our ally. We knew that the Soviets were planning some unspecified military move; this was not the time for the President to issue an order to cut off military aid to Israel, against which this imminent Soviet move was directed. Haldeman, with the long-suffering patience of a man caught between the outbursts first of his chief and then of those who—incomprehensibly to Haldeman—took substance seriously, assured me that the matter would be patched up. He did not say how. He proved to be wrong.

 

The State Department, when it receives an order of which its bureaucracy approves, is a wonderously efficient institution. When it wishes to exhaust recalcitrant superiors, drafts of memoranda wander through its labyrinthine channels for weeks and even months. But when it receives an instruction it considers wise, paperwork is suddenly completed in a matter of hours and the bureaucracy springs to marvelous action. Hence, within thirty-six hours of Nixon’s order to Sisco, Rogers sent over a memorandum telling Nixon that he had already prepared and had in hand a scenario to “carry out your decision to postpone for now the question of additional aircraft for Israel.”

 

I thought it unwise in the extreme to announce such a decision before we had any idea of the next Soviet move in the Middle East. By now I had had enough experience with Nixon’s second thoughts to be certain that he would indeed, in Haldeman’s words, seek to patch things up. Therefore, in transmitting Rogers’s memorandum to the President, I pointed out that while the domestic implications were self-evident, “abroad, the appearance of bowing to Soviet pressure cannot be disposed of by simple denial.” I therefore suggested that Rogers’s recommendations be modified to soften the blow to Israel. Either we should agree to replace aircraft lost in the period 1969-1971 (up to a given number to avoid an incentive for costly raids), or else we should keep open the production line and earmark a specific number of Phantoms and Skyhawks that could be given to Israel immediately should a massive introduction of Soviet arms endanger the military balance. Even Sisco had told me (privately) that he agreed with my approach. To avert some of the backlash of the postponement I recommended that State, not the White House, announce it.

 

My proposal demonstrated that on the Middle East I was not in the dominant position. The best that could be said for it was that it provided a pause while the President reconsidered. Thus we might avoid tempting the Soviets at the very moment they were settling on their own next move.

 

We did not have to wait long for that move.

 

<<Contents>>

 

* * * *

 

Soviet Soldiers and Missiles Appear in Egypt

 

n March 10 Dobrynin appeared at the White House with the Kremlin’s response to my demarche of February 10 warning against the introduction of Soviet combat personnel. We met in the office of the President’s military aide, the Map Room being for some reason unavailable. The military aide’s office in the East Wing of the White House is by its location far removed from policymaking. Offices of most substantive staff assistants are clustered around the Oval Office in the West Wing. There are worse yardsticks for measuring the importance of White House aides than their propinquity to the seat of power; many aides will gladly content themselves with a cubbyhole in the West Wing rather than risk losing status in more spacious and elegant quarters in the East Wing three hundred yards away or in the Executive Office Building across the street. But precisely because the offices in the East Wing deal largely with social or logistical matters it was a good place for an unobserved meeting.

 

Dobrynin exuded bonhomie. With respect to American exhortations for a cease-fire, he conveyed the conviction of his leaders that “if the Israelis stop their bombings of the UAR [Egypt], the UAR on its part will display restraint in its actions, without, of course, any official statements to that effect.” In other words, Dobrynin was offering a de facto cease-fire along the Suez Canal. Moreover, Dobrynin was happy to announce that he had been authorized to resume bilateral talks with Rogers. He gave me a preview of two “concessions” that he would offer in these talks: First, a MidEast settlement would not simply end the state of war but would establish a state of peace; and second, Arab governments would undertake to control the operations of guerrilla forces from their territory.

 

There was less to these “concessions” than met the eye. It was a measure of the never-never land of Middle East policy that the suggestion that a peace settlement might establish peace was seriously put forward as a concession. To ask Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories without offering what is normal between most states, namely peace, would have been an absurdity. Nor could a commitment to end guerrilla attacks after peace had been made be described as a sacrifice; nobody could have maintained the opposite proposition. Still, Dobrynin’s offer of a cease-fire seemed sufficiently significant to prevent me from noticing that the Soviets had not responded to the chief thrust of the February 10 conversation—my warning against the introduction of their combat personnel. The reason for this omission was to become clear all too soon.

 

I reported to the President with what turned out to be premature elation: “Dobrynin made a number of significant concessions… In the negotiations on Egypt our policy of relative firmness has paid off on all contested issues. The Soviet Union has made a first move and, while it may not be enough, at least it showed that holding firm and offering no concessions was the right course.” The President reacted to this seeming softening of the Soviet attitude by modifying his original decision on Israeli military aid. Realizing that we could not approach Israel with the cease-fire proposal while rejecting its military requests, Nixon the same day approved my suggestion to replace Israeli aircraft losses with up to eight Phantoms and twenty Skyhawks in 1970. He endorsed with alacrity the suggestion that the bad news holding the overall package in abeyance come from State, but added a Nixonian wrinkle: I should inform Israeli Ambassador Rabin immediately of Nixon’s decision to replace Israeli losses.

 

On March 12 I met with Rabin to inform him of Dobrynin’s ceasefire proposal and also to convey the President’s decision. At the same time I asked that Israel stop its deep penetration raids and agree to an undeclared cease-fire. An aide-mémoire from the President would formalize both the request and the assurance.

 

Yitzhak Rabin had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was not one of them. If he had been handed the entire United States Strategic Air Command as a free gift he would have (a) affected the attitude that at last Israel was getting its Duc, and (b) found some technical shortcoming in the airplanes that made his accepting them a reluctant concession to us. Not surprisingly, he did not embrace the replacement formula. In fact, Rabin handed over two messages from Mrs. Meir to Nixon (one of them handwritten). These were generated by reports already in public circulation that we might postpone or turn down Israel’s package of aircraft requests. Mrs. Meir wrote that such a decision would increase the military danger to Israel and encourage further Soviet and Arab aggression at the same time. The sense of “abandonment,” she feared, would increase desperation and the capacity for irrational behavior in Israel: “One cannot overstate the seriousness of the situation that will result.”

 

Rabin was also generally unenthusiastic about the cease-fire. It would save Nasser; it would settle nothing. Nevertheless, he considered the proposal important enough to take to Jerusalem personally. He flew to Israel and returned five days later with the Cabinet’s reply: Israel would agree to an undeclared cease-fire provided all military activity ceased simultaneously, the replacement figure was doubled, and there was a public announcement of Nixon’s assurance about maintaining Israeli air strength and the military balance in the Middle East. (I was now being directly exposed for the first time to Israeli negotiating tactics. In the combination of single-minded persistence and convoluted tactics the Israelis preserve in their interlocutor only those last vestiges of sanity and coherence needed to sign the final document.)

 

Before the issue with Israel could be resolved, however, we found out at last what military move the Soviets intended for Egypt. The very day—March 17—that Israel accepted the cease-fire, Rabin informed me that a substantial shipment of Soviet arms had arrived in Egypt, including the most advanced Soviet antiaircraft system—the SA-3 surface-to-air-missile. This had never before been given to a foreign country, not even to North Vietnam. More disturbing still, the missiles were accompanied by 1,500 Soviet military personnel. Clearly, this was only the first installment of a major Soviet military move. It marked a unique turn in Soviet policy: Never before had they put their own military forces in jeopardy for a non-Communist country. It was apparent to me that as the Soviets increased their forces, they would develop a vested interest in protecting them and then in showing results for their commitment.

 

All experience teaches that Soviet military moves, which usually begin as tentative, must be resisted early, unequivocally, and in a fashion that gives Soviet leaders a justification for withdrawal. If this moment is permitted to pass, the commitment grows too large to be dismantled short of a major crisis. But a strong response when the challenge is still ambiguous is peculiarly difficult to organize. The evidence, by definition, is not likely to be conclusive. The early stages of a buildup are usually limited by the need to establish a logistic infrastructure. Intelligence agencies—contrary to the mythological perception of them as reckless adventurers—tend to play it safe; they generally flock to a cautious hypothesis. In my experience in almost every crisis there has been an initial dispute about whether we faced a challenge at all—a debate that quickly spreads from the Executive Branch to the Congress. Those opposed to a firm response claim that the Administration is “overreacting.” And if the Administration acts in time and averts the danger, they will feel they were proved right. What they fail to consider is that the real choice is between seemingly overreacting (and containing the challenge) or letting events take over. By the time the true dimensions of the threat become unambiguous—when everyone agrees about its overwhelming nature—it is often too late to do anything. And somewhere along the line the question of what causes a Soviet move becomes irrelevant; American policy must deal with its consequences, not with its causes.

 

So it was with the Nixon Administration’s reaction to the appearance of Soviet missiles and combat personnel in Egypt in the spring of 1970. Preoccupied with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, shaken by domestic upheaval, more than half convinced that Israeli belligerence had provoked the Soviet move, the United States government vacillated and missed whatever opportunity there was to contain the challenge.

 

Our first reaction was in the right direction. On March 20 I called in Dobrynin for a tough dressing down. I said that we had taken the Soviet communication of March 10 extremely seriously. We had, in fact, recommended a cease-fire to Israel; Israel had accepted in principle. But at the precise moment that I was getting ready to approach him to settle on an agreed time for the cease-fire we had learned about the introduction of SA-3 missiles and Soviet combat personnel. The troops had been sent despite my explicit warning of the dangers of such a step. The tactic, I said, was reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis. We had no choice except to terminate all our efforts for the cease-fire and to inform Israel accordingly.

 

Dobrynin did not return to the subject until April 7, when he asked whether we would have a different view of the Soviet weapon deployments if they were limited to Alexandria, Cairo, and Aswan; he was vague about the personnel. I asked him whether this was a formal proposal. He said he would let me know. He never did.

 

Once we laid down the challenge, our next move should have been to follow it up. The proper response to the introduction of advanced Soviet missiles and combat personnel would have been to increase military aid to Israel—not just to promise a few replacement aircraft. This would have shown that we would match any Soviet escalation and that Soviet military pressures were not the road to solving the political problems of the Middle East—an essential first condition to encouraging moderation and to fulfilling what I considered the optimum strategy. The rationale for my view was thoughtfully stated by Bill Hyland, a Soviet expert on my staff, on June 8:

 

The Soviets respect power and strength. They understand military strength best of all. This does not mean, of course, that they are eager to fight, or that they believe in the indiscriminate use of force. But they do not understand restraint; it confuses them, and in the end leads them to conclude that there is room for their own forward movement.

 

If the United States does not support Israel demonstratively with military assistance, the Soviets will ponder why we refuse to do so. Ultimately, they will conclude that we are deterred because of either domestic, political and economic concerns or because of the consequences of military escalation.

 

I did not succeed in getting such a strategy considered. Our agencies blamed Israel for the tension along the Suez Canal, arguing—not without evidence—that Israel had provoked the Soviet reaction by its deep penetration raids. Their “solution” to the Soviet military move was to press Israel to be more flexible. Precious time was wasted debating irrelevancies. Our intelligence community concentrated on trying to measure whether in precise hardware terms the military balance had in fact been upset. All this missed the essential point. Whatever one’s view about greater Israeli flexibility, we now had first to face down the Soviets and the Arab radicals. Otherwise, Israeli concessions would be perceived as resulting from the introduction of Soviet military personnel. Our position would deteriorate as demands escalated. Once the Soviets established themselves with a combat role in the Middle East and we accepted that role, the political balance would be drastically changed, and the military balance could be overthrown at any moment of Soviet choosing. Israel was not free of responsibility for the present state of affairs, but we would be able to deal with the political problem only after mastering the military challenge.

 

This view did not prevail since I was still in the early years of my role as Presidential Assistant and the Middle East was substantially a State Department fiefdom. In any event, at that stage of my career in the White House, my influence was greatest when the agencies’ views differed and the President had no strong views of his own; I was least likely to prevail when there was unanimity among the agencies, particularly on the Middle East. And in this case, Nixon’s assessment was much closer to that of the departments than to mine. He spent much of his time on Cambodia; he was hankering after a Moscow summit; he hoped that the problem would go away, and, if it did not, that he and I could overpower it later.

 

In fact, at this very moment Nixon’s earlier decision to hold the Israeli arms package in abeyance—taken in quite different circumstances—caught up with him. The State Department had gone ahead with the cumbersome process of drafting a public statement on the arms decision. And they had proceeded with their consultations with key Congressional leaders even after news of the latest Soviet move. The thinking was that our action would show our good faith to the Arabs; at a minimum it would prevent the explosion that our agencies considered inevitable if we proceeded with additional deliveries of hardware. Discouraged by previous rebuffs and convinced that the President’s mind was made up, I let matters proceed. In retrospect I believe that I erred in not being more emphatic. So it happened that on March 23—less than a week after we learned of the dispatch of Soviet combat personnel to Egypt—Rogers announced that “in our judgment, Israel’s air capacity is sufficient to meet its needs for the time being. Consequently the President has decided to hold in abeyance for now a decision with respect to Israel’s request. …”

 

To be sure, the statement added that “if steps are taken which might upset the current balance or if in our judgment political developments warrant, the President will not hesitate to reconsider…” This qualification was understood for the soporific it was. No verbal reassurance could obscure the fact that less than a week after the introduction of Soviet combat personnel into the Middle East, and three days after canceling the cease-fire discussion with Dobrynin, the United States had publicly denied additional planes to Israel. The decision even seemed to imply that the most sophisticated Soviet weapons and Soviet combat personnel did not affect the military balance, an implication that almost invited their augmentation.

 

A trip long planned by Joe Sisco to the Middle East—ostensibly to consult ambassadors but in reality to sound out peace prospects—reinforced the impression of American indifference to the Soviet military presence. Sisco’s mission so soon after a Soviet power play seemed to suggest that Soviet combat personnel in Egypt were no obstacle and might even be a spur to US peace efforts. The Israelis, in turn, rattled by the twin blows from the Soviet Union and the United States, suspended their deep penetration raids and adopted a more selective retaliatory policy. A gesture that a few weeks earlier might have contributed to improving the atmosphere became a concession to Soviet military blackmail. And to compound the errors, Nixon chose this moment to begin his overtures for a US-Soviet summit meeting—removing any remaining Soviet hesitations. April 1970 was not the proudest month of the Nixon Administration.

 

It was inevitable, given our weak response, that the Soviets should give the screw another turn. Soviet missiles multiplied; the number of combat personnel increased dramatically, to some ten thousand in the next six weeks. Rabin informed me on April 24 that Soviet pilots had been flying defense missions over Egypt’s interior. Thus, the Egyptian air force was freed for attacking Israeli positions along the Canal and was becoming more aggressive. Air combat between Soviet and Israeli pilots was a virtual certainty.

 

At last the US government bestirred itself. The White House announced an “immediate and full” review of the situation. Nixon authorized me to tell Rabin on April 30 (the day he announced the Cambodian operation) that we would provide more planes despite his earlier decision. He was still sufficiently worried about the Arab reaction to request no publicity, thus depriving the decision of some of its deterrent effect. And since he gave no indication about the numbers he had in mind, he let himself in for weeks of additional interagency haggling from those who had opposed any plane sales to begin with. For even the appearance of Soviet pilots did not alter the cautious official analysis. The intelligence consensus was that the Soviet mission was purely defensive. But the intelligence community did not propose to trap itself by an unambiguous statement; an escape clause warned that “a shift in the situation, however, could radically alter their mission with little, if any, advance warning”—which was of course the heart of the problem.

 

On May 12, at the peak of the Cambodia hysteria, I was sufficiently concerned to sum up the developing impasse for Nixon: Nasser believed he could outwait the Israelis and Mrs. Meir thought that no peace was possible with Nasser. Mrs. Meir was prepared to stick it out until there was a change of heart on the Arab side. Israel wanted the United States to stand up more firmly to the Soviets and give Israel more planes. Even Sisco—as a result of his trip—now recommended a reevaluation of major assumptions about American strategy. Sisco was right, because those assumptions had been wrong across the board:

 

• We had assumed that major-power talks might break the impasse. In fact, they had not significantly changed the positions of any of the parties.

 

• We had assumed that the Soviets, in order to defuse the situation and limit Soviet involvement in Egypt, might feel an interest in pressing Nasser to compromise. On the contrary, Moscow had deepened its military commitment, thus encouraging Nasser’s war of attrition against Israel.

 

• We had assumed Israel might in the end go along with a properly balanced American proposal. But the Israelis had flatly rejected our various plans while asking us to support them militarily and economically whether or not there was progress in negotiations.

 

• We had assumed that the Palestinians could be dealt with in a settlement purely as a refugee problem. Instead, they had become a quasi-independent force with a veto over policy in Jordan, and perhaps even in Lebanon.

 

My memorandum proposed a fundamental reexamination of our Middle East policy. The surrounding circumstances prevented the mustering of energies for such a battle. The physical and psychic toll of the Cambodia incursion was too great. Not until Watergate was Nixon so consumed and shaken; he was not prepared to add to his problems. When we turned again to the Middle East, it was in the context of a State Department peace initiative whose practical consequence was to ratify the Soviet buildup.

 

So the crisis in the Middle East deepened. Nasser in a speech on May 1 addressed an open message to Nixon, the peremptory tone of which emphasized the decline in our position. The United States “must order Israel to withdraw from the occupied Arab territories.” If we were unable to do so, Nasser requested that we “refrain from giving any new support to Israel as long as it occupies our Arab territories—be it political, military or economic support.” Otherwise, “the Arabs must come to the inevitable conclusion that the United States wants Israel to continue to occupy our territories so as to dictate the terms of surrender.” That the prospect of Soviet predominance in the Middle East was not just the result of overwrought imaginations became apparent when Nasser told a distinguished American visitor, Eugene Black, a former head of the World Bank, that he would prefer any American diplomatic initiative to be conducted through the Soviet Union; he did not trust us enough to deal directly with us.

 

In this atmosphere the departments resisted Nixon’s decision to keep open the supply line to Israel (when current contracts for airplane deliveries ran out in July) by delays in implementation and by using the loophole that he had not prescribed any overall numbers. The issue eventually merged with the general debate over Middle East strategy. Formally, the dispute resolved itself into the essentially phony question of whether we should pursue a “political strategy” or a “confrontation with the USSR.” Whenever issues are framed in this fashion, senior policymakers should beware. No one in his right mind would not prefer a political solution; confrontation cannot possibly be sought as a policy objective. The question we faced in the Middle East in 1970 was, however, quite different; it was whether a political solution was achievable without first making clear to the Soviet Union and its radical friends that military pressure would not work. In such a situation, if confrontation is rejected as a matter of principle, the term “political solution” becomes a euphemism for settling on the opponents’ terms. As I said in some exasperation at a meeting of the Senior Review Group in late May: “What will discourage the Soviets is fear of confrontation with us. We have to have thought of how to convey that idea to them.”

 

But the time was not ripe for such an appraisal. Shaken by public protest, focused on Vietnam, half hoping for a negotiation with Moscow, the Executive Branch was torn between its premonitions and its hopes, between the reality of a Soviet challenge and the nightmare of concurrent crises. Reflecting this ambivalence, on June 2 Rogers called in Dobrynin to read him the following extraordinary statement, without informing either me, or (so far as I know) Nixon:

 

The USSR has indicated that Soviet military activities in the UAR will remain defensive. We want to make clear that we would not view the introduction of Soviet personnel, by air or on the ground, in the Canal combat zone as defensive since such action could only be in support of the announced UAR policy of violating the ceasefire resolutions of the Security Council. We believe that the introduction of Soviet military personnel into the delicate Suez Canal combat zone [within thirty kilometers of the Canal] could lead to serious escalation with unpredictable consequences to which the U.S. could not remain indifferent…

 

On the surface this seems a strong warning. What it really did, however, was to give the Soviets a blank check; it acquiesced in the Soviet combat presence in Egypt except in the immediate vicinity of the Suez Canal. The Soviets were in effect told that they were free to build up substantial forces in Egypt so long as they did not move them directly into the combat zone. Build them up they did. And within two months they were in a position to advance their units rapidly into the combat zone whenever the opportunity presented itself. My associate Bill Hyland summed up the growing crisis:

 

Looking at our position and the Israeli standdown from deep raids, the Soviets must conclude that we have acquiesced in their direct intervention. Indeed, they could well read our latest statement (Rogers to Dobrynin) as confirmation that we accept the Soviet claim of “defensive” involvement, and are only concerned that a movement toward the canal would not be “defensive.”…

 

The conventional wisdom is that the Soviets will probably not move, mainly because of the risk of combat with the Israelis. There is, however, some evidence that they are indeed already “inching” forward (the construction sites along the canal). Moreover, it would seem a logical extension of Soviet strategy to do so. The near term Soviet objective in the Middle East is to destroy Western influence. The main enemy is not Israel but the West in general and the United States in particular. The road to the displacement of the West, however, now lies through Soviet demonstration that they cannot only protect their clients, but reverse the losses they suffered in 1967…

 

Warnings alone are not enough. Indeed, since we have presented several serious warnings, the more we present the less credible. Breaking off contacts serves no end, and moving military forces is at least premature… Because the dispatch of aircraft to Israel has become the symbol for measuring our policy, it has, perhaps unfortunately, become the only immediate issue.

 

Only after demonstrating our willingness to take up this option can we expect to convince Israel of the need to make some political concession and convince the Soviets and Arabs that we are not deterred by their recent actions.

 

But the United States government was not yet ready for such a course. And the longer we delayed, the higher became the ultimate price. We learned this painfully, albeit slowly. Events finally forced our hand. They produced a series of confrontations over the autumn in the course of which the Soviet advance was first arrested and finally reversed.

 

<<Contents>>

 

* * * *

 

An American Diplomatic Initiative

 

ur first move was the opposite of confrontation; it was another peace initiative. I had tried to use an NSC meeting on June 10 to bring about a fundamental review of our strategy. The State Department preempted me by transforming it into a discussion of a tactical decision. Rogers had prepared a complex scenario involving an American diplomatic initiative to get the parties to “stop shooting and start talking.” Israel and Egypt would be asked to accept a ninety-day standstill cease-fire and indirect negotiations under UN Representative Gunnar Jarring. To encourage Israel the United States would offer—as the response to its arms needs—three Phantoms for July and August and four Phantoms and Skyhawks per month for replacement purposes thereafter. These supply arrangements were, however, subject to review “if negotiations . . . had started and showed signs of success.”

 

Amazingly, the State Department proposal thus gave Israel an incentive to have the negotiations fail; the plane sales would be reviewed only if negotiations “showed signs of success.” And the proposed scenario did not address at all the critical issue of the Soviet combat presence in Egypt. I had advised Nixon of my concerns in advance of the NSC meeting. I stressed that negotiations had to be seen in the context of the recent—and continuing—Soviet moves:

 

The character of the Soviet move in the UAR should not be underrated. You may hear the argument made (by Defense) that this move was precipitated by Israeli action or that it is purely defensive and does not threaten Israel. These arguments do not meet the main point: This is a unique turn of Soviet policy—never before have the Soviets put their own forces in combat jeopardy for the sake of a non-Communist government.

 

It is argued that now the Soviets have rescued Nasser both of them may suddenly change character and be prepared to negotiate seriously. This seems doubtful. Having scored a psychological gain with apparent impunity, it has generally been the Soviet tactic first to consolidate their gains and then to press forward, testing the ground as they move.

 

At the NSC meeting on June 10, CIA Director Helms summed up the deterioration. The Soviets had four to five regiments of SA-3S and three to five squadrons of Soviet-piloted MiG-21s in Egypt; there was no doubt about the numbers. The Soviet combat presence now amounted to ten thousand men introduced since March. Egypt’s ability to destroy Israeli aircraft had been greatly augmented. Mounting losses would create new psychological pressures on Israel. With their preemptive option lost, Israel had an overwhelming incentive to control the area along the Suez Canal. The central questions therefore were whether the Soviets would move their SA-3 missiles toward the Canal and engage their airplanes there, and whether Israel would refrain from challenging them if they did. In any event, the situation could be altered to Israel’s disadvantage very rapidly, by a sudden forward movement of the Soviet military complex.

 

Rogers then presented the State Department scenario for an immediate cease-fire and talks through Jarring as if Helms’s briefing had not occurred. In effect, the proposal, like his June 2 conversation with Dobrynin, ratified the Soviet combat presence in Egypt.

 

Nixon confined himself to opaque philosophical statements that indicated he was not ready for a discussion of basic assumptions. He speculated about the impact of the 1956 Suez crisis on Britain’s conception of herself as a world power. He considered the failure to deal with the problem of Arab refugees one of the major lapses of the postwar period. Even while we were considering a unilateral American initiative, he mused about the prospect for a joint US-Soviet enterprise, no doubt anticipating a meeting I would have with Dobrynin aboard the Presidential yacht Sequoia that evening to discuss his idea for a summit. All of this meandering was largely a smokescreen to enable Nixon to defer a formal decision. Nixon had no real belief that the State Department diplomatic plan would work, but also he had little stomach for overruling Rogers. He told me privately that he thought the current Middle East track would lead us into disaster. I agreed, adding that the worst course was to put in “a little arms and a little proposal.” (This does not exclude that Nixon told Rogers the opposite.)

 

My meeting with Dobrynin on the Sequoia on the evening of June 10 was inconclusive. Dobrynin renewed his plea that we negotiate on the Middle East in the Channel. In order to have some carrot for Nixon’s cherished summit I did not reject this possibility out of hand. But I insisted that it could work only if the Soviet Union would ask sacrifices from its Arab friends commensurate with the territorial concessions we would have to urge on Israel. Moreover, the presence of Soviet combat personnel in the Middle East was of the most profound concern to the United States. It was therefore crucial for us to know whether the Soviet Union would be prepared to withdraw its military forces as part of a negotiated peace. Dobrynin replied that he would ask for instructions.

 

The exchange with Dobrynin further strengthened my conviction that we were on the wrong track; the requisite balance of forces for effective negotiations simply did not exist. On June 16 I sent Nixon another assessment warning against the proposed initiative: The new proposal to “stop shooting and starting talking” had to be judged against the backdrop of our compulsive peace initiatives of the previous year: “They emboldened the Arabs, who stepped up their border pressures. Israel began making deep penetration raids which, in turn, caused Nasser to allow a massive influx of Soviet personnel and influence.” The new proposal seemed to me to involve the same dangers; it would buy us at most two months:

 

The State approach would have us force the Israelis back to pre-war borders while they get no further planes after the summer. They would be asked to give up both elements of their security at the same time—their territorial buffers and the prospect of more aircraft. As peace with more vulnerable frontiers approached, their aircraft inventory would drop. If, on the other hand, Israel believes that she will get the larger aircraft package if negotiations are going badly, she will have no incentive to make negotiations go well… .

 

Nasser would interpret our action as a halfway move. He would seriously doubt that we could really press Israel to withdraw on the basis of six aircraft and perhaps others later on. …

 

To the Soviets, the State Department proposal would be a weak gesture in the face of their continued expansion of influence. Our formula would be of too little military consequence and too hesitant to convince them that we are prepared to match their escalation in the area. They considered our March announcement uncertain; they will read this one the same way.

 

Above all, I considered a major initiative inopportune unless it settled the issue of the Soviet combat presence, which seemed to me the heart of the problem. I therefore suggested an alternative approach: We would tell Nasser explicitly that only the United States could bring about Israeli withdrawal; all other routes would prove illusory, and we would see to it that this remained so. But we could urge Israeli withdrawal only in the context of an Israel made secure by substantial American military deliveries and an Egypt willing to negotiate detailed conditions of peace. Soviet combat personnel would have to be withdrawn as part of a settlement.

 

Such an approach, I argued, would give Israel an incentive to negotiate by offering detailed security arrangements, a contractual peace, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. It would provide Egypt a greater prospect of regaining the Sinai. The Soviets would face the danger of escalation by a well-supplied Israel, and the escape hatch of an acceptable settlement. But I warned Nixon that to accept my plan would involve a bureaucratic nightmare: “Shortly after our Cambodian experience, you would have to override the recommendations of your top Cabinet advisers, and impose a wholly different policy upon a very reluctant bureaucracy, which would then be charged with implementing it.”

 

Almost certainly for these reasons Nixon chose not to face the problem at that point. The policy implicit in my recommendations would require three more years to obtain his approval. On June 18, the President embraced State’s proposal. He thought it would be rejected anyway; he would rather deal with a deadlock than another hassle with his bureaucracy. Thus, three months after we had turned down a cease-fire because of the first introduction of some one thousand Soviet combat troops into the Middle East, we accepted one even though Soviet personnel had since grown to ten thousand. That simple fact was to dog our footsteps in the Middle East until the Soviet Union finally overplayed its hand in September and gave us a new opportunity to restore the psychological as well as the physical balance.

 

The State Department responded to Nixon’s decision with alacrity. The proposal for cease-fire and talks under Jarring was transmitted privately immediately to Israel, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and also Jordan. It was announced publicly on June 25.

 

The first rumbling response came from Israel. Already alarmed at the delays in military supplies and the weak American reaction to the influx of Soviet combat personnel, Israel now objected to a number of provisions in our scheme, but above all to the vagueness of the promise of airplanes. A letter from Nixon on June 20, drafted by State, did not allay Mrs. Meir’s concerns because it stated, with less than dazzling clarity, that delivery of aircraft was conditional on the negotiations only with respect to timing—in other words, that we could postpone agreed deliveries if in our judgment this helped the negotiations. The Israelis, not unreasonably, considered that this exception deprived the commitment of much of its significance. Nixon, who from long campaigning considered promises to be the currency for dealing with tomorrow’s problems, had a typical Nixonian solution. He told me privately that I could see Rabin and “tell them we’ve written the letter for the record. We’re going to go forward on the planes unless there’s an enormous change.” (That too begged the question of what we would define as an enormous change.)

 

Then it was Moscow’s turn. On June 23 Dobrynin reacted rather coolly to our Middle East overture. I asked if Moscow had given him any reply to my query about the withdrawal of Soviet combat troops; Dobrynin replied that I had put so many questions that he could not keep them all in mind. Dobrynin might well have thought he could evade the issue since the formal State Department initiative had made no reference to Soviet troops. He professed to be outraged by what he claimed was a “unilateral” American attempt to take over Middle East diplomacy. Negotiations were our problem now, he asserted, but he suspected we would have to come back to Moscow later. He did not know what “concessions” would be available then. In Moscow on June 29, Gromyko told Ambassador Beam that while the Soviets were studying our proposal they saw nothing new in it and that it had all the failings of previous efforts.

 

Egypt continued to envelop itself in silence.

 

In these conditions we decided to make clear that the President was not acting from weakness and that Soviet troops were a serious issue. On June 26 in San Clemente, in a background briefing, I took the initiative in challenging the Soviet military presence in Egypt. The Soviet Union’s original intentions in sending combat personnel into the Middle East were irrelevant, I said. Even if they had been sent to shore up Nasser, their continued presence represented a strategic threat that had to be dealt with: “We are trying to get a settlement in such a way that the moderate regimes are strengthened, and not the radical regimes. We are trying to expel the Soviet military presence, not so much the advisors, but the combat pilots and the combat personnel, before they become so firmly established [emphasis added].”

 

The most accurate, if not elegant, way of describing the reaction is that all hell broke loose. I was accused by the State Department and pundits in the media of trying to scuttle the peace initiative, of making vainglorious threats beyond our capacity to carry out. The criticisms came from all quarters except the Soviets, who are usually provocative only when they can calculate a wide margin of safety and who had heard these views privately for three months. On June 30, in a backgrounder on the Cambodian operation, I was pressed on my alleged threat to “expel” the Russians. I stuck to my position; the Soviet military presence in Egypt created a dangerous new situation. Perhaps I should have used a more waffling expression than “expel,” I said, but a Soviet combat presence was incompatible with peace. Moreover, “at some point of the Soviet presence in the Middle East there will be some indigenous Arab forces that will have their own reasons for not wanting to substitute one colonialism for another.” Three years later we made this prediction come true.

 

By July 1 Nixon had substantially recovered from the trauma of Cambodia. And while he might not have been prepared yet to engage himself on the Arab-Israeli issue, he required no instruction on the geopolitical danger of Soviet combat troops in Egypt. With Rogers away on a trip, Nixon used a televised interview to express his essential agreement with my analysis. He warned that the two superpowers could be drawn into confrontation over the Middle East and that the United States would not tolerate the upsetting of the military balance there. “Once the balance of power shifts where Israel is weaker than its neighbors, there will be war. Therefore, it is in U.S. interests to maintain the balance… As the Soviet Union moves in to support the UAR, it makes it necessary for the United States to evaluate what the Soviet Union does, and once that balance of power is upset, we will do what is necessary to maintain Israel’s strength vis-à-vis its neighbors.”

 

The Secretary of State would have none of this. From Europe he protested bitterly that “his” peace initiative was being torpedoed; he even reprimanded Sisco for supporting the President in a television appearance on July 12.

 

But Soviet sensitivities are not so tender; their calculations are based on an assessment of their interests, not on atmospherics. Now that Moscow suspected that we might mean business, Dobrynin’s conduct in two meetings on July 7 and 9 could not have been more jovial. He exuded cooperativeness; he would have something to say on the Middle East soon. He made no reference to our warning. As it turned out, that had been none too soon. For in early July the Soviet missile complex, after securing the protection of Cairo, Alexandria, and Aswan, had begun inching toward the Suez Canal, despite Rogers’s warning to Dobrynin of June 2. I summed up what we knew for Nixon on July 22: The Soviets and Egyptians were constructing a new defense barrier roughly parallel to the Suez Canal and at a distance of twenty to thirty nautical miles from it. That barrier included three SA-3 and eleven SA-2 sites, which could, of course, be augmented. It was close enough to the Canal to protect Egyptian artillery positions that were firing across it. At a minimum Egypt’s capability for a war of attrition had been vastly enhanced; if the system grew in size and continued to move forward—as it gave every indication of doing—it might lay the basis for an Egyptian offensive into the Sinai.

 

In short, we were experiencing for the first time in the Nixon Administration the Soviet technique of using a military presence to enhance geopolitical influence. Within what it considers the Soviet orbit the Kremlin uses its military forces massively, rapidly, and ruthlessly. But when it operates beyond the dividing line between East and West, it moves with infinite care. The first commitment is usually moderate and justified by arguably defensive motives. At that point it is relatively simple to force a withdrawal by determined opposition. When no resistance is encountered, the Soviets tend to escalate rapidly. It is remarkable that a pattern so recurrent as to approach a stereotype should evoke—from Egypt to Angola to Ethiopia—the same doubts and hesitations that, far from encouraging moderation, serve only to guarantee that the Soviet involvement becomes massive.

 

So it was in the Middle East in July 1970. What had started as a protective move against deep penetration raids by Israel was on the verge of transforming the entire strategic equation. Some of our systems analysts already began to argue that Israel would be better served by having equipment suitable for resisting a cross-Canal invasion than by expending its aircraft in futile efforts to destroy the growing air defense system on the other side of the Canal. These arguments overlooked that a defensive strategy implies a war of attrition, a prospect fundamentally intolerable for a country outnumbered by around thirty to one. Israel was approaching the point of desperation, which might tempt it into preemptive action before the balance shifted irrevocably. Nasser might become reckless through euphoria. The Soviets were becoming indispensable to the radical Arabs. The United States seemed incapable of perceiving the essence of the danger, which was the growth of the Soviet military position in Egypt and the change in the regional balance of power. We had expended our prestige in starting talks based on incompatible premises and in paying each side for agreeing to negotiate about a peace that they needed more urgently than did we—the Israelis with airplanes and Nasser with hints of support-on the territorial question. That we offered each side too little only compounded the tensions.

 

On July 1 Golda Meir wrote a bitter letter to the President. Noting that both SA-2 and SA-3 batteries were being installed to cover the Suez Canal, she pointed out: “While these developments were going on, we were being told that the balance of power has remained intact.” She warned that Israel would have no choice except to bomb these installations . But if Israel attacked a missile complex manned in part by Soviet personnel, there was a distinct possibility that the Soviets would defend it with their own aircraft. A direct clash between Israel and the Soviet Union was a danger that we could no longer ignore. I instituted urgent planning with unenthusiastic agencies who were still mumbling about forcing greater Israeli flexibility in negotiations—irrelevant to the problem we faced.

 

Then, on July 22—just when a military clash seemed unavoidable—Nasser suddenly accepted our proposal for a cease-fire and negotiations.

 

<<Contents>>

 

* * * *

 

Cease-fire and Standstill

 

hy Nasser accepted our proposal at this point will not be known until Egyptian and Soviet archives become available. He may have feared an Israeli preemptive strike. He and his Soviet advisers may have interpreted the White House press statements by Nixon and me as raising a danger of American involvement. More likely, in the light of later events, he and the Soviets may have decided from the beginning to use the cease-fire offer much as they did the abortive initiative of March: as a cover for moving forward the missile complex with minimum risk.

 

The Administration was elated. Rogers claimed credit for having thought up the initiative—a claim privately disputed by Sisco, who insisted that he had fathered the idea. Nixon was convinced that his tough statement on July 1 had done the trick. Humility not being my strong suit, I was not loath to ascribe some of the “success” to my strong backgrounders of June 26 and 30 and my conversations with Dobrynin. Probably we were all somewhat right. In any event, it soon turned out that our elation was premature.

 

The early euphoria was deliberately encouraged by Dobrynin on July 23. He used a White House arrival ceremony for President Urho Kekkonen of Finland—Dobrynin was present as Acting Dean of the Diplomatic Corps—to give me a preview of what he would deliver at the State Department in the afternoon: The Soviet attitude to a temporary cease-fire was positive, and the Soviet Union also favored the resumption of the Jarring mission. However, Moscow believed that Jarring should have concrete guidance as to the meaning of the UN resolutions whose implementation he was supposed to promote. Dobrynin therefore urged that the Two- and Four-Power talks be speeded up to develop solutions on the outstanding issues. Showing that the Soviets had mastered our complex procedures, Dobrynin brought Rogers a special message as well. Delivering the note formally at the State Department, Dobrynin told Rogers what he neglected to convey to me—that the Soviets agreed to include a military standstill in the cease-fire. In compensation he subsequently gave me a note—of which Rogers was unaware—replying finally to my queries of June 10 and June 23 about the continued presence of Soviet troops in the Middle East. According to the note, the Soviets-after a comprehensive political settlement -would “probably” be prepared to consider withdrawal as long as it was a mutual obligation. When I pointed out that we had no troops in the Middle East, Dobrynin at first said that this was all the better for us and that the mutuality of obligation was put in as a matter of principle for cosmetic effect. Later he amended this to say that the United States would have to withdraw its military personnel from Iran.

 

Had we understood the situation better, we would have realized that we had cleared only the loWest hurdle. The negotiations we had arranged were certain to deadlock since Egypt still demanded restoration of the 1967 frontier and Israel still insisted on substantial territorial changes. Egypt expected American pressure on Israel; Israel, under the slogan of “no imposed settlement,” wanted a free hand. Nixon had not yet decided on what he would do when the deadlock in the talks became apparent. Nor was the Soviet note all that reassuring. It defined neither “cease-fire” nor “standstill.” It repeated the Soviet interpretation of the basis for Jarring’s mission, which on all significant points was identical with the radical Arab program. Its willingness to discuss troop withdrawal was hedged by the word “probably” and linked to an absurd request for withdrawal of US military personnel from Iran. Above all, the Soviets might simply be repeating the maneuver of the previous March. The offer of a cease-fire now might mask, and then protect, the movement of the Soviet missile complex forward to the Canal.

 

At that time, such considerations were generally dismissed because our government was preoccupied with the Israeli reaction to our initiative, which was quite obstreperous, matching prickliness of behavior with shrillness of rhetoric. But this is scarcely extraordinary. Two thousand years of suffering have etched the premonition of tragedy deep into the soul of the Jewish people. And Israel’s position as a tiny nation of 2.5 million surrounded by close to one hundred million potential enemies, in a region that has seen empires and states come and go, is a constant reminder to every Israeli of the transitoriness of historical existence. Israel’s margin of survival is so narrow that its leaders distrust the great gesture or the stunning diplomatic departure; they identify survival with precise calculation, which can appear to outsiders (and sometimes is) pettifogging obstinacy. Even when Israeli leaders accept a peace proposal, they first resist fiercely, which serves the purpose of showing that they are not pushovers and thereby discourages further demands for Israeli concessions. And their acceptance is usually accompanied by endless requests for reassurances, memoranda of understanding, and secret explanations—all designed to limit the freedom of action of a rather volatile ally five thousand miles away that supplies its arms, sustains its economy, shelters its diplomacy, and has a seemingly limitless compulsion to offer peace plans.

 

This tendency is reinforced by a political system in which governments are usually turbulent coalitions of several parties and autonomous factions. Such a system does not make for rapid decisions or flexible diplomacy. Any leader who advocates a concession can be pounced upon by his colleagues and shrilly denounced in the Parliament as, if not a traitor, then at least a dupe of the wily (or foolish) Americans. An Israeli Cabinet meeting is well suited to nitpicking peace proposals to death, less adapted to developing a long-range policy. Israel sometimes finds it easier to shift the responsibility for difficult choices to its great ally than to make the decision itself; “American pressure” can be an excuse for what many Israeli leaders know in their hearts is necessary for Israel anyway.

 

For Israel to have responded enthusiastically to the cease-fire proposal and the prospect of negotiation would thus have been totally out of character. Nearly two more weeks of diplomatic exchanges and Presidential interventions were required to elicit a grudgingly favorable response. On July 23 Nixon sent Mrs. Meir another message urging the Israelis to take advantage of Arab acceptance of the US initiative. At the same time he assured her that we would not force Israel to accept the Arab interpretation of Security Council Resolution 242 in developing guidelines for the Jarring mission. It was just as well that this letter was not publicized until later, for the Arabs had been given precisely the opposite impression when the cease-fire initiative was presented to them.

 

Israel responded with requests for additional military assistance, especially weapons for the suppression of the Soviet surface-to-air missiles. We promised sympathetic consideration. Israel asked for further clarification of our position on such issues as withdrawals and refugees. Our answers clarified little because there was no unified Administration position and because those who had clear ideas were afraid to make them explicit lest they abort Israel’s consent to the initiative. On July 30 Nixon bravely declared in a press conference that Israel could enter negotiations with confidence, “without fear that by her negotiations her position may be compromised or jeopardized in that period.” Finally on July 31 we were told that the Israeli Cabinet had decided in principle to respond “affirmatively”; a formal response would be forthcoming soon. The President welcomed the decision in a statement from San Clemente.

 

Israeli concerns were far from groundless. Clearly, the Soviets and Egyptians were using the period before the cease-fire for a rapid buildup of missiles along the Canal, violating the spirit if not the letter of the projected standstill. The missiles would soon be able not only to protect the Egyptian artillery positions on the West bank of the Canal but to reach across it and protect an Egyptian landing. And in a cease-fire those missiles would be immune from retaliation.

 

On August 5 Rabin hurried in to paint a grim picture: Up to fourteen missile sites had been moved to within fifty kilometers of the Suez Canal; three missile ambush sites had been moved to within ten to twenty kilometers. On July 25; 27, and 30 Soviet-piloted aircraft had engaged Israeli aircraft; on July 30 four Russian-piloted aircraft had been shot down by the Israeli air force. Rabin reiterated Israel’s determination not to permit the forward movement of the missile complex. He was so emphatic about it in a conversation on the evening of August 5 that I thought the Israelis might actually launch a ground attack against the SA-3 sites close to the Canal before a cease-fire, and so informed Nixon. At the last moment the Israeli Cabinet decided against such a move. I have never known whether Rabin exaggerated the likelihood of the attack or whether there was a last-minute change of heart in Jerusalem. At any rate, Israel informed us officially of its acceptance of the cease-fire on August 6. Rogers and Sisco rushed it to completion before anyone could change his mind, cutting some corners in the process with respect to the Jarring mission, which infuriated the Israelis.

 

On August 7 the cease-fire went into effect, born in fateful ambiguity. There was a cease-fire agreement between Egypt and Israel, which provided also for a military standstill in a zone fifty kilometers wide on either side of the Canal; unfortunately, the agreed text was vague as to what actions were prohibited by the standstill commitment. A separate “understanding” between Israel and the United States sought to fill this gap by outlining our joint view of what measures we felt would constitute violations of the Egyptian-Israeli agreement. [These included prohibitions: “(a) not to introduce, move forward, construct or otherwise install missiles in this zone; (b) not to construct any concrete structures for the implacement of missiles; (c) not to carry out any work for the establishment of any new sites for missiles; (d) notwithstanding the consent to except maintenance of existing installations, no improvement should be made on the existing missile sites or implacements.” ]

 

Our chargé in Cairo was instructed to inform the Egyptians of the examples in the Israeli-American understanding but to say that they were only “illustrative” of activities which would be violations of the standstill. Aside from the fact that it was not self-evident how an understanding between Israel and the United States could bind Egypt and the USSR, there was also a serious problem of timing. The Egyptians formally accepted our proposal early on August 7 our time, and the cease-fire went into effect at 1:00 a.m. August 8, Cairo time. But because of haggling with Israel over its terms, State’s representative did not communicate the “illustrative” catalogue of possible violations to Cairo until 2:50 p.m. Cairo time on August 9, over thirty-six hours later. This proved to be significant; the Israelis would later claim that Egypt had violated the standstill agreement in the August 8-9 period even before Egypt had any precise way of knowing what we understood by a standstill.

 

The documents and “clarifications” were also passed on to the Soviets. But Moscow was not formally a party to either the cease-fire or the standstill. And as the charges of violations mounted it increasingly insisted that it was not bound despite its approving noises of July 23.

 

From this precarious base the first initiative for negotiations between the parties since 1967 was launched. The first day of the ceasefire was quiet along the Canal though the Palestinian guerrillas based in Jordan vowed not to observe it. While the Soviets used the occasion to call once again for total Israeli withdrawal, they also publicly described the cease-fire as an “important first step.” The United States government began to prepare for the Jarring talks and to study Israeli military aid requests. Sisco even told the NSC Senior Review Group on August 12 that, looking ahead to the Jarring talks, he was already beginning to draft a “full agreement,” to include definitive provisions on final borders. Our internal debate over Israel’s aid requests rapidly bogged down into abstract arguments about what kind of Israeli strategy to support. This had the effect of delaying a decision, since the type of weapon depended on a prior interagency agreement on military doctrine. These somewhat esoteric discussions were soon overtaken by Israeli charges that the military standstill was being violated.

 

Information on the early Egyptian-Soviet moves was confused and no doubt was put in the most dramatic light by Israeli publicity. Verification was not eased by the amazing fact that the starting time of the standstill was in the middle of the night, when reconnaissance aircraft or satellites, assuming they were ready at such short notice, would have been able to see little anyway. But there was no doubt that a substantial forward movement of the Egyptian-Soviet air defense complex had taken place in the nearly three weeks between Egypt’s acceptance of the American proposal and the beginning of the cease-fire and standstill. Almost certainly, whatever was under construction at the time the ceasefire went into effect was completed afterward. This could be simple cynicism; it could also be the case that the Soviets and Egyptians were caught by surprise by the uncharacteristic speed with which our bureaucracy moved in launching the cease-fire.

 

By August 13 Israeli charges of Soviet-Egyptian violations had reached our press. In Israel Menachem Begin withdrew his opposition party from the emergency coalition in which it had participated since 1967 and violently attacked Golda Meir for having agreed to the United States plan in the first place. However, the State Department took the line that the United States had reached “no conclusions” about the Israeli reports of violations. Our Ambassador in Israel, Walworth Barbour, was instructed to urge the Israeli government to cease public discussion of the matter. Instead, Israel was asked speedily to appoint its representative to the Jarring talks.

 

On August 15 Ambassador Rabin came in to see me. He presented a demarche from Golda Meir reviewing the evidence that fourteen SA-2S backed up by SA-3S had been moved into the standstill zone. As a result Israel had lost five Phantoms (such are the wonders of a Middle East cease-fire). In other words, after our mild response to the first forward moves, made around the time the standstill went into effect, the Soviets and Egyptians had made additional deployments, this time clearly in violation of the agreement. Mrs. Meir asked to present her case to the President personally. This was judged inopportune by the State Department, which was eager to get the Jarring talks under way. Instead I arranged an opportunity for Rabin to show the Israeli intelligence to Nixon. Rabin used the occasion to complain bitterly about the reluctance of our intelligence community to accept Israeli evidence; the violations were genuine, he said. The upshot was that Nixon approved a rapid delivery of Shrike missiles for use against the SA-3 complex and later agreed to see Mrs. Meir in September when she would be in the United States for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations.

 

There was some merit in Rabin’s complaint of the reluctance of the US intelligence community to find violations. As I explained to the President:

 

Israel, with her survival at stake, cannot afford to take chances… The nature of the Israelis’ situation is bound to influence their interpretation of ambiguous events. We, on the other hand, have an incentive to minimize such evidence, since the consequences of finding violations are so unpleasant. Violations force us to choose between doing something about them and thus risk the blowup of our initiative; or doing nothing and thus renege on our promises to Israel, posing the threat of her taking military action. Accordingly, we tend to lean over backwards to avoid the conclusion that the Arabs are violating the ceasefire unless the evidence is unambiguous.

 

Whatever the reason, it is probable that our hesitant first response encouraged Nasser to accelerate the forward deployment of missiles. We were witnessing, in fact, a replay of events of the spring: a seemingly marginal Soviet move, followed by a pause for consolidation and analysis of our reaction, succeeded by a rapid, dramatic buildup. Admittedly, the evidence in the first half of August was ambiguous as to whether the disputed activity had taken place just before or just after the cease-fire went into effect. There was no doubt, however, that whenever it occurred it was in defiance of the warning of June 2 by the Secretary of State to Dobrynin that Soviet missiles within thirty kilometers of the Canal could not be considered defensive.

 

By August 19 new evidence had been received confirming, as Israel alleged, clear-cut violations of the standstill agreement. This forced the State Department to formal action. But the public response, by way of a statement by the Department’s press spokesman, was again so low-key as to suggest that we were looking for pretexts to avoid action rather than to seek remedies:

 

We have concluded that there was forward deployment of surface-to-air missiles into and within the zone West of the Suez Canal around the time the ceasefire went into effect. There is some evidence that this was continued beyond the ceasefire deadline, although our evidence of this is not conclusive… We are examining [additional information from Israel]… We do not now anticipate making further public statements on this matter…

 

In tandem with the public announcement, Egypt was informed of some of the evidence we had. But since the evidence was “not conclusive,” we told the Egyptians that we would not make any public charges; we reminded them of what were considered violations and warned that further such activity would jeopardize peace talks. The Soviets were also informed of the approach in Cairo. Finally, a major effort was made to persuade the Israelis to react with restraint and not to cause future difficulties by publicity. A second American demarche was made in Cairo on August 22 when we presented “incontrovertible” evidence of violations.

 

If the United States protests an issue, it must do so forcefully and with a description of the remedial action it expects. A plaintive tone is the least likely to evoke a satisfactory response; it suggests that the protest may be for the record only. It deprives the offending country of a domestic pretext for changing course. This is especially important when the subject is politically sensitive and the policy not easy to reverse. On August 24, the day that Jarring announced the start of peace talks involving the chief UN delegates of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, Egypt flatly rejected our charges of violations. Cairo took the position that its actions were consistent with its interpretation of the agreement; that it would not introduce additional missiles into the zone but reserved the right to “rotate” them in and out; that it would not construct any new sites but reserved the right to “maintain” and “repair” existing ones; that Israel was violating the cease-fire and that American arms supply to Israel ran counter to assurances given by Rogers as well as the cease-fire agreement.

 

At this juncture I advised the President that we were expending all our credit with the Israelis simply to establish a cease-fire before the talks had even begun. And these talks were certain to bring even more deep-seated disagreements to the surface. The Soviets and Nasser were likely to “be tempted to believe that we are willing to acquiesce in their violations of the standstill cease-fire, despite our direct warnings to them and our promises to Israel. This has serious consequences for our current initiative in the Middle East, the longer term prospects for the area generally, and US-Soviet relations.” It was crucial to take a harder line against violations of the cease-fire and to bring their responsibilities home to the Soviets.

 

A rational discussion of these issues was made next to impossible by the extraordinary diplomatic procedures that had developed in the previous eighteen months, and by the personal rivalry between Rogers and me. Nixon’s penchant for operating through his Assistants rather than his Cabinet could be managed—if with great tension—so long as the White House was indeed in charge. But when operational control of sensitive negotiations left the White House, the weakness of the system became glaring. The State Department simply did not know enough about the President’s thinking to pursue the nuances of his policy. Its tendency to nudge matters in its own preferred direction and to interpret Presidential instructions in a manner compatible with its preconceptions made matters worse. It was impossible to formulate Presidential instructions with any confidence that the intangibles underlying them would be understood or implemented.

 

I could have acted as an intermediary had my relations with Rogers been happier. But by the summer of 1970 it was clear to him that he was being excluded from key decisions on almost all issues except the Middle East, or else brought in so late that his role was that of a ratifier rather than of a policy formulator. Indeed, it must have occurred to him that it could not be happenstance that so many Presidential decisions were taken when he was on foreign trips. His pride did not let him admit that this could take place only at the instance of his old friend, the President. He therefore blamed me. Nor was he totally wrong. Nixon distrusted State and wanted sensitive matters handled by the White House alone, but my presence made the two-channel procedures possible and I was quite willing to step into the breach to conduct negotiations with my small staff and no interagency liaison. The procedures so painful to Rogers were clearly instigated by Nixon; it is equally evident that I nurtured them. Neither Rogers nor I mustered the grace to transcend an impasse that we should have recognized was not in the national interest. If we had been prepared to overcome our not inconsiderable egos, we could have complemented each other’s efforts. Even then, of course, there would have remained large areas of disagreement on policy and tactics.

 

The Middle East was the one subject on which Rogers was given the responsibility and the authority. And the Middle East cease-fire had seemed like a great triumph, the first uncontroverted achievement of the Nixon Administration in foreign policy. Understandably, Rogers was reluctant to face the prospect that it might fail; he was acutely sensitive to any hint of White House interference. He tended to consider my concerns as an attempt to deprive him of his one field of glory. Sisco was caught in the middle. Heroically, he sought to navigate between conflicting, occasionally irreconcilable perspectives, and to remain loyal to both his Secretary and his President. He often steadied the ship, but he was in no position to give it a clear direction.

 

Only the President could do that, but having decided not to rely on the NSC staff for the Middle East, and distrusting the State Department machinery, he was left with no instrument for sustained governmental action. His usual response to controversy among his advisers was procrastination. In areas under White House control this did no ultimate damage because to some extent I could manage events until they forced a Presidential decision. But in the passionate circumstances of the Middle East the procedure risked being outstripped by events—a danger reinforced by Nixon’s annual August sojourn in San Clemente, which slowed the administrative pace on all Presidential issues. Moreover, Nixon was still toying with the idea that he should weigh in personally with a Soviet summit.

 

A meeting in San Clemente on August 25 of the President, Rogers, Sisco, and me ended inconclusively and acrimoniously after Rogers accused me of seeking to foment a crisis by being so insistent on ceasefire violations. But crises cannot be avoided by denying the circumstances that produce them or blaming the bearer of bad tidings. By the end of August events began to assert their own logic; we were in danger of losing our margin for decision precisely because we pretended that we could extend it through the strenuous exercise of goodwill.

 

On August 28 the Soviets put themselves clearly on Nasser’s side in this dispute, seizing the occasion of a US communication of August 8 that had informed them we would be monitoring the cease-fire with U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. (I thought that communication a mistake then because it would encourage the Soviets to take a position on an action which was needed to monitor the agreement. It is generally unwise in diplomacy to raise an issue when one is not prepared to accept the likely response.) Their reply, to Sisco in Washington and Beam in Moscow, took us to task on the U-2 flights, which were described as a “new complicating element”; in the Soviet view they contradicted the terms of the cease-fire, violated Egyptian sovereignty, involved “extremely serious complications,” and also ran “the risk of special surprise.” I informed the President, pointing out that the Soviets probably had every reason to be concerned about verification of the cease-fire in impartial hands. It would be easier for the Soviets and Nasser to reject charges of violations if they were based only on Israeli surveillance.

 

By August 29 the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Ray Cline, had concluded that instead of one SA-2 site within the thirty-kilometer zone, about which we had protested the previous week, there were now seven or eight, as well as three or four SA-3 sites. Most of these sites in his judgment were almost certainly built after the cease-fire went into effect. On August 31 a CIA assessment confirmed these conclusions.

 

A meeting of the President and his senior advisers—Rogers, Moorer, Laird, Helms, and me—was now unavoidable, and it took place on September 1 in San Clemente. The President directed that a very strong protest be made in both Cairo and Moscow, and that Israel be asked to send a representative to the Jarring talks in New York. On September 3 the State Department publicly confirmed the violations, this time less ambiguously but still with considerable restraint, and indicated that we would deal with the matter only in diplomatic channels; concurrently, State kept urging that the Jarring talks begin.

 

Both Egypt and the Soviet Union continued to reject our protests. Cairo denied the charges on September 4, in the process challenging our continued military supply to Israel as inconsistent with alleged assurances of restraint. On September 6, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vinogradov told Beam that the Soviet Union had concluded no cease-fire agreement with the United States and was therefore not responsible for any violations. Vinogradov noted the “strange arrangement “ whereby the United States was supervising the cease-fire without any request from Egypt and violating Egyptian territory by overflying the Sinai. About the same time, the Soviet charge delivered a message in Washington expressing concern over an allegedly impending Israeli preemptive attack on the missile sites. The Soviets asked us to take steps to prevent this. We had no such evidence. I thought it was part of the perennial Soviet effort to put us on the defensive. I told Sisco to pass the warning to the Israelis without comment, but not to confirm to the Soviets that he had done so. There was no sense in letting them score easy points in Cairo as protector of the Arabs.

 

<<Contents>>

 

* * * *

Israel Bows out of Negotiations

 

fter all the disputes and violations it was no surprise that on September 6, Israel announced that it could not participate in the settlement talks under Jarring. On September 6, moreover, Palestinian guerrillas hijacked three airplanes. What had started as a step toward peace a month earlier was precipitating a confrontation. I tended to share the view of the chief Soviet expert on my staff, Hal Sonnenfeldt, then and later an invaluable collaborator, who in September sent me an analysis drawing an analogy to the Cuban missile crisis:

 

… my deep concern [is] that in the present Middle Eastern situation we may have (unwittingly) misled the Soviets to believe that cheating on the ceasefire was a matter of indifference to us and that we may have thereby contributed to a potentially much deeper crisis… The nature, timing and speed of our cease-fire initiative, the relative looseness of its terms, the informality of its consummation, our reluctance to concede violations and our other statements and actions after violations began could have led the Soviets to conclude that all that really mattered to us was a ceasefire in a pre-election period in which we preferred not to confront the awkward choices of continued open warfare… They could thus have been surprised by our subsequent apparently real indignation at what was happening (having meanwhile given the UAR and themselves the green light to proceed with violations and thus put their prestige on the line). Or they may even yet believe that we are merely play-acting.

 

At the same time, the Middle East expert on my staff, Hal Saunders, informed me that Soviet and Egyptian violations had actually accelerated after our protests of early September. Saunders, another superb analyst and fair-minded adviser, was not known for an anti-Arab bias. Yet he wrote me that, according to U-2 photography taken after our early September demarches in Moscow and Cairo:

 

… it seems clear that the Egyptians are continuing SAM activity in violation of the military standstill provision of the ceasefire agreement. They have made no move to restore or rectify the situation on the 24 sites we have protested… We have seen at least a 50 percent increase in the number of occupied SAM sites since August 10… Activity is not levelling off… The defensive missile complex along the Canal would seem to mean more to the Egyptians than the peace talks since the Israelis have made it very clear that they cannot go on with the talks until the pre-ceasefire situation is restored… .

 

Even then, some diehard analysts were determined to restore the peace initiative by making the facts fit their preferences. An inventive Defense Department expert came up with the extraordinary theory that perhaps Nasser had not violated the standstill after all. It could not be excluded, it was argued, that the missiles had been hidden in the fifty-kilometer zone before the cease-fire went into effect and had been surfaced only afterward. Hence, they had not been “introduced” into the zone; the standstill remained pristine. This sophisticated reasoning did not explain why the Egyptians would hide missiles when their deployment was permitted and surface them only when their deployment was proscribed. Nor was it possible to find through aerial photography sheds or warehouses large enough to house so much materiel, while to hide it in the sand would have required a hole the size of the pyramids.

 

There was simply no avoiding the fact that by the middle of September our initiatives had reached an impasse. In the bargain, we had fulfilled the Israeli arms request held in abeyance since March. We ended up increasing it, not so much to win Israel’s flexibility in peace negotiations as to ward off an Israeli preemptive attack against the advance of the Egyptian missiles we had not been able to stop; we gained no credit for it in Israel and we magnified the displeasure of the Arabs. The Soviets had established a combat presence in Egypt that already threatened Israel and would be useful later in collusion with Nasser against any moderate Arab government. Our actions did not dominate events; they followed them, and often seemed to be overwhelmed by them. And the greatest danger resided in the apparent Soviet misperceptions of our firmness.

 

Almost inevitably, further crises descended on the Administration in September. We were faced simultaneously with a civil war in Jordan, a Soviet attempt to build a submarine base in Cuba, and the coming to power of Allende in Chile. It was at once the most dangerous and decisive period of the new Administration—far more perilous than the Cambodian incursion, for all the hysteria and media attention that received. Only after we had braved that storm would the various components of our global diplomacy, so laboriously assembled over a year and a half, begin to fall into place.

 

<<Contents>>

 

* * * *