Sadat Expels the Soviets
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he Moscow summit had one further important consequence: Anwar Sadat’s expulsion of the Soviet Union from Egypt in July 1972.
Even before the summit, Nixon, like me, was aware of Sadat’s mounting disillusionment with the Soviet Union. For all Egypt’s dependence on Soviet military support, the USSR had failed to bring about any progress toward a settlement or Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory. Sadat himself had been in Moscow in February and April. Between those two visits, Cairo had opened a secret channel to us. This was one of the factors in our determination to ensure that the Moscow summit communiqué remained insipid on the Middle East, to see what other results our strategy might produce. We were not to know until later how well our strategy had worked. To trace this momentous change in the Middle East, it is necessary to go back almost two years.
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The Death of Nasser
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he end of 1970 was in a way a turning point in the Middle East, though we did not know it then. The Jordan crisis and even the tensions along the Suez Canal were stages in the evolution of Arab perception that the key to a Middle East settlement lay in Washington, not in Moscow. But perhaps the most decisive event was the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the accession to power of Anwar Sadat.
Anwar el-Sadat was then little known to us. He was one of the original band of army officers who overthrew King Farouk in 1952; but through the years he was not considered a major figure by our experts. At first, it was not even clear that he would be made the President of Egypt in his own right. Anyone succeeding after the death of so towering a personality as Nasser would have a hard time filling his shoes; in addition, in the case of Sadat the outside world misjudged him because of his informal oratorical style and his village origin, as well as his relatively minor role in Egyptian politics under Nasser. Nasser died on September 28, 1970, when I was with the President on his Mediterranean trip. A day later, a journalist asked me about Sadat. I said I thought he was an interim figure who would not last more than a few weeks. That was among my wildest misjudgments! Over the course of 1971 Sadat would gradually outmaneuver his opponents, accomplishing in May a stunning purge of a formidable group of pro-Soviet rivals who had been plotting to eliminate him. Gradually he established his domestic position and his international freedom of action. Few outsiders even then (certainly not I) understood with what courage, vision, and determination he would later move his country and his region toward a revolution in international affairs, and thus emerge as one of the great leaders of our period. (Another less noticed though significant result of the autumn of crises was the accession of Hafez Asad to power in Syria in November 1970. Less visionary than Sadat, he nevertheless gave Syria unprecedented stability and, against the background of the turbulent history of his people, emerged as a leader of courage and relative moderation.)
Policies well established in our government tend to appear (and sometimes to be) impervious to change. Typically enough, the change of leaders in Egypt seemed to bring no alteration in the State Department’s desire to push the diplomatic initiative it had earlier devised. The Department’s efforts had stalemated in 1969; they had been revived in June 1970 with the US proposal of a standstill cease-fire along the Suez Canal, only to be immediately submerged again by Nasser’s violations of the standstill agreement and the Jordan crisis. At the end of 1970, the initiative was picked up again as if nothing had happened in the interval. That positions had probably hardened and that no new element had been added were not regarded as reasons to forgo the eager diplomacy.
By the end of December 1970, the State Department—buttressed by a reassuring letter of December 3 to Mrs. Meir, urged on Nixon by Rogers—finally managed to persuade the Israelis to return to the Jarring negotiations, from which they had bowed out in September because of Egypt’s violations of the standstill cease-fire. But even before Israeli agreement had been secured, Joe Sisco was already sending instructions—without White House clearance—that urged Jarring to renew his mediating mission along the lines of our proposals of 1969 on final borders and peace terms (the Rogers Plan). Sisco had no reason to believe that the parties were about to compromise their heretofore irreconcilable positions, but, as he told me in early January, not much would be lost if Jarring at least made a try. A diplomat should not be faulted for leaving room for the miraculous.
Pacified by a new $90 million American arms package approved by Nixon in October, the Israelis seized the initiative in early 1971 by inviting Jarring to begin his mission with a journey to Israel. Immediately, Jarring faced the problem that had stalemated negotiations the year before: Israel insisted on “peace”; Egypt on withdrawal. The Israelis handed the Swedish mediator on January 8 a paper listing the “essentials of peace”—including the ending of belligerency, terrorism, economic blockade, and boycott, and establishment of “good neighborly relations and cooperation.” In return, Israel sought “secure, recognized, and agreed boundaries” with suitable security provisions—in other words, Israel proposed to acquire Egyptian territory as part of the peace process. Nothing, in short, had changed in the standard Israeli position.
Jarring passed the Israeli document to the Egyptians on January 13. Cairo responded a few days later with a document reiterating the standard Egyptian position, which called for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 boundaries and for Israel to repudiate the policy of “territorial expansion. “ In a desperate maneuver to reconcile the incompatible by procedural gimmick, Jarring “softened” the Egyptian paper before passing it to the Israelis for their comment; he omitted some of Cairo’s more offensive preambular language, which had dismissed the Israeli paper as adding “no new element” to previous Israeli positions. Jarring was attempting to calm suspicions; his tactics achieved the opposite result. As part of the propaganda war that Egypt and Israel were waging against each other, each side eventually leaked its position to the press. It could not have helped the Israelis’ confidence when they saw in the press a different version of the Egyptian paper from what they had officially received from Jarring.
As I had predicted, the result of the first round of Jarring talks was a deadlock. Joe Sisco told me on January 21 that he had not expected much more; the purpose of the effort, he now said, was to encourage the Egyptians to renew the cease-fire when it expired at the beginning of February. It did achieve this purpose, but within two weeks Jarring, with State Department encouragement, was putting forward substantive ideas of his own in an effort to break the deadlock.
The scenario we were witnessing was an exact replay of 1969—activity for its own sake amid self-generated deadlines that could be met only by papering over irreconcilable differences that, in turn, made a blowup all the more inevitable. Drawing on the papers traded in January, Jarring presented a new proposal to both parties on February 8, asking Israel to withdraw to the 1967 border with Egypt (subject to practical security arrangements) and Egypt to sign a peace agreement with Israel. The Israelis were furious; they saw Jarring’s paper (with good reason) as based on the Rogers Plan of 1969, which they had rejected then; they also challenged Jarring’s mandate to put forward ideas of his own rather than serve as a courier and confine himself to asking questions. To Israel, the Jarring paper was not only objectionable in substance; the mere fact of its presentation obviated, in Israeli minds, any need for Sadat to respond to the Israeli position that had focused on the “peace” provisions.
All this diplomacy was conducted without any real coordination with the White House. For example, Jarring presented his own paper to the two parties on the very day of a Senior Review Group meeting that I had convened presumably to discuss future strategy. Also, a series of important communications in January between Secretary Rogers and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad were not shown to the White House until after the fact—a procedure my able staff expert Hal Saunders did his best to monitor. These communications included Rogers’s assurance to Riad that the United States would make “an all-out effort” to secure a settlement in 1971—for which there was no White House support at all—on the basis of the Rogers Plan. If the Israelis were inflamed by the substance of Jarring’s presentations, the Egyptians would soon grow disillusioned when the proposals we had encouraged Jarring to offer received little US support. Both sides were now angry at us, as the deadlock of 1969 repeated itself. In late February, Jarring’s explorations foundered on the Israeli refusal to accept the principle of return to the 1967 borders and the Egyptian insistence on such a principle. Jarring had made some progress, however; Egypt had agreed to a peace agreement, rather than a mere declaration of nonbelligerency, if Israel returned to the 1967 borders. But since that was adamantly refused, the Jarring mission was in effect over.
There was some sentiment in the US government for imposing the Rogers Plan on the Israelis. But the President had no stomach for it in the middle of the Laotian crisis. And it made no strategic sense. As long as Egypt was in effect a Soviet military base, we could have no incentive to turn on an ally on behalf of a Soviet client. This is why I was always opposed to comprehensive solutions that would be rejected by both parties and that could only serve Soviet ends by either demonstrating our impotence or being turned into a showcase of what could be exacted by Moscow’s pressure. My aim was to produce a stalemate until Moscow urged compromise or until, even better, some moderate Arab regime decided that the route to progress was through Washington.
In fact, had we been more finely attuned to the subtleties of Mideast diplomacy we might have discerned the first hints of fundamental changes in the Egyptian position. In a speech to the Egyptian Parliament on February 4, in which he accepted an extension of the cease-fire, Sadat had surfaced the idea of an interim agreement: a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Suez Canal, permitting the reopening of the Canal, as the “first stage of a timetable which will be prepared later to implement the other provisions of the Security Council resolution [242].” And as noted, Egypt’s February 15 reply to Jarring included, for the first time, the willingness to sign a peace agreement with Israel. (Of course, it was conditioned on Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, which Israel would not accept.)
Sadat considered these steps of February 1971 as the beginning of his long, arduous, and extraordinary journey toward peace.[212] His proposal to discuss an interim agreement along the Suez Canal became the focus of diplomacy in 1971—and a version of the concept eventually was reflected in the January 1974 disengagement agreement that began the peace process after the 1973 war. His willingness to sign a peace agreement with Israel was to become a dramatic reality eight years later. Our perception of the significance of Sadat’s moves then was unfortunately still beclouded by the presence of over 15,000 Soviet troops in Egypt and his signing of a Friendship Treaty with Moscow.
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The Idea of an Interim Settlement
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HE concept of an interim withdrawal from the Canal had been born in the fertile mind of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan during the late summer of 1970. In Dayan’s formulation it required a mutual withdrawal or thinning-out of military forces on both sides of the Canal. Dayan’s concept was not then an official proposal of the Israeli government, however, and when Dayan visited Washington in December 1970 he was obliged to disavow it except as a “theoretical alternative” to the standard Israeli position, which was that Israel would not grant Egypt the boon of a reopened Suez Canal until a final peace agreement. In fact, Mrs. Meir had asked me what I thought of Dayan’s idea when I met with her at the Shoreham Hotel on October 25, 1970, during her visit to Washington in conjunction with the UN’s twenty-fifth anniversary. I told her that I had not studied it in detail but it seemed a good idea. The proposal was revived at the beginning of 1971 when an Egyptian general on January 11 approached the head of our mission in Cairo and, speaking in Sadat’s name, expressed interest in Dayan’s proposal. Next, Sadat repeated it publicly in his February 4 speech.
The reason why an interim accord never materialized in 1971 was the same that thwarted the comprehensive approach: The two sides had radically different purposes in pursuing it. Egypt wanted an interim agreement as the first step toward a total withdrawal; Dayan put it forward as a means to forestall that prospect. To Dayan, a partial disengagement had the attraction of both short-circuiting the Jarring diplomacy and reducing the negotiation to a limited scheme that could be more easily managed by Israel’s domestic policies. Above all, it would postpone discussion of the final borders. If implemented, an interim accord would stabilize the Suez front and reduce the possibility of hostilities; Egypt would be less likely to launch a war if it stood to lose the economic benefit of the reopened Canal. This reasoning persuaded Mrs. Meir to accept Sadat’s suggestion of a pullback along the Canal in a speech on February 9.
To Sadat, however, disengagement included a much more extensive Israeli withdrawal than the limited pullback Dayan envisioned. Dayan proposed a withdrawal or thinning out of forces on each side; Sadat suggested in Newsweek of February 22 that the Israelis should pull back to “a line behind El Arish” (more than halfway across the Sinai) and allow a UN force to take over Sharm el-Sheikh. Sadat also insisted that Egyptian military forces had to cross the Canal, where Dayan saw it as a mutual withdrawal from the Canal. Most important, Sadat made the agreement conditional on an agreed timetable for total withdrawal along the lines of the Rogers Plan. This the Israelis totally rejected.
Disengagement had no chance of success as long as it had to be negotiated together with an overall settlement. And if there was no chance of success, I saw no reason for us to involve ourselves. Our ace in the hole was that if we played our cards right, we could produce tangible progress in diplomacy while the Soviets could promise only help in war. But for this strategy to work we had to be effectual; we could not waste our prestige on futile maneuvers. To succeed, an interim agreement therefore had to be separated from the comprehensive settlement; if they were linked, we would merely dissipate our influence by chasing a mirage that had all the difficulties of the comprehensive schemes it purported to replace and that we were no more able to produce than Moscow.
Nevertheless, in the absence of any other alternative, the State Department energetically picked up the interim agreement as soon as Jarring’s mission collapsed at the end of February. State in the first week of March began privately discussing the merits of a possible interim step with the Israelis, broaching specific ideas with Rabin as early as March 6. The speed with which State moved—only eight days after Israel, on February 26, had rejected the Jarring proposal and with barely time for an assessment on next steps—could hardly alleviate Israel’s congenital apprehension that it would again be rushed headlong into a diplomacy which would link an interim with a final settlement along lines it opposed. In the absence of agreed objectives it proved impossible to bridge the gulf between the two sides’ conceptions by procedural legerdemain. At various times each side was led to believe that we sympathized with its version of the interim concept; disillusionment, frustration, and stalemate were the inevitable result.
My idea was to use an interim agreement to break the impasse. Once achieved, such a step would ease the way to further advances. But I also parted company with those in Israel who regarded an interim disengagement as a way to avoid any further withdrawals. On the contrary, the chief utility of a disengagement along the Canal in my view was to launch a process of negotiation that might ultimately lead to peace with some or all of the Arab states. (This was, of course, the concept of “step-by-step” progress, which unlocked the peace process in 1974.)
Nixon had given me a mandate to explore what was feasible but not to negotiate it. In pursuit of this, I broached the idea of a separate interim agreement with Dobrynin on March 22, 1971, to see whether the Soviets were prepared to abandon the linkage to a detailed comprehensive plan. I pursued the concept with Abba Eban in mid-March and with Egypt’s representative in Washington, Ashraf Ghorbal, on March 25. My approach was to use an initial step to get the process of withdrawal and mutual acceptance under way even without a commitment to ultimate goals. Since Dobrynin was unwilling to discuss my approach, negotiations returned to regular channels and there, not unexpectedly, it turned out that the parties were not yet ready to agree on even a limited accord.
The Israelis in mid-April produced a paper with the details of their approach: an Israeli pullback of unspecified (but short) distance from the Canal; no Egyptian troops to cross the Canal; some thinning out of Egyptian troops on the Egyptian side of the Canal; a cease-fire of indefinite duration; and no linkage whatever to further withdrawals. Rabin, in fact, showed me the proposed Israeli position paper before surfacing it at the State Department. I persuaded him to convince his government to modify some elements that would have made the negotiation a total nonstarter. As it was, the final Israeli version was certain to be unacceptable to Egypt.
Rogers was nevertheless determined to accelerate what he believed to be a hopeful venture. On April 19 he secured the President’s authorization to visit several Middle East countries to find common ground between Egypt and Israel on an interim settlement. I expressed my doubts to Nixon in a memorandum of April 22:
It would be especially worrisome were his presence to accelerate the diplomatic process and further to intensify the current stalemate between Israel, the Arabs, the US and USSR. For this reason, I believe it is important that you caution the Secretary not to depart from the current state of play without keeping us fully apprised and receiving your specific approval for any departure from the status quo.
But I could do no more than warn. Since he was unwilling to confront his Secretary on this issue, Nixon had no way to enforce the above strictures even if he agreed with my analysis, which was far from a foregone conclusion.
Rogers visited the Middle East at the beginning of May 1971. His discussions in Israel and Egypt made the fundamental differences explicit. Sadat wanted Egyptian troops to be able to take up positions on both sides of the Canal; Israel violently disagreed (except for Dayan, who thought, wisely, that some Egyptian police presence might be permissible). Sadat insisted on an Israeli commitment in principle to the 1967 borders linked to the Canal accord. Israel would make no such commitment (although Dayan told Sisco that he was one of the few in the government who did see the interim step as part of a continuing peace process). Rogers’s trip had no result except to get Dayan in some trouble at home when the differences between his government’s position and his own became publicly known. In an astute analysis, Hal Saunders wrote me on May 19 that he feared Sadat might have been counting on Rogers to deliver a Canal agreement; Sadat, who had just carried out the massive purge of pro-Soviet elements in his government, probably needed diplomatic progress “to make his policy work and survive politically… The door is open for a major letdown if there is no movement now.” When Rogers sent Nixon a report on his trip, I attached my own analysis in the same vein:
The sobering thought in all of this is that, while Sadat moved [to purge his opponents] mainly to secure his own position, the US has become unintentionally but closely involved. By coincidence of timing, the Secretary’s visit and the expectation of a Canal settlement will be linked in many minds with Sadat’s big move. If he cannot demonstrate success for his policy of seeking negotiation, the US—regardless of the merits of the case—may bear much of the onus.
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The Phantom Memorandum
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T this point, the quest for an interim agreement turned into a detective story. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find out who was proposing what to whom. The White House could no longer tell whether the parties were putting forward their own views or else interpretations of ours to force us into supporting publicly what we had told them privately. In the process, some of our diplomats carried out an extraordinary maneuver of which the White House was completely ignorant. In a follow-up to the Rogers trip, our diplomatic representative in Cairo helped the Egyptians draft their own counterproposal on an interim settlement. The incident not only revealed the State Department’s bias toward an interim accord that was a stage toward an agreed (and unattainable) comprehensive settlement; more worrisome, the American inability to implement the proposal (after the Egyptians had put it forward with what they felt was our blessing) magnified Cairo’s disillusionment with American diplomacy; they thought us either incompetent or deceitful.
Only three weeks afterward did the White House have any inkling of what had taken place in Cairo. Evidently what happened was that Donald Bergus, head of the US Interests Section in Cairo, [This was not an embassy since we officially had no diplomatic relations.] met with Egyptian Foreign Ministry officials on May 23 to discuss an Egyptian position paper. When the Egyptians sought Bergus’s advice, he apparently wrote out detailed ideas and left his notes with the Egyptians. Bergus’s draft, when it became known, bore a striking resemblance to the formal Egyptian proposal that was ultimately submitted to us by Sadat on June 4. It was an extraordinary procedure, which I remain convinced no professional diplomat of Bergus’s experience would have undertaken without authorization from higher-ups. It was also bound to fail and leave us out on a limb. When word of the Bergus memorandum later leaked to the press, the State Department disavowed it, saying that it did not represent an official US position.[213] The Egyptians were now doubly angry, stung by the disavowal and bitter that we could not deliver on what they had assumed represented our own idea. The Israelis were enraged that we were encouraging Egypt to put forward terms which they had told us they would never accept. I was annoyed—to put it mildly—that none of these moves had been disclosed to the President of the United States.
Then came another bombshell, of even greater importance. On May 27, 1971, Sadat signed a Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union. In his autobiography, Sadat treats this agreement as a kind of sop to Soviet sensibilities after he had purged and jailed all the top pro-Soviet elements in Egyptian politics.[214] I now believe this to have been the principal motive—though none of us understood Sadat at the time. But surely it reflected also a new Soviet boldness and Sadat’s frustration with erratic American diplomacy. It was bound to alarm the Israelis and make an interim settlement even harder to achieve. Not surprisingly, State had a more sanguine assessment. Rogers reported to Nixon that the Friendship Treaty “strengthens [Sadat’s] hand vis-à-vis his own military by its emphasis on long-range military support. It could help maintain [his] flexibility on a Suez Canal settlement.” (State and the CIA made exactly the same analysis of the Soviet Union’s Friendship Treaty with India, signed less than three months later.) I wrote the President on May 31 that I disagreed with Rogers’s assessment:
The Egyptian Army is dependent on Soviet support. In turn, Sadat is at the moment dependent on his military for his base of power, having purged the party and the bureaucracy. Rather than strengthening Sadat’s flexibility with respect to negotiating the Canal settlement, the treaty could give the Soviet Union a veto over the future negotiations. Thus, whatever the outcome of the negotiations—and after all, the Soviets are the chief beneficiaries of a Suez settlement—recent events may have enhanced Soviet long-term influence. Certainly the Soviets are committed to engage themselves as never before in case of resumption of hostilities.
I cannot tell whose interpretation Nixon accepted. My only clue is that in the margin of my memorandum he expressed his worry that “we must not allow this to be a pretext for escalation of arms to Israel. We should assist only in response to incontrovertible evidence of Soviet military aid which we evaluate as significantly changing the balance of power.” Nixon said more or less the same thing in a news conference on June 1. We were in danger of confrontation with Egypt, Israel, and the Soviet Union simultaneously.
Not knowing Sadat, I had to conclude that he was still playing Nasser’s game. Furthermore, Sadat’s impatience was becoming evident in repeated declarations that 1971 had to be the “year of decision” in the Middle East. Our strategy had to be to frustrate any Egyptian policy based on military threats and collusion with the Soviet Union. Therefore Sadat’s Friendship Treaty with the Soviets, whatever its motives, did not galvanize us to help him as he might have hoped. On the contrary, it reinforced my determination to slow down the process even further to demonstrate that Soviet threats and treaties could not be decisive.
Nevertheless, the State Department remained eager to press ahead. On the day I left for Asia (and China), July 1, Sisco sounded out Ambassador Rabin about a visit to Israel to discuss an interim settlement. (It was hardly a coincidence that this new State Department initiative came when I was leaving for a twelve-day absence abroad!) While in Asia, I managed, as I have described, to persuade the President to hold any major Mideast decisions in abeyance until I returned; he used the pretext of calling an NSC meeting on the subject for July 16, which any new initiatives would have to await. The July 16 NSC meeting, when it convened, was characterized by Presidential complaints about the pro-Israel lobby; Laird’s objections to further aircraft supply to Israel; and Rogers’s eagerness for Sisco to visit Israel. At the end of the meeting, Nixon authorized the Sisco trip to explore whether there was any flexibility in the Israeli position. There was not. His trip produced so little that Sisco did not even bother to stop in Cairo on the way home.
At this point, after my trip to China and the collapse of the State Department’s pursuit of an interim settlement, I became operationally active in Middle East diplomacy for the first time.
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Becoming Involved
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hat finally got me involved in the execution of Middle East diplomacy was that Nixon did not believe he could risk recurrent crises in the Middle East in an election year. He therefore asked me to step in, if only to keep things quiet. My first move was to explore whether the Soviets were in fact willing to moderate their proposals; if not, I intended to draw them into protracted and inconclusive negotiations until either they or some Arab country changed their position. The Soviets were still complaining about unilateral American diplomacy in the Middle East, which reflected not so much Moscow’s resentment at being left out as its eagerness to dramatize our failure to bring any progress. I therefore temporized in my talks with Dobrynin in the first half of 1971. But after the July 15 China announcement we held out the prospect of superpower cooperation in the Middle East in a soothing letter that Nixon sent to Brezhnev on August 5. Nixon had made a similar suggestion in a news conference the night before. Dobrynin asked me on August 5 what we had in mind. Having no concrete ideas in mind (nor yet a mandate to offer any), I said it simply reflected our general readiness for broadly based negotiations. Brezhnev replied to Nixon on September 7, reaffirming Soviet interest in a Middle East settlement. Brezhnev expressed dismay that we had broken off earlier direct dealings with Moscow on the subject.
These Soviet overtures came against the backdrop of a step-up of Soviet military activity in Egypt. For example, in September Israel shot down a Soviet attack bomber—an SU-7 jet—over the Canal; an Egyptian surface-to-air missile destroyed an Israeli reconnaissance plane. Egypt had moved some of its SAM sites even farther forward; this could not have been done without Soviet concurrence and cooperation. At the same time, the State Department was hinting that we would delay further aircraft shipments to Israel unless Israel showed greater flexibility. Mrs. Meir wrote Nixon on September 17, reiterating Israel’s concept of an interim settlement, but also expressing “grave concern” over the stoppage of delivery of Phantom jets to Israel at a time of an increasing Soviet military presence in Egypt.
If a negotiation on an interim accord was to break, rather than harden, this impasse, perhaps a new tack was required. I wrote Nixon on September 23:
The problem with the interim settlement is that too much has been attempted. The initial idea was simply a mutual thinning out on both sides. From that it mushroomed to Sadat insisting on moving his forces to the key Sinai passes. To achieve that, the US would have to press Israel almost as hard as to get an overall settlement.
The main hope now, it would seem to me, would be to reduce Egyptian expectations to a point where changes that might realistically be expected in Israel’s position could produce an understanding. Because official positions are tied to greater expectations, it may be that the only way of achieving this—if it were possible at all—would be through less official exchanges to see what might be possible.
My mention of “less official exchanges” was prompted by, among other things, a Soviet overture to me. Dobrynin forewarned me on September 20 that Gromyko, when he met with the President on September 29, would propose putting the Mideast issue into the special Channel. I warned Dobrynin, in turn, that at best this would be a slow process, requiring some exploration to see if it was worthwhile. The Middle East was much more complex than even Berlin (which we had just concluded successfully in the Channel); the factors were much less in our control and the indiscretion of the parties involved was of epic proportion.
The prospect of another backchannel negotiation would also require contact with Egypt. I had had a talk on September 16 with a former student of mine, Ali Hamdi el-Gammal, director of the prestigious Cairo newspaper Al Ahram, who tried to set up a confidential meeting between me and his chief editor, Mohamed Heikal, a confidant of Sadat. Gammal invited me to Cairo; he discussed as an alternative taking up the offer of a private business executive to host a meeting at his home between me and Heikal. [Heikal later turned down the invitation and the meeting never took place. Not until the spring of 1972 did Cairo find a reliable channel.] Then, in early October, Yitzhak Rabin, too, urged me to get involved personally in the interim accord negotiations; he told me confidentially that Israel might be more flexible in its terms if I were involved and it had Presidential assurances that the demands would not be open-ended. I told both Gammal and Rabin that if I decided to engage myself, their respective governments would have to face up to the hard decisions required. Egypt would have to give up its precondition of a commitment to total withdrawal; Israel would have to be prepared to put forward a reasonable package. The only point in staking Presidential prestige was to make progress.
By this time, the President himself was pushing the idea of my more active involvement—if only for the damage-limiting purpose of keeping things quiet until after the 1972 election. When Foreign Minister Gromyko met with Nixon on September 29, 1971, we went through the usual ritual by which a larger meeting including State Department participants was cut short so that Nixon and Gromyko could then talk privately in his hideaway in the Executive Office Building. Nixon accepted Gromyko’s suggestion that Dobrynin and I undertake a serious exploration of Middle East issues—though not without linking it again to Soviet help on Vietnam.
I subsequently visited the Soviet Embassy on the evening of September 30 for a two-hour private meeting with Gromyko. I repeated to him the difficulties of settling the Middle East in the Channel, in contrast to Berlin. On Berlin, the parties affected all wanted an agreement; this was less than clear in the Middle East. I pointed out that I did not want to get involved on behalf of the President unless there was a good chance of achieving an agreement; this was why I proposed exploratory talks first. The real issue was not the detail of whether the Israelis withdrew forty kilometers or twenty kilometers from the Canal, but the fact that an Israeli withdrawal would be of tremendous symbolic significance. Egypt had to decide whether it wanted substance or theory; there was no possibility of agreeing now on the shape of the final settlement. The more theology we included in the interim settlement, the less likely it would be achieved. Indeed, if I wanted to waste time, I would urge that the interim accord be specific about the final settlement because it would never be agreed to by the parties. If the President and I were to get involved, it would have to be on the basis that progress was possible; this meant to me that there should be some vagueness as to the final destination.
Gromyko rejected this approach. He insisted that an interim agreement be linked specifically and in detail to a final settlement. He argued that there could be no first stage until a final settlement had been worked out and a precise timetable had been established. The final settlement in the Soviet view should occur no later than a year after the interim agreement, though the length of the interval was negotiable. (Gromyko did not explain what value an interim agreement had in these circumstances.) He maintained that a final settlement had to involve total Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories of all Arab states. In other words, the Soviet Union was still backing the maximum Arab position, oblivious to the fact that in such circumstances Israel had no motive for an interim agreement and we had no incentive to proceed jointly with Moscow. There was no sign of the Soviet Union’s willingness to press its clients toward flexibility. However, Gromyko had put forward to Nixon in the hideaway office a proposal that on the surface was a tantalizing modification of the standard Soviet position. In the event of a comprehensive settlement, Gromyko said, the Soviets would be prepared to withdraw their forces from the Middle East, join in an arms embargo in the area, and participate in guarantees of a settlement. But as usual there was less to these proposals than met the eye. We were still being asked to force Israel to accept borders it considered incompatible with its security. The promised withdrawal of Soviet forces would come at the end of the entire process; in other words, we would have to execute our entire contribution to this arrangement before the Soviets had to do anything. And even then the Soviets made their withdrawal from Egypt conditional on the withdrawal of American advisers from Iran. All this at a time when Sadat was threatening to settle the issue by war in 1971 or 1972. (This was one of the reasons why we had reacted so strongly to the Indian assault on Pakistan; we wanted to make sure that the Soviet Union understood that a Soviet-sponsored attack in the Middle East would result in an even sharper response.)
But Gromyko had at least added enough new ingredients to fuel “exploratory” discussions between Dobrynin and me. This in turn would give the Soviets an incentive to keep the Middle East calm over the next year—a strategy that would only magnify Egyptian restlessness with Soviet policy.
With the annual gathering in New York of foreign leaders for the General Assembly, State sprang into action again to try to bridge the gap between Egypt and Israel. Rogers, in a UN speech in early October, unveiled American ideas on an interim Suez Canal agreement. This was coupled with the proposal of “proximity talks,” a procedure by which an American diplomat would shuttle between the two delegations housed in nearby hotel rooms in New York. Needless to say, neither Egypt nor Israel expected any good to come out of this since the two sides’ positions remained irreconcilable; neither side was likely to be maneuvered into a concession by a hyperactive negotiation. The Israelis especially were concerned that they would again be pressed into a futile diplomatic effort without adequate American assurances on arms supply or final destination; their fears were not eased when Sadat visited Moscow in October and returned with a communiqué that pledged new Soviet efforts to “strengthen” Egypt’s military might. (Even Rogers was moved to “deplore” that pledge publicly.)
By the end of 1971, the divisions within our government, the State Department’s single-minded pursuit of unattainable goals—and the Soviet Union’s lack of imagination—had produced the stalemate for which I had striven by design.
Then, in December 1971, Nixon took a step that began to establish my operational control of Middle East diplomacy. Mrs. Meir visited Nixon on December 2 and the two leaders reached a crucial understanding on both strategy and tactics: The quest for a comprehensive settlement would be abandoned for the time being. (Even the State Department had concluded that the road had come to a dead end.) Instead, the effort would be continued to reach an interim agreement with Egypt. Sisco would conduct the “proximity talks” between Egypt and Israel in frontchannels. But the real negotiations would be carried out between Israeli Ambassador Rabin and me, and also between Dobrynin and me. If progress were made in these backchannels, we could feed the results into the “proximity” forum. In other words, we had finally established in the Middle East the same dual-track approach that characterized our other negotiations. Only the Egyptians were as yet missing; I had every confidence that sooner or later they would join.
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Backchannel Explorations
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ven with the new negotiating channels, I saw no need for haste. First, in early 1972, Sisco and Rabin had to settle the annual question of military aid for Israel in order to avoid the periodic brawls that had resulted from trying, futilely, to keep Israel on a short leash. We had always wound up granting Israel’s requests, but only after political disputes at home that did not advance negotiations, yet made the Administration appear impotent. After this was finally settled, Israel, in early February, agreed to State’s “proximity talks”—only to have the idea rejected by Egypt. In the meantime, I sought to explore what the Soviets really had in mind. Were the overtures for an interim agreement a device to change the existing diplomatic pattern or to demonstrate our alleged pro-Israeli bias to their clients? Above all, I calculated that the longer the process went on, the more likely Sadat would seek to deal with us directly. The Soviets as intermediaries were definitely our second choice.
The answer was soon forthcoming. I began my discussions with Dobrynin in the middle of January 1972 and quickly confirmed that Gromyko’s flexibility had been more apparent than real. The Soviets were still as muscle-bound as they had been all through Nixon’s Administration. Inflexibly advocating the maximum Arab program, unwilling to run any risks, they retreated to standard positions even when discussing an interim agreement along the Suez Canal. Dobrynin, like Gromyko, was willing enough to explore a disengagement, provided it was integrally linked to an overall settlement. I summed up Moscow’s dilemma again in a memorandum to the President:
Their client cannot win a war with the Israelis. Therefore a continuation of the present simmering crisis can only lead to one of two situations: either a conviction on the part of the Arabs that their alliance with the Soviet Union is inadequate to produce a settlement, or a war by the Egyptians which would face the Soviets with a decision on military support and a risk out of all proportion to anything that could be achieved.
I suggested a strategy to break the logjam. The most significant element—which later reappeared in some early proposals of the Carter Administration—was an attempt to bridge the gulf between Israel’s insistence on border changes and the Arab demand for the 1967 frontiers. The notion was to separate the issue of security from that of sovereignty: Egypt would regain sovereignty over the entire Sinai, but Israel would be permitted to maintain certain defense posts in a defined belt on Egyptian soil. I pursued this in the private channel with the Israelis. Rabin and Dayan accepted the approach and by early in 1972 certain principles had been established: Israel said it would agree to withdraw to the Western side of the Sinai passes in return for an agreed cease-fire to last until early 1974; Egypt could cross the Suez Canal with police but no military forces; the linkage to a final settlement would be kept vague; Israel would not interfere with the reopening of the Suez Canal. (Many of these provisions found their way into the first disengagement agreement finally negotiated in January 1974.)
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, was still stuck. Dobrynin indicated in February 1972 that Moscow might be willing to discuss the concept of separating security from sovereignty, but, like Gromyko four months earlier, Moscow retreated as soon as it understood that we might be ready to explore the subject seriously. I now think that it had no understanding of any kind with Cairo that gave it flexibility. Dobrynin never came back to the subject.
During March, Dobrynin was pressing me to formulate a more comprehensive peace program of our own; it would be easier for Moscow, he said, to react to our proposals than to deviate from the Arab position on its own initiative. This was undoubtedly true. At the same time, we already knew what the Arab reaction would be to any proposals endorsed by Israel; they had rejected them often enough publicly. If we put forward a position different from Israel’s in a so-called private channel through Moscow, Moscow would use it to demonstrate what could be achieved with its assistance and we would be caught once again in crossfire between the two parties. But if we put forward through Moscow a proposal identical with Israel’s, Moscow would use it to show the futility of dealing with us.
My strategy had not changed. Until some Arab state showed a willingness to separate from the Soviets, or the Soviets were prepared to dissociate from the maximum Arab program, we had no reason to modify our policy. The Soviets never managed to square this circle. In the meantime, they increased our disquiet by signing, on April 9, 1972, the Friendship Treaty with Iraq, which was soon followed by a substantial flow of modern military equipment. While negotiating on the basis of maximum terms, the Soviets were also creating the conditions for maximum military pressure.
After the start of Hanoi’s Easter offensive on March 30, I interrupted the private Middle East talks with Dobrynin as a sign of displeasure with the Soviet arms shipments that had made the North Vietnamese offensive possible. Exchanges on the Mideast were not resumed until my visit to Moscow, April 20-24, to prepare for the summit. On that occasion Gromyko presented a document for a comprehensive settlement that implied the most rigid interpretation of the concessions he had made during the previous fall. He argued that a separate Egyptian-Israeli negotiation was admissible but only if accompanied by a settlement of the “global” issues. And again, whatever the Soviets promised would not be carried out until every provision of an overall agreement—which Israel would never sign without the most massive American pressure—had been implemented. Gromyko continued to drain the previously offered withdrawal of Soviet military personnel of much of its significance. First, it would not be carried out until a comprehensive settlement had been achieved (in other words, after a process that in our estimate was certain to be so prolonged as to make the agreement nearly meaningless); even then, Soviet troops would stay in Arab countries in proportion to American personnel in Iran. Depending on how that was calculated, there might be no withdrawals at all.
Gromyko then helpfully offered a way around our domestic obstacles. He suggested that we might negotiate an agreement on disengagement along the Suez Canal publicly as long as he and I simultaneously reached a secret understanding on the terms of a comprehensive settlement, which would be surfaced and implemented immediately after our 1972 Presidential election. Even with legendary self-confidence and devotion to secrecy, I did not believe that this could possibly work. The suggestion was refused.
The bane of Soviet diplomacy is its persistent quest for maximum advantage. Sometimes the constant pressure erodes resistance; but often it backfires by removing any incentive for a serious dialogue. In the midst of a Vietnam offensive fueled by Soviet arms, buffeted by already massive divisions at home, and facing an election, no President could be tempted by a proposition that imposed on us all the burdens of forcing a settlement on an ally in return for no discernible benefit. And it was based on a wrong estimate of our strategy and our possibilities. The Soviet leaders acted as if their presence in the Arab world were permanent, to be manipulated at will by the Kremlin. Earlier, on March 17, I had pointed out to Dobrynin that their position was not as brilliant as he was wont to picture it; the Kremlin’s current policy guaranteed its clients only stalemate, or, in fact, defeat in a war. Dobrynin had replied that Moscow also had the option to increase its military presence in Egypt dramatically. I was skeptical: first, because I was convinced that Moscow would stop well short of committing its own forces in what could easily escalate into a direct confrontation with the United States; second, and principally, because I began to sense that our strategy was beginning to work, at least with respect to Egypt.
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Egypt Opens a Secret Channel to the United States
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adat had visited Moscow in February 1972. Things were not going smoothly between Egypt and the Soviet Union. On April 8, I felt confident enough to advise Nixon that the Soviet-Egyptian relationship was clearly more reserved than in Nasser’s time. We understood that Sadat had asked for advanced weapons and Soviet diplomatic and military support on a scale reminiscent of what was extended to India during its conflict with Pakistan, including help to enable Egypt to build its own arms; he had been given assurances of weapons but no blank check of diplomatic or military support. Egypt was pressuring Moscow, but Moscow had clearly calculated—as we had hoped—that since we had gone to the brink over Pakistan, a challenge to the survival of Israel would create uncontrollable risks. And the Kremlin did not stand to gain from building up in Egypt an arms industry that would drastically reduce Cairo’s dependence on Soviet supplies. I told Nixon my impression was that the Soviets were holding Sadat at arm’s length, fearful of the risks of all-out support, and awaiting my talks with Dobrynin. As usual, they wanted everything: Egyptian subservience, minimum risk, and the complete Arab program. But diplomacy rarely works that way: Those who grab for everything, who forget that politics is the art of the possible, in the end may lose all.
A more tangible reason for my confidence was that in the first week of April 1972 Egypt had opened a secret channel to the White House.
On April 5, a high Egyptian officer told an American official in Cairo that Egypt was dissatisfied with existing diplomatic channels to the United States. In his government’s view it was essential we communicate at the Presidential level, bypassing both foreign ministries. The Egyptians suggested that either Helms or I visit Cairo; alternatively, Hafiz Ismail, my opposite number as national security adviser to President Sadat, might come to Washington. I cannot say that I was shocked or offended by the proposition that both sides bypass the Foreign Ministers. Indeed, I considered it the precondition of success. When the report of the new Egyptian approach reached me on April 8, I immediately wrote on it a note to Al Haig, my deputy: “Al: How about Ismail to Washington?”
Yet, preoccupied with the Vietnam offensive and then my forthcoming trip to Moscow, we did not respond immediately. We wanted to see what Moscow would have to offer in the Channel. We also heard that Sadat would visit Moscow again at the end of April and we did not propose to give the Egyptian party a response which might leak to the Soviets. Above all, a measured pace fitted in with our strategy of creating in Egypt the maximum restlessness with the status quo. So it was not until April 29, while Sadat was in Moscow, that we finally sent a reply to await him on his return. We said that we were indeed interested in a secret high-level meeting; a representative of President Sadat would be welcome in the United States for that purpose. But no meeting could take place until after the Moscow summit. We calculated that the prospect of a meeting after the summit would serve as a greater incentive for restraint than an earlier talk which in the nature of first contacts was bound to be inconclusive. Two weeks later the Egyptians replied that our proposal was being studied, and that we would receive a formal reply in June after the summit. This fitted in nicely with our strategy.
In the meantime, there were mounting indications that tensions between Egypt and the Soviet Union were growing. Sadat’s April visit to Moscow apparently heightened his worry that the Soviet Union might settle for the status quo in the Middle East. Even an airlift of advanced Soviet equipment in April and May did not reduce his underlying uneasiness. On May 22 I sent Nixon my assessment that the relationship between Sadat and the Soviets was now one of a worried client to his patron rather than that of equal partners with confidence in each other.
Later on, I came to know Sadat as one of the few truly outstanding leaders I have met. He possessed that combination of insight and courage which marks a great statesman. He had the boldness to go to a war no one thought he could sustain; the moderation to move to peace immediately afterward; and the wisdom to reverse attitudes hardened by decades. But in 1972 none of this was apparent. Sadat had made many threats that he had not carried out. In the Jarring negotiations he had been more flexible than his predecessor, but he had apparently not yet renounced Nasser’s delusion that he could insist on unfulfillable demands because of the backing of Soviet arms. We had no regular dialogue with him. None of our emissaries had ever managed to penetrate the charming manner to discover what Sadat really thought. Until the secret channel opened in April 1972, most of our serious dealings had been through Moscow. My reaction to this overture, therefore, was largely tactical: to continue to bring home to Sadat the futility of his course while opening a dialogue by which we hoped to change it.
This was also the background to our Moscow summit discussions on the Middle East. Because of Vietnam and SALT preoccupations, these came only at the end of the summit, when, as we saw in Chapter XXVIII, in a long-night session, Gromyko and I worked out some “general working principles” for an overall settlement; their vagueness was bound to raise additional questions in Sadat’s mind.[215] The principles were weaker than Resolution 242; they stated that border rectifications were possible (omitting the modifier “minor,” which had become sacramental in official documents); the formulations were ambiguous about the extent of intended Israeli withdrawals. I have never understood why Gromyko accepted them, unless it was exhaustion—after all, he attended even more meetings than I did in Moscow and worked even longer hours. In all events, the principles quickly found their way into the overcrowded limbo of aborted Middle East schemes—as I had intended.
Gromyko and I also agreed on the text of a final communiqué that did no more than urge a peaceful settlement and endorse the Jarring mission; it offered no concrete guidelines for it or any other negotiations. This bland communiqué was to have historic consequences. It was a “violent shock” to Egypt, Sadat records in his memoirs.[216] It proved to be a decisive blow to his relations with the Soviet Union.
All this time, the Egyptians were being treated to the unnerving experience of our three-tiered diplomacy. They were exchanging messages with us through the secret channel; they were receiving the Soviet version of our summit conversations and my talks with Dobrynin; [The Soviets did not brief Sadat on the summit conversations until five weeks afterward, which compounded his disillusionment with Soviet policy.[217]] and they were exposed to the regular State Department overtures to win Egypt’s agreement to enter the proximity talks. It must have been a bewildering set of procedures—though it left Cairo in a better position to know what messages were being passed than either the White House or State. For key State cables were not only not shown to the White House for clearance; so far as I can tell now, records of State talks with key Arabs were not even sent to the White House after the event. We therefore often learned what had been transmitted in State channels only after it had been played back in a reporting telegram from some Arab capital briefed by Cairo. Thus, for example, we did not learn of a secret overture to Cairo for proximity talks until well after the fact, nor did we know of a conversation between Sisco and Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia in June—in which Sisco sought to engage Sultan’s help in persuading Egypt to agree to such talks—until it was mentioned in a report from Riyadh on July 18. Equally, State did not know of our secret channel to Cairo. (I doubt that many textbooks on political science will commend these procedures.)
Strangely enough, except for the nervous strain on the participants, our procedures did no damage. Egypt had, after all, initiated the secret White House contact because it had lost confidence in normal diplomatic procedures. And in June, Cairo turned down the State proposal for proximity talks—without, however, significantly reducing State’s legendary dedication to the unattainable.
Sadat was now playing for higher stakes. On July 13, we received an ambiguous message through the secret channel. It reiterated the willingness to send a senior representative to Washington, provided we had something new to propose. In the absence of any different initiative Cairo saw no point in a meeting. The corollary was, of course, that we could produce a high-level Egyptian representative by the simple device of indicating that we were willing to explore new approaches.
Before we could fully assess the implications of this Delphic missive came the July 18, 1972, bombshell of Sadat’s announcement that he had terminated the mission of the more than 15,000 Soviet military advisers and experts in Egypt. They were to be withdrawn within a week; military installations and equipment set up in Egypt since 1967 were to become Egyptian property.
The decision came as a complete surprise to Washington. (That day I was on my way to Paris for a secret meeting with the North Vietnamese.) To be sure, my strategy had sought to induce Cairo to lessen its reliance on the Soviet Union. I had expected that at some point down the road, Sadat would be prepared to offer to trade Soviet withdrawal for progress with us. But, still handicapped by my underestimation of the Egyptian President, I never guessed that he would settle the issue with one grand gesture, and unilaterally. My first reaction on hearing the news was that he had acted impetuously and forfeited an important negotiating asset, for no return. Two days later I prepared a longer and more reflective analysis:
It has been apparent in the last two months that the Egyptians have resigned themselves to the fact that there will be little diplomatic movement on the Arab-Israeli problem this year because of the US elections… Despite this apparently rational calculation, Sadat has faced the dilemma of how to avoid allowing inaction to produce a permanent freeze of the situation… Frustration over the lack of movement on the Arab-Israeli issue has been high in Cairo.
The US-USSR Summit confirmed the sense that nothing was going to happen this year and brought to a head criticism of the Soviet role that had been going on in Cairo even before the summit. Heikal, the influential editor of Al Ahram who favored talks with the US last summer on an interim settlement, began a series of public debates about the Soviet-Egyptian relationship in April…
By then I had come to the conclusion that Sadat’s decision might not be nearly so precipitate as I had thought at first. I noted that Sadat explicitly rejected any restrictions on the use of arms supplied by the Soviets. I speculated that this statement “may well refer to the possible fact that the presence of Soviet advisers with Egyptian units could serve as a Soviet brake on Egyptian offensive movements.” My overall assessment summed up four possible motives on the part of Sadat, one of which was to improve his military options for the following year (that is to say, 1973):
(a) the necessity to respond politically to internal frustrations; (b) the necessity to keep, and show himself keeping, the Middle East from becoming completely frozen in this year of indecision; (c) the desirability of seeking greater Soviet support for offensive action next year; (d) the opportunity in taking these steps to offer an enticement to the US by showing that he could cut back on the Soviet relationship.
Sadat made two more speeches on July 24 and 27. Though he alleged that he had been lied to in 1971 by the United States, he reserved his heaviest fire for the Soviet Union. Sadat pointed out that he had warned Moscow before the US-Soviet summit that Cairo could not accept a continuing state of “no war-no peace”; the summit demonstrated that Soviet support for Egypt fell far short of American support for Israel. Sadat’s second speech was an indirect appeal to the Soviets to learn from the shock and to enable Cairo to develop an adequate military option for use in the future. Egypt, proclaimed Sadat, did not want Soviet soldiers fighting its battles. Egypt had no interest in causing a confrontation between the superpowers. But Moscow had to understand that for Egypt, the Middle East problem was its top priority, wherever it might rank on the Soviet agenda:
Our friend must know and appreciate this. To him, the problem might be number four or five… Hence, the pause with the friend so that he will really appreciate the battle. Perhaps when Soviet/Egyptian cooperation runs in this field the way it does in the technological field, everything will be wonderful.
Much has been written and said about the failure of the Soviet Union to live up to the principles of restraint to which it pledged itself at the Moscow summit. Most of the criticism is valid. But the record would be neither complete nor fair without pointing out that the Soviet Union paid heavily in Egypt and throughout the Middle East for its essentially putting the Mideast on ice at the summit. Certainly it did not exercise this restraint out of altruism. Doubtless Israel’s strength was the principal deterrent. The Kremlin also assessed that a war risked a direct confrontation with the United States. And the Soviet leaders, needing American grain and our support for ratification of the German treaties, could not afford generating a crisis in so sensitive an area. But it is precisely in this way that a strategy of detente, posing both risks and incentives to encourage Soviet restraint, is supposed to work. In 1972, a year when the United States was heavily engaged in Vietnam, the Soviet Union held back from endorsing its clients’ positions in the Middle East and this decision cost Moscow dearly. Our demonstrations of firmness on India-Pakistan and on Vietnam (not to mention the conflicts in the autumn of 1970) must have convinced the Kremlin that one more crisis would overload the circuit. Coupled with this firmness, our conciliatory posture in Moscow and the prospect of further moves on trade helped produce Soviet restraint.
Whatever the reasons for the Soviets’ embarrassment, we were intent on making use of the opportunity. My first need was to calm down Dobrynin. On July 20, I told him truthfully, if a bit coyly, that we did not know what was going on in Egypt; we had had no advance warning. We were prepared to continue our exploration of the “principles” discussed in Moscow; Dobrynin must have recognized this as essentially a placebo. That afternoon he brought me a letter to Nixon from Brezhnev. With amazing chutzpah, Brezhnev’s letter argued that the Soviet departure from Egypt was in part an implementation of the troop withdrawal proposal presented by Gromyko to Nixon in September 1971; a down payment, as it were, on the offer to withdraw Soviet forces! Thus, it was argued, the United States was now under an obligation to fulfill its part of the bargain, namely to influence Israel toward a settlement “whose centerpiece should be the liberation of all Arab territories occupied by it in 1967.” I saw no point in debating this mind-boggling demand; I repeated my offer to explore the Moscow principles. It was the best way to gain time to find out what Cairo was thinking.
We did not have long to wait. The same day I received a report that the chief of Egyptian Intelligence had the day before approached us in the secret channel. He stressed that we should take seriously Cairo’s invitation to come up with new ideas as a prelude to a secret high-level meeting. The Egyptians, we were told, were especially interested in an interim agreement along the Suez Canal.
I still did not want to get involved in offering “new” ideas that might only disappoint Sadat and abort the contact at the beginning. I preferred a general exploration to enable us to determine what was feasible before committing ourselves to a course of action. On July 29, therefore, I returned a reply to Cairo reaffirming our willingness to conduct confidential talks, which I described as “potentially extremely important”:
With respect to the Egyptian statement that these talks can proceed only on the basis of new U.S. proposals, the U.S. view is as follows: In all the previous successful negotiations conducted at the White House level, the parties have first sought and achieved in preliminary discussion an understanding on the principles and general direction of an agreement before engaging in concrete negotiation. New proposals that led only to a new stalemate would serve neither side’s purpose. Therefore, the U.S. side proposes that initial contacts concentrate on a detailed discussion of what is realistically achievable. This is the essence of the matter, and the only justification for the direct involvement of the President. If detailed agreement can be reached on this, then detailed proposals can be devised.
Nothing significant was heard from Sadat during August. Two new prospective intermediaries made their appearance: an Egyptian who claimed to be a friend of Sadat, and a European businessman asserting high-level Egyptian contacts. While in the early phases of approaching another government I was generally prepared to explore many different avenues, I never undermined the integrity of a valid channel once it was established. The two self-appointed intermediaries were therefore gently turned aside. That Egypt had not yet settled its course became apparent on August 22 when we were told in the secret channel that Sadat was still considering his response, but it would come soon; then we were told that a few more days would be needed. On September 4 we were advised that Sadat accepted the talks in principle but would ask for some “clarifications” in a few days.
Finally, on September 7, we received a long and extremely subtle message from Cairo. It informed us that the expulsion of Soviet advisers was a purely national decision, not taken “to please or displease anyone”; in other words, Egypt asked for no special consideration because of it. The message complained of the disproportionate influence that Israel appeared to have on American policy; it recited Egypt’s disappointment with the diplomatic exchanges of the previous years, and Egypt’s willingness to reopen the Suez Canal. None of this, it was said, was put forward as a precondition for talks.
It was all, as I would come to realize, vintage Sadat. His negotiating tactic was never to haggle over detail but to create an atmosphere that made disagreement psychologically difficult. He (like Chou En-lai) laid stress on a philosophical understanding, recognizing that the implementation of agreements between sovereign states cannot be enforced; it requires a willingness on both sides. Agreement on concepts is sometimes more important than on details. I cannot say that I fully understood Sadat’s insight then. Great men are so rare that they take some getting used to.
The next day I replied, accepting the principle of a secret meeting with Hafiz Ismail and promising a fuller reply on my return from another visit to Moscow. My lengthier reply of September 18 once again avoided the specific issues raised by Egypt, because I wanted to reserve these for a face-to-face meeting. I put forward some housekeeping details, such as a possible venue for secret talks, and concluded with a general statement of our intent:
The US wishes to reassure the Government of Egypt of its firm determination to seek the termination of the cycle of violence in the Middle East and to stress that it places the greatest importance on the forthcoming discussions between representatives of the two governments to achieve this purpose.
By then, the messages were taking on a more than procedural content. For example, Egypt used the private channel to voice its unhappiness about the tone of our public condemnation of the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games; it expressed fear that Israeli retaliation against Lebanon might cause some other Arab countries to invite Soviet military help—an interesting indication that Sadat was in fact opposed to Soviet military action in the Middle East. On September 30, we received another Egyptian message complaining that our call for realism was too reminiscent of Israel’s position. All Egypt wanted, we were told, was some assurance that we would meet with “open hearts.” I knew too little about Egyptian psychology then to respond with comparable humanity; somewhat less poetically, I stated that we were prepared to enter the talks “with an open mind to determine what useful role [we] can play in promoting a just settlement.”
These secret talks are designed to develop a course of action that can lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolution 242. The big issue is to define practical measures to accomplish this. It serves nobody’s interest to make empty promises. This is the meaning of the term realistic.
The two sides, meeting in a spirit of goodwill, should explore all possibilities with a view to beginning a continued exchange of serious and open views.
While these exchanges were taking place, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko paid his annual visit to the United Nations General Assembly. In meetings with both the President and me he repeated the standard Soviet line as if absolutely nothing had changed. He was loath to abandon sacramental positions, even though he had no idea how to implement them. He deprecated an interim settlement, claiming that Egypt would reject it. (We knew better.) And he ritualistically pressed for an overall arrangement in which Israel would get only a declaration of nonbelligerency in return for the 1967 frontiers. I was too immersed in Vietnam and Nixon in the campaign to do any serious negotiating. Nixon told Gromyko simply that he would give personal attention to the Middle East after Vietnam was settled. I went back to my proposal of taking Moscow’s “general working principles”—which Gromyko was trying to bury—and applying them to each of Israel’s neighbors (Egypt, Jordan, Syria). I knew that the procedure would certainly not work quickly; it would give us further time to explore the Egyptian channel. The US-Soviet dialogue on the Middle East remained in abeyance, which was where we wanted it.
All that remained was to set a date for my secret talk with Sadat’s representative. Sadat showed great understanding when I was too heavily engaged in the chaotic final phase of the Vietnam negotiation to accept the Egyptians’ proposed dates of October 16 or 23. My meeting with Hafiz Ismail, Sadat’s national security adviser, did not take place until February 1973. The seminal opportunity to bring about a reversal of alliances in the Arab world would have to wait until we had finally put the war in Vietnam behind us.
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