Epicenter 2.0

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  I asked Weinberger specifically if he and President Reagan had shared Prime Minister Begin’s concerns that the Soviets might try to overrun Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Persian Gulf states.

  He confirmed that they had. “The Soviets were trying to increase their influence in the whole Mideast. They were [targeting] the oil fields. . . . We were taking actions and preparing ourselves to prevent that domination from succeeding.”

  Did he believe the discovery of the Soviet arms justified the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and attempts to destroy the PLO? Weinberger said Israel’s move was at first “disturbing” because it was a “unilateral action” and threatened to upset the fragile balance of power in the Middle East, and this was “not good.”

  That said, however, he suggested that on balance the Israelis were probably right to go in, especially given what they found and the Soviet invasion they may have stopped. It was a total surprise. It unleashed international condemnation of Israel, including pointed criticism from the Reagan administration itself. But the result was that Israel effectively staved off far more cataclysmic evils that were coming from the Russians.

  Then Weinberger warned that the discovery of the secret Soviet arms cache was disturbing evidence “that military actions are being planned” or “made increasingly possible” in the Middle East that can elude the detection of even the world’s best intelligence services.

  1973: THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR

  On October 6, 1973, combined Arab forces from Egypt, Syria, and numerous other Arab and Islamic countries attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

  Tensions had been building for months. Rumors of war were in the air. But both Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials and political leaders were caught almost completely off guard, not believing the war would really come. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir was so sure fighting would not break out that she had refused to order a preemptive strike or even to mobilize the Israeli reserves, not wanting to provoke hostilities if they could be avoided. That hesitation nearly led to the annihilation of the Jewish state.

  Over the course of the first week of the war, the Arab coalition made stunning gains. In the north, 1,000 Syrian tanks and 600 pieces of Syrian artillery stormed up the Golan Heights and advanced toward the vulnerable Israeli farmlands of the Galilee region. To the south, some 400 Egyptian tanks crossed the Suez Canal, wiped out Israel’s forward defenses, and began working their way across the Sinai Desert. Meanwhile, Arab air forces shot down three dozen Israeli fighter planes in just the first few days.

  It was clear to the general public at the time that the Soviet Union was providing the weaponry, ammunition, intelligence, and military training to help the Arab and Islamic coalition destroy Israel, a key ally of the United States. What was not known publicly was the extent to which the Soviets were orchestrating the war from behind the scenes and preparing to enter it directly.

  By the second week of the war, the momentum had begun to shift. The Israelis had retaken the Golan Heights and were bombing Damascus. They had also retaken most of the Sinai Peninsula, crossed the Suez Canal, and had ground forces within a hundred kilometers of Cairo. By the third week, Moscow was under tremendous pressure from the entire Arab world not to let the Israelis humiliate Syrian president Hafez al-Assad or Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, so Moscow began to move. The Soviets began a massive airlift of arms and ammunition to their allies. The U.S., in turn, began a massive, round-the-clock airlift of arms and supplies to Israel.

  On October 24 at around 10:00 p.m. eastern time, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, telephoned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and dictated the text of a top secret message from Russian general secretary Leonid Brezhnev to President Richard Nixon. In the message, Brezhnev accused Israel of refusing to abide by a ceasefire called by the UN Security Council and then issued a chilling threat: “I will say it straight: that if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally. We cannot allow arbitrariness on the part of Israel.”221

  It was cloaked in the language of diplomats, but there it was: if the Nixon administration did not stop the Israelis from advancing and agree to send a joint Soviet-American ground force to the region to act as peacekeepers, the Soviets would send ground forces in “unilaterally.”

  Top U.S. officials in the White House and National Security Council were stunned as Brezhnev threatened to turn an already dangerous regional confrontation into an overt global showdown between East and West. What’s more, they knew they would have no choice but to match any move by the Soviets to escalate the situation. Washington had to defend Israel or send a devastating message to her allies that the U.S. could not be counted on in a direct showdown with Russia.

  And then the Soviets began to escalate. At least seven Soviet combat-ready airborne divisions in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe were put on alert and mobilized for immediate departure for the Middle East. Soviet transport planes were positioned and prepped to insert these forces into the fight with Israel. Soviet warships moved into the Mediterranean.

  The U.S., in turn, ordered its own military forces on alert. The Pentagon ordered U.S. nuclear forces to DEFCON 3, the highest state of peacetime readiness. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also ordered the 82nd Airborne Division to prepare to head to the Middle East. Additional U.S. naval forces—including another aircraft carrier—moved into the Mediterranean, all out of a real and rising concern that the Soviets were about to make an unprecedented military move against Israel.222

  Kissinger drafted for President Nixon (who was deeply embroiled in the Watergate scandal at the time) a reply that was sent to General Secretary Brezhnev on October 25. In the letter Nixon bluntly said to the Soviet leader that the U.S. had “no information which would indicate that the ceasefire is now being violated on any significant scale.” He agreed to “take every effective step to guarantee the implementation of the ceasefire” and said the U.S. was working closely with Israel to bring about a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

  But he also warned that “in these circumstances, we must view your suggestion of unilateral action as a matter of the gravest concern involving incalculable consequences. . . . [W]e could in no event accept unilateral [Soviet] action. This would be in violation of our understandings, of the agreed Principles we signed in Moscow in 1972, and of Article II of the Agreement on Prevention of Nuclear War. . . . Such action would produce incalculable consequences which would be in the interest of neither of our countries and which would end all we have striven so hard to achieve.”223

  Nixon’s firm letter, combined with the heightened American military posture, soon made it clear to Moscow that any move they made against Israel would be met with the full force of the United States. Within days, the Soviets backed off. Tensions began to defuse, and a full cease-fire was eventually achieved. Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had the U.S. and Soviet Union come so close to the brink of nuclear war, and this time the motivating factor was a Russian leader’s threat to attack Israel directly.

  Yet for all that, Kissinger would remark to his top aides that the Soviet military “did not maneuver as provocatively as they did in 1967.”224

  1967: THE KREMLIN PREPARES FOR WAR

  War clouds had been building for months. The Israelis found themselves increasingly surrounded by Soviet-backed forces of the Arab and Islamic world, all of whose leaders were vowing to “throw the Jews into the sea,” and the Israelis were considering striking first. The element of surprise might be their only hope of survival, they figured. But President Lyndon Johnson had warned Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol in no uncertain terms that such a move would be a serious mistake.

  As historian Michael B. Oren noted in his highly praised book Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Johnson sent a secret message to
Eskhol, saying, “It is essential that Israel not take any preemptive military action and thereby make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities. Preemptive action by Israel would make it impossible for the friends of Israel to stand at your side.” Oren noted that Johnson specifically “warned of the possibility of direct Soviet intervention.”225

  Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko, the Soviet deputy defense minister, had told his Egyptian counterparts in Cairo that the Kremlin had dispatched “destroyers and submarines to the waters near Egypt, some armed with missiles and secret weapons” to help wipe out the Zionists.226 One of Israel’s top experts on Soviet foreign policy told Israeli Defense Forces intelligence that “the USSR would muster all its influence and power to maintain its Middle East position.” When asked if the Soviets would intervene directly, the expert replied, “Of course.”227 Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin, meanwhile, sent a cable to Prime Minister Eshkol, warning, “If the Israeli Government insists on taking upon itself the responsibility for the outbreak of armed confrontation then it will pay the full price of such an action.”228

  But at 8:44 a.m. on the morning of June 5, 1967, Eshkol sent an urgent message back to President Johnson informing him that it was too late. War had begun.

  Explaining his rationale for the preemptive strike Israel had just launched, Eshkol wrote:

  After weeks in which our peril has grown day by day, we are now engaged in repelling the aggression which [Egyptian president] Nasser has been building up against us. Israel’s existence and integrity have been endangered. The provocative [Arab] troop concentrations in Sinai, now amounting to five infantry and two armored divisions; the placing of more than 900 tanks against our southern frontier; . . . the illegal blockade of the Straits of Tiran; . . . the imminent introduction of MiG-21 aircraft under Iraqi command [into the theater]; Nasser’s announcement of “total war against Israel” and of his basic aim to annihilate Israel. . . . All of this amounts to an extraordinary catalogue of aggression, abhorred and condemned by world opinion and in your great country and amongst all peace-loving nations.229

  Eshkol also noted that three Israeli towns had been bombed that morning by Arab forces, citing these as the last straws that led to war. He thanked Johnson for America’s support and expressed hope that “our small nation can count on the fealty and resolution of its greatest friend.” But he also had a request: that the U.S. “prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting and enlarging the conflict” at this, Israel’s greatest “hour of danger.”

  “Eshkol knew and feared the Russians,” noted Michael Oren. “War with Syria [and Egypt] was risky enough; with the USSR, it would be suicidal.” But Eshkol calculated that without U.S. support, the Soviets would find themselves compelled to get involved directly. Moscow had “invested massively in the Middle East, about $2 billion in military aid alone—1,700 tanks, 2,400 artillery pieces, 500 jets, and 1,400 advisers—since 1956, some 43 percent of it to Egypt.”230

  Sure enough, as the Israelis demolished the forces of the Arab coalition over the next three days and captured the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, reunified the holy city of Jerusalem, and began an offensive against Damascus, Moscow saw itself staring into the face of a geopolitical disaster. Those were, after all, Soviet-trained soldiers being defeated. Those were Soviet-made arms being seized or destroyed. Those were billions of dollars in Soviet funding to their Arab client states being poured down the drain. And—it would later be learned by U.S. and Israeli intelligence—the Egyptian war plan itself (code-named Operation Conqueror) had actually been written in 1966 by the Soviets.231 As a result, the Soviets feared their prestige was quickly unraveling.

  U.S. intelligence was already picking up signs of this fear in the Kremlin. In the “President’s Daily Brief” on June 9, for example, the CIA informed President Johnson that “the Soviets are finding it hard to conceal their shock over the rapid Egyptian military collapse. A Soviet official [identity still classified] could not understand ‘how our intelligence could have been so wrong.’ He asked despairingly, ‘How could we have gotten into such a mess?’”232

  So the Kremlin decided to dramatically up the ante.

  On June 10, at 8:48 a.m. Washington time, Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin used the “hotline” to call President Johnson in the White House Situation Room. His message was as blunt as it was unnerving: “A very crucial moment has now arrived which forces us, if [Israeli] military actions are not stopped in the next few hours, to adopt an independent decision. We are ready to do this. However, these actions may bring us into a clash which will lead to a grave catastrophe. . . . We propose that you demand from Israel that it unconditionally cease military action. . . . We purpose to warn Israel that if this is not fulfilled, necessary actions will be taken, including military.”233

  The Soviets quickly broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, and the Soviet-bloc governments of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria soon followed.234

  CIA Director Richard Helms would later recall that the conversations in the Situation Room for the next several hours were in “the lowest voices he had ever heard in a meeting of that kind” and that “the atmosphere was tense” as the president and his most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisors contemplated the possibility of a direct Soviet strike at Israel.235

  Johnson, a devoted friend of Israel and an ardent anti-Communist, was not prepared to kowtow to Moscow or let Israel be destroyed. He immediately ordered the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean to turn around—it was then heading west toward the Strait of Gibraltar—and steam toward Israel as a show of solidarity and to warn the Soviets not to get directly involved.236

  He did the right thing, for according to Isabella Ginor, a Russian-born correspondent for the BBC World Service and other international news services, “new evidence now reveals that the Soviets were indeed poised to attack Israel . . . and had been preparing for such a mission all along.”237

  On June 10, 2000—the thirty-third anniversary of Kosygin’s ominous hotline threat to Johnson—Ginor published an article in The Guardian (London) entitled “How the Six Day War Almost Led to Armageddon: New Evidence of 1967 Soviet Plan to Invade Israel Shows How Close the World Came to Nuclear Conflict.” In December of that year, she published a longer and more detailed article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled “The Russians Were Coming: The Soviet Military Threat in the 1967 Six-Day War.” In these and other articles, she quoted Soviet military officials who paint a fragmentary but still disturbing picture of the attack that was being prepared.

  Ginor noted that “in his recently published memoirs, Nikita S. Khruschev asserts that the USSR’s military command first encouraged high-ranking Egyptian and Syrian delegations, in a series of ‘hush-hush’ mutual visits, to go to war, then persuaded the Soviet political leadership to support these steps, in the full knowledge they were aimed at starting a war to destroy Israel.”238

  Soviet acting defense minister Andrei A. Grechko and KGB Chairman Yuri V. Andropov, meanwhile, “were pressing for the immediate dispatch of Soviet forces to the Middle East.” Retired Soviet air force lieutenant Yuri V. Nastenko confirmed in 1998 that bomber and fighter jets, such as the MiG-21s that were under his command, were put on full operational alert on the evening of June 5, 1967, and that he was convinced this was in preparation for “real combat.”239

  Yuri N. Khripunkov, a former Soviet naval officer who was serving on one of thirty Soviet warships that had been moved from the Black Sea southward to the Mediterranean in June 1967, told Ginor that he and his colleagues were preparing to unleash Soviet forces onto the Israeli mainland. His own platoon, he said, was “ordered to penetrate Haifa—Israel’s main commercial harbor and naval base.”240 Russian professor Alexsandr K. Kislov, who was stationed in the Middle East in 1967, told Ginor that the strike force the Soviets had prepared for insertion into Israel included “desant [landing] ships with well-prepared marines.”241

  So
me respected historians and diplomats have disputed the notion that the Soviets were planning to attack Israel in 1967.242 But while the evidence available from declassified documents and interviews with direct participants may not yet be conclusive, it is compelling. What’s more, Soviet premier Kosygin’s threat of direct military intervention into the 1967 war with Israel alone stands as chilling evidence of Moscow’s historic and recent animus toward the Jewish state—and as a warning of things to come.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: FUTURE HEADLINE

  NEW WAR ERUPTS IN MIDDLE EAST AS EARTHQUAKES, PANDEMICS HIT EUROPE, AFRICA, ASIA

  In a moment, we will walk through the intelligence Ezekiel provides us describing the magnitude of the coming War of Gog and Magog. We will also consider how such events will directly affect every person on the face of the earth. But first we must ask a more fundamental question: Why is the war coming at all?

  The simplest answer can be found in Genesis 12:1-3, where God promises to bless Abraham and the Jewish people, build Israel into a great and influential nation, and defend them against their enemies. “I will bless those who bless you,” God says, “and the one who curses you I will curse” (NASB).

  One cannot read the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament without realizing how much God loves the Jewish people and the nation of Israel and that he has a plan and purpose for them both. Yet throughout the ages, many world leaders have refused to humble themselves before the living God. They have also refused to view Israel through the third lens of Scripture. In turn, they have not only set their hearts against God, they have also set their hearts against his chosen people and the land he promised to them. As a direct result of this profoundly spiritual conflict, such leaders have chosen to curse the Jewish people. Some have even sought to enslave the children of Israel or to annihilate them altogether. It is a phenomenon that began with the pharaohs of Egypt, but clearly this pathology of evil has existed throughout history and continues right up to today.