Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  All three men saw themselves as living exemplars of prophetic tradition. The words of the prophets echoed in their minds. Begin devoutly believed that God had given the Promised Land to his forefathers, and that Israel was the last refuge of the Jewish people, who were constantly stalked by the specter of extinction. It was his historic burden to make them safe. Sadat represented himself as the savior of his own humiliated and downtrodden people. “God Almighty has made it my fate to assume the responsibility on behalf of the Egyptian People and to share in the fate-determining responsibility of the Arab Nation and the Palestinian People,” he had said in the Knesset. Carter was well acquainted with the gory history of the Old Testament; nonetheless, he said, “I felt that God wanted peace in the Holy Land, and I might be useful.” The faith of these men in their traditions empowered them to believe in the rightness of their cause, but at the same time, religious thinking posed the main barrier to peace. The presence of divine commandments that brooked no compromise still guided the thinking of men who lived partly in the modern secular world, filled with diverse perspectives and competing demands, and partly in the world of prophecy and revelation. The task of making peace in the Middle East would require reconciling these distant perspectives, something that much stronger and more popular figures were unable to do or unwilling to even attempt.

  In July 1978 the Carters went to Camp David for a quiet family weekend. The president’s efforts to bring the antagonists to the peace table had gone nowhere; in fact, events seemed to be drifting in the opposite direction, toward war and wider conflict. Jimmy spoke to Rosalynn about his frustration with the stalled peace process, and she suggested that he make one last effort. Perhaps he could bring them here, to Camp David. Carter immediately kindled to the idea. “It’s so beautiful here,” he agreed. “I don’t believe anyone could stay in this place, close to nature, peaceful and isolated from the world, and still carry a grudge.” He would come to appreciate the naïveté of that statement.

  Rosalynn pointed out that it would be impossible for the two men to retreat from their strident positions without a third party who was willing to take the blame. “Are you willing to be the scapegoat?” she asked.

  “What else is new?” Carter replied. He was already being pilloried and ridiculed in the press, but that was nothing compared to what would happen if the “most powerful man in the world” staged a peace summit and it turned into the fiasco everyone predicted.

  “You’ve never been afraid of failure before,” Rosalynn reminded him.

  A couple of weeks later, Carter sent his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, to Egypt and Israel with handwritten invitations to the two leaders to come to Camp David in early September.

  His horrified advisers tried to lower his expectations. His vice president, Walter Mondale, his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his defense secretary, Harold Brown, all warned him that the plan had little chance of success. The administration had already devoted an extraordinary amount of time to the Middle East with nothing to show for it, while many other important issues were allowed to slide off the table. The differences between the two parties were too wide to be resolved, the advisers argued. For Carter to invest any more of his political capital in a project that was so clearly headed to the morgue could sabotage his fragile administration. “If you fail, we’re done,” Mondale had warned him. “We will sap our stature as national leaders. We’ve got to find some less risky way of trying to find peace there.”

  There was little Carter could say to refute their doubts. Even on his vacation in Wyoming, he read their cautions in his briefing books. “Our main objective at Camp David is to break the present impasse at the highest political level so that ministerial-level negotiations can proceed toward detailed agreements,” Vance advised. “Our object is not to produce a detailed agreement.”

  It was too late now. Against the counsel of his closest aides and his own political interest, Carter had decided to risk everything. Camp David would not be about breaking a political impasse so that more talks could take place; it would be about creating a lasting peace agreement in the Middle East, with the signatures of all three leaders on the line. On a scratch pad, Carter listed all the reasons that the two countries had to make peace, and then confidently wrote, “First Egyptian-Jewish peace since the time of Joseph.” He then scratched out “Joseph” and wrote “Jeremiah”—the despairing prophet of the seventh century BCE, who foretold the destruction of both the Israelites and the Egyptians because of their faithlessness and stubbornness:

  We wait for peace to no avail;

  For a time of healing, but terror comes instead.

  1 Anwar Sadat dropped the final “y” of his family name after the 1952 revolution.

  2 Brisk was the name Jews gave to the town otherwise known as Brest-Litovsk, between Russia and Poland, each of which claimed it at various times. In the sixteenth century, it briefly became the capital of Lithuania. It is now Brest, Belarus.

  3 Begin was apparently referring to an incident in October 1966 in the Jerusalem suburb of Romema Elite, when two buildings were bombed by infiltrators associated with the Palestinian terror group el-Fatah. Four people were injured, none seriously. Begin’s son, Benny, and his family were living in one of the buildings, but they were not listed among the injured.

  4 The British census of Palestine in 1922 recorded 84,000 Jews and 670,000 Arabs, of whom 71,000 were Christian, most of the remainder being Muslim.

  Day One

  Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, and Anwar Sadat in front of the Aspen Lodge at Camp David

  THE 140-ACRE PRESIDENTIAL RETREAT of Camp David lies inside Maryland’s heavily wooded Catoctin Mountain Park sixty miles north of the White House. Franklin Roosevelt, the first president to make use of it, had named it “Shangri-La.” In 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, he had sought a secret refuge, where he could sleep late, work on his stamp collection, and occasionally entertain world leaders whom he wouldn’t mind having as houseguests. Winston Churchill was one of the first in that category, arriving in the spring of 1943 to plan the Normandy invasion. The two men took time away from their somber duties to drive through the countryside and fish in a nearby mountain stream. When word of Shangri-La’s existence leaked out, there was concern that the hideaway would be vulnerable to enemy bombs, and the president was urged to transfer his retreat to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo, Cuba. Roosevelt refused. “Cuba is absolutely lousy with anarchists, murderers, etcetera and a lot of prevaricators,” he observed.

  It was Dwight Eisenhower who renamed the retreat Camp David, after his grandson. He invited the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev there in September 1959 to try to reduce tensions between the superpowers. Khrushchev later wrote, “I couldn’t for the life of me find out what this Camp David was.” He worried that it might be a place “where people who were mistrusted would be kept in quarantine.” Little was accomplished at the meeting, but the press began speaking of the “spirit of Camp David.” “I don’t know what it means,” Eisenhower admitted. “It must simply mean that it looks like we can talk together without being mutually abusive.”

  Carter, a tight-fisted populist, came into office with the intention of selling off the property as a budget-saving move and as an attempt to democratize the imperial image of the presidency. In his first year in office, he had already sold the presidential yacht and banned the playing of “Hail to the Chief.” He was looking for other symbolic cuts. He loathed any outward display of pomp and privilege; even as a presidential candidate, he continued to carry his own suit bag. Camp David, one of the world’s most exclusive retreats, beckoned to him as a perfect sacrificial victim, and he ordered it sold.

  The director of the White House Military Office asked him if he knew what was at Camp David.

  “Cabins,” Carter responded.

  Yes, there are cabins—on the surface—the aide said. But deep underground there is a presidential bunker to be inhabited in the case of nuclear
apocalypse. It’s called Orange One. Around the property several hidden elevators lead down into the subterranean facility; one of them is inside a closet in the president’s bedroom in Aspen Lodge. Eisenhower had the shelter constructed at the height of the Cold War. In 1959 he took the British prime minister Harold Macmillan on a tour of the bunker. “A sort of Presidential Command Post in the event of atomic war,” Macmillan reported in his diary. “It holds fifty of the President’s staff in one place and one hundred and fifty Defense staff in another. The fortress is underneath the innocent looking huts in which we lived, hewn out of the rock. It cost 10 million dollars.” Six miles from Camp David is a much larger underground facility—265,000 square feet—blasted out of a mountain called Raven Rock, which was meant to serve as an alternative Pentagon in case of a catastrophic attack. At the time Carter took office, the most likely cause of such an event was the conflict in the Middle East, which was always threatening to escalate out of control.

  Once Carter visited Camp David, all talk about selling it came to a halt. The retreat was only thirty-five minutes by helicopter from the South Lawn of the White House, but it was a world away from Washington. It seemed to stand outside of time, peaceful and silent, except for the croaks and chirps of nature. The staff would sometimes observe the president and the first lady taking moonlit walks and holding hands. Instead of state dinners, they could enjoy casual dining with their ten-year-old daughter, Amy. Both of the Carters liked to fish—Carter had become an expert at tying his own flies—and they would try their luck at the little trout stream where Roosevelt and Churchill had come up empty. Such respites were rare and priceless.

  In the weeks leading up to the summit, the staff had been frantically preparing to get the accommodations ready for the three delegations and preparing recipes to accommodate halal and kosher diets. In addition to the leaders and their top advisers, each delegation included secretarial staff, physicians, personal chefs, communications specialists, and “bullshit artists,” as Carter termed the hangers-on—more than a hundred people in total, who strained the capacity of this rustic mountain retreat. They were crammed into the dozen lodges spread around the camp, which were named after native American trees. Sadat was in Dogwood and Begin in Birch, on either side of the Carters in Aspen. The frustrated press was kept well beyond the gates. The delegates assumed that their telephone calls would be monitored, which inhibited the temptation to leak details of the talks while they were still going on.1 The setting provided for total concentration on a singular goal, without the partisan commentary that might have subverted any attempts at compromise. As far as the world outside was concerned, Camp David was a black hole.

  The summit happened at an inconvenient time, politically speaking, for all of them. Egypt was still shaking from Sadat’s shift away from socialism. Under Nasser, the government provided price supports for many consumer goods and guaranteed employment to all qualified graduates of the country’s technical and professional schools—tens of thousands of them every year. These measures fed inflation, widened the budget deficit, and created a monstrous bureaucratic apparatus filled with people who had practically nothing to do except obstruct change. Sadat had reduced the subsidy on many consumer goods, setting off mass riots across the country over the price of bread. A number of policemen were killed, and Vice President Hosni Mubarak’s summer home in Alexandria was sacked and burned. Sadat then suspended the price rises and imposed a curfew, but the country was still smoldering with discontent and barely contained rage. The CIA warned Carter that, in the absence of economic improvement or tangible progress at Camp David, there was a possibility of renewed civil chaos, which could prompt a military coup. In Israel, steep inflation—exceeding 35 percent—was pushing the economy toward anarchy, growth was frozen, and defense spending was 40 percent of the GNP. A thousand Israelis per month were deserting the country, and few new Jewish immigrants arrived to replace them. “What can I do?” Begin would ask his ministers plaintively. He was losing control of his cabinet and there was rebellion in his party.

  Americans already believed Carter was wasting too much time on the Middle East when there were more pressing problems at home. The country was experiencing double-digit inflation coupled with high unemployment and anemic growth—a confounding phenomenon tagged “stagflation.” As for the president’s job performance, the two dreaded lines on the graph finally crossed in the spring of 1978, with more Americans disapproving than approving of Carter’s efforts in office. It was certainly time for him to mend his image, but not by wasting his time on a fruitless quest to bring peace to people who seemed not to want it as much as he did. Carter had budgeted three days for the summit, although he was willing to stay as long as a week if he felt that success was within reach. It would be out of the question for an American president—or, indeed, for the other leaders—to be away from the responsibilities of office for longer, given their daunting domestic problems.

  Carter brought one great asset to Camp David: a unified and experienced foreign policy team. Vance and Brzezinski, who were at odds on so many aspects of American foreign policy, were uncharacteristically in tune on matters relating to the Middle East, and their teams reflected that cohesion. William Quandt, who was on the National Security Council, was a veteran of Mideast diplomacy since the Nixon administration, as were Assistant Secretaries of State Alfred “Roy” Atherton and Harold Saunders. Hermann Eilts, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, and Samuel Lewis, the ambassador to Israel, were esteemed professionals who had ready access to the thinking of the leaders of those countries. Without the team Carter brought to Camp David, he could not have achieved any of his goals, and without the commitment of the chief executive, the peace process would have come to a dead end.

  When the opening day of the summit finally arrived, on September 5, 1978, Carter felt like a soldier on the eve of a battle. “There was a curious fatalism about the process,” he later recalled.

  ANWAR SADAT EMERGED from the helicopter with his arms wide open. He embraced Carter, then kissed Rosalynn on each cheek. Sadat and his wife, Jehan, had visited Camp David seven months earlier, a freezing weekend when the snow was knee-deep. Sadat had arrived then in a rebellious frame of mind, indicating that he was going to break off all efforts to reach a settlement with Begin. Carter had worked strenuously to keep him from taking such a drastic step. The casual setting allowed the Carters and the Sadats to get to know each other better. They even went for a snowmobile race on the helicopter lawn. Afterward, Anwar and Jehan argued over whether snowmobiles would work in the sand. By the end of the weekend, Sadat had softened his views on the peace process and agreed to let Carter continue to press for a way to resolve the impasse. Carter had been counting on the wives to provide a social bridge between the opposing personalities of Sadat and Begin. This time, however, Sadat arrived without Jehan; she was in Paris with their grandson, who was in the hospital.

  The team traveling with Sadat was almost wholly opposed to the Camp David summit. Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel, his foreign minister and ostensibly his most important adviser, had only recently been placed in the job. The two men who preceded him in that position resigned in protest over Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem. An otherwise pleasant and easygoing diplomat, Kamel was dogmatic on the subject of Arab unity, although he had never actually visited another Arab country. Even talking to Israelis was an act of treason, in his opinion. Kamel’s intransigence influenced other members of the Egyptian delegation, and yet they worried about his judgment and his ability to keep his emotions in check. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose title was minister of state for foreign affairs, observed of Kamel, his superior, “His knowledge of the Arab world and the Palestinian issue had little relationship to reality.”

  Sadat brought along his deputy prime minister, Hassan el-Tohamy, a former intelligence agent who also functioned as Sadat’s astrologer, court jester, and spiritual guru. Physically powerful—an accomplished boxer in the army—with a neatly trimmed beard, Tohamy was a Sufi mystic.
“He has something godly in him and he can see the unknown,” Sadat marveled. Tohamy was constantly reporting prophetic dreams or conversations he had just had with angels. He carried stores of ambergris and royal jelly to fortify the resolve of the other Egyptians, and would lecture to anyone within earshot about how God intended to slaughter the Jews. “We all thought he was mad,” Boutros-Ghali recalled.

  Sadat had assured his delegation that the summit was a simple affair. He would present the Egyptian proposal; the Israelis would spurn it; then Carter would step in to pressure Begin to accept the Egyptian offer. Either the Israelis would cave in, in which case Egypt would have achieved a great victory, or the summit would fail, in which case nothing was lost, but Egypt would still benefit from the closer relationship to the U.S. “What we are after is to win over world opinion,” he told his advisers. “President Carter is on our side. This will end in Begin’s downfall!”

  That afternoon, Carter and Sadat spoke privately on the terrace of Aspen Lodge. Sadat told him that he was ready to conclude a comprehensive peace—“comprehensive” being a favorite term of both men—and in fact he had a plan “here in my pocket” that he intended to present. The agreement would have to provide a solution for the Palestinians and the removal of all Israelis from Sinai when it was returned to Egypt. Sadat did not want to be seen as making a separate peace with the Israelis and essentially withdrawing from the Palestinian cause. Such an action would remove Egypt from its accustomed role as the leader of the Arab world. Despite the terrible cost that continual war had imposed on his country, a peace that appeared dishonorable in the eyes of other Arabs and his own countrymen would be impossible to defend. “Israel has to withdraw from my land,” Sadat said. “Anything else, my good friend, you can do what you want to, and I’ll agree to it.” Carter was a little alarmed at what seemed to be a carte blanche to negotiate on Sadat’s behalf. He wondered if the Egyptian leader fully understood what would be asked of him, but Sadat seemed buoyant. “We can do it, Mr. President!” he exclaimed. “We can do it!”