Carter began to read from a list of points he thought the two sides agreed upon. He said that Begin’s autonomy plan for the Palestinians had been a bold step, as had his willingness to recognize Egyptian sovereignty over the entire Sinai.
Begin stopped him right there. As for Sinai, sovereignty was one thing, but the Israeli settlements there would have to remain.
Sadat would never agree to that, Carter said.
During the discussion, Begin refused to even utter the name “Palestinians.” He persisted in calling the West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, as if to underline the claim that God had given the land to his Chosen People. “Some people ridicule the Bible,” he said. “But not you, Mr. President. And not I.”
Israel’s continuing presence in Sinai and the West Bank and Gaza was in violation of international law, Carter observed; moreover, “Sadat insists that Israel accept the principle that no land be taken by force.”
“Security Council Resolution 242 does not say that,” Begin responded. “It says that land is not to be taken by war. Mr. President, the difference is significant. There are defensive wars, too. It’s not so simple.” The Six-Day War was a defensive response to hostile moves on Egypt’s part, not a surprise attack, he added. “If such a principle is accepted, the whole map of Europe would have to be changed.” He would only agree to such a formulation if the word “belligerent” was inserted before the word “war” so that Israel could justify hanging on to the occupied territories.
“The United States expects Israel to put an end to the settlements in the occupied territories,” Carter said.
“We cannot accept that!” Begin exclaimed. Perhaps he could agree to stop creating new settlements in the Sinai, he said, but not in the West Bank. “It is our absolute right.”
Not only did Begin fail to bring any new proposals, he didn’t even seem to understand the point of the summit. Yes, it was important to reach an accord with Egypt, he acknowledged, but first Israel would have to work out an agreement with the United States about how to proceed. That alone would take several months. It obviously couldn’t be accomplished at Camp David.
Carter was caught off guard by Begin’s seeming indifference to the outcome of the summit. “Sadat is impulsive,” he warned. “If there’s no progress in the negotiations, he is liable to launch a military action.”
Begin was unimpressed. Carter began to realize just how far the Israeli leader was from even the beginning of a negotiation. At eleven p.m. Carter finally called a halt to the pointless discussion. He went back to the bedroom and dejectedly reported to Rosalynn, “I don’t think he has any intention of going through with a peace treaty.”
BEGIN STROLLED BACK in the dark to his cabin, appreciating the silence. The lights in many of the other cabins were still on as the teams prepared for the first big meeting in the morning between the two delegations. There was a mild autumn chill in the air. “What a paradise on Earth!” he thought.
Members of his own team were waiting for him when he arrived at Birch Lodge. As prime minister, he had never been good at consulting his cabinet, but now he gathered his advisers around on the veranda and filled them in on his conversation with Carter. “We have a tough nut to crack,” he told them. “His name is Anwar Sadat.”
1 Carter says that, in fact, there were no taps on the phones or in the rooms. Despite this, most of the important discussions within the delegations took place outdoors. According to William Quandt, the Egyptian team brought scramblers anyway.
2 Ezer Weizman later modified the English spelling of his name.
Day Two
Jimmy Carter, Ezer Weizman, Aliza Begin, Yechiel Kadishai, and Menachem Begin at Camp David
SINCE HIS NAVY DAYS, Carter had awakened each morning at five, a habit he could never break no matter what time he got to bed. This morning he looked over his dictation, and when the sun came up he and Rosalynn played tennis for about an hour. Cy Vance and Zbig Brzezinski joined them for breakfast. Carter kept shaking his head as he described his meeting with the Israeli prime minister the night before. Begin had seemed rigid and unimaginative, parsing every syllable; he was entrenched in the past and unwilling to look at the broad perspective. Carter was already dreading the meeting that afternoon among the three leaders.
Sadat rose at eight, went for his vigorous daily walk, then met with Carter at ten a.m. “My program is ready,” Sadat proudly told the president, handing him a draft of the Egyptian position. As Carter read “The Framework for a Comprehensive Peaceful Settlement of the Middle East Problem,” his heart sank. It was certainly comprehensive—page after page of uncompromising Arab boilerplate that was bound to torpedo any possibility of an accord; for instance, Sadat was insisting that Israel sign the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to which Egypt had acceded but Israel had not. All settlements in the occupied territories would be dismantled. In addition to totally withdrawing from Sinai, Israel would have to pay for the oil it had pumped and the damage caused by acts of war to people and civilian installations. Displaced Palestinians would be allowed to return to Israel or receive compensation, and within five years there would be a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Israel would surrender control of East Jerusalem to Arab sovereignty. It was a fantasy. There was almost nothing Israel could agree to.
Sadat said he intended to read aloud the “Framework for Peace” at the afternoon meeting. Imagining Begin’s reaction, Carter warned Sadat that it would be a terrible mistake, but it was clear that Sadat wanted a strong initial position that would appease other Arab leaders and make it easier for him to grant concessions in the long run. Then he made a surprising offer. This part of the discussion was to be kept totally secret, Sadat stressed. He produced three typewritten sheets of paper, marked for the president’s eyes only, in which he proposed several concessions that Carter could use at his discretion. Sadat would agree to full diplomatic relations, with an exchange of ambassadors and free movement of peoples across the border, routine postal service, free trade—a normal, neighborly relationship, in other words, which was exactly the future that Carter hoped to secure. In addition, there could be a more modest approach to the Palestinian refugees, as well as the establishment of a self-governing authority in the West Bank short of a state. Sadat would also agree to minor modifications in the borders of the West Bank to accommodate Israel’s security needs. In Sinai, he would accept the presence of UN peacekeepers. Jerusalem could remain an undivided city. These were all points that Carter thought he could sell to Begin. For the first time Carter caught a glimpse of a possible settlement. But for now, he was the only one who knew of the existence of this secret memorandum. Sadat had even kept his own delegation in the dark.
WHEN SADAT RETURNED to his cabin, he was in high spirits, his foreign minister observed. Mohamed Kamel had known Sadat for most of his adult life, even before they were in prison together. They had been drawn together because of their lifelong hatred of the British, which united them in a sensational conspiracy.
In the summer of 1942, the German tank corps of General Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” had bottled up the British Eighth Army in El Alamein, a seacoast town in northern Egypt. Many fervent Egyptian nationalists thrilled to the Nazi invasion and openly prayed for Britain’s defeat. “Germany is the enemy of our enemy, England,” Sadat later explained. Sensing an opportunity to make history, he took it on himself to send a letter to Rommel, proposing that elements in the Egyptian Army would block British soldiers from leaving Cairo so that German forces could have a free hand; in return, Egypt would be granted her complete independence. At the time, Sadat was a twenty-three-year-old captain in the Signal Corps, but he felt entitled to negotiate a treaty between Egypt and one of the most illustrious figures in military history. The letter never actually got to Rommel; Sadat had dispatched a fellow conspirator to fly to El Alamein and deliver the note, but he flew in a British plane and the Germans shot it down.
Soon after that, two Naz
i spies contacted Sadat. Their names were Johannes Eppler, who was half Egyptian, and Hans-Gerd “Sandy” Sandstede. They had a damaged transmitter that they hoped Sadat could repair. Sadat saw another chance to communicate his scheme to Rommel, and he readily agreed. The spies were living it up on a houseboat on the Nile belonging to a well-known belly dancer. They boasted to Sadat that a Jewish intermediary had changed more than forty thousand counterfeit British pounds for them. “I was not surprised that a Jew would perform this service for the Nazis because I knew that a Jew would do anything if the price was right,” Sadat recalled. “But I was worried on behalf of Eppler and Sandy over this contact with the Jews.”
Hekmet Fahmy, the belly dancer, had the face of an ingénue, but she was a fierce Egyptian nationalist, the Mata Hari of Cairo. Eppler used her to lure British officers she met at the Kit Kat Cabaret to the houseboat. While she was occupying the officer in her bedroom, the spies would go through his papers. Sadat began spending nights at the houseboat himself, where the scene became one of mounting depravity. Eppler was obsessed with the legend of “A Thousand and One Nights,” and he was constantly playing a recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. He told Sadat, “How happy King Shahryar must have been—getting a fresh virgin every night and then killing her in the morning! That’s my ideal life!”
The Nazi spies were caught, and they quickly implicated Sadat. Eppler complained that they had been betrayed by two Jewish prostitutes, who turned them in to British authorities after he had threatened to “slaughter” them during a role playing of “A Thousand and One Nights” while singing “Deutschland über Alles.”
Sadat was arrested in September 1942. Two years later, when the war was clearly coming to a close, many Egyptian prisoners who had fallen afoul of the British were freed, but Sadat was not. As a kind of publicity stunt, he and several companions escaped from the lightly guarded prison where they were held, hailed a taxi to the king’s Cairo residence, Abdeen Palace, signed the guest book, and then took a cab back to the prison. After this escapade, Sadat went on a hunger strike, and when he was eventually sent to the hospital, he slipped away once more. For the next year, he lived as a fugitive. He grew a beard to disguise himself and tried to find work as a contractor. Sadat was free but destitute. In 1945, his ten-month-old daughter died, apparently of starvation.
It was during this period that he met Mohamed Kamel. Kamel was the leader of an underground organization that stalked and killed British soldiers, usually when they were drunk and alone on the streets of Cairo. The two men met in a coffee shop in Opera Square. Sadat was a striking figure, tall, quite dark, with a mustache and a deep, resonant voice. In Kamel’s opinion, Sadat wore “eccentric clothes”—a dark gray suit, a red-checked waistcoat, and an especially notable pair of white leather shoes, quite an outfit for a man on the run.
Sadat immediately understood how he could employ Kamel’s little “murder society,” as he called it. Shooting a handful of British soldiers was not going to liberate Egypt, but it could be a sort of “limbering up” for the main task: eliminating prominent Egyptians who supported the British—in particular, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahhas.
Sadat took the aspiring assassins into the desert, taught them how to shoot, and schooled them in the use of hand grenades. The plan was to hurl the bombs at the prime minister’s car as it passed by the American University in Cairo on Qasr el-Aini Street and then riddle him with bullets for good measure. Sadat gave Kamel and the other killers a package containing the grenades and a couple of pistols, and then he waited in the getaway car in front of the university. When Nahhas’s car appeared, it suddenly sped up to avoid a tram, and the grenade exploded behind the target. The conspirators scattered. The getaway car was nowhere to be seen.
Sadat quickly produced another candidate for elimination: Amin Osman, a minister in the government who had said that the relationship between Egypt and its British occupiers was “as unbreakable as a Catholic marriage.” This time the attempt was successful. Osman was shot as he was entering the Old Victorians’ Club, a favored den of the English and a highly symbolic venue for the assassination. “Apart from removing a staunch supporter of colonialism, we had seriously damaged the prestige of the British authorities,” Sadat boasted. Within a few days, however, the killer made a confession and the entire murder society was rounded up and jailed.
Kamel came from a wealthy and influential family; in fact, his father was a prominent judge, which meant that he was granted special favors. His family sent food into the prison, which Kamel generously divided among his codefendants. Sadat loved Kamel’s mother’s cooking and would boldly request special dishes, such as rice-and-pigeon casserole. Kamel was also allowed out of the prison twice a week, allegedly to go to the dentist. There he would meet his family and some of Sadat’s military friends, who would fill Kamel’s pockets with goods to be smuggled into the prison.
The trial of what was called “the great political assassinations case” filled the front pages of Egyptian newspapers during the two years that it took place. Sadat’s involvement was the main subject of interest; the former military officer was already well known for his attempts to collaborate with the Nazis. His bravado and lurid background, with his handsome looks and natural dramatic flair, made him a tabloid sensation and a hero to Egyptian nationalists. “Condemn me to death if you like,” he declared from the cage that enclosed the defendants in the courtroom, “but stop the public prosecutor from praising British imperialism in the venerable presence of this Egyptian court of law.”
Although he doesn’t write about it in his memoirs, Sadat was twice smuggled out of prison by a group of young military officers who were dedicated to protecting the honor of the king from British humiliation. They called themselves the Iron Guard. Like Sadat, they too hoped to assassinate Mustafa al-Nahhas. Sadat was in a car belonging to the royal palace when shots were fired at the prime minister, but missed. A month later, Sadat was involved in a car bombing of the minister’s house, but he was never charged. (The charmed Nahhas lived to be a very old man.)
Sadat and Kamel adamantly lied about their involvement in the political assassinations case and were eventually acquitted. “My efforts at the cross-examination had adequately thrown the case into confusion,” Sadat happily concluded. Soon he was able to return to the military, where he joined the conspiracy that Nasser had established to overthrow the king. Kamel went into the Foreign Service, eventually becoming the Egyptian ambassador to West Germany. The two men rarely saw each other in the intervening years, even as they ascended in their government careers.
In December 1977, when Kamel had returned to Cairo for official business, his wife heard on the radio that he had been appointed foreign minister. He was shocked; Sadat had not even bothered to tell him. By making a public announcement, Sadat made it impossible for Kamel to back out without creating a scandal. Two foreign ministers in a row had already resigned because of Sadat’s peace overtures. Kamel felt trapped; old ties of loyalty going back to their prison days pulled on him, but in truth he was appalled by any dealings with the Israelis. He believed that once you began to talk, half the battle was lost, because dialogue implied equality. Egypt was too weak to be Israel’s equal. The only strength Egypt had was to stand with other Arabs in their refusal to negotiate. Sadat was deaf to his concerns, however. “Do you remember when we were in prison?” Sadat asked him when they finally did talk about the job. “You’ll have a place in history with me, Mohamed!”
Kamel arrived at Camp David in a state of great emotional distress, smoking too much, far more worried about success than failure. After some of the previous meetings with Israelis, Kamel had been heard sobbing in his room. Vance had tried to pacify him. The Israelis’ historic claim to Arab lands caused him to explode with outrage: “The Israeli attitude rests on an erroneous racist belief, which dominates their thinking and governs their behavior—namely, that they are God’s Chosen People. Accordingly, whatever they believe, their rights tra
nscend the rights of others.”
AFTER RELATING HIS MEETING with Carter that morning, Sadat suggested to Kamel and other members of his delegation that they take a walk in order to get familiar with the surroundings. Sadat set off in his tracksuit. Along the way they ran into Menachem Begin in a golf cart. It was the first tentative encounter between the two men at the camp.
“How are you, Mr. President,” Begin said, as they shook hands. “You are looking well. I hope you are feeling well, too.”
“You are looking well, too, Mr. Prime Minister,” Sadat replied, sizing up his adversary.
Their health was a subject of constant speculation and scrutiny by all parties. Both men had suffered repeated heart attacks. Of the two, Sadat seemed to be in better condition, although he handled his health like a cracked pot that had to be very carefully used. He usually slept until nine or nine thirty in the morning; upon waking, he ate a spoonful of honey and royal jelly, along with a cup of sweet mint tea. He prayed, bathed, and shaved, then went back to bed to read the papers until breakfast—usually yogurt or papaya and honey. Eventually, he dressed for work, fortified perhaps with a shot or two of vodka as a tonic to stimulate his heart. For the next three or four hours he conducted official business, receiving visitors and reading reports. He believed he got colds very easily and so he forbade air conditioning no matter what the temperature. Whenever needed, an aide supplied a clean white handkerchief to mop the perspiration from his face. For an hour each afternoon, he lay on the floor of his bedroom with a scarf over his eyes. As part of his diet, he had given up eating lunch, although he still smoked a pipe, which was rarely out of his hand. Every day, he would take his vigorous two-and-a-half-mile walk. The only other exercise he allowed himself was Ping-Pong; in addition to his other duties, he was chairman of the African Union for Table Tennis. Exercise was followed by a massage, a bath, and a long nap. He would wake again around seven in the evening. He had another glass of tea, then a light supper. He conducted more business until nine, when he put on his pajamas and sent out a list of films he wanted to watch—mainly American westerns—which he enjoyed with a nightcap of whisky.
Thirteen Days in September Page 8