Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  Dayan said he intended to go on Israeli television and level with the Israeli public on the perilous state of affairs, but Meir begged him not to. They huddled that night in the huge underground command center. If the nightmare that the Israelis imagined came true, and the vast Arab armies broke through their defenses, then the final line of defense would come into play: nuclear weapons. Israel had never admitted to having such weapons, but it was widely known that it had a small arsenal—perhaps as many as twenty-five bombs—that could be deployed in such a case. Dayan had suitably titled the apocalyptic strategy the “Samson Option.”

  What happened that night is still unclear. The Israelis may have decided to arm several nuclear bombs in case of a total military collapse. There was also the possibility of using the threat of a nuclear response as a way of coaxing Washington into resupplying the Israeli forces. William Quandt, who was later at Camp David, was the lead staff member of the National Security Council at the time; he recalls seeing a report that Israel had activated its Jericho ballistic missile batteries, which he presumed would be for nuclear weapons because of their rather poor accuracy.

  Meir offered to come to Washington to beg the U.S. to immediately resupply Israel with arms, but a shocked Henry Kissinger rejected the idea at once. That Meir would consider leaving Israel leaderless at such a critical period of time showed both the degree of Israel’s desperation as well as its abject dependence on the U.S. It also demonstrated the gulf between the American and Israeli perceptions of the danger that Israel actually faced. Kissinger never doubted that the Israelis would ultimately prevail, but he didn’t want to see the Arabs thoroughly humiliated again, and he certainly wanted to avoid a superpower confrontation. Total victory left little room for peace negotiations, as the previous war had proved. He readily agreed to resupply the Israeli forces, but in so doing he hoped to manage the scale of the Israeli triumph. The best course, he believed, was to let Israel “bleed a bit but not too much.” Meantime, the Soviets began resupplying Syria and Egypt. The involvement of the superpowers dangerously raised the stakes.

  By October 11, Israel had gained the advantage on the Syrian front, with Dayan threatening to send his forces into Damascus. Hoping to relieve his Syrian ally, Sadat hurled an Egyptian force of fifteen hundred tanks against a comparable Israeli force in Sinai. It was one of the largest tank battles in history, and one that the Israelis, backed by anti-tank missiles fired from helicopters, decisively won. The Egyptians had ventured outside their umbrella of air support and lost 250 tanks in a single day.

  Immediately following that victory, the Israelis launched a counterattack, led by Major General Ariel Sharon, against a much larger Egyptian force near the southern part of the Suez Canal at a place called the Chinese Farm, because the agricultural equipment had markings that the troops took to be Chinese (in fact, it was Japanese). The goal was to break through the Egyptian line and cross the canal—a brilliant and totally unexpected strategy, one that would leave the Egyptian forces stranded on the eastern bank.

  The Israeli assault started the morning of October 15, meeting no initial resistance, but it soon developed into the bloodiest encounter of the war; with armor, infantry, and air support, each side was horribly mauled for three days and nights. Finally, at dawn on October 18, the Israelis managed to place a pontoon bridge across the canal and their forces streamed across. The war took a decisive turn.

  Dayan flew to the Chinese Farm to view the carnage. Arab and Israeli soldiers lay side by side, their weapons and personal equipment strewn all over the battlefield. There were hundreds of burned-out and mutilated vehicles, still smoking, and destroyed Israeli and Egyptian tanks that were frozen in place only yards away from each other. “I am no novice at war or battle scenes,” Dayan recalled, “but I had never seen such a sight, neither in action, nor in paintings nor in the most far-fetched feature film. Here was a vast field of slaughter stretching all round as far as the eye could see.”

  Sadat stopped eating, living only on fruit juice. He saw his chances of recapturing Sinai slipping away. He grew pale and gaunt and began urinating blood. He just learned he had lost his younger brother Atif in the first five minutes of the war, when his jet was shot down over the canal. Jehan Sadat couldn’t bring herself to deliver the news for four days. The only time she had ever seen her husband cry before this was when his mother died. “All those who died for our country, who sacrificed themselves, are my sons,” he told her. “Even now my own brother.”

  On October 17, a new and strikingly modern element of warfare came into play. Arab oil producers met in Kuwait and announced an immediate cut of production by 5 percent, with similar reductions every month until Israel had withdrawn from all the occupied territories. Moreover, they embargoed the sale of any oil at all to the United States. Three days later, Kissinger flew to Russia.

  Once in Moscow, he struggled to confine the agenda to a proposed cease-fire, which the UN Security Council passed early in the morning of October 22 and Egypt accepted at once. Nixon had impulsively dashed off a letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev reviving the old notion that the superpowers simply impose peace on the Middle East. With the Watergate scandal in full blaze, Nixon yearned for a foreign policy triumph that would confound his critics, and peace in the Middle East was the biggest prize imaginable. Brezhnev was enthusiastic, but the last thing Kissinger wanted was for the Soviets to find a way to recapture their eroding influence in the region.

  Kissinger then flew to Israel. Over a tense and emotional lunch with Meir and her cabinet, Kissinger observed the psychological damage that the war had inflicted on the Israelis, made especially acute by their previous complacency. Kissinger’s sympathetic eye fell on the melancholy figure of Moshe Dayan. They had known each other for nearly twenty years. No other Israeli so impressed him with his imaginative and nimble intellect. Although Dayan was famous for his military genius and his punitive raids against Arabs, he also stood out among his colleagues because of his sympathy for their plight. In Kissinger’s opinion, he was the Israeli statesman best suited to lead the country to peace, and yet Israelis were now treating him almost as a traitor. Three thousand Israeli soldiers had already perished in this war. There were pickets carrying signs with his iconic face on them, but they were inscribed “MURDERER.”

  The Israelis wanted revenge, as if that could restore their reputation for invincibility. But the crossing of the Suez Canal by Egyptian forces had shattered that illusion. Sadat had turned the tables on them, and the rage that the Israelis felt rendered them unable to restrain themselves. Meir complained that the cease-fire came too soon; she demanded another three days of fighting in order to surround and destroy the Egyptian Third Army, which was stranded on the east bank of Sinai at the southern end of the canal. Kissinger wouldn’t sanction that, but he added, “You won’t get any violent protests from Washington if something happens during the night, while I’m flying. Nothing can happen in Washington until noon tomorrow.”

  While Kissinger was flying back to Washington, Brezhnev sent an alarming note to the White House, resurrecting Nixon’s suggestion of an imposed peace by U.S. and Soviet forces; if that didn’t happen, he warned, the Soviet Union would act unilaterally. Three Soviet airborne divisions were placed on alert and a naval flotilla was actually on its way to Egypt, intent on liberating the Third Army. Nixon—under siege, distraught, drinking heavily—was entirely preoccupied by Watergate. Kissinger worried that the Soviets were trying to take advantage of this chaotic moment in American politics. If they returned to the Middle East in the role of the savior of the Arabs, they would be able to influence the oil producers and threaten world economies. To block that scenario, Kissinger was willing to steer the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war.

  The threat level in the U.S. is denominated by five defense readiness conditions. The lowest, DEFCON 5, represents a state of calm; the highest, DEFCON 1, is all-out thermonuclear war. Kissinger decided to send an urgent and unmistakable message to t
he Soviets, and—without involving the president—he and members of the National Security Council raised the threat level to DEFCON 3—the highest it had been since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. He also put the 82nd Airborne Division on alert—troops were actually loaded onto transports and were waiting on the runway for the order to fly to Israel. He then sat back, expecting the Soviets to blink, but the flotilla continued toward Egypt.

  In a totally unexpected reversal of the forces at play, Sadat saved the superpowers from the clash they were drifting toward. He asked the UN Security Council to provide an international force—one that excluded the United States and the USSR—to oversee the cease-fire. Without a willing client, the Soviets finally backed off, but Israel still refused to take its hands off the throat of the Third Army, which was withering in the Sinai desert, without food or water or even medical supplies.

  Once again, Sadat rescued the situation. He suddenly announced that he was willing to engage in direct talks with Israel at the 101-kilometer mark on the Suez–Cairo road—the first time any Arab country had agreed to such an arrangement since the State of Israel was born. In return, Israel finally agreed to let a single convoy of nonmilitary supplies reach the Third Army.

  Kissinger had come to deeply admire Sadat without ever having met him. Until the outbreak of the war, he had regarded the Egyptian president as “a buffoon, an operatic figure,” but again and again Sadat had surprised him, not only with his vision and courage but also with his adroit moves in the complex game of international chess of which Kissinger was the acknowledged master. Few leaders on the world scene played at a level that even interested him, but now he recognized in Sadat an instinctive genius for the bold stroke that could change history.

  Kissinger had never actually visited an Arab country, but on November 6 he landed in Cairo to negotiate a truce between Israel and Egypt. Sadat began by taking the American into his office and showing him some situation maps outlining a proposed disengagement scheme. “It can be called the Kissinger Plan,” Sadat said coyly. He proposed that the Israelis withdraw halfway across the Sinai Peninsula. Kissinger observed that unilateral withdrawal was not a feature of the Israeli diplomatic vocabulary. Sadat puffed on his pipe, his eyes narrowed and unfocused. Kissinger went on to suggest that the key was to build up confidence so that the Israelis could trust in the outcome. The problem was mainly psychological, not diplomatic, he said. The best course of action was to leave the Third Army where it was—trapped—but with a steady source of supply, while the U.S. worked to disentangle the forces.

  Kissinger was asking Sadat to trust an American he had never met, one with no experience in Middle East diplomacy, while keeping his army cut off in the desert for weeks or possibly months. If anything went wrong—if Kissinger couldn’t deliver, if the Third Army cracked under pressure—then Sadat would be ruined and Egypt humiliated once again. Sadat simply accepted, surprising Kissinger once again.

  It would take heroic personal diplomacy on Kissinger’s part—shuttling back and forth between Israel and Egypt in mid-January 1974—to finally achieve the agreement that he promised, requiring each side to pull back from the canal and thin out their military forces along the front. The basic recipe for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel was a bold Egyptian leader willing to talk, a cautious Israeli leader still willing to trust, and tireless American diplomacy to press them to make the peace that they couldn’t achieve on their own. But real peace was not yet in view.

  CARTER’S PLEA WORKED. Sadat sent Tohamy to issue the invitation to Dayan to visit his cabin for tea at three p.m. When Carter found out about the meeting, he asked Dayan not to discuss the issues. He worried that each man would become more entrenched in his position and the conference would once again become deadlocked. The only goal of the meeting should be to reduce the tension between them. Dayan pledged to talk only of “camels and date-palms.”

  Sadat received Dayan with a polite smile. As his manservant served honeyed mint tea, Sadat accused the Israelis of destroying the summit because of their stubborn refusal to give up the Sinai settlements, the most notable of which was Dayan’s pet project—a proposed new city in northern Sinai, complete with high-rises and movie theaters, projected to have a quarter-million inhabitants within twenty years. Ground had been broken and bulldozers were at work at that very minute. “What did you think, that we would resign ourselves to its existence?” Sadat asked testily.

  Dayan forgot all about his promise to Carter. He recalled Nasser’s rejection of the Israeli offer to return Sinai after the 1967 war in exchange for peace. “What was your reply?” he asked. “What was taken by force, you said, would be recovered by force.” He added, “What did you think we would do, sit with folded arms, while you announced that you were not prepared to reconcile yourself to Israel’s existence?”

  “If you want peace with us, the table has to be cleared,” Sadat said. He was willing to make a full peace with Israel, despite the opposition of the Arab states, “but you must take all your people out of Sinai, the troops and the civilians, dismantle the military camps and remove the settlements.”

  “If anybody told you that any Israeli government could give up the Sinai settlements,” Dayan said, clearly referring to Tohamy, “they were deluding you.” The settlements formed a security belt to protect the Jewish homeland, not only against Egypt but also against Palestinian guerrillas, who infiltrated Israel from the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. If the Egyptians did not agree to the terms, Dayan said imperiously, “We shall continue to occupy the Sinai and pump oil.”

  Sadat exploded. “Convey this from me to Begin!” he cried. “Settlements, never!”

  Right after this disastrous meeting, Carter dropped off the draft of a new American proposal. Sadat glanced at it and said he would only negotiate on when the settlements would be withdrawn, not if. All his previous flexibility had boiled away in his wrath at Dayan.

  At this juncture, Carter had no idea how to bridge the gap between the two sides. He went to Dayan and asked for his advice. The unrepentant Dayan told him the best approach was to draw up a list of the differences that remained on both sides to show that ten days of work had not been totally in vain. Dayan himself had given up on further progress.

  The Egyptian delegation also wondered where Sadat now stood. Kamel went to see him, and found Sadat lying on his couch in his pajamas watching television. “Hi, Mohamed, take a seat!” he said, without getting up. He continued to watch the show. In a little while, other members of the delegation, including Tohamy and Boutros-Ghali, joined them. They were speaking about matters far from Camp David, and Kamel’s mind had wandered, when suddenly he heard Sadat shouting, “What can I do? My foreign minister thinks I’m an idiot!” Then he ordered everyone out of his cabin.

  Kamel started to leave, then turned to Sadat. “How can you allow yourself, in front of all these people, to accuse me of considering you an idiot? Would I work with you if I thought you were?” He then announced that he intended to resign as soon as they returned to Cairo.

  “Wait, Mohamed,” Sadat said. “Come and sit down.”

  Kamel remained standing.

  “What’s the matter with you, Mohamed?” Sadat asked. “Don’t you know what I’m going through? If you don’t bear with me, who will?”

  “I feel what you feel, but that was no reason for you to address me in such a manner in front of anybody—I wouldn’t take it from my own father!”

  “I really am sorry, it’s all the fault of this cursed prison we find ourselves in,” Sadat said. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “It is midnight and I feel like a walk,” Kamel said, still steaming.

  ROSALYNN HAD SPENT the day in Washington. When she left that morning, success was in the air. All during a White House luncheon for a local community foundation, she had to fight down a smile. Any emotion could give a hint of how the talks were going, so she remained as poker-faced as possible. When she returned to Camp David that afternoon, she was surpris
ed to see Carter, Brzezinski, and Hamilton Jordan in the swimming pool. The men were laughing in a way that struck Rosalynn as odd. She immediately knew something was wrong.

  The talks are over, they told her.

  “You’re teasing,” she said desperately. “I know you’re teasing me.”

  “No,” Carter said. “We’ve failed. We’re trying now to think of the best way of presenting this failure to the public.”

  Carter directed Vice President Mondale to clear his calendar in order to help him manage the political damage. Vance came by the Carter cabin later for martinis. He consoled Carter, saying that he had accomplished everything he could have expected, but feelings on both sides just ran too deep to achieve any major breakthroughs. That night, as Dayan advised, Carter sat down and made the list of items that separated the two sides. It was heartbreaking to see how insignificant the differences really were when measured against the enduring advantages of peace.

  1 In an Israeli survey of eight thousand Egyptian prisoners captured during the war, only one said he knew that an actual war was imminent three days before the battle, and 95 percent of the soldiers said they learned of it the day of the actual invasion. Herzog, The War of Atonement, p. 39.

  Day Eleven

  Rosalynn Carter, an exasperated Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin, and Yechiel Kadishai

  FOR THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, Ezer Weizman had sat in the theater at Camp David, watching one movie after another. He watched George C. Scott in Patton five times. He was too anxious to sleep—or perhaps too afraid to confront the truth. Israel’s future was at a crossroads; on one side was peace, on the other, endless prospects for war. Weizman used to believe that war was the only path for Israel’s survival. Then, in 1970, during the bloody standoff that followed the end of the 1967 war, his son, Shaul, had been shot between the eyes by an Egyptian marksman on the banks of the Suez Canal. Shaul somehow survived, but he was permanently disabled. He had once been so bright and promising, but the bullet in his brain pulverized the future he might have had. After he got out of the hospital, his thoughts were scattered and his emotions raged out of control. He became a heavy drinker. Every day, when Weizman looked at Shaul, he was reminded of the human cost of the conflict. The experience had gradually turned him into a dove. So many other sons and daughters were also dying and suffering similar horrible injuries—for what? If peace was really achievable, wasn’t it immoral to fail? The agreement that seemed tantalizingly close at hand now was slipping further away, and to a large extent it was all Weizman’s fault.