Israel and Its Neighbors before the October 1973 War
All this was nonsense. Dobrynin had superb communications. He could get an answer from Moscow within minutes (as he demonstrated later in the crisis). I now think that, expecting to be overheard, he wanted to use open American communications to establish an alibi against the charge of collusion between the Soviet Union and its Arab friends.
AT 6:55 A.M. I called Mordechai Shalev, the charge d’affaires at the Israeli Embassy, a senior diplomat of great sagacity, warmth, and quiet dignity. (Ambassador Simcha Dinitz was in Israel because of the death of his father.) I told Shalev that Golda’s assurance that there would be no Israeli preemptive strike had been conveyed to the Soviets. He should pass this to Jerusalem, along with my personal plea to avoid a rash move.
At 7:00 A.M. I telephoned Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed el-Zayyat, who was attending the UN General Assembly in New York. To save time and explanation I read him the Israeli message verbatim. A day earlier, ironically, Zayyat and I had discussed how to begin negotiations for Middle East peace, which the United States intended to pursue immediately following Israel’s parliamentary elections scheduled for October 30. Zayyat, I am convinced, had not been dissembling. Sadat had not shared his plans with many.
Diplomacy at the edge of war is an incongruous instrument. All one’s instincts make for haste, while precision requires time-consuming repetition. Zayyat, like Dobrynin, made me reread the message. In his case, I am reasonably sure, it was confusion, not dissimulation. He said he would transmit it immediately, though he professed to be very apprehensive that it was a pretext on Israel’s part. I told him we would stand behind the Israeli assurance.
Next, I tried to reach the Syrian Vice Foreign Minister, Mohammed Zakariya Ismail, who was also in New York, but to no avail. Syria’s UN mission did not answer its phone.
By 7:15 A.M. Shalev had reiterated to me Golda Meir’s assurance that Israel would not launch a preemptive attack. At 7:25 A.M. I called the Soviet Embassy, only to find that Dobrynin was on the phone to Moscow via the White House. I told Oleg Yedanov, an aide, to make sure Dobrynin did not hang up without conveying the renewed Israeli assurance to Moscow.
At 7:35 A.M. I called Egypt’s Zayyat again to tell him of Israel’s reiterated pledge and our guarantee of it. At 7:47 A.M. I checked in with Dobrynin. Our message had been passed to Moscow, he said. I told him about my conversation with Zayyat and asked for his help in reaching the Syrians. We would “play no games,” I said; Moscow would be informed of our communications with the parties.
Meanwhile, I instructed my NSC deputy in Washington, General Brent Scowcroft, to call a 9:00 A.M. meeting, in my absence, of the Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG) to canvass the views of the rest of the government.
At 8:15 A.M. Zayyat called me with Cairo’s reply: He claimed there had been an Israeli “provocation”; Israeli naval units supported by aircraft had attacked Egyptian positions in the Gulf of Suez; they were being repulsed; a communiqué had been issued. This was preposterous. It was improbable that Israel would break a pledge to the United States only a few hours old; inconceivable that it would start a war on the Day of Atonement; uncharacteristic for it to strike without mobilization; nonsensical for Israel to initiate hostilities with a naval action at the farthest distance from its borders. I told Zayyat coldly that I hoped Egypt would confine its military “response” to the locale where the “attack” had occurred. I would immediately contact Israel to seek clarification. I put White House communications at the disposal of Zayyat to reach Cairo. Luckily for our heroic White House telephone operators, they had become accustomed to me; otherwise the sudden plethora of foreign accents might have proved too daunting.
At 8:25 A.M. I called Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who was also in New York, and told him of Zayyat’s charge of an Israeli attack in the Gulf of Suez. Eban and I considered such a move inconceivable on Israel’s holiest day; he would check with Jerusalem immediately.1
At 8:29 A.M. Shalev was on the line from Washington with the report from Israel that Egyptian and Syrian planes had been attacking along all fronts for the past half-hour.I He had no word yet on ground operations, if any; of the alleged Israeli “naval attack” he knew nothing.
At 8:30 A.M. I dispatched flash messages to the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia urging that they use their influence to avert hostilities. (Flash messages have top priority and reach their destination in minutes.) I had little hope: If the attack was premeditated, these two moderate Arab states could not halt it; if it resulted from misunderstanding they were in no position to remove it. Their replies late that night showed that they were bystanders. Hussein conveyed his concern at the outbreak of hostilities, Faisal emphasized Arab solidarity. Both remained at the fringes of the military conflict thereafter.
At 8:35 A.M. I called Al Haig, the President’s chief of staff, who was with Nixon in Key Biscayne, Florida, to inform the President that war appeared to have started. Haig and I speculated inconclusively about the Soviets’ role. What might have happened, I thought, was that they had recommended to Egypt that a little stirring was needed to encourage diplomatic activity and “those maniacs have stirred a little too much.” I suggested that the White House spokesman in Florida, deputy press secretary Gerald L. Warren, say no more than that the President was getting regular reports on events and was on top of things.
At 8:40 A.M. I phoned UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim with a brief summary of what I knew. He would not be able to influence substantive discussions, but he was well disposed and could be helpful on procedural problems. He was in a position to delay or speed up Security Council or General Assembly meetings. And he was a great gossip. One could be sure that he would convey what one was reluctant to say directly — veiled threats or plans for compromise too delicate to put forward under one’s own name. At this point I wanted above all his cooperation in allaying any fears of Israeli preemption. I urged him to use his influence for restraint with the Syrians, with whom we still had no contact, and the Egyptians. Waldheim observed somewhat mournfully that he had sat next to the Syrian Foreign Minister at lunch the previous day but had been told nothing. I sympathized; the same had happened to me with Zayyat, though it was asking a bit much to expect Syria and Egypt to inform us that a surprise attack was imminent.
At 8:50 A.M. Eban called to convey the same reassurance as Shalev, that there would be no Israeli preemption; redundant channels of communication were obviously not an American peculiarity. He knew nothing of an alleged naval engagement in the Gulf of Suez or anywhere else.
My next task was to give Scowcroft instructions for the WSAG meeting. If this was the outbreak of a full-scale war (we were still not sure), we had two problems: what to do, and what to say. Like everyone else, I expected a rapid Israeli victory; but history taught that at some stage every Mideast war had turned into an international crisis. Arab frustrations would elicit Soviet threats. There was a danger that Europe would dissociate from us: It had never been comfortable with American support for Israel and, as I have pointed out in Chapter V, some of its leaders were looking for pretexts to build European autonomy in separation from, if not in opposition to, the United States. And it was obvious to all that Nixon was wounded by Watergate. We would need to show that we were determined to prevent Soviet intervention, but we had to do so in a low-key way, conveying confidence without weakness.
From New York I asked Scowcroft to obtain by noon, first, a plan to move the US Sixth Fleet — at the moment scattered among ports in Spain and Greece — into the eastern Mediterranean; and second, plans to reinforce our Mediterranean naval units if necessary. No troop movements should take place, but the readiness of our forces should be enhanced. Departments should do no briefing on their own. When anything was to be said, Haig or I would clear it. The President or Haig should decide whether the White House or some other agency would do the briefing.
Then at 9:00 A.M. Shalev informed me urgently that Egyp
t’s forces were trying to cross the Suez Canal. The story about a naval battle was an Egyptian “cover-up.” At 9:07 the second Israeli channel sprang to life again when Eban called to give me the same news. Eban made up in eloquence for the relative tardiness of his information: “The Prime Minister asked me to tell you that the story of naval action by us at the Gulf of Suez is false. Her Hebrew vocabulary is very rich and she poured it out.” He said that Israel was reacting defensively.
The Sinai Front: Egyptian Attack, October 6, 1973
The Golan Front: Syrian Attack, October 6–7, 1973
Meanwhile, in Washington, the WSAG was meeting at 9:00 A.M. in the White House Situation Room. Intelligence lagged behind what I had already learned in New York: Even with military operations clearly taking place, the agreed estimate repeated what had been the position all week long, that the chance of a deliberate full-scale war was low:
We [the intelligence agencies] can find no hard evidence of a major, coordinated Egyptian/Syrian offensive across the Canal and in the Golan Heights area. Rather, the weight of evidence indicates an action-reaction situation where a series of responses by each side to perceived threats created an increasingly dangerous potential for confrontation. The current hostilities are apparently a result of that situation, although we are not in a position to clarify the sequence of events. It is possible that the Egyptians or Syrians, particularly the latter, may have been preparing a raid or other small-scale action.
There was no dissent. There was also no explanation of how Syria and Egypt could have been triggered into a simultaneous attack on fronts over two hundred miles apart by the “action-reaction cycle.” CIA Director William Colby reported without disagreement that, according to Damascus Radio, Israel had launched the attack. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger commented that while Syria’s reputation for veracity was not high, it would be the first time in twenty years that Israel had not started a Mideast war: “I just don’t see any motive on the Egyptian-Syrian side.” Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thought that Israel might have attacked in order to preempt the introduction of more sophisticated air defense equipment in Egypt and Syria. Only Alfred L. (Roy) Atherton, Sisco’s deputy, challenged the consensus: “This is the last day in the year when they [the Israelis] would have started something. And there were no signs of advance Israeli preparations.”
By 9:20 A.M. in New York, having no preconceptions to defend, I had long since resolved any doubt as to what was happening. I told Dobrynin that Egypt and Syria had launched a surprise attack. When Dobrynin protested that Zayyat was claiming the opposite, I replied sharply:
You and I know that is baloney. If they [the Israelis] are going to attack they will not launch an attack in the Gulf of Suez. . . . How is it that the Syrians and Egyptians are starting at the same minute all along the front if it started with an Israeli naval attack?
I warned Dobrynin that everything that had been achieved in East-West relations might be at risk if the Middle East went out of control. It was the beginning of a protracted duel in which Washington and Moscow, each protesting its devotion to cooperation, sought to weaken the other without risking an open confrontation.
Why We Were Surprised
SURPRISE attack has been the subject of military writing and analysis since the beginning of warfare, and in America particularly since December 7, 1941. A pioneering study of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, by Roberta Wohlstetter, relates surprise to the potential victim’s inability to distinguish significant information from trivia. Evidence of an impending attack is usually overwhelmed by background “noise,” that is, the barrage of other information that is either ambiguous, irrelevant, or contradictory.2 A perceptive academic study of Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941 takes Wohlstetter’s analysis a step further: The attacker may reveal his activity but deliberately deceive as to its purpose.3 Thus Hitler in 1941 made no attempt to conceal the German military buildup on the Soviet frontier; indeed, its scale was such that it could not be hidden. But Hitler created the impression — and Stalin chose to believe — that there would be some specific German ultimatum that would trigger a negotiation rather than a war. The concept is hardly new. “All warfare is based on deception,” wrote the Chinese analyst Sun Tzu around 500 B.C.4
The Egyptian-Syrian attack was a classic of strategic and tactical surprise. But the surprise of the October war is not explained fully by either background “noise” or deception. It resulted from the misinterpretation of facts available for all to see, unbeclouded by any conflicting information. Sadat boldly all but told what he was going to do and we did not believe him. He overwhelmed us with information and let us draw the wrong conclusion. October 6 was the culmination of a failure of political analysis on the part of its victims.
Every Israeli (and American) analysis before October 1973 agreed that Egypt and Syria lacked the military capability to regain their territory by force of arms; hence there would be no war. The Arab armies must lose; hence they would not attack. The premises were correct. The conclusions were not. After the October war, the Israelis learned from prisoners that Egypt had no serious expectations of even reaching the Sinai passes twenty to thirty miles from the Suez Canal. Egyptian forces had drilled for years to perfect the technique of crossing the Suez Canal; beyond it they had no operational plan except to hang on. The Egyptian army never did reach the Sinai passes. The Syrian and Egyptian armies both suffered heavy setbacks. Yet Sadat achieved his fundamental objective of shaking belief in Israel’s invincibility and Arab impotence, and thus transformed the psychological basis of the negotiating stalemate.
What literally no one understood beforehand was the mind of the man: Sadat aimed not for territorial gain but for a crisis that would alter the attitudes into which the parties were then frozen — and thereby open the way for negotiations. The shock would enable both sides, including Egypt, to show a flexibility that was impossible while Israel considered itself militarily supreme and Egypt was paralyzed by humiliation. His purpose, in short, was psychological and diplomatic, much more than military. Sadat knew from two secret meetings in early 1973 between his national security adviser, Hafiz Ismail, and me that we were willing to engage in the diplomacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he must have drawn two conclusions: one, that the full Arab program of total Israeli withdrawal was unattainable; two, that what was achievable immediately was insupportable for Egypt so long as it seemed to flow from weakness. So Sadat fought a war not to acquire territory but to restore Egypt’s self-respect and thereby increase its diplomatic flexibility. (Syria fought for more conventional and literal objectives: It simply wanted to regain occupied territory and at a minimum to inflict casualties on Israel.) Rare is the statesman who at the beginning of a war has so clear a perception of its political objective; rarer still is a war fought to lay the basis for moderation in its aftermath.
The boldness of Sadat’s strategy lay in planning for what no one could imagine; that was the principal reason the Arabs achieved surprise. The highest policymakers in both Washington and Jerusalem did not lack facts. The error lay in the conclusion drawn from them.
Sadat, in fact, paralyzed his opponents with their own preconceptions:
• He had been threatening to go to war every year since 1971. One year after another had been loudly proclaimed as the “year of decision.” No threat had ever come close to being implemented. New threats of war were therefore dismissed as bluff.
• Israeli planners simply assumed that Egypt would not attack as long as it lacked air superiority, and that no attack would come without at least twenty-four to forty-eight hours’ warning.5 The United States would have time to intervene diplomatically and Israel time to mobilize.
• The Arab nations were not expected to go to war without giving diplomacy one more chance. They would therefore wait for the results of our peace initiative, promised for after the Israeli election on October 30.
All these assumptions turned out to
be false. Sadat’s unfulfilled threats camouflaged his intentions. Israel had barely ten hours’ warning. And Sadat saw no point in awaiting our diplomacy. Its probable outcome — some sort of interim agreement moving forces back from the Suez Canal — would serve none of his political purposes unless he could present it as having been exacted by Arab strength. The imminence of negotiations thus probably spurred rather than delayed his decision; he could afford to let us neither succeed, which would have mortgaged his domestic position, nor fail, which might have undermined our interest in mediation. The approaching diplomacy distorted the Israelis’ perspective as well. They acquired a vested interest in belittling Arab threats lest the United States use the danger of war as a pretext to press Israel for concessions.
Storm clouds had been evident since the spring and particularly in May, five months before the war. Brezhnev and Gromyko warned of the danger in my meetings with them in Zavidovo in early May and at the summit with Nixon in June. But we dismissed this as psychological warfare because we did not see any rational military option that would not worsen the Soviet and Arab positions. In May also, King Hussein had sent us warnings that Syrian and Egyptian military preparations were too realistic to be considered maneuvers. I assured him that we were “watching the situation very carefully” — smug bureaucratese for our conviction that there was no real danger of war. Almost concurrently, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Newsweek’s senior diplomatic correspondent, told me over lunch that war fever was rising all over the Middle East, especially in Egypt. In May, too, Israel considered Egyptian preparations sufficiently threatening to order partial mobilization. It turned out to be a false alarm.II
Years of Upheaval Page 68