As a result of these danger signals I had assembled a WSAG meeting on May 15 to review the possible threat of war. Nothing seemed to have affected the reassuring tone of the Israeli government. My staff summed up the Israeli view, which was that an Egyptian attack was unlikely:
There is low probability that Sadat will renew fighting to break the deadlock, not because Sadat would not want to go to war but because he is conscious of the severe results of such a step in view of the balance of power in the area, the relative weakness of Egypt and the current international circumstances.
The report went on to characterize Egypt’s military preparations as not being practical steps toward war. And it regarded a joint Egyptian-Syrian move as out of the question.
Our own assessments were substantially the same, perhaps because of our respect for Israel’s judgment. On May 5, 1973, James Schlesinger, then CIA Director, had sent me a report that the Egyptian General Staff had been ordered to prepare a detailed plan for crossing the Canal. But the CIA added soothingly that it did not believe that the plan described matched up with Sadat’s objectives. It made the standard assumption about Sadat’s definition of rationality, noting Egyptian and other Arab military preparations but concluding that they were for psychological purposes. Overall the CIA did not believe that an outbreak of hostilities was likely before the next UN debate (scheduled for midsummer). Similarly, an interagency report of mid-May noted that even if the UN debate passed without useful results, “this does not mean that hostilities will then become inevitable or even probable.”III Schlesinger told the WSAG meeting of May 15 that Egypt’s military capabilities were limited to a sneak air attack on Israel, a move that would be “extremely ill-advised.” Egypt would not be able to hold even a small amount of territory across the Suez Canal for as much as one week.
No wonder that the May 15 WSAG meeting lasted less than forty-five minutes and that it drifted off into a discussion of Lebanon’s chronic crisis. I did, however, ask for two contingency plans. The first was for the eventuality that Lebanon might get out of control. The second I outlined as follows:
. . . the kinds of things the Egyptians might do, the various ways in which the Israelis might react and the diplomatic issues that might ensue. Short of actual Soviet intervention, it’s hard to envisage any direct US action. But we should consider what to do to keep the Soviets out; the ways in which we might use the crisis to get diplomatic movement, if that is what we want, or to return to the status quo ante if it is decided that is desirable.
I would like to claim prescience for raising questions that defined fairly accurately the very issues that were to confront us abruptly a few months later. Unfortunately, the acuteness of my analysis was not matched by a sense of urgency. The contingency study had not been completed when war broke out on October 6.
Between June and September, the reporting from our various diplomatic posts converged on the proposition that war was improbable. Egypt and Syria were said to be suspicious of Soviet motivations and were thought to be relying increasingly on economic pressures, especially the oil weapon. Those evaluations were maintained during September while Egypt canceled leaves, called up large numbers of reserves, and began major military exercises; and while Syria built up its forces in the Golan Heights. Lulled by the false alarm of May, both Americans and Israelis interpreted these activities as merely more realistic exercises.
On September 28 Gromyko visited Nixon at the White House and warned once again that it was dangerous to treat the Middle East as quiescent: “We could all wake up one day and find there is a real conflagration in that area.” But the warning in fact lulled us, for Gromyko then agreed to a schedule for dealing with the incipient crisis, including preliminary talks with the Middle East parties starting in November, followed by an exchange of views with the Soviet Union in January 1974, when I was planning to visit Moscow.
But on Sunday, September 30, by pure chance, I experienced alarm. I was spending my first full weekend in Washington as Secretary of State and I leafed through some intelligence reports by State’s intelligence bureau (INR) in order to acquaint myself with its capabilities. I came across one that noted concentrations of unusual numbers of Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights. Would Syria so expose itself to Israeli preemption unless it intended to attack? I asked myself. I caused our intelligence to be reviewed at once.
There are two ways by which intelligence reaches top officials. One is through an agreed National Intelligence Estimate of all the different agencies represented on the US Intelligence Board. This usually requires several days to accomplish. Another is the individual assessment of the intelligence agency serving a particular Cabinet member — the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for the Secretary of Defense; INR for the Secretary of State. The CIA is technically available to all agencies of the government; however, it usually undertakes special studies for the President. Its director is the titular head and actual coordinator of all the various departmental intelligence units.
On this occasion I covered all bases. I asked for an interagency estimate as soon as possible. Pending it, I requested separate assessments that day from INR (as Secretary of State) and from CIA (as Presidential national security adviser).
As it happened, I had also that Sunday scheduled a meeting with Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz to review our plans for starting Middle East negotiations later in the year. Dinitz arrived worried — but not about Syrian tanks. He passionately pressed another problem. Soviet Jews who left the Soviet Union under the liberalized emigration policy of the détente period generally did so via a transit camp in Austria, at Schönau near Vienna. On September 28 a train traveling from Moscow to Vienna with Soviet Jews aboard was attacked by Arab terrorists as it crossed from Czechoslovakia into Austria; some emigrants were taken hostage. Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky agreed to the terrorists’ condition for release: that the transit facilities at Schönau be closed. The result was a furor in Israel and the riveting of attention, during the crucial week before the war, on Austria, not on Egypt or Syria. As Abba Eban later observed of that week, “Historians who read the Israeli newspapers published in the first days of October will be startled to find that there was no hint of any crisis, let alone of imminent war.”6
Thus it was I who first raised questions with Dinitz about the Arab military buildup. Had he any information? His instructions, it proved, were to convey to our intelligence officials what Israel knew of Arab deployments but not to raise it at a “political” level unless there was a specific query. Israel, especially as it was taking a relaxed view, did not want to stir up our diplomacy. Clearly it would have insisted on intense consultation at the highest levels if it saw a serious danger of war. Its judgment was that Arab deployments were maneuvers or psychological warfare. I remained uneasy, however, and asked Dinitz to review the assessment every forty-eight hours. I asked our own intelligence agencies to do the same when they, too, reported that day (in response to my request) essentially the same conclusions. INR said:
In our view, the political climate in the Arab states argues against a major Syrian military move against Israel at this time. The possibility of a more limited Syrian strike, perhaps one designed to retaliate for the pounding the Syrian Air Force took from the Israelis on September 13,IV cannot of course be excluded.
But the qualification referred only to the familiar small-scale raids and reprisals. Such diffidence calmed rather than alerted us.V The CIA reassured us on September 30 that the whole thrust of President Sadat’s activities since the spring had been in the direction of bringing moral, political, and economic force to bear on Israel in tacit acknowledgment of Arab unreadiness to make war.
My sense of alarm thus dispelled, I turned my attention to other problems, among them getting to know the Arab foreign ministers attending the UN General Assembly. Subsequent intelligence reports completed the process of reassurance: On October 3 an Israeli foreign ministry official expressed the view that Egyptian military movements were rou
tine and that “the voice of reason” would prevail in Damascus as well. Eban spoke to me in the same vein on October 4 in New York. Our own reporting was a mirror image of Israel’s. DIA’s morning summary of October 3 concluded: “The movement of Syrian troops and Egyptian military readiness are considered to be coincidental and not designed to lead to major hostilities.” Two days later — the day before the war — the CIA reiterated its judgment of September 30 that Egypt did not appear to be preparing for war with Israel.
Clearly, there was an intelligence failure, but misjudgment was not confined to the agencies. Every policymaker knew all the facts. The Israelis were monitoring the movement of every Egyptian and Syrian unit. The general plan of attack, especially of the Syrians, was fairly well understood. What no one believed — the consumers no more than the producers of intelligence — was that the Arabs would act on it. Our definition of rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect. There was no defense against our own preconceptions or those of our allies.
Our mind-set was dramatized by the events of October 5, when we woke up to the astonishing news that for twenty-four hours the Soviet Union had been airlifting all its dependents out of Egypt and Syria. Technical and military advisers seemed to be staying, however. It is now inexplicable how that development was misinterpreted. Still, despite this event and the Egyptian military exercises, our morning briefings assured us that Egypt and Syria were not planning for war.
As it turned out, my White House office was unusually alert to events in the Middle East that day because it had received cryptic word from Shalev that a special message was coming from Jerusalem about “alarming developments overnight.” A meeting was arranged for early afternoon between Eban, Shalev, and me in New York. In preparation, Peter Rodman tried to determine from my NSC office what the “alarming developments” might be. He could find only the overnight report from our Defense Attaché in Tel Aviv on the evacuation of Soviet civilian dependents. A check with the Situation Room turned up no other cables reporting any other significant occurrences.
At Rodman’s suggestion, General Scowcroft called CIA to ask for a fresh political and military assessment to arm me for the meeting. Received at the White House around noon of October 5, it added nothing to the previous judgment denying the likelihood of war:
It appears that both sides are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of the other. Rumors and agent reports may be feeding the uneasiness that appears to be developing. The military preparations that have occurred do not indicate that any party intends to initiate hostilities.
Whatever had alarmed the Israelis obviously failed to produce a sense of urgency in the delivery of their message. My appointment with Eban was repeatedly postponed because the promised cable had not yet arrived from Jerusalem. In the meantime, I started a heavy schedule of talks with foreign ministers attending the United Nations. Then Jerusalem decided that Shalev should deliver the message to me; a meeting with Eban was no longer thought necessary. This, of course, downgraded the importance of the message. By late afternoon Rodman suggested to Shalev that it would speed matters if he delivered the message, when it came, at the NSC office in the White House rather than flying up to New York himself. My schedule there was jam-packed and secure cable communications between my Washington office and my New York suite were excellent.
Shalev checked with Jerusalem and finally appeared at the White House around 5:30 P.M. to give Scowcroft two messages for me that tended to cancel each other out. The “urgent” message was that I inform the Soviet Union and the Arabs that Israel intended no preemptive strike; if Arab military preparations were for defensive purposes they were therefore unnecessary; at the same time Israel would react with firmness and great strength if the Arabs initiated a war. Simultaneously, Shalev delivered the latest Israeli estimate, which coincided exactly with that of the CIA six hours earlier, reinforcing the existing complacency. After cataloguing the by-now familiar Arab preparations, Israel concluded:
Our assessment is that the alert measures being taken by Egypt and Syria are in part connected with maneuvers (as regards Egypt) and in part due to fears of offensive actions by Israel. We consider the opening of military operations against Israel by the two armies as of low probability.
Scowcroft heard Shalev out and wired the messages immediately to my New York office.
In the event, I did not see the messages until the next morning. On that Friday night I closeted myself in my Waldorf Towers suite for a private dinner and work on a major speech I would give in Washington three days later. It was the first evening I had had to myself since my nomination as Secretary of State on August 22. I did not ask for additional paperwork and my staff saw no urgent reason to interrupt me. Nor am I sure I would have done anything immediately with the messages had I received them. It was now the middle of the night in all capitals concerned; nothing menacing seemed afoot. We were not informed that Israel had taken any special precautions — and it had not called up reserves. It is also clear in retrospect that any effort by us then would have been academic. The Arab assault was deliberate, not even remotely prompted by fear of an Israeli attack. Any last-minute message to Egypt and Syria reassuring them that Israel would not preempt would only have been greeted with elation in the war rooms of Cairo and Damascus.
The breakdown was not administrative but intellectual. At the latest on October 5, as we learned of the Soviets’ evacuation of their dependents from the Middle East, we should have known that big events were impending. We uncritically accepted the Israeli assessment that the reason was either a “crisis in relations with Egypt and Syria or the result of a Soviet assessment that hostilities may break out in the Middle East.” But the only danger of hostilities foreseen lay in the “action-reaction cycle”: each side’s fear that its adversary was about to attack.
There were questions crying to be asked that would have rapidly reached the heart of the matter. That they occurred to no one, including me, seems inexplicable in retrospect. What crisis could possibly occur in Soviet-Arab relations that involved both Egypt and Syria simultaneously? Why would the Soviets evacuate dependents but not the advisers if there was a political crisis? Why would they undertake an emergency airlift if they were not working against a deadline? And what could that deadline be other than the opening of hostilities? The Israeli view that the Soviets might fear the outbreak of war should have given us pause. For if we had reflected, it would have been clear that the Soviets could not be fearing an Israeli attack. Had they done so they would have made urgent representations in Washington to get us to dissuade Israel, and perhaps added public threats. If the Soviets evacuated dependents because they feared a war, they must have had a very good idea that it would be started by the Arabs.
Policymakers cannot hide behind their analysts if they miss the essence of an issue. They can never know all the facts, but they have a duty to ask the right questions. That was the real failure on the eve of the Mideast war. We had become too complacent about our own assumptions. We knew everything but understood too little. And for that the highest officials — including me — must assume responsibility.
Shaping a Strategy
WHEN the war did break out, we had to face up to a number of seemingly contradictory concerns. We had to assure the survival and security of Israel; we needed to maintain our relations with moderate Arab countries, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. We knew that in a prolonged crisis Europe and Japan would be restless and, if we faltered, pursue a course different from ours. And while the Soviet Union would no doubt maneuver warily, it could not be expected to rescue us from our dilemmas; indeed, it would probably do all it could to intensify them.
From the first, I was convinced that we were in a good position to dominate events. Our de facto ally Israel stood to win. Our moderate Arab friends — though they could not admit it — were nearly as afraid of a victory achieved by Soviet arms as of a defeat of their Arab brethren. Europ
ean dissociation might be mitigated by a conspicuous assertion of American leadership. And we might induce Soviet caution by threatening the end of détente while assembling the means for a confrontation should diplomacy fail.
This would not be an easy assignment, however, especially while the American Presidency was in trauma. It was not clear that Nixon retained enough authority to manage the manifold pressures about to descend on him. But we could not sit on the sidelines if the Middle East should rage out of control; the world would view it as a collapse of American authority, whatever alibi we put forward. We had to protect our country’s ability to play its indispensable role as the guarantor of peace and the repository of the hopes of free peoples. We were like a tightrope walker: To stop was to fall; our only hope was to move forward, to ignore the chasm yawning below us.
Here at last was the critical test of the strategy we had been pursuing in the Middle East ever since Nixon entered office. We had seen no chance of serious negotiation while radical tendencies fed on the conviction that Soviet pressures and Arab blackmail would obviate the need for compromise. To demonstrate the futility of Soviet-backed blackmail had been for some time the key to our diplomacy; it was now culminating in an unexpected showdown. At its end — if we played our hand well — the Arab countries might abandon reliance on Soviet pressure and seek goals through cooperation with the United States.
Once war had started, it was plain that the diplomatic stalemate would be broken. But it would not be easy. If Israel won overwhelmingly — as we first expected — we had to avoid becoming the focal point of all Arab resentments. We had to keep the Soviet Union from emerging as the Arabs’ savior, which it could do either by pretending that its bluster stopped the Israeli advance or by involving itself directly in the war. If the unexpected happened and Israel was in difficulty, we would have to do what was necessary to save it. We could not permit Soviet clients to defeat a traditional friend. But once having demonstrated the futility of the military option, we would then have to use this to give impetus to the search for peace. In sum, we had the opportunity to dominate events; but we ran the risk of becoming the butt of every controversy.
Years of Upheaval Page 69