We, naturally, have questions as to what is behind all this. I wish to say it frankly, Mr. President, that we are confident that you have possibilities to influence Israel with the aim of putting an end to such a provocative behavior of Tel Aviv.
We would like to hope that we both will be true to our word and to the understanding we have reached.
I will appreciate information on your steps towards Israel’s strict and immediate compliance with the decision of the Security Council of this October 22 and 23.
I told Dobrynin he would hear from us when we had formulated a reply. In the meantime I had to impress on Israel the gravity of the crisis. Whenever I needed to enhance a message or avoid a personal confrontation between me and the Israeli cabinet, I would ask Haig to call Dinitz on behalf of Nixon. I did so on this occasion. At this stage of Nixon’s agony, I doubt that Dinitz took the stratagem too seriously — but at a minimum it showed that painful decisions were needed. Haig demanded an end to offensive Israeli military operations.
At 10:30 A.M. on Wednesday, I chaired a WSAG meeting, briefing my colleagues on what had happened, and urging a steady course:
The Arabs may despise us, or hate us, or loathe us, but they have learned that if they want a settlement, they have to come to us. No one else can deliver. Three times they have relied on Russian equipment, and three times they have lost it. So, strategically we have a very good hand if we know how to play it.
After the WSAG, I continued my efforts to calm tempers and to gain time for diplomacy. I sent a message to Ismail accepting Sadat’s invitation to visit Cairo and proposing an early date, November 7, “to review the situation and plan appropriate actions toward a permanent settlement.”
Meanwhile, I learned that Haig’s phone call had elicited an ambiguous Israeli response. Dayan sent a message through Dinitz, and Golda saw Ambassador Keating. Both made the same points: The Israelis were trying “to absorb fire without answer”; they had not tried to advance during the day and “they will not try to do so.” (This left open the possibility of a war of attrition designed to use up Egyptian supplies and force the surrender of the Third Army.) Israel had asked UN observers to come from Cairo to the west bank of the Canal but the Egyptians appeared to be detaining them. (This left open the issue of what was happening on the east bank.) Israel had concrete evidence that Egypt planned to continue fighting, supported by tanks sent from Cairo to break through the Israeli line on the west bank. The Israelis had no intention of attacking Egyptian forces on the west bank. (We were concerned, of course, about Israeli activity on the east bank.) Dayan added that Keating would be kept fully informed and given access to Israeli information “in a further effort to calm the Secretary and to demonstrate Israeli good intentions.”
Whatever our private thoughts, we treated Dayan’s information at face value. Thus a Presidential message went to Brezhnev at 1:00 P.M. summarizing the Israeli assurances. A similar communication went from me to Ismail. But mine to Cairo crossed with a climactic new message from Sadat to Nixon. Sadat claimed that Israel had once again initiated offensive operations, and he then agreed to what we had not offered: the immediate dispatch of American observers or troops for the implementation of the Security Council cease-fire resolution on the Egyptian side. What was new was what I had feared three hours earlier: Sadat told us that he was “formally” issuing the same request to the Soviets. Shortly after Sadat’s private message, I learned through a news bulletin that Cairo had announced publicly that it was calling for a Security Council meeting to ask that American and Soviet “forces” be sent to the Middle East. The makings of a crisis were appearing.
We were not prepared to send American troops to Egypt, nor would we accept the dispatch of Soviet forces. We had not worked for years to reduce the Soviet military presence in Egypt only to cooperate in reintroducing it as the result of a UN resolution. Nor would we participate in a joint force with the Soviets, which would legitimize their role in the area and strengthen radical elements. Anti-Soviet moderates like Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Jordan, and Kuwait might well panic at this demonstration of US–Soviet cooperation. The Soviet force might prove impossible to remove; there would be endless pretexts for it to intervene at any point against Israel, or against moderate Arab governments, for that matter.
While we were waiting to see whether the Cairo report would turn out to be a false alarm, the Soviets stepped up the tension. At 3:35 P.M. Dobrynin called with a message, this time from Gromyko. The fact that it was at the foreign minister’s level was a slight blessing because it de-escalated the level of the confronters, but the substance was ominous enough. Gromyko alleged that Israel was intensifying military operations and that Israeli assurances to the contrary were false. No specific action was requested other than that I inform the President — leaving it to us to solve an undefined problem, thereby creating a basis for holding us accountable. I told Dobrynin to come by my office at 4:00 P.M. In the meantime, I checked with Dinitz. He emphasized that he had been told not five minutes earlier that all was now quiet on the Sinai front.
There were several explanations for the conflicting Soviet and Israeli claims. They could both be telling the truth; Gromyko and Dinitz might be operating on different time scales. Allowing for transmission time, word of the end of military operations might not have reached Moscow when Gromyko’s message was sent. If that was the case, Moscow would calm down once the facts reached it. Or, one side or both might not be telling the truth. If Israel was continuing military operations contrary to its report to us, a confrontation was certain. If Gromyko knew the Israelis had stopped but sent the message anyway, Moscow either wanted to garner credit in Cairo, pretending that it had extracted an already accomplished cease-fire, or else it was seeking a pretext for a showdown to free the Third Army and send its troops back into Egypt. In any event, a cease-fire would not solve our basic problem. Even should military operations have stopped, the Third Army was still encircled and imperiled.
We were determined to resist by force if necessary the introduction of Soviet troops into the Middle East regardless of the pretext under which they arrived. When Dobrynin called on me shortly after 4:00 P.M., I told him that we would veto any UN resolution calling for the sending of troops by permanent members of the Security Council — both a delicate way of phrasing the issue and a face-saving formula for the Soviets to back down.
Dobrynin was without new instructions but spoke in a most conciliatory fashion. Since it was now after 11:00 P.M. in Moscow, he must also have decided that it was too late for new instructions and therefore matters might be quieting down. He speculated that perhaps the best way to proceed was not to bother with any formal new Security Council resolution. Rather, the President of the Security Council could simply express a “consensus” favoring another cease-fire appeal. I agreed, with some relief, that this was a good way to defuse the crisis. The atmosphere seemed calm enough then — as I recounted at a press conference the next day — for us to exchange ideas on the site, participation, and procedures for a Mideast peace conference. If Dobrynin knew what he was talking about (and he generally did) the Soviet leadership had decided to make the best of a bad situation and steer matters rapidly toward a peace conference as the best way out of its dilemmas, including the fate of the Third Army. In this we were willing to cooperate.
In the same spirit I asked the Near East Bureau of the State Department to prepare papers on procedures and composition for a peace conference. In New York, Soviet UN representative Yakov Malik had as yet given no sign of supporting Sadat’s request for American and Soviet forces. It was getting to be past midnight in Moscow. It seemed that we had managed to avoid a crisis at least for the better part of another day — and every hour gained improved the prospect of a diplomatic outcome.
Then suddenly at 7:05 P.M. that Wednesday evening, October 24 (2:05 A.M. Moscow time), the Soviet leaders decided on a showdown. Dobrynin announced to me that Malik had just been instructed to support a resolution cal
ling for the dispatch of American and Soviet troops to the Middle East if someone else introduced it. This, I knew, would be easy to arrange; at a minimum Egypt would do so. I just had time to tell Dobrynin that we would never agree when I had to interrupt for a call from the President.
Nixon was as agitated and emotional as I had ever heard him. Talk of his possible impeachment increased daily. He expressed the hope that at a briefing scheduled for the next morning I would tell the Congressional leadership about his central, indispensable role in managing the Mideast crisis. He had already urged me to call some Senators to make this pitch — a symptom of the extremity in which this proud man felt himself. He spoke of his political end, even his physical demise: “They are doing it because of their desire to kill the President. And they may succeed. I may physically die.” I tried to soothe him. He was at his best in adversity, I said. But for once he was not to be reassured:
What they care about is destruction. It brings me sometimes to feel like saying the hell with it. I would like to see them run this country and see what they do. . . . The real tragedy is if I move out everything we have done will crumble. The Russians will look for other customers, the Chinese will lose confidence, the Europeans will — They just don’t realize they are throwing everything out the window. I don’t know what in the name of God. . . .
Here was the Watergate tragedy encapsuled in a brief phone conversation. Nixon was correct in his perception of the probable international consequences of Watergate and not too far from the mark about the motives of some of his tormentors. Yet it was also true that he had given his lifelong enemies the opportunity to settle old scores. And now each side was trapped on a collision course it could not alter: his critics in the passions of a lifetime; Nixon in the paralysis of an approaching nightmare, unable either to avert it by timely disclosure or to transcend it by an act of grace.
We were heading into what could have become the gravest foreign policy crisis of the Nixon Presidency — because it involved a direct confrontation of the superpowers — with a President overwhelmed by his persecution and with a Congress that had just, in the War Powers Act, restricted the President’s authority to use military force. It was in a somber mood that at 7:15 P.M. I turned from the conversation with the President to resume talking to Dobrynin. He admitted that what he told me three hours earlier was “wrong.” The Soviet Union now wanted the United Nations to send troops — including Soviet troops — to the Middle East to enforce the cease-fire. I said curtly that we would veto it.
Urgent preparations had to be made. In the next ten minutes I took several steps. I instructed Scali to veto any peacekeeping force that included the superpowers, and also to veto any condemnation of Israel since that could provide the pretext for later intervention. The alternative we favored was augmentation of the UN observer force already called for in Resolution 339. I also told Scali to inform Chinese Ambassador Huang Hua of my instructions, as I was pretty certain that China did not want to see Soviet forces under UN auspices in the Middle East. China was likely to join our veto if it knew our views. Since I did not know which Chinese ambassador had the better communication, I simultaneously asked Scowcroft to inform Huang Zhen, head of the Liaison Office in Washington, of our decision and preference.
With the preliminary battle lines thus drawn, I called Dobrynin again, at 7:25 P.M. I urged him not to push us to an extreme. We would cooperate on sending more UN observers; we would not accept Soviet troops in any guise. Dobrynin replied that in Moscow “they have become so angry they want troops.” He blamed us for allowing “the Israelis to do what they wanted.” I urged him to prevent such a resolution from being introduced: “It would be a pity to be in a confrontation.” In a crisis there was nothing congenial about Dobrynin; he was all business. He would mention any comments to Moscow, he said, but he was sure they had already discussed it and made up their minds.
I immediately called British Ambassador Lord Cromer to ask London to join our veto. At 7:35 P.M. I briefed Dinitz. Just after 8:00 P.M., I called Dobrynin again. According to our best information, I told him, no fighting was now going on in the Middle East. There was still time to avoid a confrontation. It was a way of warning without turning it into a test of manhood. Dobrynin played it the same way. “Let me know what the exact situation is,” he said coldly and matter-of-factly, as if Moscow needed our intelligence on Middle East deployments, “and I will send a telegram.”
Incongruously, in the midst of the building confrontation, a message from Hafiz Ismail arrived accepting my proposal to visit Cairo on November 7.
At 8:25 P.M. Dobrynin told me that Egyptian Foreign Minister Zayyat, in is speech minutes before in the Security Council, had formally asked the United States and the Soviet Union to send forces. I urged “great restraint.” The Egyptian proposal was not yet in the form of a resolution. If it became one, “it would be that from the closest cooperation we turn to a very dangerous course.” Dobrynin had no new instructions; he was “only saying what he [Zayyat] said in the Security Council.”
I immediately sent an urgent message to Sadat in Nixon’s name telling him that we would veto any resolution embodying the Egyptian appeal. It also warned that such a course might cause me to cancel my trip to Cairo. Sadat would be jeopardizing his careful edging toward us if he insisted on the dispatch of superpower forces.
Then there was somewhat better news from the Security Council. John Scali called to tell me that the Soviet speech, while condemning Israel and bordering on an attack on the United States, fell short of actually endorsing the Egyptian call for superpower intervention. I told Scali to present our position; in a strong speech he opposed the intervention of the great powers and urged the rapid deployment of more UN observers. He did not blame either Egypt or Israel.
At 9:32 P.M. I informed Haig, for the President, of the state of play at the UN and we discussed a possible opening statement for a Presidential news conference scheduled for the next day. The President had retired for the night. Haig and I agreed we might be heading for the most explosive crisis of an unquiet tenure.
Within minutes, the forebodings were dramatically fulfilled. There was a call from Dobrynin at 9:35 P.M. It was 4:35 A.M. in Moscow but he had a letter from Brezhnev so urgent that he had to read it to me on the phone. I could see why. It was in effect an ultimatum: It proposed joint Soviet and American military forces to ensure the implementation not only of the cease-fire but also “of our understanding with you on the guarantee of the implementation of the decisions of the Security Council” — in other words, the imposition of a comprehensive peace:
. . . Let us together, the USSR and the United States, urgently dispatch to Egypt the Soviet and American military contingents, to insure the implementation of the decision of the Security Council of October 22 and 23 concerning the cessation of fire and of all military activities and also of our understanding with you on the guarantee of the implementation of the decisions of the Security Council.
It is necessary to adhere without delay. I will say it straight that if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally. We cannot allow arbitrariness on the part of Israel. . . .
It was one of the most serious challenges to an American President by a Soviet leader, from its peremptory salutation, “Mr. President,” to its equally peremptory conclusion demanding an “immediate and clear reply.” In between it proposed that American and Soviet military forces impose not just a cease-fire but a final settlement on terms that were not specified but that had been repeatedly spelled out by Moscow during the year and had just as often been rejected by us. And it threatened to send troops unilaterally if we refused.V
The proposal was unthinkable. If we agreed to a joint role with the Soviet Union, its troops would reenter Egypt with our blessing. Either we would be the tail to the Soviet kite in a joint power play against Israel, or we would end up clashing wit
h Soviet forces in a country that was bound to share Soviet objectives regarding the cease-fire or could not afford to be perceived as opposing them.
But the impact would go far beyond Egypt. If Soviet forces appeared dramatically in Cairo with the United States as an appendage, our traditional friends among Arab moderates would be profoundly unnerved by the evident fact of US–Soviet condominium. The strategy we had laboriously pursued in four years of diplomacy and two weeks of crisis would disintegrate: Egypt would be drawn back into the Soviet orbit, the Soviet Union and its radical allies would emerge as the dominant factor in the Middle East. China and Europe would be shocked by the appearance of US–Soviet military collaboration in so vital a region. If the joint effort collapsed and turned into a US–Soviet crisis — as was probable — we would be alone.
There was no question in my mind that we would have to reject the Soviet proposal. And we would have to do so in a manner that shocked the Soviets into abandoning the unilateral move they were threatening — and, from all our information, planning. For we had tangible reasons to take the threat seriously. The CIA reported that the Soviet airlift to the Middle East had stopped early on the twenty-fourth, even though ours was continuing; the ominous implication was that the aircraft were being assembled to carry some of the airborne divisions whose increased alert status had also been noted. East German forces were also at increased readiness. The number of Soviet ships in the Mediterranean had grown to 85 — an all-time high. (It later reached more than 100.) We discovered the next day that a Soviet flotilla of twelve ships, including two amphibious vessels, was heading for Alexandria. There were other ominous reports in especially sensitive areas. And I could not avoid the conviction that Nixon’s evident weakness over Watergate had not a little to do with the Politburo’s willingness to dare so crass a challenge.
Years of Upheaval Page 86