Years of Upheaval

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by Henry Kissinger


  Some of these thoughts ran through my mind as I read Brezhnev’s letter back to Dobrynin to make sure I had understood it correctly. I warned him against a unilateral move. He said he would report the warning to Moscow. Both of us were now caught in the rhythm of confrontation, which has its own logic. One side or the other would have to veer away from collision.

  At 9:50 P.M. I informed Haig. He first thought the Soviets were bluffing: “They’re not going to put forces in at the end of a war.” I did not see it as a bluff but it made no difference. We could not run the risk that they were not. If we remained passive in the face of the threat, the Soviet leadership would see no obstacle to turning it into a reality. We had no choice except to call the bluff, if that was what it was, or face the reality if it was serious. I asked Haig whether I should wake up the President. He replied curtly: “No.” I knew what that meant. Haig thought the President too distraught to participate in the preliminary discussion. It was a daunting responsibility to assume. From my own conversation with Nixon earlier in the evening, I was convinced Haig was right.

  The decision before us urgently required a meeting of our government’s most senior officials. I called a WSAG meeting to convene at the State Department at 10:30 P.M. Meanwhile, at 10:00 P.M., I told Dinitz of the Brezhnev letter, and asked him for Israel’s views. We had no intention of accepting the proposal, I said.

  At 10:15 P.M. I called Dobrynin to make sure that he knew where we stood, and to discourage precipitate action:

  KISSINGER: We are assembling our people to consider your letter. I just wanted you to know if any unilateral action is taken before we have had a chance to reply that will be very serious.

  DOBRYNIN: Yes, all right.

  KISSINGER: This is a matter of great concern. Don’t you pressure us. I want to repeat again, don’t pressure us!

  DOBRYNIN: All right.

  In a subtle way, this conversation added to the impact of Brezhnev’s threatening letter. It would have been easy for Dobrynin to say that the Soviets would in no case act until they had heard from us. He might have indicated in the hundred ways available to a seasoned professional that we were overreacting, that the threat of unilateral action was a figure of speech, the normal recourse of a sovereign country that feels pushed against the wall. Instead, Dobrynin permitted the impression to stand that a crisis was indeed impending, and that nothing had changed to defer the possibility of a unilateral Soviet military move in the Middle East. That awareness dominated the deliberations that our government was about to start.

  Haig and I conferred again at 10:20 P.M. We were now both convinced that we faced a genuine threat of Soviet intervention. Haig urged that we move the WSAG meeting to the Situation Room, to demonstrate White House control and because he thought — correctly — that I should chair it in my capacity as Presidential Assistant and not as Secretary of State. We discussed again whether to awaken the President. Haig reasserted, somewhat ambiguously, that my best move would be to hold the meeting at the White House. The implication was that he would handle the internal White House notifications. Nixon has written in his memoirs:

  When Haig informed me about this message, I said that he and Kissinger should have a meeting at the White House to formulate plans for a firm reaction to what amounted to a scarcely veiled threat of unilateral Soviet intervention. Words were not making our point — we needed action, even the shock of a military alert.4

  The meeting started in the White House Situation Room, in the basement of the West Wing, with me in the chair, at 10:40 P.M., Wednesday, October 24. It went on with various interruptions until 2:00 A.M. early Thursday. Present were Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger; Director of Central Intelligence William Colby; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer; Presidential chief of staff Alexander Haig; Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs General Brent Scowcroft; Commander Jonathan T. Howe, my military assistant at the NSC; and me.

  The White House later described it as a National Security Council meeting. There has been some discussion since of whether it was a “proper” National Security Council meeting if the President did not attend. (We were also without a Vice President, since Gerald Ford, nominated by President Nixon on October 12, had not yet been confirmed by the Senate.) It was in effect the statutory membership of the National Security Council minus these two men.VI

  I now discover that our internal records called it a WSAG “meeting of principals” — a rare but not unprecedented occurrence. Since my elevation to Secretary of State, I thought it proper that the Defense Department representative be of Cabinet rank as well; therefore Secretary Schlesinger attended. Nixon had never attended WSAG deliberations in the past (though he occasionally appeared for brief pep talks). No one present thought it unusual that he did not do so now.

  I began the meeting with a detailed briefing. There had been no particular cause for alarm for most of the day. In fact, matters had seemed to be calming down when suddenly, at about 7:00 P.M. our time (or 2:00 A.M. Moscow time), the Soviets decided at first to support and then to insist on the introduction of a joint US–Soviet military force into the Middle East. I said that in my view, joining the Soviets would be “a mug’s game” for us, with devastating consequences to our relations in the Middle East, China, and Europe — all fearful, for various reasons, of a US–Soviet condominium. There were three possibilities: (1) The Soviets had intended this move all along and had invited me to Moscow to gain time for it; (2) they decided on it as the consequences of the Arab defeat began to sink in; or (3) they felt tricked by Israel and by us as the Israelis moved to strangle the Third Army after the ceasefire. I thought that the likely motivation was a combination of 2 and 3.

  This was preliminary to one of the more thoughtful discussions that I attended in my government service. The participants weighed Soviet actions, motivations, and intentions. During the night, the consensus emerged that the Kremlin was on the verge of a major decision. We expected the airlift to start at dawn in eastern Europe, about two hours away. At 11:00 P.M. I interrupted the meeting to see Dinitz in the deserted lobby of the West Wing of the White House. I repeated to him that we would reject the Soviet proposal out of hand; only the tactics remained to be decided. We still were eager to hear Israeli views on this.

  When I returned to the Situation Room, agreement was quickly reached to test whether we could slow down the Soviets’ timetable by drawing them into talks. This suggested an American reply conciliatory in tone but strong in substance. There was consensus, too, that this would have no impact unless we backed it up with some noticeable action that conveyed our determination to resist unilateral moves. Ideally our response should be noted in Moscow before our written reply reached there. We therefore interrupted the drafting of a Presidential reply to Brezhnev for a discussion of various readiness measures.

  Our forces are normally in various states of alert called DefCons (for Defense Condition), in descending order from DefCon I to DefCon V. DefCon I is war. DefCon II is a condition in which attack is imminent. DefCon III increases readiness without the determination that war is likely; it is in practice the highest stage of readiness for essentially peacetime conditions. Most of our forces were normally at DefCon IV or V except for those in the Pacific, where as a legacy of the Vietnam war they were in 1973 permanently in DefCon III. The Strategic Air Command was usually at DefCon IV.

  We all agreed that any increase in readiness would have to go at least to DefCon III before the Soviets would notice it. Even then, they might not recognize the significance of the change rapidly enough to affect their diplomacy. We agreed to discuss additional alert measures not foreseen in DefCon III. In the meantime Admiral Moorer — at 11:41 P.M. — issued orders to all military commands to increase readiness to DefCon III.

  Just before — at 11:25 P.M. — Dinitz gave the Israeli reply as to how to deal with the Soviet overture. It was in effect to offer a variant of the Israeli disengagement proposal of 1971: Israe
li forces would withdraw to the east bank of the Suez Canal, Egyptian forces to the west bank in a territorial swap; a demilitarized strip of ten kilometers would then be created on each side of the Canal. It was an impossible scheme. Sadat would consider it an insult to be asked to vacate territory that not even the Israelis challenged as Egyptian. Nor could he end the war by withdrawing ten kilometers from where he had started it. And it was too complicated to negotiate in time to head off a Soviet intervention if indeed one was imminent. It might even accelerate the move if Sadat was sufficiently infuriated by it to insist on great-power participation. I told Dinitz that I would discuss the proposal with my colleagues but that I knew it would not work. In the event, we grew too preoccupied with forestalling the Soviet move to take up the Israeli scheme.

  Our next decision was to seek to close off Moscow’s diplomatic options by inducing Cairo to withdraw its invitation to the Soviets to send in troops. At 11:55 P.M. the meeting approved a message to Sadat in Nixon’s name reiterating our previous rejection of a joint US–Soviet force. In its operative paragraph the message warned that should Soviet forces appear, we would have to resist them on Egyptian soil. At the very least, in these circumstances my planned trip to Cairo to start the peace process would have to be canceled:

  I ask you to consider the consequences for your country if the two great nuclear countries were thus to confront each other on your soil. I ask you further to consider the impossibility for us undertaking the diplomatic initiative which was to start with Dr. Kissinger’s visit to Cairo on November 7 if the forces of one of the great nuclear powers were to be involved militarily on Egyptian soil.

  Immediately after we instituted DefCon III, I asked Scowcroft to leave the meeting to call Dobrynin with the following instructions:

  [T]ell him to desist from all actions until we have a reply. Tell him you are not empowered to give any reply. I am in a meeting and can’t be pulled out. There should be no unilateral actions and if they are taken it would have the most serious consequences. If he says anything you can say you have instructions not to comment. They may as well know that we mean business.

  But two could play chicken. Dobrynin made no comment except that he would transmit our message to Moscow. No reassurance; no claim of having been misunderstood; no suggestion that at midnight we all go to bed and resume our discussions in the morning because there was no real threat. Only the laconic comment that he would stand by for our reply.

  If Dobrynin’s pose was designed to heighten our sense of menace, it succeeded admirably. Our conviction that we were facing an imminent Soviet move was hardly diminished when we learned during the evening that eight Soviet An-22 transport planes — each capable of carrying two hundred or more troops — were slated to fly from Budapest to Egypt in the next few hours. And we discovered too that elements of the East German armed forces had been put on alert effective at 5:00 A.M. Washington time, or five hours away. We estimated that the Soviets could lift 5,000 troops a day into Egypt. We decided that going to DefCon III would not be noted quickly enough by Soviet decision-makers. Something more was necessary. At 12:20 A.M. we alerted the 82d Airborne Division for possible movement. At 12:25 A.M. we ordered the aircraft carrier Franklin Delano Roosevelt — now off Italy — to move rapidly to the eastern Mediterranean to join the carrier Independence south of Crete. The carrier John F. Kennedy and its accompanying task force were ordered to move at full speed from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

  There was some desultory talk about whether the Soviets would have taken on a “functioning” President. I said: “We are at a point of maximum weakness but if we knuckle under now we are in real trouble.” There was some discussion about whether the United States — in response to the Soviet dispatch of troops to Egypt — would be able to make a countervailing move by putting its own troops in the area. There was concern whether our domestic political situation would permit such a military move. But I was adamant that we would have to act in the national interest regardless of media skepticism or political opposition: “If we can’t do what is right because we might get killed, then we should do what is right. We will have to contend with the charge in the domestic media that we provoked this. The real charge is that we provoked this by being soft.”

  The readiness measures were our signal to Moscow. At 12:30 A.M. we returned to drafting the President’s formal reply to Brezhnev. We decided to deliver it around 5:30 in the morning Washington time. Insofar as the Soviet decision to intervene depended on our message, it gave us additional time to complete our preparations. And by then the Soviets would notice our troop movements. At 1:03 A.M. I informed Ambassador Cromer for the British government of our various alert measures and of the letter from Brezhnev. I told him that we would formally brief the North Atlantic Council an hour after delivering our reply to the Soviets, or about noon Brussels time. We hoped that Britain would support us in the North Atlantic Council as well as in other capitals.

  It was a classic example of the “special relationship” with Britain as well as of the limits of allied consultation. We shared our information with Britain as a matter of course, despite the fact that the Heath government was doing its utmost to distance itself from us in Europe and had rather conspicuously underlined its different perspective in the Middle East. We could not consult the other allies in advance because we wanted the Soviets to pick up our readiness measures themselves and not through allied leaks, which would inevitably include any reassurances we might have given and thus lessen the sense of determination we thought it essential to convey. In retrospect I think this procedure was wrong. We could have informed our allies an hour or two before delivering our reply to Moscow; we should have risked the leaks.

  At 1:35 A.M. Dinitz reappeared. He urged on behalf of the Prime Minister that we not ask Israel to pull back to the line it occupied at the time the original cease-fire went into effect (on October 22). I assured him that we had no intention of coercing Israel in response to a Soviet threat.

  At 1:45 A.M. Scowcroft, at my request, called Dobrynin again with the same message as before, adding only that we had still several more hours of deliberation ahead of us. Dobrynin could infer from my refusal to talk to him that we were in no mood for negotiations. Once again he replied that he would report, offered no reassurance, and said that he would stand by. Concurrently, we notified the commander of our forces in Europe that he was to delay the scheduled return to the United States of troops participating in an annual NATO exercise designed to test our ability to reinforce Europe rapidly.

  At 2:09 A.M., minutes after the conclusion of our formal meeting, I told Dinitz that we had completed our reply to Brezhnev. We would offer no new proposals except to augment the UN observer force. We would unequivocally reject joint military action and we would resist unilateral intervention by force, if necessary. I also asked Dinitz, for my information, how long it would take Israel to destroy the Third Army if a showdown became unavoidable.

  At 3:30 A.M. as instructed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the return of Guam-based B-52s to the United States. They were there as a vestige of the Vietnam war, to deter resumption of the fighting in Indochina. Congressional action in the summer of 1973 had made this impossible. But hoping that Hanoi might feel some uncertainty about our constitutional procedures, we had not moved the planes, recognizing that we could not fool these experts in protracted warfare for long. Now we used the opportunity to end this empty game and in the process give the Soviets another indication that we were assembling our forces for a showdown.

  At last, at 5:40 A.M. the reply to Brezhnev was delivered to Dobrynin in Nixon’s name. It rejected all Soviet demands. We sent it by messenger, avoiding any softening via an explanation. The letter offered American approval of — and willingness to participate in — an expanded UN truce supervisory force composed of noncombat personnel on a temporary basis whose sole task would be to provide “adequate information concerning compliance by both sides with the terms of the cease-fire.”
Our reply added:

  You must know, however, that we could in no event accept unilateral action. This would be in violation of our understandings, of the agreed Principles we signed in Moscow in 1972 and of Article II of the Agreement on Prevention of Nuclear War. As I stated above, such action would produce incalculable consequences which would be in the interest of neither of our countries and which would end all we have striven so hard to achieve.

  The Crisis Abates

  AT 6:30 A.M. Thursday morning, October 25 — after three hours of sleep — I discovered that the American public had already learned of the worldwide alert of American forces. It was all over the morning news. I was shocked. This unexpected publicity would inevitably turn the event into an issue of prestige with Moscow, unleashing popular passions at home and seriously complicating the prospects of a Soviet retreat. It also showed the change in the discipline of our government in the three years since the Jordan crisis of September 1970. Then we had gone through similar alert measures; their extent had not become known until the crisis was already over, three days later.5 The current alert had leaked within three hours in the middle of the night; we would now have a public confrontation, and not with a Soviet surrogate as in 1970, but with the Kremlin itself.

  But at my White House office the day began well, minutes before 8:00 A.M., with two messages that had come from Egypt an hour apart. They were responses to my message to Ismail and Nixon’s to Sadat. Showing a degree of care appropriate to the seriousness of the situation, the Egyptians had numbered them sequentially to help us follow the evolution of their thinking. Message number one was Ismail’s answer to my account (midday on October 24) of the efforts we had made to secure Israeli compliance with the cease-fire. Despite the plight of the Third Army — to which he proudly did not refer — Ismail expressed his appreciation for our offer of help. He did not consider the sending of American military attachés adequate; he maintained that a combined US–Soviet force was the best guarantee. However, “since the U.S. refuses to take such a measure, Egypt is asking the Security Council to provide an international force” (emphasis added). This meant that Egypt was withdrawing the request that had produced the crisis. And it was substituting a proposal for an “international force,” which by United Nations practice excluded forces from the five permanent members of the Security Council and therefore the US–Soviet force urged by Brezhnev.

 

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