Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Asad at no point claimed this authority. He began many crucial meetings, particularly once negotiations started, alone with me and only my interpreter — probably wanting to leave no trace of his exploratory probing. His tactic was to open with a statement of the most extreme position to test what the traffic would bear. He might then allow himself to be driven back to the attainable, fighting a dogged rearguard action that made clear that concessions could be exacted only at a heavy price and that discouraged excessive expectations of them. (His negotiating style was in this respect not so different from the Israelis’, much as both of them would hate the comparison.) Once he knew the lay of the land, he would call in his closest associates, who included senior military people and of course Syrian interpreters. Then we would go through the whole process again, trying to duplicate our previous dialogue as much as possible. By then, Asad and I were acting as if in rehearsal for a play. Time-consuming, nerve-racking, and bizarre as the procedure was, it had the great advantage from Asad’s point of view that he never had to argue for a concession himself, at least in the first instance. That onus was on me. His colleagues were part of the negotiations; they had a chance to object; they almost never did so. Whatever arguments persuaded Asad would also have persuaded his colleagues. It was effective domestic politics at the expense of many sleepless nights for me. For during the Syrian shuttle, when I got through with Asad I generally had to return to Israel and report to a negotiating team that took pride in being no easier than Syria’s.

  Withal, I developed a high regard for Asad. In the Syrian context he was moderate indeed. He leaned toward the Soviets as the source of his military equipment. But he was far being from a Soviet stooge. He had a first-class mind allied to a wicked sense of humor. I believe that I was the first Western leader with whom he had dealt consistently. He grasped the opportunity for some free tutorials on Western political systems. During the Syrian shuttle, almost every bargaining session began with an hour or so of perceptive questioning on the institutions and personalities of the Western democracies. Since Asad was learning English at the same time, these long talks may have left at least one enduring mark. I teased him that he would be the only Arab leader who spoke English with a German accent.

  Asad never lost his aplomb. He negotiated daringly and tenaciously like a riverboat gambler to make sure that he had exacted the last sliver of available concessions. I once told him that I had seen negotiators who deliberately moved themselves to the edge of a precipice to show that they had no further margin of maneuver. I had even known negotiators who put one foot over the edge, in effect threatening their own suicide. He was the only one who would actually jump off the precipice, hoping that on his way down he could break his fall by grabbing a tree he knew to be there. Asad beamed.

  At this first meeting on December 15, we were both on our best behavior, trying to take each other’s measure rather than come to conclusions. Asad opened by saying that he had heard from his Arab brothers, specifically Sadat and Boumedienne, about my conversations with them. Translated, this meant that I had better not try any funny business, but also that what he had heard was at least worth exploring. As it happened, I had told each of them to make sure Asad was informed of our talks; besides, if Geneva was ever going to take place, it was essential that everyone sing from the same music. In response to Asad’s query, I outlined the main elements of our strategy along lines well rehearsed with Boumedienne, Sadat, and King Faisal.

  Asad left little doubt that he would not die unfulfilled if the Geneva Conference never assembled. He was not “dreaming about going to the conference,” he said. What he really wanted was its fruits without contaminating himself by its process. But before he made a final decision, he wanted to know how the United States and the Soviet Union saw the situation. It was a subtle hint: Asad would brook no superpower condominium. He also wanted to suggest that he was not a Soviet puppet; otherwise he would have had no need to ask me about Soviet views. I decided to use the opening:

  We’d rather make an agreement with you rather than the USSR make it with you. . . . They have made specific proposals and a plan for a peace settlement — I’ve avoided them. Because if it is a viable proposal, we can make it directly to the Arabs. Lots of people give us advice. We have to do some work with the Israelis and [the] Soviet Union can’t help us there. They have no influence with Israel. There is only one agreement — a conference, and we’ll stay in touch with one another. There is no agreement on substance on any issue. If you are told anything else, then it isn’t true. I told Boumedienne that we do not recognize any sphere of influence in the Middle East. What will happen at the conference will depend on you and us. You can talk to the Soviets, we don’t want to influence Syrian-Soviet relations.

  This was less than the whole truth, of course; it was a statement of reality. We wanted to influence Syrian-Soviet relations: We preferred them to be less close than they were. But Asad would loosen his ties with the Soviets for his reasons, nor ours, and we could affect Syrian-Soviet relations best by giving Damascus a stake in closer ties with the United States.

  When I turned to the letter of invitation, I was in for a big surprise. I laboriously went through the text of the letter and the various formulas on the Palestinians, winding up with my recommendation that any explicit reference to them be dropped. Asad accepted all of the changes. I told him that the opening of the conference would probably have to be postponed by three days. That gave him no pain either. I thought for a fleeting moment that the Arab President with the fiercest reputation was turning out, amazingly, to be the most tractable.

  It was illusory. When I asked him whether there was anything else in the letter to which he objected, he replied that in fact he had one specific reservation: He was happy enough to let me make the modifications in the draft letter concerning what would take place at the conference, but he could not agree with the sentence that all the parties mentioned — Syria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan — had agreed to go to the Geneva Conference. For Syria had no intention of attending! Therefore it made no difference whether he failed to show up on the eighteenth or failed to show up on the twenty-first, or indeed what the letter of invitation said about the Palestinians or the United Nations.

  At first I was stunned. But then I realized that Asad was in fact being helpful. He was rejecting only the opening plenary session of the conference, not the concept of the negotiation. He did not seek to block the conference and therefore gave it a sort of left-handed blessing. He did not object to the letter but simply regarded it — correctly — as irrelevant.

  What Asad really wanted to know was not the procedures for the conference but its outcome. That would determine Syria’s ultimate participation, and in the meantime, in his prickly manner, he would keep his options open. He wanted an answer to three questions: Did the United States agree with Syria that Syria could not give up any of its territory? Did we agree that there could not be a solution without the Palestinian people? Were we going to Geneva for an objective consistent with the first two points, or “only to think and take a long time without reaching a radical solution”?

  The questions were as penetrating as they were unanswerable. Any attempt to respond precisely would abort the peace process before it had barely started. At this stage, constructive ambiguity was essential; this is another way of saying that the outcome would have to be left to negotiations, not be determined in advance. That these negotiations would be no joyride was shown in Asad’s attitude toward Israel’s claim to “secure” borders. He argued that the 1967 border was farther from Tel Aviv than from Damascus. He therefore had a better claim to advance the 1967 frontier into Israel than Israel had to keep the Golan Heights.

  As it turned out, once he had made a record, Asad was not eager to press his point. What was really on his mind was disengagement. The Egyptians, to make him more tractable on Geneva, had obviously implied to Asad that the Sinai disengagement agreement was all wrapped up and that one on the Golan could not be far
behind. He therefore thought it only proper to use the occasion of my visit to negotiate his own. He told me that he agreed with Sadat that the Geneva Conference should be only a framework and that a Syrian-Israeli disengagement should be negotiated through me. He wanted the outcome settled beforehand.

  Matters were unfortunately not quite that simple. We were far from agreement on the Egyptian disengagement, I said. But in Egypt’s case there was a history of discussion going back to 1971; there had been the Kilometer 101 talks and other exchanges since the cease-fire. We understood the outlines of a possible Sinai negotiation. There was no such background for a negotiation about the Golan Heights. I would not know what to propose. I had no idea of Israeli thinking. (Indeed, knowing Israeli suspicions of Syria, I was painfully aware that even starting the negotiations would be a horrendous exertion.) I could not promise anything at this stage beyond a serious effort to follow an Egyptian disengagement with a Syrian one.

  Undeterred, Asad brought out a map of the Golan to show me what would be involved in disengagement. The practical effect of it would have been for Israel to give up all the territory it captured in the 1973 war and virtually all the territory it captured in 1967. (Asad called this a concession, since by his reasoning the disengagement line should be along the 1967 frontier.) Such a scheme was patently impossible to negotiate; it was even dangerous to present it since it might lead to an Israeli refusal to talk at all. So I brought the discussion of it to a close:

  The best we can do is our best effort. We have not given any promise we can’t keep. I’m in no position to make an agreement. . . . It would be irresponsible for me to start drawing lines. I have not studied the matter. You wouldn’t respect me if I did this. I am a serious man.

  Asad was adamant. “Beginning talks are a loss to us,” he argued, pointing to the heart of his political problem. He needed to show some achievement in order to attend Geneva. Syria would go to a peace conference only after a disengagement agreement had already been concluded. On the other hand, he repeated, he would not oppose others’ going to Geneva.

  The seemingly perverse reaction hid a major breakthrough. In his convoluted way, Asad was in fact blessing the peace process and our strategy. If Syria did not object to the peace conference and was indifferent to the content of the letter of invitation, all roadblocks would disappear. We could finesse the Palestinians by simply placing them among “other participants” in the draft letter. Israel’s insistence on the release of its POWs as a precondition for participating with Syria in the peace conference now became academic.

  What the exchange with Asad did, among other things, was raise serious questions about Soviet diplomacy. The Soviets and we had agreed that in the preparations for Geneva, Moscow would use its influence in Damascus and we in Israel. In the past four weeks, Moscow had at no time so much as hinted that Syrian participation at the conference was in question, or that Syria had objections, much less prior conditions. Did it not know? Or did it deceive us? And, if so, why? If it had known about Asad’s objections and failed to overcome them, its influence with Damascus was less than we had thought. If it had deceived us, it was difficult to understand the motive. Probably the Soviet Ambassador in Damascus was not particularly well connected — later on, the Syrians frequently made disparaging remarks about him. Soviet psychology is not well attuned to the Arab mind, and the Soviets have an uncanny knack for alienating their own best clients by their heavy-handed conduct.

  And the Syrian failure coincided with other mixed signals from Moscow. On December 15 Vinogradov told Eilts in Cairo that my alternative of a very short letter of invitation was acceptable. But late that evening, Dobrynin told Scowcroft in Washington that Moscow would go along only if I could convince the other parties. (By then it proved no longer necessary.)

  The fact was that Syrian participation at the opening plenary session was in no way essential — indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, we were better off without Syria. (Perhaps Asad knew this as well as anyone.) Nevertheless, to maintain Syrian interest in the peace process, I thought it important to let Asad take the responsibility for refusing, and that required us to make him feel welcome should he change his mind. And as on many other occasions, there was the problem of reconciling perception and reality. It was undesirable to have the meeting end in a seeming impasse. It would make a bad public impression; I would not be able to explain candidly why it was ideal if Syria stayed away from the plenary session. Therefore, to maintain the appearance of momentum, I told Asad that after my visit to Israel the next day, we would send an official to brief him on my talks with Golda and to bring him the final version of the letter of invitation so that at least he knew what he was rejecting. Since he had a stake in not seeming to be excluded, Asad fell in happily with this procedure. And to ease communications between us, I proposed the establishment of Interests Sections in each other’s capital. Once again, Asad agreed. He suggested I describe our talks to the press as “frank and useful.”

  We had achieved somewhat more than what we had hoped for. Syria would not obstruct the peace process; it would probably participate later in the disengagement negotiations that were at the core of our strategy. We had begun the arduous diplomacy of tempting fiercely independent Syria into a more constructive role in the drama of peace.

  Respite in Amman

  THE meeting with Asad had started at approximately 4:00 P.M.; the plan was for me to leave Damascus for the short flight to Amman around 7:30 P.M. and to dine with King Hussein. In fact, my meeting with Asad lasted until 10:30 P.M. — six and a half hours. Journalists were speculating: Had I been kidnapped? Was I the one hundred and twenty-eighth prisoner of war? Was I meeting secretly with Yasir Arafat? Finally, at 11:00 P.M., they heard the sirens of my motorcade. One weary reporter remarked: “Either he’s finally coming, or they’re finally coming for us.”3

  By now I felt like an orchestra conductor who had to elicit a harmonious sound from varied and potentially discordant instruments. We wanted Hussein to play a role at Geneva and I owed Hussein a report on the trip. The tardiness of my arrival did not diminish his goodwill. He served a cordial late supper — after midnight — and I had breakfast the next morning with him and his brother, Crown Prince Hassan, to continue our consultations.

  At that time, it was soothing to arrive in Amman. Jordan was unconditionally a friend of the United States. It did not threaten us with dire consequences if we failed to adopt its recommendations. It was in no position to invoke the oil weapon. Its participation in the 1973 war had combined respect for the need for Arab solidarity with an understanding that the cause of peace would be served by restraint. And it must be admitted that Hussein paid for it, because now no one was very interested in advancing Jordan’s claim to the West Bank.

  When I arrived in Amman on December 15, Hussein turned out to be the one Arab ruler to whom his “brothers” had sent no word of my peregrinations or conversations. I therefore had to go through the state of play in some detail with respect to both the Geneva Conference and our general strategy. Jordan’s objectives at Geneva paralleled our own. Hussein was no more eager to have Palestinian participation; if their presence was unavoidable, he wanted them as part of the Jordanian delegation. All Jordanian leaders had grave doubts about the intentions of the other Arab states. “I am concerned,” said the Prime Minister, Zaid Rifai, “that Egypt will make its own agreement and abandon Jordan.” The Crown Prince always suspected Syria of scheming to annex Jordan. For all these reasons the King would have preferred a single Arab delegation at Geneva, to discourage separate arrangements or the introduction of new participants. If that proved unattainable — and it was in fact contrary to our strategy — he would not oppose separate negotiations so long as each formed part of a “package settlement.”

  We saw an opportunity for an Israeli-Jordanian negotiation after the Syrian disengagement. Rifai urged me, when I visited Israel, to suggest that Israel undertake a modest pullback so as to turn over to Jordan the city
of Jericho with its exclusively Arab population and its location close to the Jordan River. It would symbolize Jordan’s claim to the West Bank and establish King Hussein as Israel’s interlocutor on West Bank negotiations. I promised to do so, and I did. But Israel could not handle simultaneously a Geneva Conference, a parliamentary election, a Sinai disengagement, and a move in Jericho.

  So it was not to be. By the time we had completed the Egyptian and Syrian disengagements in mid-1974, Nixon’s Presidency was approaching its end. Before the new President could start another initiative the other Arab states, in a fit of emotional myopia, deprived Hussein of his negotiating role on the West Bank and designated the PLO, the one group Israel was least likely to accept, as interlocutor. Thereby the Arabs contributed their share in stalling any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

  This explains some of Hussein’s later actions — when he chose the risky course of seeking radical backing first from Syria and then from Iraq. He began a more open flirtation with the Soviet Union. He sought greater distance from the United States, in the process moving demonstratively away from some old personal friends and admirers.

  Lebanon

  ON Sunday, December 16, I flew into Lebanon. In those far-off days, Lebanon was always cited as a model of cooperation between the religious faiths in the Middle East. Theoretically, there was a narrow Christian majority; the high offices of state were apportioned roughly that way. The President of Lebanon was always a Christian, the Prime Minister invariably Moslem. The demographic reality was probably the reverse, but facing it would have rent Lebanon’s delicate fabric. It was avoided by simply not taking a census for thirty years.

  The two religious communities coexisted; Lebanon prospered; Beirut became a thriving, cosmopolitan metropolis. This happy state of affairs might have continued indefinitely had the Palestinian leadership not decided, upon being expelled from Jordan in 1970, to make Lebanon its main base of operations.