I told Dayan that his disengagement plan was “intellectually respectable,” a “good proposal,” a “big step forward.” I would be prepared to submit it to Egypt, though we could not possibly undertake mediation on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. There had to be room to take into account the Egyptian point of view. I predicted that there would be disagreement over the depth of the Israeli withdrawal; over the restrictions on the types of arms in the various zones; over Israel’s insistence on an end to belligerency; and over an Egyptian commitment to Israel to reopen the Suez Canal. Some of the objections would be substantive, others procedural. I did not believe that Egypt would give Israel an undertaking of what it would do on its own sovereign territory.
These caveats did not dampen my confidence that we were within negotiating range. The two sides were talking about the same concepts even if they still gave different practical application to them. And once a negotiation is thus reduced to details, it has a high probability of success — unless one party has consciously decided to make a show of flexibility simply to put itself in a better light for a deliberate breakup of the talks. Egypt was precluded from such a course by the plight of the Third Army, Israel by the fear of diplomatic isolation. The odds favored success, even though major differences remained.
I therefore discussed with Dayan how to give the negotiations maximum momentum. Three possibilities suggested themselves: Israel might introduce its new plan at the Egyptian-Israeli working group at Geneva. The United States could have its Ambassador in Cairo present it to the Egyptian government, preferably to Sadat himself. Or I could travel to the Middle East to work out general principles that would then be turned over to the Geneva working group for implementation. The difficulty with starting at Geneva was that the Soviets would be able to stall progress by putting forward unfulfillable suggestions and embarrassing Egypt if it sought to be flexible. Also, the proposal would have to run the obstacle course of the Egyptian bureaucracy, which would play safe, pointing out the shortcomings and leaving it to Sadat to overrule them. Sadat might be prepared to do that; but it would make life unnecessarily complicated for him. If we asked our Ambassador, Hermann Eilts, to present the Israeli plan we could be sure that Sadat would see it first. But Eilts had no authority to negotiate and no access to Israeli deliberations. The approach did not lend itself to Sadat’s propensity for the sudden stroke.
All this drew Dayan and me to the idea that I should present the Israeli proposal to Sadat personally — all the more so as I had promised Sadat that I would involve myself directly as soon as the Israeli elections were over. No doubt there was an element of vanity involved on my side as well, and a touch of flattery and domestic politics on Dayan’s. He favored an agreement; but he needed help in putting his ideas through the Israeli Parliament.
What came to be seen as a dramatic, surprising coup was thus in fact carefully prepared. In my view, the Secretary of State should not, as a general rule, go abroad on a serious negotiation unless the odds are heavily in his favor. Since in diplomacy the margins of decisions are narrow, the psychological element can be of great consequence. A reputation for success tends to be self-fulfilling. Equally, failure feeds on itself: A Secretary of State who undertakes too many journeys that lead nowhere depreciates his coin. And it is dangerous to rely on personality or negotiating skill to break deadlocks; they cannot redeem the shortcomings of an ill-considered strategy. By early January 1974, however, the ground was as well prepared as it was ever going to be. We had been working on the problem for two months. The positions of the two sides were approaching each other; both feared the penalties of failure.
As Dayan and I were considering how to proceed, the Israeli proposal surfaced disconcertingly in another channel. Difficult as it is to extract a negotiating position from the Israeli government, it is next to impossible to keep it secret once it has been formulated. Each minister is tempted to raise his own visibility by claiming credit; each negotiator wants to be perceived as the author of the breakthrough. There is rarely a penalty for even a gross breach of discipline. Yet it was essential to keep this Israeli concept secret for several reasons: Egypt would find it easier to accept if it appeared to result from American influence, rather than to be an Israeli demand. It would become a public benchmark, making it harder for either side to yield in the subsequent bargaining. Publicity would tempt other parties, including the Soviets, to enter the process.
My colleagues and I were therefore horror-struck when a telegram from Geneva was brought into my meeting with Dayan on January 5, according to which the Israeli representative on the Geneva working group, General Mordechai Gur, had presented two hypothetical “models,” one of which was suspiciously close to what Dayan was putting forward in Washington. Dayan professed to be equally stunned. The American position became especially difficult. We could hardly claim, I told Dayan, that the proposal had been worked on jointly by Israel and the United States when it was being presented in Geneva while he was meeting with me. The Egyptians would not be able to distinguish between a “model” and a formal proposal, not to mention the psychological difficulty for Egypt in accepting something that Israel proposed, however reasonable. Furthermore, the Soviets were bound to involve themselves — as indeed they did a few days later when Dobrynin phoned in some reflections on the Gur “model.” The difficulty was overcome when General Gur withdrew his “model” a few days after it was presented, claiming unconvincingly that it had been put forward only as an “illustration.”
I doubt that the charade fooled Sadat; after all, similar ideas were all over the Israeli press. He went along with it because it served his strategic purpose to present the disengagement agreement as having resulted from an American initiative. At that point it would be too dangerous for him to treat directly with Israel. We continued therefore to plan for a trip by me to Cairo. I sent Sadat a message that I would be prepared to go to Egypt to obtain his views as to appropriate principles of disengagement. Meanwhile, Dayan would take my suggestions to the Israeli cabinet. On January 8 Sadat urged me to come immediately; he would await me in Aswan.
By this time, Watergate pressures were producing some anxious moments. Nixon, who had extended his stay in San Clemente, was chafing at my growing prominence; his reaction to the Pilgrims speech was not an isolated case. During his retreat he rarely spoke to me; chief of staff Al Haig was my point of contact. He reported that Nixon was tense and distraught. The President had not given up the idea that some spectacular success could demonstrate his indispensability and thereby end his torment. His recurrent dream was an initiative to end the oil embargo. For example, on January 7 Haig told me that a California oil executive had just introduced Nixon to an Arab emissary who promised to be helpful in doing just that. I never learned his name nor what was discussed; it was a replay of the Dobrynin audience of three weeks before. There was no way the oil embargo could be ended through a personal tour de force or through such a channel. But the secretiveness showed that Watergate might soon claim the confidence between President and Secretary of State essential for a functioning foreign policy in the best of times — not to speak of the crisis of institutions through which we were passing.
On January 8 I informed Haig of my conviction that Sadat wanted “to settle fast,” yet “with all this fancy footwork going on, if we don’t wrap this thing up fast, it will never happen.” Haig did not know what Nixon’s reaction would be; he still seemed preoccupied with the mysterious emissary. Our fear that Nixon might drag his feet proved groundless. We know from his own diary that he was making notes for himself at this time on how he might run the campaign of his life against impeachment (January 5: “[A]ct like a President”);1 he certainly acted like one when late in the day he approved my trip.
There were only a few loose ends left. If at all possible, I wanted to keep the Soviets calm while I pushed disengagement. I told Dobrynin that the purpose of my trip was to transform Israeli “models” into a concrete proposal. Ellsworth Bunker, our permanen
t representative to the Geneva talks, would be with me; the results could then be fed into Geneva for detailed negotiations. That suited Dobrynin fine; he knew the Soviets had no capacity to promote a disengagement scheme and they would get a crack at the “principles” in Geneva. (It was not intended as a trick though it worked out that way; it was precisely the procedure we intended to follow until Sadat speeded matters up after I reached Aswan.) Dobrynin wished me the “very best” for the trip — implying that the Soviets would stay quiescent.
I gave UN Secretary-General Waldheim the same briefing. Waldheim could be useful if the negotiations returned to Geneva and would give what he was told wide distribution to those — mostly among the non-aligned — more willing to rely on information from a third party than from us.
With these preliminaries out of the way, I left Andrews Air Force Base shortly after midnight on the morning of Friday, January 11, 1974, for what turned into the first “shuttle.”
Watergate Again
WATERGATE was a hydra-headed monster. There was no way of knowing when a new sensation would seize public attention. In the miasma of doubt and suspicion, every revelation — no matter how trivial or how unrelated to others — fed the seemingly inexhaustible obsession with scandal. Anything that appeared to deviate from previous accounts raised the specter of a “credibility gap” for the Administration, and for me the nightmare of dissipating the last vestiges of executive authority for the conduct of foreign policy.
On the very day I left for the Middle East, a bizarre event from the year 1971 became public for the first time. The facts were these: Since October 1962, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been assigned to the National Security Council staff as a liaison officer, to improve communication between the Pentagon and the White House. Duties of a liaison office are somewhat ambiguous. Theoretically, the White House is entitled to all the information it needs or requests, and, in turn, it has an interest in seeing that key agencies are adequately informed.
Reality is not so simple. The White House often does not know what papers exist in the bureaucracy; the agencies do not always understand what is wanted; even when they do they are loath to bare their internal disputes. If in doubt, they are tempted to put themselves in the most favorable light — to suppress, not to put too fine a point on it, unfavorable or embarrassing information or views contrary to their final recommendations. The same holds true, of course, for White House dissemination of its own information.
A skillful liaison officer with an alert staff can help the White House and the agencies understand each other better. He functions in some ways like a military attaché overseas. He treads a delicate line between serving the common interest in obtaining what has not been distributed out of ignorance or oversight, and seeking to ferret out what has consciously been kept in restricted channels. When the latter is done by a department or agency against the White House, it approaches spying on the Chief Executive by his subordinates. However they may deplore a President’s administrative practices, officials of subordinate agencies should not circumvent them by stealth.
Late in 1971 I became aware that some of the personnel of the NSC liaison office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may have crossed the line between liaison and abuse of trust. During the India-Pakistan war a passionate controversy broke out in America over whether the Administration was unduly “tilting” toward Pakistan. As part of the bitter bureaucratic battle, a number of highly classified documents were leaked to columnist Jack Anderson; some concerned US naval deployments in the Bay of Bengal. To his enormous credit Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, head of the JCS liaison office at the time, told Haig, then my deputy, that internal evidence suggested that his office might be the origin of the leaks. Haig told me and, on my instruction, Presidential Assistant John Ehrlichman, who had been assigned by Nixon to investigate the Anderson leaks.
A Navy yeoman on Welander’s staff turned out to be a principal suspect; if he gave classified documents to Anderson (which is still disputed), it was the culmination of a remarkable career of systematic reporting on his White House superiors. The young yeoman had the advantage that he was considered so insignificant that no one thought of taking precautions against him. He often served as a trusted messenger carrying important documents between my office and the Executive Office Building across the street, where most of my staff were located. He was an indefatigable worker. General Haig had taken him along on occasional trips to Southeast Asia; on Haig’s recommendation he had accompanied me on my around-the-world trip in the summer of 1971. He used the occasion to make himself generally useful, in the process — as he later testified — going through my briefcase, reading or duplicating whatever papers he could get his hands on, and sometimes retaining discarded carbon copies of sensitive documents that were intended to be disposed of in the “burn bag.” He delivered a huge quantity of documents to the head of the JCS liaison office, who passed them on to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In this manner the Chairman may have learned of my secret visit to Peking all of two days before it was announced. (The yeoman did not go into China with me nor was he told about it. But he seems to have acquired a copy of trip reports to Nixon and other sensitive messages, which were drafted and typed on the plane ride home.)
The expanding practice of the liaison function apparently started early in my tenure as national security adviser. Whether the then Chairman, General Earle Wheeler, knew how the documents were acquired or whether he simply accepted them as the assiduous work of the liaison officer, I cannot judge. I considered Wheeler (who has since died) a man of extraordinary decency. It was continued under Admiral Thomas Moorer, who became Chairman in 1970. Moorer has insisted that he was not told how the documents were obtained nor did he pay particular attention to them since he had already been told their substance by me. I have no reason to question the word of an officer with whom I worked closely and whom I greatly respected.
In the immediate aftermath of the disclosures I felt less charitable. I learned what I have described here from John Ehrlichman. He permitted me to listen to part of a taped interview with Admiral Welander summing up what I have recounted. On the basis of this, I thought I knew enough in December 1971 to be deeply hurt. At the time, Nixon told me that if I wished he was prepared to take disciplinary action against Welander and not to reappoint Moorer as Chairman when his term expired six months hence. But I should consider, he said, the impact on the military services and the country of washing such dirty linen in public in the midst of the Vietnam war and the pitiless assault on the military establishment. Should we add grist to the peace movement’s mill? I accepted Nixon’s arguments. In December 1971 I closed the JCS liaison office and requested the transfer of all its personnel within twenty-four hours. I took no other action. Neither did Nixon.
Welander served in other posts and later retired; the yeoman also was transferred elsewhere. As these facts continued leaking out while I was in the Middle East in January 1974, they were turned not against those individuals whom one might have thought guilty of trespass, but against Nixon and his Administration; the media pursued me also. What kind of government was this in which military personnel colluded in the misappropriation of documents and suspects were interviewed on tape? And had I lied in May 1973 when I said I had not been aware of the “Plumbers unit,” since the questioning of the Admiral was by “Plumber” David Young? I have already described the degree of my knowledge of the “Plumbers” in Chapter IV. I did, of course, know that investigating security leaks was Ehrlichman’s responsibility. My impression was that such investigations as he conducted were ad hoc; the reality seems to be that his aides (Egil Krogh and David Young) had no other responsibilities. The nuance was lost in the sensational stories now unfolding. There was no way of my deducing from listening to the tape of a single interview that Young had no additional responsibilities, nor would I have thought it strange if that had been told me. The fact was that I gave the matte
r little thought one way or another.
That one interview was all I ever learned of the investigation of the yeoman. Ehrlichman submitted a formal report, which he never showed me. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird also requested an investigation from his general counsel, Fred Buzhardt; that, too, was never shown to me. This was not unusual in the Nixon White House. The flow of information was strictly compartmentalized and internal security was considered outside my province.
The question might, of course, have been approached differently by the media. If it was true that military secrets were being leaked to the press for political purposes even by uniformed personnel, what the media had been pleased to call Nixon’s paranoia might turn out to have some basis in fact. While this would not excuse the transgressions constituting the body of Watergate, it might partially explain their origin and thus mitigate the judgment.
But by then Watergate had its own logic. The quarry would not be permitted to plead extenuating circumstances. The blame for the military spying would be placed on the victim, not the perpetrator. Three lines of argument developed. One was that Nixon’s decision-making process was so secretive that the Joint Chiefs had been forced to take matters into their own hands. Another was that since the liaison office existed to speed the flow of information from the Pentagon to the White House, turnabout was fair play: The military had every right to impose reciprocity on the Commander-in-Chief, extracting what information they desired by whatever methods served that purpose. The whole affair, so ran the third line of argument, was a petulant White House reaction to leaking — in other words, the episode proved the original charge of paranoia.
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