Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  My reaction was summed up in a recommendation I sent from Aswan on January 14 to Scowcroft:

  The facts of the case, which I believe should be taken into account in developing any reply, are as follows:

  — The activities of the JCS which the [news]papers term “spying” began in 1969, not as a result of initiatives taken in 1971.

  — These actions went on during my first secret diplomatic initiative and therefore could hardly have been caused by it.

  — No intelligence information of any kind has ever been withheld from any member of the National Security Council. Since the Joint Chiefs were represented on the WSAG, it is insane to say that “transcripts of deliberations” of the WSAG were targets of the intelligence effort.

  — The only matters handled on a restricted basis were three secret negotiations. But even here, the substance was reviewed by the various interdepartmental bodies, although the purpose was not always known.

  The JCS Liaison Office was established for the precise purpose of giving the military access to the activities of the National Security Council and the NSC staff. This fact also belies the charges now appearing in the press.

  It would be useful to challenge those who are making these charges to be specific as to what documents were ever kept from the Chiefs. I know of none.

  My analysis was better than my advice. There was no sense in debating whether there could ever be justification for a subordinate agency to purloin documents from the White House without authority. Such actions cannot be condoned, whatever secrecy the White House deems necessary and however it organizes its policymaking. The only sensible course was the one followed by Moorer. He denied that he had any need to spy on the White House since he had a close relationship with me; the whole enterprise was the work of overeager subordinates. I had, in fact, made a similar comment to Senator John Stennis, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on January 10, hours before leaving for the Middle East. I had urged him to take jurisdiction as quickly as possible before less responsible groups drew the uniformed military into the maelstrom of Watergate.

  Senator Stennis conducted hearings in February 1974.2 The Armed Services Committee published a report clearing Admiral Moorer and putting the issue into context. The incident is recounted here because it is luridly symptomatic of the Watergate atmosphere that, while our Middle East policy hung in the balance, during the entire week of the first shuttle the media were bemused by pursuing lines of inquiry whose practical consequence could only be to undermine the authority of the negotiator. In fairness to the media, it must be noted that no such harm in fact developed. Still, it all certainly added to the mental and physical burdens of a fateful and frenetic week.

  Aswan: January 11–12

  THE itinerary for my trip — first to Egypt, then to Israel, and back again to Egypt — had been choreographed with an eye to the psychological necessities and the margins for maneuver available to each side. I did not want to arrive in Egypt with an “Israeli plan,” for that would make me appear as if I were Israel’s spokesman. General Gur’s premature presentation of the “model” at Geneva and its subsequent withdrawal could even be turned to advantage by making it appear as if cabinet divisions had been overcome by our intercession. Sadat correctly understood the Israeli situation — I had, after all, promised him a concrete plan for January — but it served his domestic purpose to exalt the American role. And because the actual scope for negotiation was likely to be limited, it was important to present the initial Israeli plan as something influenced by us and already taking account of Egyptian views (which had the added virtue of being true).

  After a brief refueling stop in Spain, we landed around 8:30 P.M. on Friday, January 11, on a blacked-out military airfield in the desert near Aswan. It was my first time in Upper Egypt. Despite the evening hour, one could see concrete shelters, antiaircraft weapons, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and troop concentrations. Aswan was an area of extraordinary sensitivity for Egypt; destruction of the High Dam could ruin the country’s economy for a long time to come. My own concerns were more self-centered. We knew that a squadron of North Korean fighter planes was stationed at Aswan. I wondered in what language the Egyptians communicated with their allies and whether the knowledge that the American Secretary of State was approaching would act as a deterrent or a spur to the Korean air force.

  Foreign Minister Fahmy greeted me with the by-now traditional kiss and embrace in the dark in front of the dingy terminal. I expected to begin the talks in the morning. Whenever possible I scheduled my overseas trips so that I would arrive too late for serious discussions; this gave me a night’s sleep to recover from jet lag. (In fact, I was never consciously aware of any disequilibrium, though those who had to deal with me might differ.) But Fahmy told me that Sadat was waiting, leaving me no choice.

  Aswan is a resort town, some 400 miles south of Cairo, whose mild climate drew Sadat to move his office there for several weeks in the winter months. At the first cataract of the Nile, it marks the limit of the Upper Egypt of Pharaonic times; beyond it lie Nubia and present-day Sudan. It is an oasis of serenity alongside that ribbon of water that brings life and hope to men and flood and nourishment to the countryside. The cultivation on both sides of the river is a narrow strip much less extensive than that in Lower Egypt, the fertile Nile Delta; occasionally it disappears altogether.

  Driving in from the airport, one traverses the original Aswan Dam, built by British engineers around the turn of the century. It is far less ambitious than the Soviet-constructed High Dam and less effective in controlling floods; on balance it is ecologically far less damaging, for it does not interfere with the life-giving silt that the High Dam has cut off, forcing Egypt to import large quantities of fertilizer and destroying fishing off Alexandria. Dhows can be seen on the river as it winds through the narrow strip of green. On both sides huge sand dunes stretch to a far horizon. The desert here creates a sameness that causes a wanderer without compass soon to lose all sense of direction. Not a sound can be heard, and in the stillness one feels strangely detached, as if transported to some distant, desolate planet.

  Sadat’s villa was an unprepossessing stone government rest house. One entered a small vestibule. Directly ahead was a study overlooking the Nile; the furniture was placed so that one faced the door and not the view. Sadat and I would usually sit on opposite ends of a sofa, parallel to the windows; there were some other easy chairs scattered about. (On this shuttle we usually met alone; in later negotiations, then–Vice President Hosni Mubarak was almost always present.) To the right of the study was a conference room; to the left a dining room.

  Sadat, wearing his military uniform, greeted me with a booming “Welcome” and drew me into the study. As was his wont, he went straight to the heart of the problem. He saw no sense, he said, in developing “principles” that would then be filled in at Geneva. Such a procedure provided too many opportunities for radical Arab opposition and Soviet mischief. And the effort to produce agreed principles could not be much less than that to finish the job. The laborious diplomacy since the October war had to be brought to some conclusion; the time had come to sum up all the exchanges, agreements in principle, and vague hints in a final document. Sadat therefore asked that I stay in the Middle East until the negotiations had either succeeded or failed. He would cooperate to the utmost. A disengagement agreement, in his view, was essential to turn a new page in Arab-American relations and give momentum to the peace process with Israel.

  To demonstrate his sincerity, Sadat gave himself a deadline. He had scheduled a trip around the Arab world starting the following weekend (January 18). He hoped to complete the agreement before then. In that case he would urge an end to the oil embargo as he made the rounds of various capitals. And Sadat offered to promote the lifting of the embargo in any manner that would publicly give Nixon the credit — showing that our domestic difficulties had not gone unnoticed in Egypt.

  The carrot he held out to us was in fact
much less significant than the deadline he gave himself. Normally, a negotiator who sets a time limit weakens his own position, unless the mediator in turn is convinced that the failure of the negotiation is more dangerous to his own country than to the parties — a highly unusual state of affairs. This was far from the case in the disengagement talks. So Sadat’s deadline guaranteed that he would go to the limit of possible concessions. We agreed that we would review the substance of the proposals over lunch the next day.

  At 11:00 P.M. I finally arrived at my lodging, the New Cataract Hotel, a high-rise modern structure located at a picturesque bend in the Nile. Nestled beside it was the old Cataract Hotel, a superb sandstone relic of a vanished time, with huge fans rotating from high ceilings; shuttered windows made the musty atmosphere appear slightly mysterious. It looked like the setting for an Agatha Christie novel — as indeed it had been — but it had now gone to seed along with the colonial pretensions of Great Britain, the aristocratic taste of whose ruling class it reflected. The New Cataract Hotel bespoke the values of a newer imperialism — that of the Soviet Union. Its only concession to aesthetics was the unavoidable view across the older namesake toward the Nile and beyond it the white marble mausoleum of the Aga Khan. Inside the hotel all is functional and shoddy, as if a concession to personal comfort would acknowledge an individualism that the Communist system is determined to transcend. Fahmy was keen to test our endurance by inviting my party and me to a late supper in the deserted dining room.

  On Saturday morning the Egyptians made a gesture to humaneness. They arranged some sight-seeing before I went back to negotiating. I saw at last the monumental High Dam in Aswan, violating one of my cardinal principles of sight-seeing when on official travel: Never visit in a foreign country what you would refuse to see in your own. This rule had enabled me to avoid steel mills, oil refineries, and other wonders of modern technology all with the common feature that their mechanism is as obscure as their architecture is uninteresting. But the Egyptians seemed to want to make some subtle political point by taking me there — whether to needle the United States or the Soviet Union was not clear. So I attempted to look fascinated as engineers explained the operation of the huge turbines and was in fact engrossed by the tremendous man-made lake forming behind the dam’s sullen gray walls.

  Next we visited a place I would have gone to see anywhere. We took boats to the spectacular Philae temples that were in the process of being rescued from the rising waters of Lake Nasser (as the area inundated by the barrier of the High Dam was called). We saw this engineering feat at an early stage. Two tremendous pylons that marked the entrance stood out from the swirling waters — defying the elements as until now they had withstood time. “Before we are through here,” I joked to an accompanying newsman, “we will see it all.” I was not far off the mark. During the negotiations of 1975, I paid another visit to Philae. A cofferdam was holding back the waters from the site, by then fully drained of water and dry in the summer sun. We toured the magnificent structures on the lake bottom before the process of moving them to higher ground had begun. Five years later the temples stood fully rebuilt and resplendent on a nearby island.

  At 11:00 A.M. I was back at Sadat’s villa. Over lunch we reviewed the state of the negotiations. Three sets of issues confronted us: the location of the forward lines of the two armies; the extent of the zones of limited armaments and the nature of the limitations; and assurances on such issues as Israeli passage through the straits of Bab el-Mandeb and Tiran as well as through the Suez Canal. There was also the Israeli shopping list of which Sadat was as yet mercifully ignorant, about an end to the state of belligerency, reopening the Canal, and rebuilding the Canal cities. (I held this for later; if we got hung up on the principal issue, these requests would only confuse matters. If we scored a breakthrough, it would ease the disposition of these problems.)

  Egyptian-Israeli Disengagement: Sadat’s Concept, December 1973 (approximation)

  Sadat had long since abandoned his scheme of a deep Israeli withdrawal two-thirds of the way across the Sinai. Still, he maintained his December position that Israel should vacate the strategic Mitla and Giddi passes. As for arms limitation, he now reduced the number of troops he wanted to retain on the east bank of the Canal from three divisions to an absolute “minimum” of one and a half divisions; he rejected the stringent restrictions on types of weapons that Israel proposed.

  I knew that none of this would be accepted by Israel (and so probably did Sadat, if his staff had given him summaries of the Israeli press in full cry since the leaking of the Dayan plan — but he, too, had a record to make). At this stage I saw no sense in arguing. In mediation I almost invariably transmitted any proposal about which either side felt strongly, thus reassuring the parties that their viewpoint would receive a fair hearing. Only when a deadlock seemed imminent would I interject my own ideas for possible compromises. As I said to Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon in Israel the next day (January 13):

  Let me explain exactly what my position has to be, for the preservation of my own position. I cannot be in Egypt as Israel’s lawyer. I cannot be in Egypt to start with one position and then say to him [Sadat], well, I will accept another one. The position that I will bring to him is the only position I will discuss. The only thing I can do is, acting as an interpreter of what I take to be your views, I can tell him if the line may be five kilometers more or less, or I can say to him it is a waste of time for me to bring it here. If he says, “I need two more battalions,” I cannot say I accept it. But I can say I will take it to Israel and see what they say. I, in no case, will go further than telling him that I will take certain things to Israel for your consideration. You will have the perfect freedom when I arrive to reject what I bring to you. I must do that, for my own sake, because I do not want to be in a position where I have plenipotentiary powers from you and say I agree to four battalions rather than three battalions. That puts me into a bad position because it makes me look vis-à-vis him that I am trying to strike the best possible bargain for Israel. So it would destroy my usefulness even with Egypt. So the use I am as your intermediary is to give him my interpretation of your thinking and steer him away from some things altogether; others I bring here and you can still reject them.

  The same principles applied, of course, when I brought Egyptian proposals to Israel. Meticulousness did not necessarily ease my task. Mediation tempts the parties to advance extreme proposals and to blame the mediator for insufficient effort if they are rejected or to use him as an excuse for their failure to put forward what they know cannot be achieved. The Israeli cabinet was especially skillful in using outside mediation as a foil for its own decision-making.

  While Sadat’s tone was firm, his insistence on a rapid settlement left little doubt that his ideas were not put forward on a peremptory basis. He affirmed that upon disengagement the blockade of Bab el-Mandeb would be lifted and cargoes bound to or from Israel would be able to transit the Suez Canal. He knew, said Sadat with a twinkle in his eyes, that Israel was demanding passage for its own ships, but after all, Dayan’s son-in-law, Colonel Dov Sion, had publicly stated that Israel would settle for cargoes. (Another opening position abandoned for a one-day publicity stunt, I thought with melancholy.) More helpfully, Sadat promised not to raise the Palestinian issue during the disengagement phase — including the Syrian one.

  Sadat grew so enthusiastic about our prospects that he began to speculate on the modalities of signing. For fear of some Soviet maneuver, he did not want even the signing in Geneva. He proposed Kilometer 101. And proudly he came up with an idea that would have the rare merit of driving both Nixon and the Soviets up the wall: that I attend the signing ceremony. As yet we were far from that point. But I had no intention of infuriating Nixon with another dramatic burst of publicity or humiliating Gromyko by a symbolic demonstration of what had become the reality: that the much-touted, much-debated “US–Soviet auspices” had turned into a unilateral American initiative.

 
; All this left Syria out of the process. Sadat was convinced that unless Egypt proceeded alone, President Hafez al-Asad would always find some pretext for delay or put forward impossible demands. A Sinai agreement would thus, in Sadat’s view, help Syria face its realities. Since Syria was reluctant to go to Geneva, Sadat offered to have Syrian officers join the Egyptian military delegation to create a forum for its disengagement talks. I was not sure that relations between the two allies would allow this or that Asad would accept a procedure for Syria different from that followed with Egypt. But these were technical matters almost irrelevant to the key issue. Sadat posed its essence as the choice of either stalemate for everybody, or initial progress for Egypt that would unlock the door for Syria and eventually to a general peace. And in that assessment he was right.

  The meeting with Sadat had lasted three and a half hours. At 4:00 P.M. on Saturday, January 12, I left Aswan for the two-hour flight to Israel to receive the final formulation of the Israeli plan.

  Jerusalem: January 12–13

  EN route, I learned that Golda would be unable to participate in the talks. She had come down with shingles, a nerve disease. (In Israel it was said that Golda suffered from so many illnesses that any Israeli medical student fortunate enough to examine her automatically received a medical degree.) If the negotiations failed, would Sadat ever believe that her illness had been genuine?

  Still, I did not really believe the negotiations would fail. Israel needed an agreement for its own reasons. It could not hold its enclave on the west bank of the Suez Canal without remaining mobilized, which meant a difficult burden for its economy. And it would face near-certain isolation in the alternative forum of Geneva. This became clear when I visited Golda in her small private home on a narrow Jerusalem street around 8:00 P.M., shortly after arriving. In America its modest-sized living room, tiny study, and small dining room would have been lower middle-class; here it housed the Prime Minister. Golda was weak and in pain but in fine sardonic form. She expressed her distrust of Sadat, her abiding suspicion of all things Egyptian and of any scheme involving Israeli withdrawals. But it was good-humored; it was to put me on notice not to get overconfident. It lacked a confrontational charge; we were clearly not in for one of the nerve-racking, legalistic, nitpicking sessions.