Sadat agreed with the analysis. However, he raised two considerations implying contradictory pulls on Egyptian diplomacy. He was determined to move toward peace and away from the Soviet Union at an accelerating pace. But he was honor bound to Syria, at least until it had recovered the prewar line. If Israel returned less than the newly conquered territories and Syria went to war, he would support his ally even though it would wreck the design of his entire policy. If Asad did achieve a full Israeli withdrawal to the prewar line, Sadat was prepared to tell the other Arab states that this was a major accomplishment. Even if no more than that was gained, he would praise American efforts — though he could not blame Asad for rejecting it; he would have to back Asad in that case. If, however, Israel was prepared to pull back a few more kilometers west, beyond the October 6 line, Asad’s achievement would be in a sense the equivalent of his own in the Sinai. Should Syria refuse such an offer, Sadat would be prepared publicly to blame Asad for breaking up the talks. And he would not join Syria in a war fought over such an issue.
Unfortunately, Sadat was not my Arab interlocutor in these negotiations. He could not move matters forward on the Golan with one of his bold strokes. All he was able to do was to put his prestige behind my efforts and thereby place obstacles in the way of any Syrian temptations to wreck the negotiations. Sending Gamasy ostentatiously to Damascus after my briefing signified that Sadat had heard enough to convince him that the peace process on the Golan Heights should continue. The corollary, of course, was that Asad would be in the wrong were he to break off the talks after my next visit to Damascus, even if I did not bring the Israeli plan that I had promised him. After lunch, Sadat preempted with another supportive move. He went public with his views even before I left Cairo. Meeting with the press on the veranda, Sadat called attention to the fact that he was wearing civilian clothes; it was a symbolic confirmation of the new era of peace. Aside from that, he expressed public appreciation for my efforts. Asked what advice he had for Asad, he said: “Trust Henry.”
Sadat went further; he publicly endorsed our strategy. Syria would have to go through stages similar to his experience with the Sinai agreement, he said. Lest Gromyko — who was arriving the next afternoon — get too insistent, Sadat cleverly gave the Soviets, too, a stake in a rapid conclusion of the Syrian disengagement talks. The second stage of a Geneva Conference, the President proclaimed, would have to wait for the completion of the Syrian-Israeli disengagement. Thus was the approaching Gromyko put on notice that any interference with the disengagement process meant the end as well of the Geneva Conference, the Soviets’ principal — indeed, only — forum for participation in Mideast diplomacy.
That evening at ten o’clock, Fahmy took my party to the Sheraton Hotel for a late dinner — but mainly to see Nagwa Fuad, the famed belly dancer. Looking like a somewhat ripe younger Rita Hayworth, she put on an awesome display justifying her reputation as the top dancer in the Middle East. Despite the late hour and their perennial complaints of exhaustion, my staff showed vigor and indeed ruthless dedication in elbowing their way to the edge of the dance floor. The journalists accompanying me for once found a subject worthy of their intellectual and cultural interests. Richard Valeriani of NBC wrote a detailed pool report describing in lavish and expressive prose Miss Fuad’s movements as well as the nervously dignified reactions of my staff.3
Our hosts were achieving several purposes in addition to the simple goal of showing their guests a good time. The appearance of the Egyptian Foreign Minister at a nightclub signified that there was no crisis, the peace process was on course. Even more deliciously, it lent itself to a little dig at Gromyko. He had been so incautious as to demand ahead of time the same treatment accorded to me. He would soon be invited to the top floor of the Sheraton Hotel along the Nile, just as I had, to see the undulating Miss Fuad. How he would explain such an excursion in his puritanical capital or to some of his equally puritanical radical friends in the Arab world was left to him. (I do not know if he went.)
For the next morning, Friday, March I, his Egyptian hosts had prepared for the arriving Soviet diplomat another demonstration that their priorities had changed. Sadat had decided that there was no better day for the announcement of the restoration of full diplomatic relations with the United States. He was so pleased that he jumped the gun of the agreed announcement by nearly two hours.
It was not a world-shaking event because practically speaking we had had normal relations — indeed, extraordinarily cordial and productive diplomatic links — ever since my first visit in November. Legally Hermann Eilts in Cairo still headed a US Interests Section attached to the Spanish Embassy and likewise Ashraf Ghorbal in Washington. But symbolically it meant a great deal, and my colleagues and I were deeply moved that Friday morning as the Stars and Stripes rose on the flagpole in front of our Embassy for the first time in nearly seven years. Fahmy and I made friendly little speeches at the flag-raising ceremony, which enabled the Egyptian media to eclipse Gromyko’s arrival with the report. Sadat could hardly have made his new course clearer.
One could almost feel sorry for Gromyko traveling around capitals that a few short months earlier had been bulwarks of Soviet influence. He had been shunted about in Damascus to fit my schedule. Now he was greeted in Cairo with a studied rebuff. These were Arab decisions, not American. “It is not in our interest to humiliate Gromyko,” I told Golda during a six-hour stop at the Guest House near Tel Aviv, where on Friday afternoon I briefed her and her colleagues on my visit in Cairo. It was true. We tried to reduce the Soviet strategic position in the Middle East but we had no interest in making its impotence obvious. In foreign affairs one usually must choose between posture and policy; the stronger one’s real position, the less one need rub in the other side’s discomfiture. It is rarely wise to inflame a setback with an insult. An important aspect of the art of diplomacy consists of doing what is necessary without producing extraneous motives for retaliation, leaving open the option of later cooperation on other issues.
The Israeli negotiating team was not concerned with such philosophical questions; it was still obsessed with cabinet-making. Golda hoped to present her new government to the Parliament in three days; if necessary she would organize a minority government. In the meantime, the Israeli negotiators wished me godspeed to Damascus. My assignment: to keep negotiations going without an Israeli plan to talk about.
Damascus Again: Asad Stays Cool
EN route to Damascus early Friday evening, I learned that the Watergate avalanche was moving relentlessly on. Scowcroft sent me a flash cable reporting that a federal grand jury had indicted Nixon Administration officials H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Robert Mardian, Gordon Strachan, and Washington attorney Kenneth Parkinson. I had never had much sympathy for Colson. I barely knew Mardian and was not conscious of having met Strachan and Parkinson. But I was moved by the enormity of the disaster that had befallen Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell. They had been colleagues in a difficult period, working sometimes competitively, more frequently cooperatively, for the success of an Administration in which they believed and for the good of their country. I could not bring myself to think of them as criminals then — nor for that matter now — though I had no doubt that there were sordid elements in the White House that undoubtedly engulfed them. Knowing their families, I could never share the contemporary outrage at them, which occasionally struck me as pharisaical in its hypocrisy.
Their tragedy underlined the fact that the Administration quite literally could not afford to add a single foreign setback to its domestic debacles. This was not because it would weaken Nixon further — by then I saw no way he would be able to restore his authority. Rather, once our credibility in foreign policy was destroyed, the gossamer illusion by which he had maintained authority abroad in the absence of it at home would be fatally rent, tempting challenges and inviting crises that we would be in a poor condition to overcome.
My meeting with Hafez al-Asad on th
e evening of March 1 therefore was one of those encounters whose failure could do enormous damage even though its success would not be measurable; indeed, the definition of success would be the absence of failure, the admission ticket to a negotiation guaranteed to be long and nerve-racking. By 7:30 P.M. I found myself alone again with Asad in his heavily curtained sitting room. This time each of us had only one aide (mine was Roy Atherton, though Isa Sabbagh, as always, acted as interpreter). We met for four hours, following the pattern that had become almost a ritual. Despite the stakes involved, we generally spent the first hour on subjects having nothing to do with the issue at hand but helpful in enabling each of us to gauge the other’s cast of mind. We began with banter about the suffering of staff members working for me, the relative effectiveness of prepared as against extemporaneous speeches, and the relationship between what arguments appeal to a crowd and what makes a good State document. We graduated from there to a discussion of Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy; I explained my view that Roosevelt was a great leader whose grasp of geopolitical realities was less sure than his feel for the idealistic values of America. FDR had not understood, I said, that one of his problems was to conduct the war so as to have the best possible bargaining position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union afterward. Asad wanted to know whether I was rectifying that error in the conduct of our Mideast diplomacy. I was evasive. We were not anti-Soviet in the Middle East, I said (remembering that he must report something to his ally); we sought no clients (to ease his fears and Boumedienne’s about American “imperialism”); our hope was that Arab states would pursue a policy independent of the Soviet Union (which, of course, as far as Syria was concerned, would be a major step toward us). Asad affirmed that this was his goal as well; there were no obstacles to improved relations with the United States unless the United States was adamant in its support of Israeli occupation of Syrian territory.
It was the first time in an hour that disengagement came to be raised: “When the disengagement agreement is signed,” said Asad simply, “we could raise the level of our representatives. . . .” It was impossible not to notice that he had said “when” and not “if.”
Still, the Syrian President was in no hurry to plunge into substance. He talked about Gromyko. Gromyko had been in the Syrian capital, he said, for nearly twenty-four hours before Asad had received him. (The longest I had had to wait was a few hours and then only because Asad was at a State dinner.) In foreign policy, small gestures often define important priorities.
If Asad’s account of the meeting was accurate, Gromyko had received thin gruel during his visit. Asad had told Gromyko little that could not be read in the newspapers. He had said nothing about a disengagement line, because he did not want to be committed in the eyes of the Soviets to a posture of intransigence that might blow up the negotiation. Later on in our conversation, he urged me to be sure not to tell the Soviets what my ideas were on that delicate subject. Apparently he wanted no premature pressure. And what, I asked, would happen when Gromyko reappeared in Damascus on his trip back from Cairo, as had just been announced? Asad saw no problem: He and Gromyko had also discussed bilateral issues, including economic relations; when Gromyko returned, the Soviet Foreign Minister would take up these matters with other Syrian officials. Asad also assured me he would find a way to prevent Gromyko from being present in Damascus when I came back for the final phase of negotiations.
Shuttle diplomacy works only if the diplomat undertaking it has an object that all parties want and cannot get without him. Gromyko was far from being in that position. He could contribute nothing to what was most on the minds of his Arab allies. His trip was for Soviet prestige and amour propre — rarely a negotiable currency in international affairs. It was a symptom of Soviet insecurity, not a demonstration of mastery over events.
The Soviet Union had placed itself into that unpromising position by its own heavy-handedness. It had had a free run in the key countries of the Arab world ever since 1967. Even we had been forced to accept its presumed special influence with its clients, appealing to it for support at crucial moments such as the crisis of 1970 and the October war. It must have been galling for Gromyko to be relegated so visibly to a secondary role, but the steps he took to remedy it made his situation worse. For if the Soviet Union had been willing to contribute to a solution, or if it had been less concerned with appearances, it would have understood that our current preeminence was tactical. But the Soviets’ insecurity is such that they could not bear even the appearance of declining influence, and in railing against the inevitable weakened their position beyond necessity.
After more time spent on such musings, and about an hour and a half into the discussions, with my nerves becoming slightly frayed, I finally suggested, “if the President is willing, perhaps we can discuss disengagement.”
Asad was willing to go no further than to note that he had received a personal briefing about my visit to Cairo from General Gamasy. Whether he was engaging in psychological warfare or wanted to prolong the conversation to impress outsiders, he thought he needed to reciprocate my tutorial on geopolitics with a lecture on the structure of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He stressed that Fatah, the group headed by Yasir Arafat, was only one faction; the Syrian-dominated Saiqa was of equal importance. Though smaller in numbers it was better trained; we should establish contact with it. This led naturally to further reminiscences of the Jordan crisis of 1970.
Finally, after another twenty minutes of chitchat, Asad deigned to turn to the subject of my visit. Of course, neither the media nor other outside observers knew this. They were left to assume of our lengthy meetings that we were either locked in mortal struggle or making major progress. Asad said that Gamasy’s visit to Damascus had been disturbing — though it was not easy to tell whether it was the presence of an Egyptian official or the substance of the communication that was upsetting him. At any rate, the Egyptian message had clearly served the minimum purpose of preparing the ground psychologically. Asad did not blow up at the feared moment when I told him that I had not found the Israeli ideas worth presenting and had brought no plan with me. Rather than submit a proposal that could not serve as a basis for discussion, I urged, we should start the process with a visit of an Israeli negotiator to Washington. A Syrian emissary should come next, provided, I needled, that Asad had enough confidence in someone to entrust him with his mission. In other words, I was saying that no plan was better than the Israeli plan. Asad sputtered about Israeli unreasonableness fostered by American support. He would fight for Syrian territory, if necessary alone. But when the long harangue — delivered without emotion, clearly for the record — was over, he accepted my proposal. He may have been relieved not to have to take a position on an Israeli plan right on the spot. This would enable him to avoid briefing Gromyko and give him more time to build his own consensus.
The next hour was consumed by the new wrinkle Asad managed to add to every procedural discussion. Most statesmen enter a negotiation in order to crystallize a solution; Asad sought a guarantee of the result before he would begin negotiating. He now wanted to make a side-deal on the line to which Israeli forces would retreat. Having just experienced Israeli hesitations to put forward any line at all, it would have been foolhardy to encourage Asad’s ambitious one. But Asad was as persistent as his idea — reflecting his domestic risks — was unfulfillable. At one point I exclaimed: “You are such a tenacious negotiator that our nerves could not stand having you as an opponent all the time.” The exchange gave me an opportunity to make clear to Asad that even the minimum line he had previously given me (returning half of the Golan Heights) was not attainable; Israel would not move any of its settlements for a mere disengagement scheme. The maximum that was attainable was a bit beyond the prewar line but short of the settlements. When Asad agreed to continue the process I had outlined, the parameters of the disengagement negotiation were in effect established — though I knew that even this change would require bruising negotiations.
/> It remained only to tidy up the public presentation. Asad wanted it said that he, not I, had rejected Israel’s “ideas” — a point helpful to both of us domestically. We settled on the following press line:
A. [The] Secretary brought Israeli ideas to Damascus for discussion with President Asad. Syria did not accept [the] Israeli ideas and provided some ideas of its own. The discussions will continue in Washington.
B. Israel has agreed to send a senior representative to Washington in the next two weeks or so for further discussions there. Thereafter, Syria is prepared to send senior representatives to Washington if necessary to continue discussion with the Secretary.
C. We are hopeful about the evolution of the process we are engaged in and will make every effort to bring the discussions to a successful conclusion.
We had achieved our immediate objective. Negotiations between Syria and Israel were started according to a procedure that we dominated and that would not continue unless the oil embargo was lifted. Syria agreed to the public expression of “hope” about the prospects. I informed Jerusalem and Cairo. I would take care of briefings in Riyadh and Amman personally.
Riyadh
RIYADH on Saturday, March 2, was relaxed as it had not been during my previous two visits. I had decided to stick to the pose of taking it for granted that the oil embargo would be lifted at the next meeting of the oil ministers; therefore, the subject required no lengthy discussion. Nor was it necessary to debate a great deal about the Golan disengagement. A procedure accepted in Damascus would not be challenged in Riyadh; it was totally against Saudi policy to object to a decision for peace made by one of the radical Arab countries.
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