Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Mount Hermon presented yet another problem. It is really a mountain range paralleling the frontier with Lebanon and overlooking the Syrian plain, including Damascus. Since the outbreak of the October war, Israel had occupied five positions near its summit. Syria first insisted on having them returned to its control; at most, Israel would give them only to the UN. It was not a trivial issue, for it involved with respect to Damascus the same issues as the western hills about Quneitra. Israel from there would be able to observe the entire Damascus plain. At the same time, in Syrian hands they would permit surveillance of all the Israeli-occupied Golan.

  The most intractable issue, however, proved to be Israeli insistence that Asad promise to prevent Palestinian terrorist raids across the line of separation. Ironically, unlike so much of the contention, this issue was more theoretical than practical. Asad had never encouraged, or for that matter permitted, guerrilla raids from Syrian territory. It was not in the Syrian character to permit others to involve them in risky ventures they could not control. But giving an assurance to that effect was something else again. Sadat had had no problem with it because there were no fedayeen in Egypt and because the disengagement line was over 100 miles from Israel’s borders. But the drive into Damascus from the airport past Palestinian refugee camps made vivid the importance of the issue in Syrian political life. No Syrian leader could afford publicly to disavow the Palestinians’ cause even as he sought to restrict their impact on Syrian politics and to influence PLO policy through Saiqa, the Palestinian element that Damascus controlled. Nor was the Israeli position without its elements of contradiction. Refusing an agreement would not end the guerrilla threat but compound it with the prospect of a military confrontation.

  In solving these various remaining issues I would get little help from other Arab leaders. They had been willing to encourage a compromise over the line of separation because they recognized that it involved a major, otherwise unattainable, retreat of Israeli forces from the salient. But except for Sadat, they would find the limitation of forces too technical and the Palestinian issue too deadly; their response was bound to be to side with Asad. So while I kept the key Arab leaders generally briefed, I did not ask for their support. Nor was there enough time left for a side trip even to Cairo to explain the various deadlocks.

  And the situation in Washington was deteriorating. As early as May 17, James Reston in the New York Times had ascribed the prolonged shuttle to my desire to stay out of the Watergate battles at home:

  Mr. Kissinger is the key figure in this Cabinet question. He is staying out of the Watergate and impeachment battles. One suspects he may even be prolonging his shuttle diplomacy in order to avoid the even more complicated and poisonous controversies of Washington.

  It was untrue, but by May 22 this had become a general theme taken up by both the CBS and NBC television correspondents on my shuttle.

  If some of the media were eager to get me home — or to criticize my prolonged absence — the White House suddenly decided that it had to keep me in the Middle East as a way of demonstrating its control of the negotiations. On May 18, the day of the breakthrough on the line of separation, the White House press office let it be known that the President had asked me to stay in the area as long as necessary. This was a near-disaster. My most effective means of putting pressure on both Israel and Syria was to threaten that I would leave. On May 21, after I had in fact given both sides an ultimatum that negotiations had to be completed by Friday, May 24, Nixon’s press aides, with him in Key Biscayne, mindlessly repeated the original statement. It was not even intended to contradict me; it was simply the most convenient way to show Presidential direction of the negotiations. I cabled an urgent warning to Scowcroft:

  Please get the press people under tighter control. I have told both parties here that I am leaving on Friday in order to put heat on the negotiations. . . . It seems to me that if the President wants to issue me instructions, there are far better ways to do it than through the press.

  In any event, I am leaving this weekend having reached, I am convinced, the limit of what can be done on this trip. We will succeed or fail in the next 48 hours.

  Another sign of Washington restlessness was the obsession with planning a Presidential trip to the Middle East. I received innumerable White House instructions to explore such a prospect with my hosts. I did so at some cost, because it convinced the parties that the United States desperately needed a settlement, tempting them to stall. Such a trip clearly presupposed a successful shuttle; failure would have the President in the area with our mediation disintegrating and tensions rising. As the shuttle dragged on, the planned date for the Presidential journey necessarily kept being postponed, only to multiply the number of insistent White House directives urging me to stay on to finish the job.

  All this time, I had as well to conduct the other business of the Department of State. Luckily it was a quiescent period. In the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and Britain, new governments were in the process of taking over and they welcomed a respite in order to get their bearings. China was wishing our diplomacy well; it would not deliberately distract us from our main challenge. The Soviet Union, while unhappy about my solo efforts, did not choose to risk detente by being visibly obstructive — especially with the imminence of another Presidential visit to Moscow. And the developing countries had temporarily sated their yearning for center stage by an orgy of rhetoric at the Sixth Special Session of the UN General Assembly in April.

  Still, a calm period for a Secretary of State is a relative term. Every day, reams of cables descended on my traveling caravan requiring some sort of action. My diligent State Department staff, on the plane and in Washington, kept the paper flowing in both directions. I made key decisions on a myriad of issues. The Atlantic Declaration was at last being finished; I had already had two important gatherings with Latin American foreign ministers to start a valued new dialogue with our hemispheric neighbors. There was a point beyond which it would not be possible to conduct my office out of my briefcase.

  In these hectic conditions I resumed my role as itinerant psychiatrist. Dayan’s suggestion, drawn from the Sinai negotiations — that the heavy weapons of each side should be placed where they could not reach the frontline of the opponent — made unexceptionable military sense. It was less persuasive to the President of Syria, who saw it as a means to protect Israeli settlements on Syrian soil and who had visions of being asked to move his air defense behind Damascus. Asad was eloquent in expounding the requirements of Syrian sovereignty and dignity. But the alternative he faced was not fully armed Syrian forces in front of Damascus but the collapse of the agreement, leaving an unrestricted number of Israeli forces a short distance from his capital.

  And so with anguish and chagrin, and without grace, the two adversaries began to grapple with harsh detail. My mediation consisted of explaining each side’s thinking to the other, occasionally coming forward with a formula to break a deadlock.

  In the final days, a regular schedule developed. I would meet with the Israeli negotiating team in the morning in Jerusalem. Around noon my motorcade would depart for Ben-Gurion Airport an hour away. Early in the afternoon I would arrive in Damascus. After a meeting with Asad — usually lasting several hours — I returned to Israel, where I would generally meet again with the Israeli negotiating team. Between May 20 and May 25 alone, I logged some twenty hours in conversations with the Israelis; some thirty hours in talks with the Syrians. There was no night when I retired before 3:00 A.M. And my associates worked even longer hours. Somehow by Saturday evening, May 25, we were again close to an agreement — so close, in fact, that I said: “If it fails now, nobody will be able to explain how it happened.”

  Except through psychological exhaustion. Both sides had stripped themselves to the bone. They had agreed on the numbers of troops and types of equipment in a first zone of limited armaments ten kilometers from each side’s forward position. A “United States proposal” signed by both sides wou
ld spell these out. Asad was reluctant to commit himself in an agreement with Israel to limit his ground forces in front of Damascus in a second zone ten to twenty kilometers in depth, but he was willing to have me write a letter of his intentions, provided we could agree on what they were. The “United States proposal” would also spell out the arms limitations in the ten- to twenty-kilometer belt: No artillery with a range of more than twenty kilometers would be introduced there and no surface-to-air missiles would be deployed closer than twenty-five kilometers to the forward line.

  What remained to be settled was the exact location of the line from which all these distances would be measured. Asad remained adamantly opposed to pulling back the forward Syrian military line (the red line) so as to leave exposed villages that had previously enjoyed Syrian military protection; Israel would not consider any other possibility. With respect to the UN presence, a concept was emerging that combined the structure of the UN Emergency Force in Egypt with the nomenclature that had been traditional on the Golan since 1967. Asad did not want a “force” but was willing to accept “observers.” Golda rejected observers and insisted on a force. What could be more natural than to create a hybrid called the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force whose function or charter no one could possibly deduce from its title? Asad was still haggling about replacing the word “force” with “organization,” but I did not think he would collapse the negotiation over it. The number of UN personnel was still seriously disputed. And the Syrians remained unwilling to give any formal assurances about paramilitary Palestinian activity.

  Meanwhile, too, the Soviets had become active again. Whether because he thought an agreement was imminent or because he anticipated failure, or perhaps because he wanted to deal with either contingency, Gromyko had again announced himself for Damascus. I gave Asad this reaction:

  One, I will not see Gromyko in Damascus; two, I will not come to Damascus if Gromyko is in Damascus; three, except for that, you are a sovereign country and I will not tell you what to do so long as my other two points are understood. What you do with Gromyko is up to you.

  By May 26 it was becoming clearly incompatible with my position as Secretary of State to remain absent from the United States any longer. As it was, no Secretary of State had ever been abroad for such an uninterrupted period. Gromyko was now scheduled to arrive in Damascus on May 27 — my birthday. I could have wished myself a better present. My next visit to Damascus would really have to be my last trip.

  The Final Phase: Damascus, Another Crisis

  ON Sunday, May 26, the twenty-ninth day of the shuttle, both parties were once again at a point they dreaded but did not know how to transcend. They knew that relatively minor concessions now would clinch the final agreement. Yet every move had been wrung from reluctant souls. They had come this far because someone — now the Israelis, now the Syrians — recoiled at the specter of a world without an agreement and yet neither side had been able to rise to a genuine vision of peace. The American negotiators, themselves spent physically or emotionally, were being asked by both leaders for irreconcilable private assurances so as to provide a pretext for a final concession. And time would not ease the problem. If we failed when so close, much more difficult decisions would be required to resume, and the whole area was more likely to drift to explosion rather than to reconciliation. If someone jumps across an abyss, he falls as surely if he misses by an inch as by a yard.

  Before my departure for Damascus, Golda scheduled a ceremonial lunch on Sunday honoring me in the appropriately named Blue Room at the King David Hotel. The start had to be delayed several times because my talks with the Israeli negotiating team ran on; it finally took place at 3:00 P.M. We hungrily gulped down our food because there was not much time left before we had to rush to the airport to make our scheduled arrival in Damascus. There was an atmosphere of near-despair that we would probably fail so close to our goal and yet of hope that all the sacrifices that had been made must not prove futile when success was almost palpable. Golda delivered a very moving speech about how my shuttle had helped Israel’s understanding of the Arabs, which was, after all, the key intangible:

  I think he has given us a lesson: that it is not enough to be right and to be convinced that one is right; that we know. But in order to reach a point where we can really sit together with the people in our area, we must also have some understanding not to accept things that are not right but to at least understand them. I think he’s gotten to know us; he’s shown an awful lot of patience with us — hours and hours and hours. . . . No matter what happens, you and all of you who will leave this area will know there is nothing that is more desirable to every Israeli, to every man, woman, and child in this country; that is the simple thing of peace. Getting up in the morning and being sure that nobody died because he was attacked by somebody across the border. We don’t want them to die; we don’t want them to kill; we don’t want them to shoot at anybody else. When we get peace in this area, Dr. Kissinger, without any exaggeration, I think you will be first on the list, after the Israelis, that will have made this possible because you understood, because you wanted peace, because you know that is the thing that we want. We hope it will come. I am sure someday it will come. But if you can possibly make it come while I’m still around, I’ll be doubly thankful to you.

  I replied:

  As we have embarked on this effort, sometimes thinking that it would fail, sometimes making progress, we have all been determined that whether we succeed on this particular effort or not, the course on which we embark must succeed, that peace must be brought to this area, and that all of us will make the greatest effort to realize what we have started. . . . Madame Prime Minister, you represent this generation that came to this country when it was only a dream, and you have done what is given to very few — to bring a people to a country, to make the country a state, and to turn the state into a home. All of us who have had the privilege of working with you have been inspired by your greatness as a human being as well as by your leadership of your country. . . . We join you in your hope for a peace that will last, in which children can guard their innocence and all the men can turn to tasks of construction.

  If emotion could fuel diplomacy, we would have left at 4:30 for the climactic meeting in Damascus certain of a breakthrough. But emotion can supply only the endurance to persist through the tedium by which diplomacy inches forward, adjusting nuances along the way. I had sent Asad a letter from Israel warning that this would be irrevocably my last visit to Damascus.

  When I arrived, the Syrian President showed that he was not to be bluffed. He informed me that since I had announced my departure for the next morning, he had accepted Gromyko’s visit starting at noon. But he also showed the limits of the Syrian-Soviet relationship. Told that this seemed to cut matters rather closely, he turned to an aide and coolly delayed the arrival of the Foreign Minister of his principal armorer until ten o’clock in the evening. Still, that left us a little more than twenty-four hours to finish.

  Two sessions with Asad followed that Sunday night, May 26, one from 9:00 P.M. to midnight with a larger group of advisers, including on his side the Defense Minister, the Air Force Chief of Staff, Shihabi, and Khaddam; then from 12:15 to 2:30 A.M., as I entered the day of my birth, Asad and I dined alone with only an aide present while Khaddam and Joe Sisco reviewed the texts of the various documents. But the result was the same in both meetings. Asad was implacable, haggling endlessly about the Syrian forward line (the red line), the force limits, the size of the UN contingent, and the Palestinians. Asad also sought to extract a written assurance to the effect that the United States would support Israel’s ultimate return to the 1967 borders. I could go no further than to promise continued American involvement in the peace process. Simultaneously, Sisco in his meeting with Khaddam encountered a stone wall.

  I met with Sisco and my other associates between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. in the state guest house. Somberly, feeling drained, we concluded that the shuttle had failed.
I would turn the meeting scheduled with Asad in the morning into a courtesy farewell call.

  My associates were kind enough to see that my birthday was marked by something less bleak than this. Tom Scotes gave me a surprise birthday party in the morning with a cake of epic proportions. The press contingent presented me with a poster parodying an airline advertisement: “I am Henry, Fly Me to Damascus.”

  My staff, by this time a bit demented from fatigue, had come up with a birthday present of its own. I had jocularly criticized them a month earlier when Ron Ziegler claimed that a letter referring to Nixon had been washed up in a bottle on an island in the Bahamas where he had spent a weekend. “Why can’t you do something like this for me?” I asked Robert McCloskey, who acted as supervisor of press relations, Congressional relations, and any other subject requiring wise and unflappable counsel. He had taken my yearning to heart and had induced some Israelis skillful in faking antiquities to produce a smallish flat brown rock bearing the carved inscription in Hebrew: “HAK was here — 5683V — Quneitra.” The theory was that I was a reincarnation of an early ruler of the area; only this could explain my obsession with every street, hill, and rock of the provincial capital of the Golan. An accompanying press release spelled all this out. At the last moment McCloskey’s nerve failed him, or on my birthday he thought — wisely — the mood was not right. He handed the rock to me with great flourish in a ceremony on the aircraft three days later on the way back home.