So we repaired to Asad’s small dining room, which had the same cocoonlike quality as his other chambers. The mood was relaxed and genial as never before. I mentioned that Gromyko had told me of a Siberian bird he hunted which had to be lured by imitating its mating call. I asked whether Gromyko had ever given him the privilege of hearing it. “He only sings it in your presence,” cracked Asad. I suggested that Gromyko might do it in lieu of a departure statement.
Asad twitted me about being afraid to let Sisco come alone to Damascus. It was not his failure that I feared, I rejoined, but his success. I then sarcastically paid tribute to the inspiration of the UN force:
KISSINGER: It’s an epic poem. [Laughter.] He got it from the Defense Minister. As long as this group lives, it will know it has done something that has not been done in 6,000 years of recorded history: There has never been an organization called UNDOF. [Laughter.]
ASAD: These were my sentiments yesterday.
KISSINGER: I’ve never heard the Defense Minister’s poetry.
SHIHABI: I have; the difference in comprehension is the same. [Laughter.]
Whereupon the Defense Minister recited a long poem in nonsense Arabic that amused our Syrian hosts hugely.
After an hour of this we returned to the conference room to check the maps yet once more. The Army Chief of Staff had joined us as we went one last time through all the hills and streets that had so possessed us for nearly five weeks. Finally, we agreed on a procedure for announcing the agreement — which we hoped to do by 7:00 P.M. Syrian time the next day. Signature was to take place on Friday (May 31).
At midnight, I finally called on Andrei Gromyko in a state guest house unfamiliar to me. It was a demeaning position for the Soviet Foreign Minister, but he carried it off with aplomb. Unless Gromyko was a better actor than I thought possible, he knew next to nothing about the disengagement negotiations, which we discussed for less than ten minutes. The only subject he seemed vaguely informed on was Syria’s refusal to undertake formal obligations to restrain the guerrillas. Predictably, Gromyko supported the Syrian view, but without any passion. He acted more like a professor analyzing a diplomatic event far removed in time than like the foreign minister of a superpower. There were some boilerplate exchanges about the European Security Conference and SALT, and after barely half an hour Khaddam collected me to take me to the airport.
In the car Khaddam promised once again that there would be no Syrian reaction to a unilateral American statement of our attitude toward guerrilla attacks. Despite Gromyko’s presence in Damascus, Khaddam preferred that the formal notification of Moscow about the agreement be made from Washington. The reason seemed inscrutable to me unless it reflected perversity. He hoped the announcement of the accord could be moved up to 5:00 P.M.
In Israel, my return very early Wednesday morning, May 29, was the start of another all-night session — beginning immediately, at 2:10 A.M. Golda informed me that Rabin had succeeded in forming a cabinet. He would present it to the Parliament on Sunday, June 2; Friday, May 31, would be her last day in office. She showed no emotion at the end of her public career. I thought I detected a sense of relief that she would be the Prime Minister who brought back the last Israeli prisoners from a war for which she would never cease blaming herself, and that she could preside over a cease-fire on the Golan Heights.
But neither the imminence of leaving office nor the yearning to end her career on a high note induced any flagging of vigilance. In the quiet of the early morning hours, I met with her alone and reviewed the discussions I had had with Asad. We agreed that Golda could make a statement to her Parliament on the subject of guerrilla attacks, which after several drafts emerged in the Knesset debate in this form:
As for the prevention of terrorist activities, the United States has informed us of its position on that first paragraph of the agreement, and this is: “Raids by armed groups or individuals across the demarcation line are contrary to the cease-fire. Israel, in its exercise of its right of self-defense, may act to prevent such actions by all available means. The United States would not consider such actions by Israel as violations of the cease-fire, and will support them politically.”
I assume that the United States would not have made such a declaration to us had it not had a solid foundation for doing so, and I make this statement public with the knowledge of the United States.
There was no Syrian response.
Golda Meir, who had fought bitterly for every square inch and had scanned every escape clause, was resting her case on an act of faith. It was symbolic that in the end both of these leaders, so suspicious of each other, would end up by affirming the reality of intangibles.
From 2:45 A.M. to 4:00 A.M., I met with the full Israeli negotiating team. A short while later, the cabinet met again and approved the agreement.
There was no time for a letdown. We had to work frantically to complete all documents, send them to Damascus (not an easy matter as they had to be routed through Washington), and set up the arrangements for the various procedures such as announcement and signing. There was a last-minute hitch when the Syrians suddenly asked for a five-hour delay of the announcement and a delay of the signing from May 31 to June 2 — which would put it past the end of Mrs. Meir’s term of office and require another approval by the new cabinet. I suspected Gromyko’s fine hand at work. In the event, after a series of rather strong messages, Asad returned to the original schedule.
Finally, at 1:00 P.M. Washington time that Wednesday, May 29 (7:00 P.M. in Jerusalem, 8:00 P.M. in Damascus), President Nixon read the following statement in the White House briefing room:
The discussions conducted by United States Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger with Syria and Israel have led to an agreement on the disengagement of Syrian and Israeli forces. The agreement will be signed by Syrian and Israeli military representatives in the Egyptian-Israeli Military Working Group of the Geneva Conference on Friday — this Friday — May 31.VI
That evening Golda gave a reception in the Spartan conference room of her office. All the cabinet was there, as well as leaders of the Parliament. Exhaustion was etched on all the faces, and an immense relief. Were these tired men and women the same people who had bargained so obstinately and had seemed so ready to risk everything? Did the relief indicate that they had really dreaded the consequences of the tension that they seemed so ready to court? Probably both questions must be answered in the affirmative. Israel’s leaders were at the end of their psychic resources after eight months of nearly unending crises. They did not give in to their fears and they did not dare to trust in their hopes, and so they had moved crab wise, carefully, not excessively generously, but when all was said and done unequivocally toward agreement.
Golda was almost too tired to speak, but what she said was imbued with the great dream of a people that had only known war:
There is no doubt that this is a great evening, an evening that spells great efforts, a lot of soul-searching, and searching possibilities that maybe some time ago seemed to be impossible.
This is a day that we hope will be a day that will not only bring immediate quiet on our northern borders and that Syrian mothers, Israeli mothers, Syrian young wives, Israeli young wives, children on both sides of the border can go to sleep at night without terror, dreams of who knows — if their dear one is alive today, will he be alive again on the next day? This is what we hope for our people and for our neighbors, and we hope that this goes well. We pray that it should, that this is a beginning for a real and lasting peace with all our neighbors and all our borders. Again, for the sake of the people on both sides of the border.
Israel had come a long way when its Prime Minister could speak feelingly of the hopes and dreams of the people of Syria as well as those of the people of Israel.
I uttered a few banalities, to the effect that we would never forget the experience of the past month and the mood of its culmination. And then I kissed Golda on the cheek. But Golda would not tolerate sentimentality fo
r long. Mindful — and slightly resentful — of my embraces of Arab leaders, she said: “I have been afraid you only kissed men.”
The next day, Abba Eban brought me to the airport and spoke nostalgically:
The Secretary will not be coming back tonight. Now that is something that I’m capable of grasping intellectually, but not emotionally. The experience of the daily meetings had become almost part of our lives.
And then he summed up the psychological significance of the past five weeks: We had gone to the point of despair and then beyond it through an act of will and faith in peace.
There was a brief stop in Cairo to call on the father of disengagement, Anwar Sadat. We met at the President’s residence in the Giza section of Cairo, first alone, then with advisers. Sadat was immensely relieved. For nearly six months he had endured Arab taunts because he had made a separate disengagement agreement in January. But without his courage, stalemate would have been certain on both fronts. The thirty-four-day ordeal of the Syrian shuttle showed what would have happened if the Sinai and Golan negotiations had been attempted simultaneously. Deadlock would have been inevitable, another explosion highly probable. The Third Army could not have sat in the desert all that time without efforts to free it. Asad would have had great difficulty obtaining domestic support for his step toward peace. Sadat had made possible the first withdrawal of Israeli forces in which Arab diplomacy played an important role.
But he was already thinking of the future. The road was now open to larger steps toward peace and to acceleration of the shift of his diplomacy toward Washington. He was looking forward to Nixon’s imminent visit to symbolize Egypt’s confidence in America. We decided to announce the formation of a joint commission of economic, scientific, and cultural cooperation. And we spoke in the confidence and affection that had grown up between us of next steps that might be taken on the various Arab fronts. Sadat asked whether Rabin had Golda’s guts; I complimented him on asking the significant question, not the superficial one of whether he was a hawk or a dove. Sadat wanted Rabin to have enough time to get “on his legs”; he was wise enough to understand that only patience would get Israel over its psychological hurdles and thus paradoxically speed the peace process. And Sadat needed the time, too, to build “a new image for America” in the Arab world. He called me a “magician”; I said he had made me a magician. Which was true. He had changed reality; I had only helped the two sides to begin walking down the path that he had opened.
If the Syrian shuttle was a grueling experience, it also represented a process of maturing. Sinai disengagement had been all innocence: huge obstacles overcome; a great man to keep the focus on essentials; a rapid conclusion; an almost perfect symmetry between aspiration and achievement. But it was not the real world, at least of the Middle East with its clash of profound passions and principles. On the Golan Heights, there was no room for the acts of grace by which Sadat ennobled the peace process and made appear inconsequential the abstruse debates that for decades had substituted for real dialogue. Neither side had that scope; concession had to be wrested from their very souls. The negotiation took the form of an endless series of haggles but these were all way stations on a journey through spiritual necessities. At every critical point, the two sides went to the edge of the abyss that bespoke renewed conflict. And then they drew back; they could not bring themselves to give up their first chance for peace. So the long shuttle produced an accord that, with all its inherent complexity, fragility, and mistrust, has endured without significant challenge for nearly a decade. There have been no serious complaints of violations; through crises in Lebanon there has been no moment when the accord on the Golan seemed in jeopardy. In the eight years since the agreement was signed, no event has occurred to mar the judgment I made about guerrilla action late at night in Asad’s somber sitting room. So the acts of faith that culminated it proved justified.VII
The significance of the Golan disengagement was not all or even primarily psychological. On the political plane, it marked a major breakthrough. If radical Syria could sign an agreement with Israel, there were no ideological obstacles to peace talks with any other Arab state. During the summer, a procession of foreign ministers from all over the Middle East descended on Washington to divine our policies, symbolizing — not by accident — the shrinking of the Soviet role in the area. Our plan was to take at least two more partial steps before attempting more comprehensive goals: We would seek to bring Jordan and Israel together in a serious negotiation over the West Bank. And we knew further steps were possible in the Sinai, trading additional Israeli withdrawals for political steps toward peace. At the end of the Syrian shuttle we had not yet decided which course to follow first; but the Syrian disengagement was a prerequisite for either. Somewhere along the line we would be in a position to move forward on several fronts simultaneously. Even Syria was counting on us to continue the negotiating process. After a step with Jordan and another Egyptian accord, we intended to explore the conditions for an end to the state of belligerency on all fronts.
Thus, the Syrian shuttle seemed to us the watershed between the world of crisis ushered in by the October war and the world of peace toward which we were striving. How much a country racked by constitutional crisis could attempt and achieve was unclear; but we did not feel we were at the end of the road. On the contrary. We planned to proceed — and we did. And in the process, we fervently hoped, a moment would be reached when all the nations of the area would take that step toward reconciliation to which their sacrifices have long since entitled them.
* * *
I. At the time, the opposition Likud Party, led by Menachem Begin, opposed even this. Later, in office, Begin adopted the earlier Labour position and renamed it “autonomy.”
II. In 1981, retired from the military, he was elected to the Parliament and began a promising political career.
III. The Israeli Air Force had attacked Palestinian targets in Lebanon on May 16 as retaliation for the Ma’alot attack. A limited ground assault followed the next day.
IV. The hardy survivors of the Syrian shuttle were Richard Valeriani of NBC, Marvin Kalb of CBS, Barrie Dunsmore of ABC, Marilyn Berger of the Washington Post, Bernard Gwertzman of the New York Times, Barry Schweid of AP, Wilbur Landrey of UPI, Jim Anderson of Group W News, Bruce van Voorst of Newsweek, Jeremiah O’Leary of the Washington Star, John Mulliken of Time magazine, Marie Koenig of USIA, Darius Jhabvala of the Boston Globe, and Charlotte Saikowski of the Christian Science Monitor. The rivalry between the Washington Post and Star — Marilyn Berger and Jerry O’Leary — reached a particular degree of intensity on the Syrian shuttle. One result was some frenetic jockeying for position at the background briefings I gave in the lounge compartment of the aircraft. A formal rotation system had to be devised for the seating arrangements, which came to be known as the “Berger-O’Leary separation of forces agreement” — almost as difficult to negotiate as the Syrian-Israeli disengagement.
V. On the Hebrew calendar, 5683 was the equivalent of 1923, the year of my birth — a memorable year in Fürth if not in Quneitra.
VI. The agreement was signed on schedule. Its text and that of the “United States proposal” are in the backnotes.3
VII. This was written before the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights in December 1981.
XXIV
The Last Hurrah
The Salzburg Press Conference
As the Syrian shuttle went on and on, we sustained ourselves by visions of the return home, which took on the quality of an oasis for a wanderer in the desert. The longer the working days, the tauter the nerves, the more idyllic the end of the shuttle appeared to us. We would not have believed that the vision would turn into a mirage.
The Syrian-Israeli disengagement proved to be the last major achievement of the Nixon Administration. To a great extent, the heart of our foreign policy had seemed to be insulated from the most corrosive domestic effects of Watergate, as if by a tacit national recognition of the needs of survival. It cou
ld not continue. When the fabric of a society is sufficiently rent, all restraints give way sooner or later. Shortly after the Syrian agreement was completed, foreign policy was subjected to a direct assault. The cocoon that seemed to protect me from personal attack was abruptly torn asunder.
I arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at 1:50 A.M. on May 31 at the conclusion of the thirty-four-day shuttle to what may have been the high point of public acclaim ever accorded to a Secretary of State. News-week’s cover showed me in a Superman suit. Time’s cover was less heady but its praise nearly as excessive. Commentators described the shuttle as one of the greatest diplomatic achievements in history; there is no record indicating that I resisted the hyperbole. The (apocryphal?) story made the rounds that I responded to someone at a dinner party who thanked me for saving the world with the smug reply, “You are welcome.”
In fact, my mood was more complex. I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. I was experiencing the letdown that always followed great exertions. And better than most, I knew how narrow had been the dividing line between success and failure. Had Asad not called me back a few days earlier — on my birthday — as I was walking out of his room, the whole agreement would have aborted. Many now applauding would have been castigating the investment of so much prestige in a prolonged personal negotiation. A foretaste of these ashes had been provided when the talks seemed to stalemate three days before the signing, as in this report filed by the fair-minded CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb on May 28:
This is the 31st day of the Kissinger journey to a disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel. There have been 16 visits to Israel, 12 to Damascus, 18,200 miles from Washington and back and forth between Jerusalem and Damascus — an extraordinary expenditure of energy and personal influence on the Secretary’s part. He wanted an agreement. That he failed to achieve it, it seems, [was] no failure of effort or commitment. . . .
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