William B. Quandt
Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia
Early on the morning of October 6, 1973, the phone rang in my apartment in southwest Washington, D.C. The 6:00 a.m. caller was a duty officer in the White House Situation Room. I had become acting head of the Middle East office at the National Security Council (NSC) the previous day and had left word that I should be called if there were any major developments in the tense Arab-Israeli arena.
The previous day had been filled with alarming news of preparations for war, yet the Israelis, with a reputedly excellent intelligence service, seemed calm; my quick survey of American intelligence assessments had confirmed that view. These signs of war, I had been told, were just exercises. “We’re watching things closely, don’t worry,” was the bureaucratic answer I received when I asked why the Egyptians were evacuating patients from hospitals on the front lines and why alert levels had gone to unprecedented heights on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal.
As I picked up the phone, I was pretty sure that the news would not be good. Sure enough, the caller said he had a flash cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, which he proceeded to read to me. Prime Minister Golda Meir had just met with US Ambassador Kenneth Keating and had started the conversation by saying, “We may be in trouble.” Several “totally reliable” sources had informed Israel that “Syria and Egypt were planning a coordinated attack against Israel today in the late afternoon.”1 The most important of those sources was Ashraf Marwan—about whose role Dr. Yigal Kipnis tells us a lot more in the material that follows. In fact, the war began shortly before 14:00 Israel time, 08:00 in Washington.
I participated personally in many of the meetings that Henry Kissinger and top US policymakers held in the lead-up to October 6, and in most of them during the war itself. Later, I did a lot of research and writing of my own on these events. I was not expecting to learn much new about US policy during this period in a book by an Israeli scholar. After all, most of the American sources have been available for some time now; Kissinger has written at length about the crisis; and just last year the Nixon Presidential Library held a conference on the occasion of the declassification of several hundred additional documents from its archives.2 What more could one hope to learn?
The answer is that the most sensitive aspects of Israeli policymaking and US-Israel relations did not come into the public domain until quite recently. Yigal Kipnis’s 1973: The Road to War, published in Hebrew in 2012 and now in English, is the first account that mines both the rich American archives and, crucially, the recently released documents from the Israeli war cabinet. What we see is an intimate account of how key Israeli decision-makers—especially Prime Minister Meir and her defense minister Moshe Dayan—saw the events leading up to the war. We can read their remarkable communications with Henry Kissinger.
Although I worked on Kissinger’s NSC staff during this period, I understood that he handled the Israeli account as almost a private matter. The Israeli ambassadors in Washington—first Yitzhak Rabin and then Simcha Dinitz—had a direct line to his office, a privilege shared by only one other ambassador, Anatoli Dobrynin of the USSR. When Kissinger spoke on the phone with these individuals, he would sometimes record the conversations; those tapes have been transcribed and are available to researchers. But when Kissinger met face-to-face with Rabin or Dinitz, there was often no American record of what transpired. The Israeli ambassador, however, would report in detail to the prime minister, who would usually respond, often with revealing and detailed instructions. These are the resources that Kipnis has examined and on which he bases much of his analysis.
So what is new in this account? First, we get a better idea of the origins of what I have previously labeled “standstill diplomacy,” the period from about 1971 to the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, when Kissinger was initially determined to thwart State Department initiatives, then slowly came to realize that something must be done to respond to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s overtures.
We now know, thanks to Kipnis, that in December 1971, on the eve of President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, Nixon and Kissinger met with Meir and Rabin in Washington and reached an understanding that the White House would not press Israel for diplomatic concessions during 1972 (for US electoral reasons) or 1973 (for Israeli electoral reasons). In return, Israel agreed not to launch preemptive military operations. Kissinger told Meir there would be no joint US-Soviet proposal for an Arab-Israeli settlement and that a regular supply of arms would be forthcoming; in return, Meir said that Israel might eventually be willing to withdraw to the Mitla and Giddi passes in Sinai as part of a future interim settlement. In short, the Arab-Israeli conflict would be frozen for a two-year period, during which Nixon and Meir would tend to their own political needs and the US would work on its delicate détente relationship with the Soviet Union, while also winding down the war in Vietnam and beginning its engagement with China. If there was to be an American initiative on the Middle East, it would come from the White House—and not until the end of 1973.
As Nixon, Kissinger, and Meir seemed to see the Middle East scene, as long as the Americans kept Israel strong, the Arabs could do little to challenge the status quo. In time, Kissinger thought, this might lead them to abandon their dependence on the Soviet Union and turn to the United States. Only then might he be ready to get involved diplomatically in trying to broker some form of Arab-Israeli peace. Nixon’s views were a bit different. He was more inclined to see the need for joint US-USSR pressure on troublesome small powers whose parochial quarrels might disrupt super-power relations. He was not averse to thinking of a sort of superpower condominium. But by 1973 Nixon was deeply involved in the Watergate affair and it was Kissinger, not the president, who shaped US Middle East policy. We now know that Kissinger did so in very close coordination with the Israelis.
On the American side, only Kissinger, his deputy Brent Scowcroft, and his assistant Peter Rodman were fully involved in managing the relationship with Israel, and thus Middle East policy writ large. Nixon and his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, were kept aware of the broad lines of strategy, but the details were handled by a very small inner circle. On the Israeli side, those in the know were the prime minister, Dayan, Yisrael Galili (Minister without Portfolio), Mordechai Gazit (Meir’s chief of staff), and first Yitzhak Rabin and then Simcha Dinitz, the two Israeli ambassadors to Washington during the period covered in this book. As Kipnis makes clear, those in the intelligence business were not part of the Israeli inner circle: although they had access to important parts of the overall picture, they were not privy to its most sensitive political dimensions.
In the spring of 1972, the White House tentatively began to explore a new “back channel” relationship with Sadat. In the summer, Sadat unexpectedly expelled some fifteen thousand Soviet advisers. Kissinger and Nixon took notice and began to exchange more messages with Sadat through his national security adviser, Hafez Ismail. The Israelis were kept apprised of the content of these exchanges. Once Nixon secured his reelection in November 1972, it was just a matter of time before he and Kissinger would meet with Ismail. This happened first in February 1973, and then Kissinger held a second face-to-face meeting with Ismail in May.
The upshot of these meetings was that the White House began to see the possibility of working with Egypt on some kind of diplomatic step. Kissinger had in mind a secret track of diplomacy that might get under way after Israeli elections, then slated for late October 1973. He would try to persuade the Israelis to recognize Egypt’s sovereignty over Sinai and to make a significant territorial withdrawal in return for Egypt’s agreeing to extensive security arrangements (demilitarization, some continued Israeli outposts at sensitive locations for an indefinite period), all wrapped up in an agreement to end the state of war, but not necessarily a full-fledged peace. Kipnis refers to this as a plan. My sense at the time was that it was little more than some broad guidelines that Kissinger was thinking about, but it might well have become a plan after the Israeli elections. In any case, Golda Meir would have none of it. She did not trust Sadat; she did not want to recognize Egypt’s sovereignty over all of Sinai; and she did not think that war was likely if she rejected a diplomatic track. But even if it was, she was confident that Israel would easily prevail and that it was Egypt that should worry about war, not Israel.
Sadat’s response to the first hints of a new approach from the White House was one of interest, but also skepticism. (Unfortunately, the Egyptian and Syrian parts of the story cannot be fully told because the relevant documentation is not available. The memoirs and partial accounts we do have leave many unanswered questions.) Kissinger did seem to feel some urgency and tried to persuade the Israelis to give him something to work with, but they refused. So he essentially acquiesced and played for time, hoping that after Israeli elections he might find more flexibility on the Israeli side.
The Egyptians and Syrians signaled their frustration in spring 1973 by staging quite realistic military exercises. There was a real concern in Washington that war might take place, but it all turned out to be a bluff. The next warning came during the US-Soviet summit in San Clemente, California, in summer 1973. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev told Nixon there that war in the Middle East would occur before the end of the year and that the two great powers should act jointly to prevent it. Kissinger was not eager to work with the Soviets, but he did begin to watch for signs of war. He tasked the US intelligence agencies to watch carefully. A huge amount of information flooded in, but no clear picture emerged. Meanwhile, the Israelis, confident that they had a reliable source in Sadat’s inner circle, showed little sign that they were worried about war.
This brings us back to the mysterious figure of Ashraf Marwan. Who was he? Marwan was an Egyptian intelligence operative who also happened to be the son-in-law of Egypt’s historic president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who died in office in September 1970. Marwan contacted the Israelis in 1969 and offered his services. After testing the information he provided to them, some in Israeli intelligence came to believe that he was for real. Others were less sure. But by 1973, the most important Israeli decision-makers seemed to trust him. Several times during 1973 he provided warnings that Egypt and Syria were contemplating war. He also made it clear that Egypt preferred a political settlement, but would insist on getting all its territory back. On October 4, 1973, Marwan told his Israeli contact that he needed a high-level meeting immediately. The head of the Israeli intelligence service (the Mossad), Zvi Zamir, flew to London and met with Marwan, who told him that war would begin at the end of the day on October 6. This was the crucial tidbit of information that convinced Prime Minister Meir that war was indeed on the horizon. Kipnis reviews in detail, in a fascinating appendix to this book, the argument over whether Marwan was a genuine Israeli-controlled asset, as top Israeli officials believed at the time, or was really a double agent, working for Sadat to mislead the Israelis about the precise timing of the onset of the war. The evidence is inconclusive, but it is clear that at the crucial moment in October 1973 the top Israeli leadership had come to depend heavily on their favorite spy in Sadat’s inner circle.
Kipnis concludes his comprehensive analysis of the evidence he has amassed by stating that the war could have been avoided. If Israel had been more willing to engage diplomatically, if the US had pressed its ideas more insistently, he believes that Sadat would not have gone to war. There is a school of thought that disagrees with this view and argues that Sadat needed the war in order to become the peacemaker he subsequently became. We will probably never know exactly how Sadat calculated the odds, but we can see that for much of 1972 and up until mid-1973, he seemed quite eager to pursue a diplomatic strategy instead of a military one; it was only when the US-Soviet summit of summer 1973 ended with no sign that anything would be done to address the Arab-Israeli conflict that he made up his mind to go to war.
By September 1973, the signs of war preparations were certainly there for all to see. I saw them, as did many others. But most of us were wedded to the notion that Israel was so strong militarily that it would be suicidal for Egypt and Syria to attack. Deterrence would work. Sadat would not start a war that he could not win. But he did. This book concludes that the war, with all its human, economic, and political costs, could have been avoided if the political leaders in Israel and the United States had read the signals from Cairo more carefully. But these leaders were bound to preconceptions that kept them from seeing clearly. The material Dr. Kipnis presents also affords us a new appreciation of the nearly incestuous relationship at the highest level between Israeli and American leaders—and of how this very closeness led them to reinforce each other’s misconceptions.
The October 1973 war may seem far in the past to many people today. But it had a huge impact—on détente, on oil prices, on Israeli and Arab politics. It also led Kissinger to reassess his views on Egypt: shortly after the war he embarked on an intense period of shuttle diplomacy, finally delivering on his promise to turn his attention to the problems of the Middle East, and a few years later, President Jimmy Carter built on the groundwork Kissinger had laid to conclude a final peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, transforming the strategic geography of the whole Middle East. But that is another story. For the moment, it is worth reflecting, on this fortieth anniversary of the October 1973 war, what the Middle East and perhaps the world would have looked like had the war been avoided by an imaginative round of diplomacy in early 1973. It may be worth reflecting, too, on whether there are other situations in the Middle East or elsewhere in which the fixed preconceptions or misconceptions to which policymakers have become overly attached might similarly be blocking the path to a possible diplomatic opening.
No one who wants to understand how war came to Israel and its neighbors in 1973 can afford to ignore this pathbreaking book. Yigal Kipnis has done all serious scholars, concerned citizens, and policymakers a real favor in spelling out so convincingly the steps that led to this avoidable war.