“I completely accept the conception that there is a difference between Egypt and Syria…. To cross the canal, the Egyptians can and will be farther from their base and what will it give them in the end? On the other hand, the situation is completely different with the Syrians.”
—Golda Meir to Dayan about his “political conception”1
Dayan’s central and, in most cases, exclusive role in decision-making led Israel to act in accord with his perception of the political and security situation in the days preceding the war. His importance greatly exceeded his official position as minister of defense. As former chief of staff in wartime and as defense minister during the Six-Day War and the War of Attrition, he was the supreme security authority, both officially and unofficially. He analyzed intelligence information and the military situation as well as the head of military intelligence and the chief of staff. He had the skills, the experience and, even more important, an outline of the political situation that other military personnel and intelligence bodies lacked. His undisputed public status gave his conduct additional validity; this was also true of his status in the political system, especially in the various camps of his own party. All of these factors led the prime minister and other ministers to accept his positions, determinations, and demands, even if Dayan chose not to insist on them.
Dayan did not frequently include other decision-makers in his considerations; whenever possible, he avoided sharing his appraisals of the situation with others. This was not based simply in the need to maintain secrecy: Dayan’s character led him to behave this way. His close associates usually served as messengers to convey his positions rather than interlocutors with whom to evaluate these positions.
The events of the six days preceding the war required Dayan to deviate from his habits and reveal a bit more of his line of thought and his analyses. He was receiving large amounts of the intelligence information flowing into Israel as well as military intelligence assessments of this information. As in the past, he did not adopt military intelligence positions that conflicted with his own analysis regarding both the Syrians and Egyptians. So, for example, he completely rejected an intelligence analysis that maintained that there was only a low probability of a Syrian attack. Although Dayan thought that Egypt would not attack, he based his considerations on an evaluation of the political state of affairs rather than on an analysis of the military intelligence situation, as did the military intelligence organization.
Until the moment the war broke out, Dayan retained his mistaken belief that Sadat would not initiate war before affording another opportunity for a political process and would wait for an American peace initiative after the Israeli elections. This evaluation was reinforced by the fact that, in two of the warnings received on the eve of the war, King Hussein’s (on September 25) and Ashraf Marwan’s (on October 5), there was one important shared element that lent support to Dayan’s political assessment: both had qualified their warnings, stating that an attack might be avoided at the last minute if there was a political development.
Dayan’s viewpoint, which Prime Minister Meir shared, dominated Israel’s decision-making during those fateful days to a greater extent than the mistaken military intelligence assessment. Thus, only if we add political considerations can we properly investigate the dramatic events of the six days preceding the outbreak of war and fully and convincingly explain the Israeli decision-makers’ apparently puzzling conduct, considering the information available to them and the obvious threat it contained. This does not lessen the intelligence and military failure to evaluate the situation correctly or faulty preparation for the impending war, but it directs a great share of the blame to Golda Meir—and especially to Moshe Dayan.
The reports of the unusual deployment of Syrian and Egyptian troops at the front began to reach Israel immediately after September 22, the date the Syrian and Egyptian army chiefs of staff received orders to launch the attack on October 6. Although this military movement greatly occupied Dayan in the days preceding Rosh Hashanah, he did not see fit to invite the prime minister to discussions regarding the irregular deployment. When Hussein hastily arrived in Israel to meet Meir on the night of September 25, Dayan only requested that she ask Hussein about the meaning of Syria’s moves. He did not demand to participate in the meeting—or perhaps was not invited to participate. Meir, for her part, updated Dayan only by telephone on what she had heard from the king.2 The absence of a security authority from the Meir-Hussein meeting was striking. The most senior security figure present at the time was Zamir, the head of the Mossad. Although, during his discussion with the head of Jordanian intelligence, Zamir had received Syria’s war plans in addition to a warning about the imminent war, he focused his interest on another issue: namely, Palestinian terror. In retrospect, King Hussein and the head of Jordanian intelligence complained that the Israelis had not given their warning the attention it deserved. From then on the war warnings were left to Dayan, who was the supreme security authority in actuality, even in the eyes of the prime minister.
On the political level, it remained important to Israel to hide the tension in the area as much as possible, lest it move Secretary of State Kissinger to take unwanted steps. This affected Ambassador Dinitz’s conduct during his meeting with Kissinger on September 30. They met for the first time in Kissinger’s State Department office. When they finished at 17:30, Dinitz hurried to the embassy to report to the Prime Minister’s Office. Kissinger continued to go over the material that had piled up in his office during his absence. A report discussing Syrian military intentions was bothering him; he had just spent an hour and a half in an intimate discussion with Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador and the prime minister’s confidant, and nothing had been said about the military tension in the area.3 The only thing Dinitz had mentioned about military affairs was to point out that the “Arabs are being strengthened, both from Soviet and Western sources”4—and even that was only as background to Israeli requests for weaponry from the United States. Dinitz had been acting on Meir’s precise instructions, which had not included anything about reports of unusual military deployment.5
At 19:45 (early Monday morning, October 1, in Israel), Lawrence Eagleburger, Kissinger’s assistant, telephoned Dinitz on Kissinger’s behalf and requested that the ambassador urgently clarify the significance of the information about Syrian moves.6 After consulting with a representative of the Mossad, Dinitz replied that Israel was investigating the matter. Dinitz reported to Meir that Kissinger had told him “to notify him about any development at any hour of the day or night.”7 The next day, Dinitz transmitted an intelligence assessment to Kissinger: “Our people are now studying the situation based on some reports that have reached them. The present evaluation is that from the beginning of September, the Syrian forces have been taking up their emergency positions in a defensive posture.”8
Israel already knew the information about which Kissinger had asked Dinitz. It included a detailed program for a Syrian attack that was to begin at the end of September—that very day. This information had not necessarily rocked Israel to its foundations; it was primarily based on Hussein’s warning. During that period, Israeli intelligence surpassed the CIA in its ability to gather high-quality information on matters concerning Egypt and Syria. Considering this information, Zeira wrote that morning that Israel had the attack plan and it was no different than the one military intelligence had acquired several months before, in May, except for the new addition that all of the preparations had to be completed by the end of September.9
After the three-day vacation opening the new year in Israel, on Sunday, September 30, the military tension appeared to relax. Even the tank crews of the Seventh Brigade, who had been flown to the Golan on the eve of the holiday, were returned to their base near Beersheba. On that day, military intelligence distributed an intelligence compilation that cited a comprehensive exercise beginning in Egypt, intended to practice crossing the canal and capturing areas in Sinai. This was how Israel explained the high alert in the Egyptian military and the expected troop movements on the west side of the canal.
At the end of the day, army leaders had some free time to discuss the military situation. At 18:00 Israeli time they held a consultation in Chief of Staff Elazar’s office about the Syrian front. The participants were Elazar; his deputy, Yisrael Tal; Eli Zeira, the head of military intelligence; Aryeh Shalev, the head of the military intelligence research department; Yitzhak Hofi, the head of Northern Command; and Benny Peled, commander of the air force. Zeira predicted that Syria would not go to war; Peled said that the only change that had taken place, from his point of view, was the arrangement of surface-to-air missiles and the alignment of the Syrian Air Force. Thus, he clarified that if Syria attacked in the evening, the Israeli Air Force “will be able to destroy all thirty-four missile batteries in two sorties lasting an hour and forty minutes to two hours. If the attack takes place in the morning I will need four to six hours to prepare the attack.”10 Israeli ground forces would have to block the Syrian troops during those hours without the Israeli air force’s assistance.
Tal objected to Peled’s appraisal that the standing army could block the Syrian forces and asked to reinforce the Golan troops with an additional regular army brigade and to call up reserve forces. Elazar disagreed with this objection. Later, in a discussion he requested with Zeira, Tal disagreed with Zeira’s evaluation that the probability of a Syrian attack was low. But Zeira continued to argue that Syria would not attack without Egypt. In that, he was correct, but his failure was in his assessment of Egypt’s intentions.
In Northern Command, where Syria’s preparations were both obvious and tangible, the attitude towards the alert was different. The fact that preparations were not evident in Egypt did not calm them. “I don’t need any more warning signs. All of the attack elements that they need, they already have. According to combat doctrine, all they need is the order to move immediately. For me, the signs are all there,” stated Hagai Mann, the intelligence officer of Northern Command.11 In the end, Elazar partially accepted Hofi’s demand and it was decided to reinforce the artillery deployment with an additional regular unit and to increase the number of tanks and crews in the Golan Heights by leaving a reserve battalion force that had been called up for an exercise; later, they added a regular force from the seventh brigade as well.
Meir was out of the country at the time and her deputy, Yigal Allon, was serving in her place. Dayan avoided holding consultations or discussions among government ministers to consider the information about the Syrian army’s deployment.
In 1937, Yigal Allon, a member of the group that settled Kibbutz Ginossar that year, was sent for a military course given by the British at the Sarafand (Tzrifin) army base for Jewish guards. When he returned to his home kibbutz after completing the course, he told his good friend Sini: “It was simply great. I enjoyed every day. Except for one thing: There was this one guy who was unbearable, who spoiled the whole course for me. His name was Moshe Dayan.”12
History placed both Allon and Dayan at the center of Israeli security and political events. Conflicts between them were frequent and seemed compulsive; they peaked in June 1967, when Dayan was appointed defense minister, over Allon, to take Levi Eshkol’s place. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War elevated Dayan to fame, and Allon was left in his shadow. Israel did not adopt Allon’s creative and daring political course of action for the areas captured from Jordan, known as the Allon Plan, to no small extent because Dayan had developed his own plan for the territories of the West Bank: the “Five Fists Plan,” to place outposts on the mountain ridge. When Dayan resigned from the government following the Yom Kippur War, Allon was appointed foreign minister in the Rabin government and held the position until the 1977 political upheaval. Menachem Begin, who formed the new government in 1977, chose Dayan as foreign minister to replace Allon. Dayan led Israel to a peace agreement with Egypt, which Allon had difficulty supporting as an opposition Knesset member. Sini lived much longer than Allon or Dayan and in one of the conversations I enjoyed with this unique individual at his kibbutz, Yiron, during the last years of his life, he remarked, “The State of Israel would have looked completely different if Dayan and Yigal had known how to cooperate during all of the events of their lives.”
The period of the High Holy Days that preceded the Yom Kippur War is one example. For four critical days of Egyptian and Syrian preparation for war, and through many warnings about its proximity, Meir was outside Israel. During that period, Dayan avoided initiating governmental security-political consultations. Allon, filling in for Meir as deputy prime minister, would have had to head such meetings; it seems logical that this would have been difficult for Dayan to accept. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that Dayan knew that Allon was not a full party to the secret proceedings between Kissinger and Meir and between Kissinger and Sadat and that he had not seen all of the reports from military intelligence and the Mossad. Before the prime minister left Israel, Dayan had requested that Galili organize such a meeting—but only upon her return.13
Along with this obstacle and the absence of orderly work patterns for discussion and decision-making at the elite level of Israeli politics, there were additional difficulties during those critical days. Dinitz had to return to Israel upon the death of his father to “sit shiva,” the seven-day Jewish mourning period. Dinitz’s deputy, Mordechai Shalev, conducted contacts between Israel and the United States but lacked the intimacy required to maintain this secret channel, which had been based on intimate and confidential talks. Kissinger stayed in New York most of the time, occupied with diplomatic meetings during his first days as secretary of state, which made it difficult to carry on steady and routine discussion. If that was not enough, the three parties to the knowledge of the secret contacts had carefully distanced Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister, from any of this information, and he was now visiting the United States. All of these factors significantly affected developments in the following days.
On the night between September 30 and October 1, Israel’s leaders received a number of conflicting warnings, all from reliable sources.14 “On October 1, after two o’clock, a telephone message reported that the armies of Egypt and Syria, under Egyptian command, were planning to open hostilities in the morning,” Aryeh Shalev testified. He added that, following that message, which came from a senior officer in the Egyptian army, “a check of Egyptian ground and air forces had been carried out and it became clear that none of the steps necessary to prepare for the initiation of battle had been taken; thus, it would be impossible for them to open hostilities on the first of the month.” Military intelligence analysts attributed the information to a military exercise about to begin in Egypt. “I did not think that we had to distribute information at night that, in our opinion, lacked any basis. There is time enough to do that in the morning, along with an evaluation of its significance,” Zeira told Dayan, explaining why he had waited five hours before informing him of the message.
On the following day, when war did not break out, the original source of the information provided an update that this was an exercise that could lead to war if Israel took military steps. Two days later, on October 4, the source again confirmed that his error had been due to an incorrect analysis of the exercise order.
Another intelligence source who often reported on the Egyptian military system transmitted information at the end of September about Egypt’s decision to cross the canal and gain control of the Sinai passes. However, this source had transmitted twenty reports of focused alerts for war in five years: the first in November 1968, six additional reports in 1970, six more in 1971, five in 1972, and three during 1973. Military intelligence therefore doubted the twenty-first.
Simultaneously, on the night between September 30 and October 1, military intelligence received a focused report from a source known as “Kotesh” who had good access to information from the Egyptian army leadership and who was considered high-quality, trustworthy, and reliable. According to this information, on October 1, a large Egyptian military exercise that would simulate a canal crossing would begin. The exercise would end in an actual crossing. In retrospect, with the wisdom that comes post factum, this was correct information. It even fit the reports coming from the field about Egypt clearing land mines from the canal. However, its intensity was lost—it was first misinterpreted, then was lost in a sea of other reports. The heads of military intelligence continued to maintain that this was just an exercise. The information was distributed to the commands, but with an emphasis on that appraisal.
Allon, Dayan, and Elazar were notified of these alerts. In the morning, the third and final summary discussion of strategic matters took place in Dayan’s office (as noted, the first two had taken place one week and two weeks previously). At the beginning of the discussion, Zeira referred to the alerts he had received. In addition, he outlined the unusual Syrian deployment and the information from important sources that the Syrian army was organized for war. Dayan and Elazar heard all of this, along with Zeira’s appraisal that Syria would not go to war without Egypt and that there was no sign that Egypt was planning to open hostilities.
Dayan, guided by his political assessment, accepted this appraisal as additional support for his evaluation: “The Arabs talk and talk, but they don’t fire much …. On the way to peace, or at least, to non-renewal of war, I expect that there will be a kind of ebbing of hatred, or not fanning the flames into something active.”15 However, Dayan did not hide his fear of Syrian action: “We are sitting on Syrian land and, for the Syrians, that is painful. They have a case for carrying out various actions.”16 He explained that “if the Syrians get into our settlements and slaughter people there, it will mean complete disaster for us.”17 Bartov testified about Dayan’s observations, “The election-eve psychological atmosphere permeated the consciousness of a public who had for weeks been hearing that war was not expected in the coming years. Consciously or unconsciously, Dayan feared panic.”18
Later in the day, an additional piece of information similar to Kotesh’s was received. In retrospect, it too turned out to be true: The Egyptians had decided to cross the canal and take the passes, expecting the superpowers to intervene. Egypt intended to open the canal to shipping and conduct negotiations on a permanent settlement.19 The source reported that Egypt was concentrating crossing equipment in the area of the canal and had breached openings in the earth embankment on the canal bank in order to lower bridging equipment to the water. Military intelligence summarized the situation in a report distributed on the same day:
Egypt—A military exercise involving many branches of the army began at 8:00 and the army went on highest alert, while the operations centers were staffed at full complement. On the night between October 1 and October 2, soldiers were about to be called up for reserve service; in Syria, the state of heightened preparedness continued. This included the air force.20
Israeli newspapers devoted their October 1 headlines to the terror incident in Vienna, Golda Meir’s speech in Strasbourg at the European Assembly discussions, and her trip from there to Vienna for a meeting with the chancellor of Austria. Nothing was written or said about security matters, nor were decision-makers quoted discussing the security situation.
In the absence of Meir, who had continued on from Strasbourg to Vienna, despite the information still flowing in about troop deployments on both the Golan and Suez fronts, Dayan made do with a discussion of the situation with Elazar. When they met in Dayan’s office that evening, Elazar summarized the day’s information:
The conclusions are that in Egypt, an exercise is going on and that can be said with certainty…. In Syria, in contrast to the information, there are no signs of opening fire…. Why they are deployed that way, I don’t have an explanation. Either they are afraid that we will initiate or they are preparing themselves, and my assessment is that they are not going to open fire.21
“At the moment, I don’t propose anything else,” Dayan said, and advised Elazar to take only passive, defensive steps in the near future, including laying mines, digging antitank ditches, and paving a road—actions which, by their nature, would take more than a few days.
The Israeli intelligence compilation of October 2 detailed Egypt’s continued deployment at the canal which deviated from any known past exercise activity and testified to an intent to attack. The interpretations of the information that continued to come in aroused an internal dispute among military intelligence, but the research department and Zeira continued to adhere to their assessment that these moves were part of the Egyptian exercise; this evaluation was distributed to military and defense system elites. The compilation detailed information about Syrian forces’ continuing concentration at the front and the transfer of fighter planes to frontal airfields. However, it determined that at this stage there were no signs that Egypt was ready to renew the fighting, which the Syrians would consider a condition for significant military success; the intelligence organization continued to assume that Syria’s intentions were defensive.
Almost all of the newspaper headlines that day concentrated on the events in Austria, their significance, and Israeli and American pressure to change the Austrians’ decision to close the transit camp for immigrants to Israel. The front pages even noted that the Soviet Union had defeated Israel 101 to 78 in the European basketball championship in Spain. Four days before the war broke out, not even one word was reported about the security situation.
If decision-makers had fully read the news, they would have discovered a clear message from Kissinger under the headline “Times: Israel Will Be Acting Foolishly If It Rejects the Kissinger Plan.” The article quoted a London Times editorial:
If it becomes clear that the Arab states are willing to conduct negotiations, even indirectly, on the basis of proposals which have been raised by the American Secretary of State Dr. Kissinger for settling the Middle Eastern dispute, it will mean that Kissinger has achieved an unusual diplomatic breakthrough. Israel will be very foolish if it tries to prevent an agreement with the procedural arguments or territorial demands.22
The article also explained that “according to these proposals, which were published in the Times last week, Israel would retain its sovereignty over East Jerusalem, would evacuate only a part of the Golan Heights and would retain a presence in a good part of Sinai for a long period.” Even if Dayan skipped this report, he knew its content well. Kissinger’s plans and intentions had been central in his mind when he formulated his own approach.
Golda’s kitchen group met at 10:00 on Wednesday morning at the prime minister’s home. The participants were Meir, just back from Vienna, Dayan, Galili, and Allon, as well as Elazar, Peled, and, taking the place of Zeira, who was ill, Aryeh Shalev, who was participating in the ministers’ forum for the first time. Also participating in this consultation were Mordechai Gazit and Avner Shalev, directors of the Prime Minister’s Office and that of the chief of staff, and Arie Braun, Dayan’s adjutant.23
Dayan opened by explaining that he had called the meeting “due to the changes at the fronts, especially in Syria and to a certain extent, in Egypt.” He asked Aryeh Shalev, who lacked experience in presenting information in that forum, to present an intelligence review. Later, in testifying about the meeting, Shalev mentioned the participants’ impatience at the lengthiness of his report; except for Allon, all of them knew the information he was presenting. He noted in particular that Dayan was perusing the newspapers during his review. Dayan, as mentioned, had his own explanation, different from that of military intelligence, for his assessment that Egypt was not intending to attack. He did not take the trouble to share his explanation with the others; he apparently considered the many details Shalev reported bothersome.
Nevertheless, if Dayan was listening to the report—and, considering his comments during the presentation it appears that he was listening—he heard Shalev fully detail the information received; a precise picture of Egyptian and Syrian troop deployments; King Hussein’s warning (though he did not cite the source); the Syrian war plan; the report of September 30 about the intentions of Egypt and Syria to start a war on October 1 (which had already passed); the military exercise being conducted, stressing that from these positions, both Egypt and Syria could immediately initiate an attack; the alert, which had stated that the exercise would end with an actual crossing of the canal; and Shalev’s appraisal that war, even if it was possible operationally, did not seem to be reasonable. Meir also heard all of this.24
After Shalev had completed his report, Elazar, perhaps because of the impatience he discerned in Dayan and the others, immediately opened with the conclusions: “At this stage, I think that we are not facing a joint attack by Egypt and Syria, and I believe that Syria alone is not going to attack us without the cooperation of Egypt.” Elazar attributed less importance to the intelligence warnings; he considered them not unusual and even less alarming than past warnings about actions that did not take place. He reminded his listeners, “From time to time, we have also known about dates. What we knew about previous dates—sometimes they were more realistic than what we know now,”25 referring to war warnings from intelligence agents during the past year. But, in contrast, this time no warning had been received from Marwan, which “lessened” the importance of other alerts.
Regarding the possibility of a cooperative Egyptian-Syrian attack, Elazar said, “I don’t see a concrete danger in the near future—that is, not as a function of the present deployment.” Nevertheless, he stated that in their present deployment the two armies could immediately attack and stressed that the Syrians could cross the ceasefire line under cover of their missiles. Should that happen, Elazar recommended deploying reinforced regular army forces (more than a hundred tanks instead of sixty or seventy), and eight artillery batteries instead of four, without calling up the reserves. He estimated that the air force could participate in the holding action, attack, and be the decisive factor even if “we lose two or three planes.” He seemed to have internalized the obvious or implied message of the policymakers: to try to calm the atmosphere and not intensify the tension by calling up the reserves.
After the chief of staff presented his viewpoint, Dayan explained that the objective of the discussion he had initiated was “to share the picture rather than to make a decision.”26 It was evident that Dayan saw fit to update those present about the military developments of the past days—especially the prime minister, who had been absent from Israel—but had determined that it was not necessary to react to these developments. He disagreed with the military intelligence appraisal and examined Egypt and Syria’s intentions with a comprehensive viewpoint, combining military analysis with political thinking. His view of the situation was that of a politician examining the train of thought of the decision-makers on the other side, weighing political benefit in contrast to abilities and military danger. It is no coincidence that the only one who understood him was Meir.
Dayan, as mentioned, accepted military intelligence’s assessment that the probability of an attack by Egypt was low, but he did not agree with their explanation. In April he had already rejected Zeira’s explanation that Egypt would avoid attacking because its leadership did not see itself as ready for a comprehensive war in which Egyptian forces could advance deep into Sinai. At that time, Dayan had well understood that Egypt was interested in attacking in order to set a political process in motion. “That’s also a way of getting things moving,” he had said then to the chief of staff, and had ordered the IDF to prepare for such an attack.27 Now Dayan believed that because Sadat had been promised that a diplomatic process would begin in the near future, he had no need for a war “to get things moving.” It was certainly not in his interest to initiate a military conflict in which Egypt was expected to lose and which would give Israel additional cards at the negotiating table in the form of conquered territory on the west side of the canal. At most, Sadat could gain from arousing tension in order to demonstrate the need for political steps, just as he had done in the past.
Regarding Syrian intentions, Dayan completely disagreed with military intelligence. He believed that the Syrians had a strong motive for instigating quick action in order to gain immediate territorial benefit. With regard to the massive missile deployment, he responded during Shalev’s report, “Almost the only significance for this internal division of missiles is that they want to reinforce their line and their ability to act in the Golan Heights under the umbrella of missiles, as the heights are covered to a greater extent than Damascus. That is not normal defense.”28
In other words, Dayan understood Syria’s hope that, with the present deployment, it could succeed in capturing the Golan, or part of it, with a swift action:
And here the Syrians are facing a situation in which everything that it lost in the Six-Day War it can theoretically capture in one step, protected by a missile deployment and the artillery it presently has, and after that, it has a relatively good defensive line, a natural obstacle—the Jordan—and it has solved its national problem in freeing the Golan Heights from our control.29
Despite the Syrian deployment, like the others, Dayan did not disagree with the plan Elazar presented for defending the Golan—100 Israeli tanks against 600 Syrian tanks and a striking inferiority in the number of artillery batteries facing more than 500 Syrian batteries. This would be in a battle arena defended by surface-to-air missiles, which might limit the assistance of the Israeli air force.
Afterward, Dayan examined the situation with regard to the Egyptians:
If the Egyptians cross the Suez tomorrow, in one blow, ten, twenty kilometers and up to the Mitla pass, forty kilometers. If the Egyptians are thinking about a move like that, they will find themselves in a very uncomfortable position after that first step. There are many traveling expenses in crossing the canal, and afterwards, working in an area which has no end and we are coming at them from all sides … a situation in which the Egyptians … are not solving anything (they don’t receive any political benefit for the effort—they are not regaining Sinai) and they are in a much more difficult situation than they are now, when the Suez Canal is protecting them. If they cross the Suez … they are exposing themselves, so that there are quite a few people who are not stupid saying: “Let them come, because if they cross—all of the tanks will advance on them,” etc.30
There were those who saw Dayan’s final words as evidence that he wished for an Egyptian attack.31 This conjecture was an attempt to explain his indifferent behavior in the hours before the war. But Dayan did not want war. His words echoed his “political conception,” but that was not clear to those present except to the prime minister herself. Dayan’s understanding was that Egypt was aiming to regain its sovereignty over the territory it had lost in 1967 by a political agreement; thus it would be a mistake on Egypt’s part to initiate a war at the present time. It would lose from both a military standpoint and a political standpoint. In contrast, the Syrians were, in any case, not aiming for a political process but rather for a surprising and swift military achievement. If they could manage to break through the ceasefire line and advance a few kilometers from the line in the direction of the Jordan, they would be regaining areas they had lost in 1967 and would be establishing a more convenient line for themselves. That was the reason Dayan continually related with great alertness to the danger posed by the Syrians and concluded that this danger did not exist in Egypt’s case and that a coordinated attack was even less likely.
The prime minister understood Dayan’s analysis. She said to those present at the briefing,
I accept the “conception” of the difference between Egypt and Syria one hundred percent. I think that no argument can be made against it. To cross the canal, the Egyptians can and will be farther from their base and what will it give them in the end? On the other hand, the situation is completely different with the Syrians. Even if they wish to take all of the Golan, if they succeed in holding on to a few settlements, for each step over the line, if they can succeed in holding on to it—it exists in their hands.32
Dayan’s “conception,” which Meir accepted, was clear: Sadat did not have the military ability to regain Sinai, but he did have a feasible political option that might soon be realized with the help of Kissinger’s initiative. On the other hand, the Syrians did not have a political possibility of recovering the Golan. This line of thinking was also supported by military deployment—Egypt’s success in crossing the canal would be disastrous for it, as it would lose the natural defense line of the canal which protected it and the forces that crossed would be destroyed. On the other hand, the Syrians could advance a few kilometers in a surprise attack and establish a new defense line, under the protection of missiles, along the cliffs that controlled the water obstacles of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.
Meir, surrounded by intelligence and military experts, later testified that “nobody at the meeting thought that it was necessary to call up the reserves and nobody thought that war was imminent.”33 It appeared that, in assessing the military situation, the prime minister could not have been expected to come to a different conclusion than the military experts. But this was not the case regarding her ability to read the political state of affairs.
After the consultation in the “kitchen,” a cabinet meeting was called. The unusual security situation that had so occupied the security-political leadership, was not discussed at all at this meeting. Allon had proposed a separate discussion on this issue at a cabinet meeting on October 7, and the prime minister had agreed.
At exactly the same time, in Damascus, the president of Syria was agreeing to the Egyptian war minister Ismail Ali’s proposal not to postpone the date of the first attack and to attack on Saturday at 14:00. At the two fronts, Egyptian and Syrian forces were continuing in their preparations, which could not be camouflaged from the Soviets in Egypt. In Cairo, Ashraf Marwan heard wonderment at the fact that Israel had not taken any steps in anticipation of the coming war. In the evening, he had to travel to Libya to deal with the transfer of the Egyptian navy and air fleets, a sign for him that war was imminent.
Israel took several military actions: it put the reserve mobilization system on high alert in case it would be needed. Northern Command was instructed to carry out additional moves, creating obstacles to a possible Syrian incursion—laying four thousand land mines and digging an antitank ditch six kilometers long. These were to be completed by October 9.
And what of the media?
Three days before the war, the front-page headlines were mostly devoted to the discussion between the prime minister and the chancellor of Austria, the implications of the terror event in Austria, and the Israeli basketball team’s stinging loss to Turkey, 93 to 94 in overtime. Regarding the security situation, the Israeli government had held a press briefing for military affairs reporters a day earlier, on October 2, asking them to play down the reports of concentrations of Egyptian and Syrian forces. Ha’aretz reported marginally that “no tension was to be seen yesterday on the banks of the canal.” This was a new item intended solely to refute “the information from Cairo that a state of alert had been announced in the Egyptian army units along the Suez Canal.”34
The following evening, at an election campaign assembly in Givatayim, the prime minister proclaimed, “In a few more years, the Arabs will receive less territory from us in return than what they could have received at present.”
The defense minister’s viewpoint continued to dictate Israel’s approach to its situation.35 In the morning, Dayan summoned to his office Chief of Staff Elazar; Tal, his deputy; Hofi, the head of Northern Command; and Shalev, still filling in for Zeira. The participants and contents of the discussions are evidence that the IDF was being guided by Dayan’s way of thinking, according to which Egypt would not attack and attention should thus only be devoted to the Syrian sector. Even with regard to Syria, Dayan did not speak in terms of a comprehensive war or even an urgent situation due to an immediate, specific threat.
Dayan asked those present, the IDF elite responsible for the Syrian sector, for a solution that would prevent a pointed, opportunistic Syrian thrust to harm one or more settlements in the Golan Heights.
My trauma is not about the [Golan] Heights but about the settlements there―whether they [the Syrians] break through or not, I think it is worthwhile and necessary for the State of Israel, for the IDF, to invest a large amount of money and much work, and more money and more work … to create a situation so that they [the Syrians] cannot just get up and go, so that they will have to work on it. If we have three days, we can delay them, call up the reserves; even one day, just not a surprise…. I’ll buy any idea: fish ponds, land mines, anything anyone can think of.36
Those were Dayan’s words. After the participants discussed preparing ground impediments, Hofi spoke: “If we are well-organized with our tanks, even without the air force, we won’t have any problem with the Golan Heights.” But that was not what Dayan meant. “In a situation where you don’t mobilize the reserves?” he asked. Dayan was hoping for a deployment plan that would not require Israel to maintain a reinforced armored corps. He summarized these consultations:
The general assumption is that they [the Syrians] will not take action without Egypt, and the Egyptians are not going [to initiate a war]. Let’s say for the sake of argument that they will. This month [October, with the elections planned at the end of the month] we will not transform the world. After this month, winter will begin. In winter, it is clear that no serious war takes place…. If I summarize: what can be done this month should be done. What is impossible, a plan should be made of how much it has to cost.”37
It is a bit difficult to believe, but on the same day, two days before the war, the general staff held a routine meeting to discuss army discipline; no outline of the military situation was given. Perhaps this stemmed from the desire not to initiate a discussion that could arouse argument regarding the need to mobilize the reserves. In the summer of 1967, the general staff had been drawn into a conflict with decision-makers, demanding to initiate hostilities before all of the political steps had been completely explored. Calling up the reserves in the face of the Egyptian and Syrian threat led Israel to a dead end and forced it to initiate war in order to extricate itself from that decision. Neither did Meir, who appeared that day in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, speak of the military situation; instead she discussed the humiliating treatment she had received from the Austrian chancellor.38
Three incidents that took place later in the day were convincing enough to indicate that Egypt was intending to go to war—and therefore that the war would be a comprehensive one. Information accumulated gradually and the security elite were apprised of the full picture only after midnight. They discussed its implications the following morning, October 5.
The first piece of information resulted from an aerial reconnaissance sortie over the canal.39 Toward nighttime, it became clear from the photographs that the crossing equipment had been brought closer to the canal. The reinforced Egyptian armored and artillery corps were deployed at battle positions and a dense battery of surface-to-air missiles could be seen. This information fit reports from the observation points at the canal, but it might also have been interpreted as part of the Egyptian military exercise. What was lacking was an expert personal view from the senior level of leadership. The Agranat Commission found that, during the week before the war, the head of the Southern Command, Shmuel “Gorodish” Gonen, and his intelligence officer only visited the canal line once. Perhaps his physical distance from the front explains why he did not receive a firsthand impression.
The second piece of information was a preliminary report of the evacuation of Soviet advisors’ wives and children, who began to arrive from Syria in the afternoon hours. The information indicated that the families had received instructions to wait, with limited luggage, for bus transportation and evacuation by sea from the port of Latakia. It was later reported that the evacuation would be carried out by air; the first planes arrived in Damascus shortly before midnight. Information also arrived about preparations for an air evacuation from Cairo, where the first plane arrived shortly after midnight.40
The third event also took place toward midnight. Mossad agent Ashraf Marwan made contact with his handlers and warned them in code about accelerated preparations for war, but did not provide information about the date and even avoided using the code word that was meant to announce it. He asked to meet the head of the Mossad on the following evening in London.
Zeira and Zamir cross-checked all of this information and transmitted it to Elazar, Dayan, and Meir. It was presented to the political and defense leadership in the early hours of the morning, and as mentioned, set a chain of discussion in motion, beginning on the following morning, a shortened work day for Yom Kippur Eve.
And the media?
Two days before the war, loyal to the censor’s instructions, newspaper editors avoided reporting on the situation. Military reporters discussed this after the war, testifying that
in the ten days that preceded the war, there was a clear orientation in Israel to prevent any possibility of warning in the state media. Information that indicated Egypt’s and Syria’s intent to initiate large-scale hostile action was systematically and consciously prohibited from being published. The experiences of the Israeli military correspondents who inspected the ceasefire lines and came in contact with the low-level command during these ten days prove this.41
Only one short news item referred to this: Dado Elazar had warned the Egyptians and Syrians, who were concentrating their forces at the front, at a paratroopers’ conference the day before at Kfar Maccabiah.
The following morning, readers of Ha’aretz read the front-page headline: “Kissinger Is Opening Discussions with Eban and Arab Foreign Ministers.” The sub-headlines added: “The United States’ Good Offices Will Be Offered to Guide the Sides Toward Negotiations to Settle the Conflict.”
The short workday of Yom Kippur Eve turned out to be particularly long.
The rush of events began in the early hours of the morning. At about midnight, a message reached Israel from Marwan’s contacts, along with his request to meet with the head of the Mossad. As noted, Marwan did not use the agreed-upon code word for war, but rather gave a general warning about preparations for one.42 The wording of Marwan’s request and the fact that it had not opened the report arriving from Paris moderated its urgency. It appears that this was why Zamir did not sense an emergency situation and not hurry to update anyone outside the Mossad about it. The unusual thing about the incoming information from the secret agent was the dictated date and time of the meeting with the head of the Mossad, which did not fit the pattern of communication up to that point.
A short time later, at 01:00 Israeli time, Zeira telephoned his colleague Zamir. According to his later testimony, this was the first time since being appointed a year earlier that Zeira had done so at such a late hour. The information about the Soviet evacuation marked a dramatic change for him in the level of tension. During this call, Zamir did not mention Marwan’s request, nor did he note that he would leave that evening for London to determine the meaning of Marwan’s warning.43 It seems that Zamir was still not aware of the urgency in Marwan’s request for a meeting.
About two hours later, Zamir’s telephone rang again. His bureau chief, Freddie Eini, spoke to him for a second time, and only now did Zamir understand that the reference was to war. He then transmitted to Eini the news of the evacuation of Soviet families. Zamir then called Zeira and updated him about Marwan’s request. “This means war; we don’t have a date because a hint is not a date,” said Zamir. He saw the fact that Marwan did not cite an exact date as evidence that an immediate step was not to be expected.
Zamir’s flight to London was scheduled for that afternoon. Only after he had taken Zamir to the airport and returned to his office at the Mossad did the bureau chief call the prime minister’s military secretary, Yisrael Lior. The secretary was unavailable, so he left a message asking him to call back. Meir found out about Zamir’s trip to London at the cabinet meeting from Dayan, who had been informed of the trip by Zeira.
Marwan himself supplied an explanation for the unhurried conduct of affairs. He stated that, when he had called from Paris and asked to meet with Zamir, he had not known that war would break out within forty hours and had even doubted that it would take place at all. “In my opinion,” Zamir testified years later, “Marwan did not want to say that war would break out without adding the background and the complementary factors, as well as the possible reservations according to which, if conditions changed at the last moment, Sadat might retreat from his warlike intentions.”44
If Marwan’s information still did not testify to an immediate war, the hasty Soviet evacuation should have been evidence of the highest probability of an attack in the coming hours.
Military intelligence reported the following:
Between 23:50 on October 4 and 03:30 on October 5, five Soviet Aeroflot IL–18 passenger planes landed at the international airport in Damascus. Two of the planes arrived from Budapest. All five took off later on October 5 and flew north. The tail numbers on the planes were 75676, 75602, 75516, 75465, and 75454. According to one report, Russian families (women and children) were seen at the airport, apparently being evacuated from Syria. Between 00:20 and 04:30 on October 5, six Aeroflot passenger planes landed in Cairo. Four of them were IL-18 and two were IL-62. Four of the six took off a few hours later (starting from 07:10) and flew to the Soviet Union. The tail numbers of the IL-18 planes were 75894, 74261, 75784, 74262, and those of the IL-62 were 86699 and 86698. In addition, it is known that seven ships of the Soviet fleet were scheduled to leave in the morning of October 5 from the port of Alexandria. Likewise, on October 4, a Soviet ship left the harbor of Port Said and a military landing craft left on the morning of October 5. An additional Soviet sea craft anchored in Marsa Matruh was also due to leave the port.45
A military intelligence compilation disseminated at 05:45 that morning summarized an aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Suez Canal front with the comment: “The Egyptian army at the canal front is in emergency deployment, one we have never seen in the past.”
Israeli military intelligence followed a large volume of information in real time and reported its essence to decision-makers, who pondered its significance over the next few hours but did not succeed in understanding what should have been obvious—even when, as we shall see, Zeira presented this conclusion as the only possible reasonable explanation: the Soviets were expecting a coordinated Egyptian and Syrian attack in the coming hours. Israeli decision-makers found it convenient to maintain the illusion that Marwan would supply an exact warning a reasonable time in advance; as he had still not done that, the warning light of the Soviet evacuation and the accompanying alert siren could be ignored.
“Just looking at the numbers could bring on a stroke,” Dayan commented that morning as he looked at the military intelligence report on Egyptian and Syrian deployment.46 Whether due to external or internal political considerations, even on Yom Kippur Eve, the Israeli media obeyed the military censor and made no mention of the situation. However, no one who heard Dayan speak at the discussion held in his office could have had any doubt that he well understood the military significance of the information reported to him.
What Dayan said next, which did not receive great attention, testified to his train of thought and line of action, based on the political dimension: “You are not taking the Arabs seriously. I am dealing with the Labor Party platform, where they are taken extremely seriously.” Not only was this a reprimand to the army commanders, but it was also an explanation that the military threat would be dealt with in the political arena. But while military intelligence was using the new information to gradually crack the assessment of low war probability, Dayan remained unchanged in his belief that Kissinger’s diplomatic steps would satisfy Sadat, who would therefore avoid opening fire. This line of thought also led Dayan not to take steps such as mobilizing the reserves, which could only intensify the tension and lead to an unavoidable military conflict.
The discussions in Tel Aviv were conducted in a number of rounds. The first was in Elazar’s office at 08:25. The second was held in Dayan’s office at 09:00. The third took place in Meir’s office at 09:45. Next, at 11:30, there was an improvised cabinet meeting with a limited number of government ministers. And finally, at 12:30, Elazar called an urgent discussion.
At 08:25, Elazar conducted a short and concise discussion with his deputy Tal, Zeira, and Peled. They decided to recommend that Dayan declare a full red alert of the entire standing army for the inception of war (which meant cancelling all vacations), to reinforce all of the fronts with a regular division of the armored corps, and to prepare for a general mobilization of the reserves.47
Elazar, Tal, and Zeira rushed on to the Ministry of Defense to a discussion called for 09:00 with Dayan’s advisor, ex-chief of staff Zvi Tsur; the secretary-general of the Ministry of Defense, Yitzhak Ironi; the minister’s assistants, Aryeh Braun, Yehoshua Raviv, and Avner Shalev; and other generals. The talk focused on the new situation, particularly on attempting to understand the Soviets’ motive for evacuating and on what steps to take on Yom Kippur Eve. This was the last discussion of the security leadership before the war.
Elazar told Dayan that, considering the information, he “was choosing the stricter way”—meaning that, since he did not have enough evidence that war would not break out, he was acting on the assumption that there would be an attack. Elazar explained that this was why he was using the standing army, which was under his command, and detailed what had been decided some minutes earlier in his own office. In other words, the entire standing army would be on full alert and all vacations would be cancelled. This applied not only to units at the front, but also to the air force staff and all forces that could be used in reserve. Mobilizing the reserves was not under the authority of the chief of staff, and at this point Elazar did not propose mobilization to Dayan.
The next speaker, Zeira, had up to that point continued to assess that there was a low probability for war. Against the backdrop of the dramatic events that had unfolded during the night, his position had changed. What undermined his certainty was the hurried evacuation of the Soviet families. “Of all of the things that Elazar has mentioned, I feel that the most problematic and serious is the Soviet issue,” he said. “If the Russians hadn’t done anything, the signs would have indicated that the Egyptians and the Syrians were not going to attack, but rather were anxious about us, and we have recently carried out a series of actions which could have caused them anxiety.”48 But the Russians were leaving and that could not be denied. Zeira enumerated three explanations which had been raised in military intelligence, only one of which seemed reasonable to him: “The bottom line is, the Russians know that the Egyptians and the Syrians are going to attack.”
Zeira also reminded those present that “Zvika [Zamir] had received an announcement that night from a good source who warned that there was going to be something, and he requested that Zvika come to meet him. Tonight at ten p.m. he will see him, so prepare a list of questions.”49 On the basis of these factors, Zeira expressed his opinion that “it is certainly justified to do everything proposed by Elazar.”50 He was now less determined in his appraisal of the low probability of war, but was also encouraged by the “general feeling … that the regular army and the air force would hold them back.” However, he concluded with a momentary return to his former assessment: “I don’t see the Egyptians and the Syrians attacking.”51 Ironically, Zeira’s skepticism matched Marwan’s as he expressed it to Zamir about twelve hours later. Marwan reported on preparations for the war that would break out the following day, but added his doubts that Sadat would actually implement the decision.
Dayan followed the presentations alertly and did not disapprove of their content. It was clear that he knew the details well and was very particular about their accuracy. “In all of the traffic between lines in Egypt, there hasn’t been anything special?” he asked. “Complete quiet,” replied Zeira. They were referring to the listening devices the Israeli Matcal special unit had installed on the Egyptians’ telephone lines. Earlier, at midnight, following the information about the Soviet evacuation, Zeira had approved their activation and they began operating at 01:45.52 At 02:00, Yoram Dubinsky (Dubi), the individual in charge of activating them, sent a telegram to Menahem Digly, the head of the collection department in military intelligence, reporting on their operation and detailing which lines were monitored and the few insignificant messages received.53 The Egyptians were using wireless communication, not telephone lines, which the Israelis picked up freely and continually. The telegram sent to Digly also stated that the monitoring was carried out until 11:00. The ten hours during which the “special devices” were operating did not provide any information about Egyptian preparations for war. In actual fact, the “special devices” continued to work for many more hours, but after 11:00 no one was listening to them any longer. All of the other listening devices had signaled that war was imminent. While these devices did not pick up the information for which they had been designated, it was not the devices which failed, but the person who misled decision-makers in Israel to believe that they were an insurance policy for an advance warning of war.
At the meeting with Dayan, Zeira brought up another source of surprise: “Regarding the military exercise, as well, I have a dilemma. Is it a tactical exercise? Is it a telephone exercise? Is it a command exercise? Is it an exercise of the forces? Up to now, we have no indication about what kind of an exercise it is. In most places, forces are not being moved.”54
At this stage, Dayan had already rejected Zeira’s explanation that the Egyptian activity was an exercise and taken into account that “their exercise was only a cover, so that we would think it was a cover.”55 He also correctly interpreted the Soviets’ rushed evacuation when he determined that “what we previously viewed as being less probable we now view as having greater probability.” As expected, Dayan supported and approved of the military’s actions: “This Yom Kippur, everything you have done is well and good.”56 He had one request regarding the preparations for possible war: to prepare a helicopter, just in case one of them had to make a flight. On the other hand, he rejected Elazar’s expressed intention that “if something happens, we want, in plain language, to begin to concentrate forces or to give alerts.” Dayan responded to that immediately: “Don’t move forces unless it actually begins. The roads are empty today.”
Considering his new assessment of the situation, Dayan was facing two important questions: Whether to try to prevent the war, and if so, how? The person who raised these questions for discussion was Zvi Tsur, Dayan’s advisor and perhaps his only confidant. As a positive answer to the first question was clear, it only remained to discuss how this could be done. Tsur presented two possibilities: first, to intimidate the Egyptians and let them know via the media that their intentions were known and that Israel was prepared to react; second, to do this more secretly, indirectly, and deliberately via the Americans.
Eli Zeira, July 2011
Dayan’s reaction indicated that he had already considered the question. He explained that, as a rule, Israel was not interested in deterring the Egyptians from attacking because if they did, “we will take care of them.” However, this time the timing was unsuitable: “The whole business is not convenient for us.” What was different this time? The probable reason for the “inconvenience” was the imminent elections. A war or a state military alert would require calling up the reserves on a wide basis and disrupt the routines of life, and that would have been unsuitable at that point in time. So it was important to try to stop the Egyptians from attacking and to calm the situation and clarify to them that there would be no surprise and that Israel was ready.
Dayan did not choose the direct and rapid deterrence method—using the media—although ten days earlier in the Golan Heights, when referring to the northern front, he had made use of the media to deter the Syrians. This time, he was not only aiming for deterrence, but also to tempt Sadat politically—and to do that secretly. Thus, he determined, “Considering our relations with Kissinger, we can tell him that Israel has not done anything and ask him what is going on with his clients. On the superpower level, not only won’t they [the Russians] lie to them [the Americans], but they are not interested in a Russian-American conflict.”57 The other participants in this discussion did not know that the Israeli leadership had promised Kissinger that Israel would not escalate the tension. The days of escalation at the end of May 1967, during which Israel had mobilized the reserves when facing the threat of war with Egypt and Syria, were seared into Dayan’s consciousness.
The discussion continued for about forty-five minutes and when it was finished, the forum went on to the Prime Minister’s Office to update her on their conclusions and receive her approval. At that meeting, speakers solidified their positions and presented them more succinctly. Zeira again reported on the updated information but also repeated that an Egyptian-Syrian attack was completely improbable in his opinion and that “our feeling is that they are not going to attack.” However, he also again noted that Zamir had left to have a personal meeting with the source of the alert, who had reported that something was about to happen.
Elazar distinguished between his interpretation that “they are not yet going to attack” and the fact that “technically they could do it.” He thus explained that the IDF was on high alert, but he hoped that “there would be an additional early indication” before an attack. It is difficult to ignore the feeling among the partners to the secret of Marwan’s existence that, as long as he had not transmitted focused information about the timing of a hostile attack, the tension was not yet substantial. What Elazar had not emphasized, Dayan completed: “Preparations have been made, except for a call-up of the reserves.” He proceeded to present the reason for this: “We are not worried at the Egyptian front, and in the Golan Heights, we are worried all year round.”
Zamir was absent from this consultation, as he was already on his way to London. At this stage, his position remained unvoiced. A short time after the war, Dayan asked him what he had been thinking on that day. According to Dayan’s military secretary, who wrote the minutes, “Zvika replied that he too did not think that war was a probability before October 6. On the other hand, he thought that a high alert should be initiated and deployment reinforced.”58
At this point, Dayan took over leadership of the discussion. He had already rejected Elazar’s and Zeira’s analyses and determined that the Egyptians were not carrying on a military exercise, but getting ready to cross the canal. Yet this did not worry him. Dayan declared Elazar’s military steps satisfactory and refused to make any further military moves. Elazar himself still had not asked to mobilize the reserves, and like many of the security elite, Dayan too felt that the regular army and the air force could hold off an attack, if it took place, until reserve forces could arrive.
Dayan still retained his “political conception.” September, Sadat’s target date for an agreement, had come and gone, but within less than a month Dayan intended to begin an accelerated political process. Perhaps now Sadat was building additional leverage for pressure, escalating the threat to renew fighting and making it concrete.59 More seriously, Dayan was concerned that this step might cause Israel to call up the reserves and to reach the elections while the country was paralyzed, in which case Israel might be pressured by the United States into making exaggerated concessions. There might be a return to the nerve-wracking “waiting period” of the summer of 1967, as Meir would mention later. In the discussion in his office, Dayan himself had said, “If a situation like 1967 begins to develop, and no one knows who suspected whom, we must now try to break the vicious circle and tell the Americans.”60
Dayan clung to a line of secret political action that would enable him to dismantle the threat without revealing it to the public, and of course, without mobilizing the reserves. He assumed that there was still time for an enticing diplomatic step to prevent Sadat from initiating a war and time to make preparations on the northern border in order to prevent an opportunistic attack from the Syrians, who were not interested in a political process. “I propose telling the Americans that signs are accumulating which make an Arab attack more realistic than in the past,” he stated during the discussion in Meir’s office, adding,
We should request that the Americans speak to the Russians and make it clear to them, and have the Russians make it clear to the Arabs, that we do not intend to attack, but to warn them that if the Arabs initiate war, “they will find themselves in hot water,” and we should ask the Americans to get the Russian reaction. If that calms things down, good. If not, we will request more equipment…. We have information that the probability now is greater and there is a deployment at present that is heading toward a definite canal crossing…. If we could tell Kissinger, but Simcha [Dinitz] is here [in Israel].61
Dayan knew that Kissinger had a direct channel to the Egyptians intended for political moves—but to activate it, Dinitz needed to be in Washington, not Israel. At the time, Abba Eban, the Israeli foreign minister, was in New York, in close proximity to Kissinger; they had even conversed twice the day before. Dayan did not even consider asking Eban to help in this mission, however, because he was not a party to the secret political moves.
It is difficult to assume that the others present, except for the prime minister, were aware of the significance of what Dayan had started to say. That is also true of researchers of the period. But Golda Meir did know what Dayan was referring to. She immediately interrupted him, saying that they could use the services of Mordechai Shalev, Dinitz’s assistant. Shalev had accompanied Dinitz to his meetings with Kissinger and knew of the secret contacts. For Dayan that was sufficient. Only he and Meir understood what was being said and, as noted, Meir accepted Dayan’s position “one hundred percent.” She had even made use of the term “conception.” This time she reinforced Dayan’s line of thinking, viewing the Egyptian preparations as an attempt to improve Egypt’s position in advance of the expected political process. She now said, “Perhaps their crooked thinking tells them that they have to force the [UN General] Assembly to face the fact that the region is not dormant, but active.”
As we shall see, it turned out that the Israelis’ message reached Kissinger only after the war had broken out. The US secretary of state, on whom Meir and Dayan had pinned their hopes of making Sadat put down his weapons, went to bed in New York secure in the assessment by all of the US and Israeli intelligence organizations that the probability of war in the Middle East was low, including a calming report from the CIA issued that very day which was identical to the assessment he had received from Israel.62 Kissinger became aware of the impending war only ninety minutes before it broke out. He later admitted that he had not managed to evaluate the situation well and had not felt the proper sense of urgency, acknowledging that “policymakers cannot hide behind their analysts if they miss the essence of the issue … for that the highest officials—including me—must assume responsibility.”63
After the discussion in the Prime Minister’s Office, Elazar issued a written order to initiate Alert C, which meant that “the entire standing army and the reserves that have previously been mobilized should be in a state of high alert for war activity.” In keeping with these orders, on the morning of October 6, there were about 300 tanks and their crews in Sinai and about 180 tanks in the Golan Heights. A high command post was prepared for action. But not all of the military networks were informed and aware that Alert C meant that war could break out at any moment. This was due in no small measure to the advance in the timing of the initial attack. Elazar also failed when he assumed, like almost all of the security apparatus elite, that the regular army alone could block the attack. These issues fell within the purview of the military establishment. However, these omissions and failures did not lead to the breakout of war. They could not have prevented it.
At 11:30, six government ministers who were spending Yom Kippur Eve in the Tel Aviv area gathered in Meir’s Tel Aviv office of the prime minister: Bar-Lev, Galili, Dayan, and ministers Shlomo Hillel, Michael Hazani, and Shimon Peres.64 In this incomplete assemblage, the cabinet held a meeting that included Elazar, Zeira, Gazit, Tsur, and a few more bureau chiefs.
Since not all of the members of the government were cognizant of the situation, Dayan opened with a general summary. Listening to him, the ministers learned for the first time of the security tension, which had become more serious during the last twenty-four hours with the information that the Egyptians and the Syrians were about to renew hostilities. He completed his summary by saying, “We still are not completely sure that this is war, but the assessment was sufficient to invite you here.”
Zeira presented to the ministers the information accumulated from the beginning of September until that moment. Regarding the deployment of Egyptian and Syrian forces, he said,
It is suitable for both defense and attack. In the past, there has been information about thoughts of a coordinated Syrian-Egyptian attack in October; actually, today the Syrian and Egyptian armies are in position to be able to implement these attacks or to defend themselves against us from the same positions.65
Zeira finished his review with his assessment: “We still feel that there is a high probability that the Syrian and Egyptian states of alert stem from fear of us, and that there is a low probability that their real intentions are to carry out attacks with limited aims.” He pointed out, though, that “the unusual thing about all of this is the fact that eleven [Soviet] planes reached Egypt and Syria, for which we have no explanation.” He added that “almost all of the Russian vessels which were stationed in Alexandria have left the port … and the significance of that act is—Soviet reservations about an Egyptian attack.”
None of the listeners asked the obvious question about the Soviet airlift: Why had the Soviets not approached the United States, if they were actually afraid that Israel was about to attack? Zeira had already analyzed this previously, in the more limited consultations: the only explanation for the rushed Soviet evacuation was fear of a coordinated Egyptian-Syrian attack. The fact that the evacuation had taken place by airlift testified that the attack was imminent.
Nevertheless, Elazar supported Zeira’s assessment:
The fundamental assessment of military intelligence that we are not facing a war is the more probable evaluation in my opinion…. However, I must mention that a defensive deployment according to Soviet military doctrine is also an attack deployment and can become war. Thus, this deployment has all of the qualities required for attack. As I don’t deal in interpretation, … I must admit that they have the technical ability to attack from this deployment. First, I have no proof that they do not want to attack. Second, they are able to attack. As a result, we have taken comprehensive preparatory steps.66
In answer to a question from Galili, Elazar replied, “We are holding up the mobilization of the reserves and other means until we have additional indications.” No one objected to the decision not to call up the reserves.
“I want to add one more thing,” Meir interjected, after listening to Dayan, the minister of defense and the highest level of the IDF leadership, with whose military authority she could not disagree. Her words show that her difficulty regarding mobilization of the reserves was not military but political. “There is one thing, there are the similarities which are repeated from June 5, 1967…. It reminds me of what happened at the end of May or the beginning or middle of May, until June 5, which also should tell us something.”
Meir did not want the scenario of summer 1967 to recur. At that time, Israel reacted to Egyptian and Syrian deployment on the borders with full mobilization. The following three weeks had seemed like an eternity, with the economy at a standstill, the security leadership’s nerves on edge, and a loss of faith in relations between the government and the military. Those three weeks led to dramatic developments in the political system, leaving Israel with no alternative but to initiate the war. The lengthy mobilization had been what led Israel to attack. This time—when the enemy was stationed far from the borders of the state, when the army held “defensible borders” of the Suez Canal and a line of missiles in the Golan, when Kissinger and Nixon had agreed not to compel Israel to retreat—Israel was obligated to the United States not to mobilize. A development like what had taken place in summer 1967—military tension, general mobilization, and an escalation to the threshold of war—was undesirable to a governing party during the days before the elections.
Minister Hazani, who was present at the meeting and learned for the first time of the situation, received the impression that the motive for not mobilizing the reserves was “so as not to create panic.” Others chose to interpret Meir’s words as having an opposite meaning—as though her summary was inviting the chief of staff to call up the reserves.67 “Our intentions were to prevent the eruption of the war,” Meir herself declared thirty hours later.68 This explained her summary at the cabinet meeting, twenty-four hours before the war broke out, better than any other interpretation.
The marathon of consultations concluded with a meeting of the general staff at 12:30 in the afternoon. Elazar called the meeting to present the general staff with the essence of what had been said throughout the morning and his assessment regarding the question of whether war would break out: “I see the danger of war breaking out today or tomorrow as less probable than war not breaking out.”69 He continued, “I don’t think that this is the zero hour. I hope that we will receive a warning.” Elazar knew that Zamir was on his way to meet Marwan and that Marwan was able to transmit a number of days’ warning. While he was talking, Zeira interrupted him to give an update of about the accelerated evacuation of the Soviets from Egypt and Syria.
The discussions that day received practical expression in military deployment. At the Golan Heights front, the number of tanks was doubled by returning the Seventh Division to the Golan, including three tank battalions. An additional artillery battalion was added at this front. In Sinai, three divisions of the regular armored corps were stationed in the area between the canal and Refidim-Bir Gafgafa, and the artillery force was increased at the canal zone. The reserve mobilization system was on high alert to implement an order to mobilize. The air force mobilized additional reserves in order to be ready to assist in holding a defensive position; these were mostly technicians and supervisory units. The elite military command post was operating.
The Prime Minister’s Office asked Mordechai Shalev, acting as Dinitz’s representative in Washington, to arrange an urgent meeting with Kissinger in order to convey a dispatch they had worded.70 The dispatch included three clauses.
Israeli tanks move through the Sinai, October 1973
The first stated that Jerusalem was attributing the military alert in Syria and Egypt and the deployment along their front lines with Israel to one of two possibilities:
A. A bona fide assessment by both or one of these countries, for whatever reason, that Israel intends to carry out an offensive military operation against them or against one of them. B. The intention on their part—or on the part of one of them—to initiate an offensive military operation against Israel.71
The second clause of the message related to the first possibility. Israel promised that it had no such intentions and that the opposite was true:
We wish to assure you personally that Israel has no intention whatever to initiate an offensive military operation against Syria or Egypt. We are, on the contrary, most eager to contribute towards an easing of the military tension. Inform the Arabs and the Soviets of our attitude, with the view of allaying their suspicions and the aim of restoring calm to the area.72
The third cause was a warning to clarify in advance to Egypt and Syria that if one of them intended to attack, Israel would react powerfully and with great strength.
The military implications of the message, which promised to contribute to the restoration of calm in the region, included Israel not mobilizing the reserves and not attacking first. As noted, this was the price demanded from Israel for the “Understandings of December 1971”: “To wait longer than two hours.”73
The message was transmitted to the embassy in Washington, where Shalev waited for the intelligence report to arrive. The Israeli embassy tried to arrange a meeting in New York between Kissinger and the foreign minister. The intelligence report arrived at the embassy in Washington at 16:30; Shalev passed on the message and the intelligence report to Kissinger’s assistant at the White House at 17:30 (near midnight in Israel) and they were immediately sent to Kissinger’s people in New York. Kissinger himself received the message and the report only after the war had broken out.
The quiet that characterized the end of the short workday on Yom Kippur Eve left the main players of that day time for thought. Golda Meir later testified that she had remained in her office for some time to consider the discussion earlier in the day, during which she had not disagreed with the certainty expressed by Dayan, Elazar, and the other members of the defense and political leadership that they had taken the necessary steps to deal with the situation. “I sat in my office, thinking and agonizing until I just couldn’t sit there anymore and I went home.”74
Dado Elazar remained at work in his office until 17:00 that night.75 When he left to go home, he was still deliberating about whether it had been an exaggeration to declare Alert C on Yom Kippur Eve.
Eli Zeira testified that his thoughts wandered to the meeting abroad and to Zamir’s coming report about his meeting with Ashraf Marwan; he was waiting for an “additional indication.”
The information that continued to accumulate from intelligence sources to military intelligence headquarters during the Friday afternoon hours strengthened the signs of approaching war, but there was still nothing to indicate its timing. The messages only increased the operatives’ internal argument about the probability assessment and whether they needed to disseminate the information flowing in. Zeira, who received the information at 23:00, decided to put off distributing it and did not inform Elazar. “From my standpoint and from that of the minister of defense, the IDF was prepared and ready for war,” Zeira later testified about his thinking. It can certainly be assumed that Zeira, along with Elazar, Dayan, and Meir, all of whom knew that Zamir was then meeting with Marwan, put his trust in the ability of the Egyptian agent who was close to Sadat to indicate the exact timing of the war in advance, before it was too late.