IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1970, L. Dean Brown was a career Foreign Service officer in traditional flux—on the move from one overseas post to another. Brown had completed a three-year tour as Ambassador jointly to Senegal and Gambia in West Africa and was scheduled, he had been told by Joseph Sisco, for reassignment to Lebanon. Instead, in early September, he was abruptly ordered to report to the California White House to meet with the President, then in the midst of a lengthy working vacation in San Clemente. Brown, who hardly knew Nixon, was met at San Clemente by Kissinger, who quickly asked whether Brown would agree to serve as Ambassador to crisis-ridden Jordan. Of course the answer was yes; and now the President was ready to greet him.
Brown recalls being a little confused and apprehensive that day. He was not an Arabist, nor was he an expert on the Middle East. Far from it. After he and Kissinger were ushered in to see the President, “Nixon did most of the talking—he obviously thought I was an expert. Henry was at his most obsequious; taking notes on a yellow pad.” Nixon’s message was that he did not trust the State Department and its policies. In Nixon’s view, the Russians were beginning to stir up trouble in the Middle East with their client states. In Jordan, the Soviet-aided PLO was directly threatening the moderate regime of King Hussein, and it would be Brown’s job to shore up Hussein by whatever means possible. The King was then under renewed attack by the PLO for his support of Egypt after Nasser agreed to the July ceasefire in the Sinai with the hated Israelis.
Nixon made it clear he believed warfare was inevitable in the Middle East, a war that could spread and precipitate World War III, with the United States and the Soviet Union squaring off against each other. The President was impressive; he seemed to have a good grasp of Hussein’s problems and a clear view of how to help the King. Like most American ambassadors who visited the President, Brown promised to relay any important information directly to Kissinger’s office by backchannel.
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s misperceptions about the extent of Brown’s knowledge of the Middle East were not significant; he turned out to be an excellent and effective ambassador. The more important misperception, and the tragedy of American policy in the Middle East in the early 1970s, lay in the White House’s inability to understand that the Russians were not behind every sand dune in the Middle East.
By 1970, the PLO had carved out a virtually independent existence inside the small desert kingdom of Jordan; it was a state within a state. Arab refugees had been flocking to Palestinian settlement camps inside Jordan since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The number of such refugees increased dramatically after the 1967 debacle, when King Hussein, in a show of Arab unity, joined in attacking Israel and lost control of Jordan’s West Bank. Hussein’s position softened after the war, under American diplomatic pressure, and by 1968 he began talks with American officials in the hope of a negotiated return of the conquered area. As the PLO guerrillas, or fedayeen, became more organized and daring in the later 1960s, under Yasir Arafat, Hussein’s rule grew more tenuous. By 1970, the fedayeen were operating with impunity inside Jordan, staging bloody guerrilla raids into Israel that could not be controlled or limited by Hussein and his central government in Amman. In June, a PLO faction tried to assassinate the King, and there was open—although brief—conflict between the guerrillas and Hussein’s army, which was composed largely of British-trained Bedouin tribesmen intensely loyal to the King. Strong opposition to a protracted civil war inside Jordan came not only from the United States, which feared Hussein’s overthrow and the emergence of a radical Palestinian state, but also from Egypt’s President Nasser, who was convinced, as Mohammed Heikal wrote in his memoirs, that “civil war in Jordan would simply play into the hands of the Israelis and the Americans.”
On September 6, 1970, two days after Dean Brown talked with Nixon and Kissinger, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most extreme factions in the PLO, hijacked a Swiss and two American passenger planes; three days later a British airliner was seized. Nearly 500 passengers from the aircraft were flown to an airport thirty miles outside of Amman and would not be released, the guerrillas declared, until all the PLO terrorists held in Swiss, German, British, and Israeli jails were freed.I A deadline of seventy-two hours was set. The hijackings and ransom demands were a precursor of terrorist acts by “Black September,” a secret PLO terrorist wing, whose operations in subsequent years—triggered by the failed September war in Jordan—created outrage and anxiety throughout the world.
The hijackings did more than jangle nerves in Washington. Nixon, deciding that the time had come to destroy the fedayeen, ordered American Navy planes from the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to bomb the guerrillas’ hideaways. The strike was meant to be purely punitive, a warning blow. Nixon’s goal was not to save the American hostages, but to demonstrate America’s willingness to challenge the PLO and to aid its ally, King Hussein. There is no evidence that Kissinger raised any objections to the order, which the President himself verbally gave to Laird. But Laird did. “We had bad weather for forty-eight hours,” Laird recalled years later, with a grin. “The Secretary of Defense can always find a reason not to do something. There’s always bad weather.”
At the time Nixon articulated his order, the fedayeen were still in control of nearly 500 aircraft hostages. Asked what the President hoped to accomplish with the bombings, Laird admitted that he wasn’t sure: “He probably wanted to show the Russians that, by God, they couldn’t tell what he might do.” The former Defense Secretary was reluctant to discuss the incident in detail, but in a conversation with a former government official not long after the incident, he expressed shock at the presidential order and at Kissinger’s role in urging its execution. As the official remembers the conversation, Laird said, “Conducting an air operation would have been incredibly dumb,” and he explained that he had been forced to move quickly to prevent the White House from going around his office to that of Admiral Moorer, who would have been only too willing to do what the President and Kissinger wanted. Laird telephoned Moorer and said, as he told the official, “Tom, I’ve gotten this order. . . . We’re just going to have terrible weather out there for the next forty-eight hours.” Laird managed to stall for days, although Kissinger telephoned to find out why it was not carried out. The White House seemed to accept the explanation of “bad weather,” and eventually rescinded the order. Nixon had changed his mind.
The exact date of Nixon’s order is not known, but the evidence—and Laird’s recollections—suggest that the most critical moment came on or before September 8, two days after the first hijacking, and before the deadline for the release of the jailed PLO members. Nixon convened a high-level meeting of his advisers that afternoon, and also invited J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell. Kissinger, always eager to demonstrate his role as an insider, revealed in his memoirs that the President “had earlier told me privately that the hijacking should be used as a pretext to crush the fedayeen; in the meeting he made no such comment. He did say that in an extremity he preferred American to Israeli military intervention.” At this point, Kissinger wrote, Rogers raised his usual objection, noting that an American involvement would result in the payment of an “enormous price for an essentially useless act.” Nixon then turned to Kissinger, who—the President understood—knew far more than Rogers what Nixon wanted to hear, and Kissinger told the group that if “the fedayeen could use Jordan as their principal base and in the process destroy the authority of the king . . . the entire Middle East would be revolutionized. . . . We could not acquiesce in this by dithering on the sidelines, wringing our hands, urging the resumption of peace talks, and then proclaiming our importance.”
It was a good show. If the weather “cleared” and the ordered air raids on the fedayeen did take place, the rationale had been laid out. If the raids did not come off, a possibility that must have seemed more likely to Nixon and Kissinger with each passing hour, the President and his top aide had managed in front of J. Edgar Hoover to look far more resolute than their Cabinet advisers.
Neither Nixon nor Kissinger mentioned the attack order in his memoirs. Some years later, Kissinger described the incident to at least one of his senior associates, but he depicted it solely as an example of Nixon’s irrationality. He failed to mention that he was involved in reaffirming the order to Laird and in badgering the Defense Secretary about it on Nixon’s behalf. Laird has steadfastly refused to talk about the incident in detail, explaining, “If I’m going to be insubordinate on a direct order, I’m not going to tell anybody about it.”
With his Patton-type order to Laird out of the way, Nixon worked effectively with Kissinger during the rest of the crisis. The two refused to negotiate with the fedayeen, who were still insisting on the release of jailed terrorists. The President also made it more than a little obvious that the United States was prepared to take military steps, if necessary, to free the hostages. He ordered a carrier task force in the Mediterranean to deploy off the coast of Lebanon and placed some Army units in Europe on “semialert.” Plans were drawn up in the Pentagon, and made known in some detail to the press, for the deployment of American paratroop units to the Middle East, where they would be within a short flight of the hostage sites. The fedayeen responded to the reports of American troop movements by destroying the three remaining aircraft on the ground on September 12 and shifting the hostages to a new hideaway. The American threats and the fedayeen’s response led to a new round of intense bargaining, with the International Red Cross involved, and with more deadlines set by the fedayeen. The situation remained highly volatile, especially since a superpower showdown in the Middle East seemed possible.II
As tensions grew, the Soviet Union decided to urge restraint on Jordan and Iraq, and to tell the Nixon Administration it had done so. A Soviet diplomat informed Sisco on September 9 that Moscow had sent diplomatic notes to Jordan and to Iraq, its closest ally in the Middle East, and urged them to practice restraint in the crisis. Conflict among the Arab nations would only help their enemies—“the Israeli aggressors and the imperialist forces behind them,” the Soviet notes said. Given the fact that the notes were addressed to Arab countries, such language could hardly be construed as out of proportion, but Kissinger, as he made clear in his memoirs, viewed the Soviet attempt to be conciliatory as an act of provocation. He concluded that the notes were a “crude slap at us” that was “hardly calculated to douse any fires.” It was a sign that “Moscow obviously did not believe that it was running a serious risk” in the Middle East. The Kremlin leaders had “made formally correct noises,” Kissinger acknowledged, “but did nothing constructive to reverse the drift toward crisis.”
Kissinger and Nixon were unable or unwilling to separate the Soviet Union from the actions of the PLO. Nothing the Soviets said or did in the next three weeks would change their view.
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The Popular Front’s continuing terrorist activities in September had little to do, in fact, with the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, but were an angry reaction to Egypt’s decision to participate in the ceasefire with Israel. The Popular Front’s main goal was to provoke a military confrontation between Hussein and the more cautious wings of the PLO. In those efforts, the Popular Front was supported by the bitterly anti-Israel governments of Syria and Iraq, both of which ruled out the possibility of any negotiations with Israel. Syria also had long-standing grievances against King Hussein, whose moderate views it held in contempt. In none of this did the Soviet Union play anything amounting to a key role, although it was a major supplier of arms to Syria and Iraq.
Nonetheless, Nixon reported in his memoirs that on September 15, when King Hussein decided to initiate a full-fledged civil war between his 50,000-man army and the PLO guerrillas in Amman, Kissinger informed him: “It looks like the Soviets are pushing the Syrians and the Syrians are pushing the Palestinians.” Nixon readily agreed that the Soviets were the villains. In his memoirs, he described the situation in Jordan as confused on September 15, but “[O]ne thing was clear. We could not allow Hussein to be overthrown by a Soviet-inspired insurrection.” The prophecy that Nixon had raised earlier in the month in his talk with Ambassador Brown was now being fulfilled, less than seven weeks before the congressional elections. Nixon’s memoirs presented the moment as the ultimate test of American resolve and courage: “It was like a ghastly game of dominoes, with a nuclear war waiting at the end. . . . If it [Hussein’s overthrow] succeeded, the Israelis would almost certainly take pre-emptive measures against a Syrian-dominated radical government in Jordan; the Egyptians were tied to Syria by military alliances; and Soviet prestige was on the line with both the Syrians and the Egyptians. Since the United States could not stand idly by and watch Israel being driven into the sea, the possibility of a direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation was uncomfortably high.” Nixon was determined to have his crisis and prove his mettle, as John F. Kennedy had in the Cuban missile crisis. If there was to be no summit, there would be nuclear dominoes.
Another major power that fully shared the Nixon-Kissinger view of the crisis in Jordan was Israel, whose army and air force, so the White House thought, would surely intervene if necessary to rescue Hussein’s army. Hussein informed the British on September 15 that he was forming a military government and would begin combat operations in Amman and in other PLO strongholds. Word was immediately flashed to Nixon and Kissinger, resulting in another wave of Kissinger-dominated meetings in the White House Situation Room and a Nixon-Kissinger decision to order a second aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean. Full-scale warfare broke out in Amman on September 17, and continued for the next few days, although Hussein’s troops—fighting well—always maintained control of the city.
As their memoirs show, Nixon and Kissinger spent much of the next week debating whether it would be wise to permit the Israelis to intervene to protect Hussein, if necessary, or whether American military units should be involved. Kissinger was in total command—he was finally getting a chance to act in the Middle East without State Department fetters. Secretary Rogers, as usual, was more cautious and more inclined to seek a negotiated settlement. He urged a diplomatic approach with the Russians, such as a joint American-Soviet intervention to prevent the spread of warfare in the Middle East. “Rogers thought calming the atmosphere would contribute to its resolution,” Kissinger wrote. “I believe that it was the danger that the situation might get out of hand which provided the incentive for rapid settlement.” The same threat policy that was not working against the North Vietnamese would now be put into effect in the Middle East.
Nixon, with Kissinger’s support, rejected Rogers’ conciliatory proposal out of hand. Russia was not to be a partner of the United States in a Middle East peace settlement; it was the enemy. One immediate Nixon-Kissinger goal was to “signal” the Russians to stay out of Jordan; within a week the United States had assembled in the eastern Mediterranean two aircraft carrier task forces with fourteen destroyers, a cruiser, and 140 aircraft, as well as a Marine landing force of 1,200 men. A third carrier task force and an additional 1,200 Marines were en route to the coast of Lebanon. Three Army battalions in Europe were also ordered to stand at full readiness and be prepared to parachute into Jordan within eight hours. The Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N. C., was also placed on full alert and ordered to be ready for airlifting to the Middle East. Eighteen F-4 Air Force fighter planes and crews had been assembled at a base in Turkey for possible combat, with refueling craft—although, as a Pentagon memorandum warned Nixon and Kissinger, “Turkey has not authorized us to use the base to launch these aircraft in strikes over Jordan.”
In all of these military deployments and signalings, Kissinger was dominant. The Kalbs, in their biography, reported that Kissinger, the World War II intelligence sergeant, was in his element as he pored over military maps of the Mediterranean in the White House Situation Room, shifting about toy battleships and aircraft carriers, arguing with combat-seasoned admirals, and peremptorily picking up the telephone to demand that the Joint Chiefs of Staff change the deployment of the Sixth Fleet. “Henry adores power, absolutely adores it,” one senior official was quoted as saying. “To Henry, diplomacy is nothing without it.”
All this American military might had been assembled in the Mediterranean with almost no publicity inside the United States and no awareness among the public or the bureaucracy of the drastic steps being taken in the name of stopping the Russians. The military moves were kept secret because, as Kissinger wrote, “announcements would have backfired because they would have required too many public reassurances. . . .” The Russians, however, were to learn of the troop alerts and deployment, since Kissinger ordered the military units involved to move without any special communications security, insuring that the Soviet intelligence agencies would intercept their signals.
Nixon was far less interested in such secrecy; he wanted the American voters to know that he was standing up to the Soviets in Jordan. On September 16, shortly after learning from Kissinger of the renewed fighting in Amman, Nixon, then in the middle of a short campaign trip, told the editors of the Chicago Sun-Times that his administration was “prepared to intervene directly in the Jordanian war should Syria and Iraq enter the conflict and tip the military balances against government forces loyal to Hussein.” Only Kissinger, Nixon, and a few military aides knew the extent of that preparation. The President’s statements were meant to be off the record, but they were published by the Sun-Times for a few editions the next morning without any sign of presidential displeasure.III Kissinger’s memoirs portray Nixon as almost jubilant because of the military maneuvers during those days, quoting him as saying: “The main thing is there’s nothing better than a little confrontation now and then, a little excitement.”
The reality was far less exciting, and much less of the stuff by which political campaigns can be won. The most important misconception—or deliberate Nixon and Kissinger deception—concerned the Soviet position toward King Hussein and the Jordanians. Many senior United States intelligence officials and diplomats believed at the time that the Soviet leaders were as concerned as Nixon and Kissinger were at the possibility of Hussein’s overthrow and the emergence of a Palestinian state in Jordan. “I don’t think the Soviets wanted to see Hussein overthrown,” one American diplomat, a Middle East expert, recalls. “They saw that as a very risky occurrence. I’m not a believer that the Soviet Union goes around the Middle East pushing buttons and making people react.” The Soviets obviously realized that, if they did rush into Jordan on the side of the fedayeen, the Israelis would be difficult to restrain, and a major war could be triggered. Another limiting factor on the Soviet role in the Middle East, and one that seemed to escape Nixon’s and Kissinger’s attention, was the widely known fact that the Soviets’ influence with the PLO had been diminishing—ever more so with the approval of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Egypt in July. The PLO publicly condemned Egypt’s participation, which was tacitly supported by the Soviet Union. By mid-1970, many of the PLO factions had far greater affinity for the People’s Republic of China than for the Soviets.IV A third restraining factor was King Hussein’s careful determination to stay on good terms with Cairo as well as with Moscow. For example, Hussein sent a delegation to see Nasser before forming the new military government in Amman and beginning his offensive against the fedayeen. Mohammed Heikal reported in his memoirs that Nasser subsequently called a summit meeting of Arab leaders in Cairo, some of whom wanted to send men and matériel in support of the fedayeen. At a critical point in the conference, Heikal wrote, Nasser argued against the spread of war in the Middle East, stating that “the difficulty is that if we send troops to Jordan this will only result in the liquidation of the rest of the Palestinians.”V
There was also evidence that the Soviets were advocating restraint on all factions throughout the crisis in Jordan. One explicit Soviet message was sent to Nasser’s summit meeting, urging, as Heikal reported, that Egypt and other Arab nations “exercise the utmost restraint because . . . any miscalculation might result in the Arabs losing all the reputation which they have recovered over the past three years” (since the 1967 war). A few days earlier, the Soviet Union had warned, through a commentary in its official press agency, Tass, against any outside interference in Jordan, a declaration that seemed to be aimed at Iraq, Syria, and the United States. The Tass commentary specifically cited “the concentration of ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet near the coasts of Syria and Lebanon . . . and other events,” which it said were “alarming symptoms which in no way contribute to relaxation of tensions in the world.” Western diplomats in Moscow subsequently told reporters they were “sure” that the Soviets were urging the Syrians—who were threatening to come to the aid of the PLO—to stay out of the fighting. Still another sign of Soviet caution was seen in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. One American official with access to communications intelligence recalls that as the carriers and destroyers of the United States Sixth Fleet began their early September buildup off the coast of Lebanon, the Soviet fleet “started getting out of their way” and there was no harassment of the American forces, a clue that the Soviets did not believe their role in the Middle East was at stake in Jordan.VI
It is possible that the Nixon Administration played a far greater role than is publicly known in King Hussein’s decision on September 15 to form a military government and take on the fedayeen. Heikal wrote that Nasser sent a delegation of Arab leaders on a private visit to Amman shortly after Hussein’s army began its attacks. The delegation came back “shaken by what they had seen,” largely because of the size and scope of Hussein’s military activities against the guerrillas. General Mohammed Ahmed Sadiq, chief of staff of the Egyptian Army, subsequently concluded that Hussein’s operation had been planned far in advance. “By then,” Heikal wrote without elaboration, “Nasser had information that the operation had been planned in cooperation with the CIA and some Jordanians, including Wasfi Tel,” the Jordanian Prime Minister. No further evidence was cited by Heikal, nor could more be learned in subsequent research on the CIA’s direct involvement in Hussein’s decision, but Wasfi Tel did play a major role in the next phase of the Jordanian crisis, a role that neither Kissinger nor Nixon mentioned in his memoirs.
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The most mysterious and controversial phase of the Jordanian crisis began early on September 20, according to Kissinger’s account, when the United States received intelligence reports from the Jordanians and from Mossad of a large-scale tank invasion of Jordan by the Syrian Army. By late afternoon, Kissinger wrote, the United States was able to confirm—he did not say by what means—that two additional Syrian armored brigades had crossed the Jordanian border and were rolling toward the strategic town of Irbid, south of the Golan Heights. By that date, the Hussein regime was no longer facing a direct threat from the fedayeen; the Jordanian Army had performed well in the heavy fighting. The Syrian tank movement was obviously a destabilizing factor, as Kissinger wrote: “I had no doubt that this challenge had to be met. If we failed to act, the Middle East crisis would deepen as radicals and their Soviet sponsors seized the initiative.” The rhetoric was familiar, as were the culprits.
Nixon’s account offered different facts. The Syrians invaded with “at least a hundred tanks” on the night of September 18, and, after “a very stern note” was delivered to the Soviets, half of the tanks returned to Syria. Three days later, three hundred tanks crossed the border, broke through Jordanian defenses, “and were rumbling almost unopposed along the roads toward Amman.” Nixon wrote that he placed 20,000 American troops on alert, moved more forces into the Mediterranean Sea, and told the Israelis that America would support its air force in strikes on the Syrian tank forces if necessary. The next day, most of the Syrian tanks, faced with the American troop movements and the possibility of Israeli intervention, withdrew.
The Nixon and Kissinger accounts differ so dramatically because neither told the full story. At the time, the United States had no independent means of intelligence in the crucial areas of Jordan and Syria; it relied almost totally on information supplied by Mossad and King Hussein—far from objective sources. Some tanks and armored cars, many of them bearing the markings of the Palestinian Liberation Army, did move into Jordan from Syria, but their numbers were not independently known by the American government. Kissinger listed a total of 120 destroyed Syrian tanks without revealing that the statistic was supplied by Israeli intelligence. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger described the extensive disarray inside the Syrian government over the tank attacks, nor did either report that a faction led by Lieutenant General Hafiz Asad, the Syrian Defense Minister, was in surreptitious and indirect contact with Wasfi Tel of Jordan. Asad would emerge in a bloodless coup two months later as Syria’s new leader. And finally, Kissinger and Nixon, while praising Israel’s willingness to come, if needed, to the aid of King Hussein’s forces during the crisis, did not fully describe Israel’s price for such support: a guarantee of American military intervention in case the Soviet Union or Egypt came to the aid of Syria or the fedayeen. Some NSC and State Department aides who were involved in the crisis recall that a fundamental American commitment was given to the Israelis: an explicit promise of support in case Israel attacked in northern Jordan and annexed portions of that area, considered vital to its defense.
The underpinnings of the American responses in Jordan were predicated on a series of mistaken assumptions that could have led to an American act of war whose consequences had not been fully thought out. Nixon’s reaction to the reports of a Syrian tank invasion has not been described in any memoirs or contemporary news accounts, but the Syrians—and the Soviet Union, in Nixon’s eyes—were defying his warning as published by the Chicago Sun-Times a few days earlier. Nixon had explicitly said then that he was ready to intervene if Syria or Iraq entered the war.
By Sunday night, September 20, there were intelligence reports that Syria had taken up his challenge. On Monday, a further report of a large-scale Syrian tank breakthrough in northern Jordan was relayed to the White House by the Israeli and British embassies in Washington. At the time, Pentagon contingency plans endorsed by Nixon and Kissinger called for an airborne battalion of the Eighth Infantry Division, on alert in West Germany, to parachute into Amman airport to set up perimeter defenses in support of Hussein, with a second battalion landing in transport planes. Both units, whose immediate goals were to save Hussein and rescue the American dependents and hostages in Jordan, would be protected by fighter planes from the Sixth Fleet. Would Nixon and Kissinger really have committed the forces in a showdown? Robert Pursley, Melvin Laird’s military assistant, recalls that the White House was acting with a sense of panic on that Sunday night, relying exclusively on raw intelligence from the Israelis and Hussein’s government, as relayed through the British. None of the intelligence had been evaluated by area specialists in the State Department or the Pentagon. “If there’s one thing we’d learned, it’s that you never believe the first story, and only one-half of the fourth story” during a crisis. “The White House was always reacting to the first story.” The White House desire to use American forces in Jordan was shaped by the same lack of analysis that marked the EC-121 incident, according to Pursley. “What are you going to use if you get involved in a big war? Where are the forces going to come from if the other side, such as the Soviets and the Egyptians, decides to go to the aid of the Syrians?”
In a speech to a military meeting five months after the crisis, Alexis Johnson echoed Pursley’s view. “[T]hose of us who were involved in planning and working on that contingency”—the rescue effort in Jordan—“were appalled at the . . . inadequacy or limited resources and capabilities that we had to bring to bear if we had been called upon to do so.” There were immense logistical problems, as Johnson obviously appreciated, in getting fighting troops to the area and, if necessary, keeping them supplied on the ground. There were also immense conceptual problems: How do you land fighting troops in a guerrilla stronghold without severe casualties? Could any hostages be rescued under such circumstances?
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Such problems were far removed from the Oval Office at the height of the crisis. Richard Nixon seemed once again to have personalized a confrontation with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were coming to the aid of Syria against Jordan to challenge his presidency and his authority. Henry Kissinger was a willing conspirator in perpetuating Nixon’s attitude, for his power always expanded in such situations. Nixon was “at his best” in crises like that in Jordan, Kissinger wrote in his memoirs. “He did not pretend that he was exercising his responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief by nervous meddling with tactical details or formative deliberations; he left the shaping of those to the governmental machinery under my supervision. . . . [H]e had a great sense of timing; he knew instinctively when the moment for decision had arrived; and he would then act resolutely, especially if he could insulate himself from too much personal controversy.”
During the crisis, one young NSC aide caught a glimpse of Nixon “at his best” that showed a great deal about the reality of life at the top. Kissinger had assigned the staff man, an expert on the Middle East and South Asia, to prepare overnight situation intelligence reports on the crisis. He quickly learned that Nixon would invariably first want to know about the Russians, and so he carefully included any possibly relevant items about the Soviet Union. “We always seemed to be dragging the Soviets into crises,” he recalls. “It’s almost as if the Soviets weren’t there, but we were going to discover them anyway.” An unusual routine was soon worked out. The aide prepared his intelligence briefing for the President and then waited outside the Oval Office while Kissinger and Nixon discussed policy in private. Upon being summoned, he was to give only an intelligence briefing and respond to Nixon’s specific questions; not—according to Kissinger’s repeated orders—to engage the President in any policy discussion. That was solely Kissinger’s province. It was a rare chance for an aide to see the two men in action in an informal meeting, and he learned more than he had thought possible. “I’d walk in and begin to give a specific listing of what’d happened overnight and Nixon would interject, ‘Bomb the bastards,’ or some other wild remark.” Normally the young man was shooed out of the office at such points, but “sometimes Henry would forget to move me out and so I stayed and listened.”
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The Arabists in the State Department knew nothing of Nixon’s hope for a military intervention by someone—the United States or Israel—in the Jordanian crisis, but they did share increasing doubts about the intelligence upon which the White House was basing its diplomatic activity. One of the first to question the intelligence on the Syrian tank invasion was Andrew N. Killgore, a State Department desk officer in charge of monitoring developments in Arab Region North—Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. At the height of the crisis, after Hussein’s troops seemed to have won their battle with the fedayeen in Amman, “We started getting CIA reports of a great Syrian tank movement. The Syrians were apparently going down to help the fedayeen.” Killgore was suspicious, he says, because “I knew that Asad was a cautious man and he wouldn’t commit his tanks across an open plain.” Some tanks and armored cars did cross the border into Jordan, “but we started getting these reports as if it were El Alamein. They were invading in full force.” Killgore subsequently learned that the CIA’s reports were in fact supplied by Mossad and were being relayed directly into the White House. At one point the CIA was relaying reports on a tank battle Mossad said was taking place south of the city of Irbid, more than thirty miles inside Jordan.
Killgore was skeptical. “My theory was that the Israelis saw this as a possible opportunity,” he recalls. “If the fedayeen got the best of Hussein, it would have created a dangerous situation and given Israel a chance to grab off some land in the north” of Jordan. Killgore himself believes that peace will not come to the Middle East until the Palestinian refugees have a separate state—a view that has marked him as an enemy of Israel in the view of many in the State Department. Yet his account is supported by one of Kissinger’s NSC aides who was directly involved. “We were relying on the Israelis, who had a vested interest, and Hussein, who was panicked,” for up-to-the-minute assessments of the battlefield situation. There was no American satellite coverage available and no reports from undercover CIA agents in Syria. There was even less information about the decision making there: “It was like the dark side of the moon. We knew very little about the dynamics of Syria’s internal society. No one in the White House or who came to the meetings could tell us what was going on.” If a major tank battle near Irbid did take place between Hussein’s troops and the Syrians, the aide added, he saw no evidence of it in the White House.
In this aide’s view, “The Israelis wanted the Irbid Heights”—the area surrounding the city of Irbid—“and they wanted the green light from us. And they almost got it. For the Israelis it was a strategic decision—Irbid is the high ground and you could control everything in the line of sight.”
In his memoirs, Kissinger wrote that Nixon—in the hours after the Syrians began the tank “invasion”—agreed at one point to support Israeli ground actions inside Jordan, and the Israelis moved army units close to the border.VII Kissinger agreed with Nixon in the use of Israeli rather than American forces, he wrote, because he thought the American forces “were best employed in holding the ring against Soviet interference with Israeli operations. . . . [I]f the situation in Jordan got out of control it could be remedied only by a massive blow against Syria, for which Israeli armed forces were best suited.” Thus the White House was willing to challenge the Soviet Union in support of the Israelis in an attack against a tank force which may or may not have been Syrian, may or may not have totaled in the hundreds, and may or may not have been part of a Soviet-led plan aimed at overthrowing King Hussein and installing a Palestinian government. The only certainty in all this was the Israeli goal. In a 1977 interview with David Frost, Nixon explained that the Israelis saw a great military potential in the Jordanian crisis: “There’s nothing they [the Israelis] would like to have done than to roll on those Heights [in Jordan] with their aircraft . . . and with their own tanks. They would have demolished the Syrians and gone right into Damascus, which they would have wanted to do.”VIII
Nixon did not explain to Frost how he had come to hold that view, which is shared by former Egyptian Foreign Minister Riad. In his memoirs, Riad wrote that the real danger was not that of American intervention but the “possibility of Israel taking advantage of the opportunity to deal a military blow against Syria.” If that had happened, he added, Egypt would have had no choice but to support Syria by resuming warfare against Israel in the Sinai, “which would have inevitably led to a new war.IX Riad dismissed the American threats as “muscle-flexing” because, he wrote, if the Nixon Administration had seriously considered deploying its naval power in the crisis, “it would have come face-to-face with the Soviet fleet in the Mediterranean . . . which Nixon would not have welcomed.” Since the American threats and hints did not “intimidate anybody,” Riad added, they could not “have been the decisive factor in the withdrawal of the Syrian tanks.”
Kissinger’s memoirs show that he and Nixon believed that the Soviet Union, impressed by the joint American-Israeli show of resolve, persuaded its client state Syria to begin withdrawing its tank force, thus ending the crisis and giving the White House a foreign policy victory. The American strategy—to create “maximum fear of a possible American move,” Kissinger wrote—had worked. On September 21, Yuli Vorontsov, Dobrynin’s chief deputy at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, visited Joseph Sisco at the State Department and presented a note urging all parties not to intervene inside Jordan—a reference not only to Syria, with whom the Soviets were in contact, but also to the Israelis and the United States. Kissinger could not resist a note of triumph in his memoirs: “The tone of the message was remarkably mild, considering the menacing, almost flaunting openness of our deployments. . . . Unless the Soviets were tricking us, they were saying that they were pressing the radical government in Syria to halt its invasion. And tricking us while our strength in the Mediterranean was growing daily and Israel was mobilizing would have been extremely foolhardy.”X
Unquestionably the Israeli and American military movements played a role in the Syrian turnabout, but those maneuvers were not the whole story. The Syrians, it should be noted, had defied Nixon’s public threat in the Chicago newspaper, and theoretically could do so again. Equally significant during those crucial days was the bitter feuding between the military and civilian wings of the ruling Baath party in Syria—a dispute that flared anew with the tank invasion into Jordan. At a critical point in that invasion, General Asad—a leading figure in the military wing of the party—refused to commit the Syrian Air Force to the defense of the tank force inside Jordan, thus permitting Hussein’s weak air force to bomb and strafe the Syrian tanks unmolested. Asad’s decision to limit the Syrian military involvement was a significant turning point in the crisis, American analysts concluded, since it forced the remaining Syrian and PLO tanks to return across the border to safety. State Department officials who were in the Middle East at the time have said it was also known in select diplomatic and intelligence circles that Asad had been in indirect communication with Wasfi Tel, the Jordanian Prime Minister, and had reassured Hussein in advance that the Syrian Air Force would not retaliate against Jordan’s air force.
In November 1970, Asad joined with Mustafi Tlas, the Syrian Army chief of staff, and other military moderates in Syria to overthrow the more radical government of President Nuredin Attassi. The new government emphatically denounced the Attassi regime for having urged the commitment of Syrian tanks in the Jordanian war, and a number of radical officials were arrested, including Major General Salah Jadid, Asad’s chief political rival, and Yussef Zaylin, a former Syrian Prime Minister who was commander of the Palestinian tank force that entered Jordan. Attassi, Jadid, and Zaylin had been among the leading advocates of Syria’s stated policy—prior to the coup—of opposing any form of accommodation with Israel.
United States officials concluded at the time that the Soviet Union supported Asad’s seizure of control, largely to insure that, as one Middle East expert puts it, “someone who would listen to the Soviets was installed.” There was no evidence that the Attassi government had done so, at least to Moscow’s satisfaction, these officials noted. Analyzing the 1970 war much later, one experienced CIA official, who was on duty as a station chief in the Middle East at the time, said that Nixon and Kissinger were simply wrong in their belief that the Soviet Union could control Syria’s military and political decision making. “The Soviets don’t have that much influence,” he said, adding that the demonstration of Soviet impotence—though missed by the White House—had been carefully noted in Cairo. A senior State Department analyst similarly concluded, “It was a Jordanian victory and a Syrian defeat. It wasn’t seen by the political officer [in the State Department] as primarily a Cold War issue.” The real cost of the war, these officials understood, was not to be found in the failed political aspirations of the Soviet Union, imagined or not, but among the civilian populations of the cities and PLO camps in Jordan. Estimates of the Palestinian and Jordanian dead ranged from 5,000 to 20,000, with thousands of homes in Amman and elsewhere demolished.
The view was different in the White House, where Nixon and Kissinger began claiming the spoils of victory. Elaborate press briefings were held and photographers were allowed to take pictures of the President agonizing over strategic decisions in his Oval Office (as photographers had been permitted to photograph President Kennedy after his success in the Cuban missile crisis).XI
By late September, Asad’s intervention—not described in Kissinger’s or Nixon’s memoirs—had turned the tide and made Syrian withdrawal inevitable. The Soviet Union was active in passing messages to the Syrian government and Yuli Vorontsov took the unique step of approaching Kissinger at a cocktail party to reassure him that the Soviet Union had no vital interest in Jordan. But Kissinger kept up the pressure. On September 23, he ordered four more destroyers to leave the United States for the Mediterranean and redirected two attack submarines to the area. “Letting up now would surely leak and could convey the wrong signal at a critical moment,” Kissinger wrote. “Contingency planning against Soviet intervention continued. . . .” Nixon later told Congress that the crisis in Jordan was “the gravest threat to world peace since this administration came to office.”XII
The major victors were the Israelis, who had joined in active partnership with Nixon and Kissinger in supporting Hussein’s regime. On September 17, shortly before the Syrians sent their tank force into Jordan, Nixon had authorized $500 million in military aid for Israel and also agreed to accelerate the delivery of previously promised F-4 Phantom aircraft. There was also an unprecedented promise from Nixon and Kissinger: If Israel moved its troops into Jordan and they were engaged by Egyptian or Soviet forces coming to the aid of the Syrians, the United States would then intervene on behalf of Israel. The agreement, which has never been fully disclosed, was made in oral communications between Ambassador Rabin and Kissinger, who met and talked repeatedly during the crisis.XIII In his memoirs, Rabin told of a telephone call from Kissinger on September 25, conveying a message of victory and thanks from Nixon to Golda Meir: “The President will never forget Israel’s role in preventing the deterioration in Jordan and in blocking the attempt to overturn the regime there. He said that the United States is fortunate in having an ally like Israel in the Middle East. These events will be taken into account in all future developments.” Rabin understood the significance of the Kissinger message, as he wrote: “This was probably the most far-reaching statement ever made by a president of the United States on the mutuality of the alliance between the two countries.”
The legacy of Jordan was a new American policy in the Middle East—never formally stated—that would strangle diplomacy for the next three years. No longer would the White House seriously consider an “even-handed” American role in the Middle East, although Rogers, ever more isolated from real authority, still talked that way on occasion. The policy was tilted toward Israel. Kissinger and Nixon, exhilarated by their successful showdown with the Soviet Union, would continue—until forced otherwise—to view the basic problem in the Middle East as one of containing the Soviet Union and its client states, especially Egypt. Israel was seen as the bulwark of that policy, a regional American partner willing to intervene without question on behalf of the Nixon-Kissinger view of the world. More arms and economic aid also began to flow to King Hussein, who was perceived as an equally unquestioning ally for his seeming willingness to permit the Israelis to enter his country and, if necessary, do battle with the Syrians. By mid-1971, Hussein had fully reestablished his authority over Jordan and ousted the fedayeen. America’s policy in the Middle East was now measured in terms of insuring that Israel and Jordan had enough hardware to maintain the military balance.
Egypt’s President Nasser died in late September 1970, and his successor, Anwar Sadat, realized that Egypt and other Arab nations had been frozen by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s beliefs into a pro-Soviet—and thus anti-American—position. Sadat and his advisers, no longer inhibited by Nasser’s distrust of the West, would try a new approach in 1971. But, knowing little of the real balance of power inside the Nixon Administration, Sadat would rely on William Rogers and the State Department to relay his proposals. His approach thus was marked for failure before it began.
I. One of the hijacked planes, a Pan American 747, was flown to Cairo airport, the passengers were released, and it was blown up by Popular Front guerrillas. The PLO was far from unified in support of the hijackings. On September 12, the Central Committee of the guerrilla movement, led by Yasir Arafat, suspended the Popular Front, a Marxist group led by Dr. George Habash, for having violated PLO discipline. The Central Committee also condemned all actions “that could affect the safety and security of the Palestinian resistance.”
II. A compromise, in which Israel played a key role, was eventually worked out and the hostages were freed. Israel agreed to release 450 Palestinian prisoners in return for a fedayeen commitment to begin releasing the hostages in small groups. The hostage release was concluded by September 29, without incident, despite the onset of the PLO war in Jordan.
III. In his memoirs, Nixon noted that Kissinger awakened him in his Chicago hotel room at 8:00 A.M. on September 17 with a report on the intensified civil war in Amman. At the time, however, the New York Times reported that Nixon had been awakened at 2:00 A.M. by the Kissinger call. The disparity can easily be explained as routine campaign drama, as the p.r. men who seemed to be incessantly around Nixon—including Kissinger, on occasion—sought to heighten the sense of crisis and presidential stamina.
IV. Kissinger and Nixon seemed unaware of a basic fact: The Soviet Union’s rivalry with China lessened its influence in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Third World.
V. The sharpest advocate of Arab intervention in Jordan on behalf of the fedayeen was Muammar el-Qaddafi, the President of Libya, who was depicted throughout Heikal’s memoir as an often-irrational gunslinger, always eager to commit his army to bloodshed. Heikal published excerpts from what seems to have been an unofficial transcript of the summit meeting, which took place September 22 and 23 at the Nile Hilton Hotel, in which Qaddafi argued with Nasser and King Feisal of Saudi Arabia:
Qaddafi: “I think we should send armed forces to Amman—armed forces from Iraq and Syria.”
Feisal: “I think that if we are going to send our armies anywhere we should send them to fight the Jews.”
Qaddafi: “What Hussein is doing is worse than the Jews. It’s only a difference in the names. . . . If we are faced with a madman like Hussein who wants to kill his people we must send someone to seize him, handcuff him, stop him from doing what he’s doing, and take him off to an asylum.”
Feisal: “I don’t think you should call an Arab King a madman who should be taken to an asylum.”
Qaddafi: “But all his family are mad. It’s a matter of record.”
Feisal: “Well, perhaps all of us are mad.”
Nasser: “Sometimes when you see what is going on in the Arab world, your Majesty, I think this may be so. I suggest we appoint a doctor to examine us regularly and find out which ones are crazy.”
Feisal: “I would like your doctor to start with me, because in view of what I see I doubt whether I shall be able to preserve my reason.”
VI. This official, who had been closely involved in United States defense planning since the Kennedy Administration, said of Nixon and Kissinger in the Jordanian dispute: “They were looking for a cheap Cuban missile crisis.”
VII. Nixon later changed his mind about the Israeli ground action, Kissinger wrote, after Rogers expressed “serious reservations” and Laird asked to see further intelligence on the situation in Jordan. Kissinger once again maneuvered himself into the position of being the only senior adviser Nixon could trust to be consistently hard line.
VIII. This Nixon-Frost interview took place on March 30; it was the fourth in an extensive series of tapings made in preparation for Frost’s television interview with Nixon, which was broadcast later in 1977. Only a fraction of the interview was televised, but Frost kept a complete transcript. In those interviews, Nixon also gave the following explanation of the crisis in Jordan: “My feeling was that the conduct of the Russians in Jordan in 1970 should be used by us as one of the tests as to whether or not we could go forward and meet with the Russians later in a summit and expect them to keep their word and expect them to be helpful in reducing crisis. . . .” In reality, a factor in the White House’s hysterical reaction to the crisis was precisely the opposite: Nixon’s belief that the Russians had humiliated and embarrassed him by not agreeing to a summit before the congressional elections of 1970, despite his personal intervention with Ambassador Dobrynin.
IX. Riad also took issue with Kissinger’s account of the crisis. “Kissinger had tried in his book,” he wrote, “to picture the crisis as a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, not between Jordan and the [PLO] Resistance.” Kissinger ignored the fact that “the Soviet Union had no interest in coming to their [the PLO’s] defense in Jordan. . . . The only role played by the USSR during the events in Jordan, as proved by its communications with us in Egypt and by its contacts with the Syrians and Iraqis, was to urge the containment of the crisis rather than accelerate it.”
X. Despite his expressions of satisfaction at the time and in his memoirs over the outcome in Jordan, there is evidence that Kissinger believed the American maneuvering and “signaling” had had less impact on the Soviets than desired. In 1972, citing Jordan as an example of the impotence of American nuclear planning, Kissinger asked senior Pentagon officials to study new options for the use of such weapons in, as one officer calls them, “non-central campaigns”—that is, not against the Soviet Union. Kissinger’s comments came during a meeting with members of an ad hoc military panel on American nuclear-targeting strategy directed by Dr. John S. Foster, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering. Staff director for the study was General Jasper A. Welch, one of the Air Force’s leading nuclear theoreticians. At the meeting, Kissinger spoke of Jordan as an example of an American threat that nearly failed. One participant recalls that he said, “We put everything on the line with the Soviet Union, and they didn’t blink until the last day.” Kissinger’s complaint was that if he was unable effectively to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in such crises, “we weren’t getting our money’s worth out of them.” He asked the planners to develop new options “to be sure that America’s strategic forces really did cast a shadow on peripheral situations,” as the participant says. “Kissinger’s point was that even if the military situation on the ground is not interesting for nuclear use, the Def Con [America’s military alert] has a different impact on the Russians if they know we have flexible options.” The Pentagon’s planning did eventually lead to more flexible presidential options for nuclear response, which were adopted by the White House in 1974.
XI. In one interview after the crisis, Haig described the President’s response to the pressure in these glowing terms: “He makes lonely decisions, sometimes after contrary advice, thoughtful decisions based on intellect, not emotions. In this crisis he contributed the extra ingredient of personal leadership. He stayed on it from the time it got white-hot until it was resolved. He had a firm hand on the controls. His success is a great tribute to him. Most of the country had no conception of the tenseness of the crisis. This also resulted from the President’s decision. He showed cold calm. He didn’t drain the American people with fears and emotions. . . . He refused to indulge in a phony publicity buildup to make himself a national hero.”
XII. There was a curious addendum to the Jordanian crisis that gave a hint, perhaps, of some presidential uncertainty. In late September, shortly after the threat to Hussein had subsided, Nixon began a previously planned nine-day trip to Europe, with stops in Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Ireland. For obvious political purposes, a visit to a group of freed American hostages in Rome was tacked on to the presidential schedule, after the White House learned that the hostages would stop briefly at the airport there en route to the United States. The President met privately with the group for a few minutes and later described to the White House traveling press corps some of the key elements in the conversation. “I told them that . . . those of us with responsibility in government wanted to do something. We were naturally terribly frustrated because we realized that if we did the wrong thing, it would cost them their lives. . . . We had to show power and at the same time, we had to demonstrate restraint.” The former hostages were sympathetic and supportive of his efforts, Nixon told the press: “They told me that was exactly the right policy, because they said that every day they had the feeling that their captors might do something irrational in the event that we triggered it, or somebody else triggered it.” Nixon, having finished his summary of his conversation with the hostages, added: “This, of course, bore out the wisdom of our policy, and I am glad that we did show the proper restraint during this period while, at the same time, being very firm in our diplomacy and firm in the demonstration of our military strength.” The President’s description of his conversation with the hostages and their support of his policy was made out of whole cloth; such an exchange did not take place, as an official White House transcript of the meeting demonstrates. The transcript shows that Nixon engaged in small talk, as he had in May with the antiwar demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial, asking various hostages, for example, to name their home states. At one point a hostage complained of being “so sick of that Red Chinese jam we had to eat,” and Nixon responded: “Is that what it was? It is a little better if you could mix some pineapple with it.” In The Illusion of Peace (1978), commenting on Nixon’s curious account of the meeting, the journalist Tad Szulc asked: “Why did Nixon feel the need to invent this—since nobody in the United States seriously questioned his policies in the first place?”
XIII. In Decade of Decisions (1977), an insider’s account of the Nixon-Kissinger Middle East policy, former NSC aide William Quandt reported that Israel had asked for and received clarification of the American commitment on seven specific points—none in writing. Congress did not learn of the agreement at the time, because of the usual White House secrecy.