Fumes from the gas works and lime kilns combined with the slimy flow of the Potomac River to create on certain days a stinky smog along the swampy lowlands of the nation’s capital. When the polluting industries were finally removed by 1928, The Washington Post declared it was time to drop the neighborhood name, Foggy Bottom, but to no avail. When the State Department moved there in 1947, Foggy Bottom became its nickname—a running smirk at the overdressed Ivy Leaguers who implemented the foreign policy of the United States of America. Long lunches with at least two bottles of decent Bordeaux preceded many directions to Chad or Chile. Career ambassadors around the globe would sometimes snarl about Foggy Bottom as a center of uninformed isolation from the realities of foreign lands.
Full of energy at 50, Henry Alfred Kissinger endeavored to shed this out-of-touch image. The German-born former Harvard professor became President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state on Saturday, September 22, 1973. He decided to make his first day on the job Sunday, September 23, when few were around. “Just to see what we had,” Kissinger recalled.
On his desk were two new intelligence reports from the day before. “There were Egyptian concentrations near the Suez Canal. And … there were Syrian concentrations on the Golan Heights. Being an amateur and not yet a professional, I thought this was rather strange. So I asked the various services what it meant.” The reply was terse, blunt, and dismissive.
Nothing. It meant nothing. Just maneuvers.
Instinctively, Kissinger was uneasy about rumblings in the most volatile of all regions now under his purview. Israel was the most important ally of the United States in the Mideast. Egypt and Syria were the most important clients of the Soviet Union in the region. Washington and Moscow had armed and trained the armies of all three. There were simmering confrontations after Israel defeated Egypt and Syria in wars in 1948 and 1967. Any conflict between Arabs and Jews could threaten the world supply of oil from the Persian Gulf and intensify Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow as they bolstered their client countries. On Monday, Kissinger demanded updates. “And every two days I was told that these were just maneuvers,” he said. “The Israelis reported the same thing.”
Pressed by Kissinger, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and his department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research came up with a combined conclusion on October 4, 1973:
We continue to believe that an outbreak of major Arab-Israeli hostilities remains unlikely for the immediate future, although the risk of localized fighting has increased slightly as the result of the buildup of Syrian forces in the vicinity of the Golan Heights. Egyptian exercise activity under way since late September may also contribute to the possibility of incidents.
Two days later, the CIA once more complied with Kissinger’s request for an update. A redacted version said:
Both the Israelis and the Arabs are becoming increasingly concerned about the military activities of the other, although neither side appears to be bent on initiating hostilities.… Exercise and alert activities in Egypt are continuing, but elements of the air force and navy appear to be conducting normal training activity.… A build-up of tanks and artillery along the Suez Canal, this cannot be confirmed.… For Egypt, a military initiative makes little sense at this critical juncture of President Sadat’s reorientation of domestic and foreign policies.… For the normally cautious Syrian President [Hafez al-Assad], a military adventure now would be suicidal.
When the analysis landed on Kissinger’s desk the morning of October 6, Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt, had already launched a war that turned the world upside down. Code-named Operation Full Moon (Operation Badr), it was a two-pronged attack to recover Arab land Israel had seized six years earlier. At the Golan Heights in northern Israel—you can the see the lights of Damascus—Syria sent 1,300 Russian- and British-made tanks against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) position. In the south, as the minute hand struck 2 p.m. (9 a.m. Washington time) on the west side of the Suez Canal, 4,000 Egyptian cannons erupted in a 53-minute barrage. The first of 40,500 shells—175 per second—landed on the east side of the canal and Israel’s massive Bar-Lev trench line, a World War I–style rampart erected by Chief of General Staff Haim Bar-Lev. For 93 miles along the canal, from the Mediterranean entrance at Port Said to the town of Suez, there were 20 forts and 35 strongpoints, each with 26 machine-gun bunkers. Concrete bunkers for troops could withstand a 1,000-pound bomb. A barrier of concrete-reinforced sand berms reached 82 feet high in front of minefields, interlocking artillery positions, antitank guns, and thousands of automatic weapons. Armored brigades of tanks were staged in support positions. Oil storage containers along the Bar-Lev fed underground pipes into the canal; once the fuel was ignited, invaders would face a three-foot wall of fire on the canal, radiating an incinerating 1,292°F. “One of the best antitank ditches in the world,” Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told Prime Minister Golda Meir. She and Dayan had poured $300 million ($1.7 billion today) into the Bar-Lev for the same sort of invulnerability and national pride that France once sought from the Maginot Line.
On the afternoon of October 6, more than 100,000 Egyptian troops watched 240 Mirage and MiG fighter-bombers streak low overhead to attack the Bar-Lev, Israeli airfields, and bunkers on the Sinai Peninsula. In the north, 60 Syrian MiG fighters struck IDF positions around the Golan Heights. The Muslim troops were given an extra meal, a dispensation from dawn-to-dusk fasting during the month of Ramadan; avoid impure thoughts and evil deeds is the admonition of Islam on these holy days. Egyptian frogmen had plugged the Israeli underwater oil outlets the night before the attack started. That afternoon, Egyptian commandos slid down the sandy west bank with rubber boats. On the east bank they rigged rope ladders for the infantry to scale the Bar-Lev. The night of October 6, when the moon set and the canal’s tide was low, boats with laser-like water cannons cut away Israel’s sand and concrete defensive berms. Other army engineer craft deployed 10 classic assault bridges—a line of pontoon boats supporting platforms strong enough for 1,250 tanks in the strike force. The bridging locations were picked to outflank the fixed Israeli forts, igloo-shaped redoubts manned by 20 to 30 men. Much of the Bar-Lev shared the same fate as the Maginot Line of World War II—fixed fortresses were simply bypassed. At dawn on October 7, five divisions of Egyptian infantry and armor slammed into the Bar-Lev and five points along the canal. The Egyptian navy performed an amphibious landing, at a sixth assault site just west of Port Said. “It was one of the most memorable water crossings in the annals of warfare,” said US Army Colonel Trevor Dupuy, a strategist at the Pentagon for most of his career. With the Bar-Lev a smoking ruin, Sadat’s armies surged into the Sinai.
In the Golan, the IDF in Mount Hermon—the mountain range’s highest point—oversaw 14 fortified blockhouses that could fire on an array of tank ditches and antitank mounds just inside the Purple Line, the 1967 border imposed on Syria. Minefields and barbed wire were laid to hamper infantry. President Hafez al-Assad wore his uniform on October 6. He had been trained as a jet fighter pilot in the Soviet Union and now commanded 60,000 troops and 1,300 tanks. Israeli forces in the Golan were more prepared for a Syrian attack than their counterparts in the Bar-Lev trench line on the Suez Canal. As a result, Assad’s troops made uneven advances on October 6. Yet by the night of October 7, his tanks were in striking distance of the Sea of Galilee and the West Bank of the Jordan.
In Washington on October 7, the intelligence community had no inkling that Egyptian and Syrian armies had overwhelmed Israeli forces. They could only tell Kissinger that fighting was under way.
“Who started this?” Kissinger demanded.
All three intelligence agencies agreed that it must be Israel attacking Egypt. The inbred analysts could only assume the Jewish nation was once more wiping the floor with Arab armies, as it had done in 1948 and again in 1967. As in past failures—Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam—the American intelligence community reported today exactly what they reported yesterday. Intelligence amateur Kissinger ended the briefing.
“I finally said, ‘Listen, I’m of Jewish origin. The Israelis do not start wars on Yom Kippur when half of their army is in synagogue.’ It took us until the end of the day to put it all together.” His displeasure grew after he was presented with maps of the Sinai both vague and dated. “Who in the hell made these maps?” Kissinger was said to have snapped. “Moses?” He, his department, and the Government of the United States were all badly out of touch. Few understood Sadat’s real goal, although he had proclaimed it in public two years earlier. War was key for Sadat’s plan to achieve peace with Israel. Sadat recounts in his memoir what he used to tell his predecessor, President Gamal Abdel Nasser: “If we could recapture even 4 inches of Sinai territory (by which I meant a foothold, pure and simple), and establish ourselves there so firmly that no power on earth could dislodge us, then the whole situation would change—east, west, all over.”
The coordinated October 6 strike by Egypt and Syria so threatened Israel by October 9 that the shaken Jerusalem government unsheathed its nuclear weapons. Fearing a nuclear strike, President Richard Nixon on October 12 yielded to Israel’s pleas for a massive resupply of weapons. Warplanes from American units in Europe began arriving in Israel on October 14. From the brink of defeat, a revived Israel crossed the Suez Canal on October 16 in a stunning flanking maneuver that had its tanks poised for an invasion of Cairo. Syrian forces were thrown back in the Golan. A $2 billion resupply of weapons to Israel was announced in Washington on October 19. In Riyadh the next day, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia announced the cutoff of Gulf oil to the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands. The embargo of Arab oil would remain until Israel withdrew from the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, according to the king’s edict. On October 24, Israel’s counterattack into Egypt alarmed Sadat’s supporters in Moscow. Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev threatened insertion of Russian troops unless Sharon’s army halted. In Washington, Kissinger alerted US strategic forces to counter the Kremlin’s saber rattling. The superpower blustering lasted only a day, but it served to reinforce pressure by Moscow and Washington to end the conflict—just as Sadat had foreseen. A cease-fire was announced October 26.
In 20 days, both Washington and Jerusalem were outwitted and outmaneuvered by Sadat on the tactical Mideast battlefield. With American aid, Israel was able to regain balance on the battlefields in Egypt and outside Damascus.
It took Kissinger longer to comprehend Sadat’s strategy of bringing leaders of the Western world to their knees. Within hours of the predictable American rearming of Israel, Arab oil became a bigger weapon than silos filled with hydrogen warheads. King Faisal’s embargo on all supplies to the United States, Europe, and Japan would last until Prime Minister Golda Meir returned the West Bank to Jordan, the Sinai to Egypt, and the Golan to Syria. Soon, oil-consuming nations were lining up in favor of the Saudi demands and against Israel. It was also the start of rigged and unrelenting increases in the price of oil that continue to drain family finances to this very day.
At first for most Americans, the Yom Kippur War was another distant fight between Arabs and Jews. This time, the desert war quickly reached deep into America. By November, angry American motorists waited in lines around the block for a rationed 10 gallons of gas. The average price jumped from 38 cents a gallon to 55 cents. The price kept doubling. Soaring inflation caused rising unemployment. The American stock market crashed. A global energy conservation movement was launched. Dealing with energy costs became central to American politics. All US oil exports were halted, a ban that would last until 2017. At least two US presidents went down to defeat caused in part by crushing inflation and double-digit interest rates. American gasoline prices once set by the Texas Railroad Commission were now set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries—OPEC. Hundreds of billions of dollars were transferred from the United States and other consuming nations to small Persian Gulf countries once inhabited by nomadic Bedouin tribes.
With the weapon of world oil supplies strapped to his side and newfound respect for Arab armies, Sadat now embarked on a goal first announced two years earlier—a peace treaty with Israel. It was unthinkable. It was impossible. But four years later, Sadat strode into the Knesset to applause from Israel’s lawmakers. “I come to you today on solid ground, to shape a new life, to establish peace,” Sadat said.
As these earthshaking events unfolded, Kissinger was awed. Before his eyes, this former Egyptian army colonel was transformed into a modern pharaoh who grabbed the Western world by the throat. Kissinger watched as a gambling Sadat dominated the world stage. “A statesman has to take his society from where it is to where it has never been,” Kissinger would say years later. “I mention all of these qualities because I met no other leader—and I’ve known almost all the top leaders of the last 50 years—who exemplified them better than Anwar Sadat.” Through war, Sadat would achieve the rarest of gains in the Mideast: peace. Kissinger could not say the same for his own record that year. Kissinger oversaw Nixon’s failure to achieve peace in Vietnam—his central campaign pledge in 1968—and implemented the 4,000 secret B-52 bombings of Cambodia and the bombing of civilian centers in North Vietnam. Seeking peace through war, Kissinger spread only death and destruction. Kissinger’s only real success was seducing the Washington press corps into promoting his celebrity campaign for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiations with Hanoi that went nowhere. Sadat, by contrast, had pulled off in the same year the most audacious strategic initiative Kissinger had ever seen.
“I don’t know any expert who, 48 hours before Sadat announced that trip, would have believed that any Arab leader would simply and unilaterally announce himself on a visit to Israel, lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, address the Israeli Parliament, and make a breakthrough towards universal peace in the area,” Kissinger said years later. “This was a move of extraordinary strength and almost prophetic vision. That is why I call him the greatest man that I have met.”
The metamorphosis of Sadat started when he picked D-day to be October 6, 1973, during the most holy time for Muslims and Jews. When he finally had time to reflect, it dawned on Kissinger, as it did on Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, that this man Sadat had achieved an assault of strategic proportions. The start of the Yom Kippur War—the Ramadan War to Arabs—contained the element most sought by any general: surprise. It ranked with George Washington’s Christmas attack on British mercenaries in Trenton in 1776 and the Japanese Sunday morning attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Egyptian leader had befuddled Jerusalem’s military and intelligence experts with a series of feints from May to August of 1973. Israel limited its mobilization in May to key personnel—not the full-scale alert it would order in August. Moshe Dayan, minister of defense, recalled Sadat’s 1973 tactics. “[He] made me do it [mobilize] twice at a cost of $10 million each time,” Dayan said. “So when it was the third time round, I thought he wasn’t serious. But he tricked me.” In August, the Egyptian army, troops, tanks, and missiles, would roll up to the Bar-Lev Line with a threat that forced Israel to mobilize its citizen army. More than 240,000 citizen soldiers raced from their work. Men and women, stockbrokers, sheepherders, kibbutz managers, schoolteachers—all assembled with their IDF infantry, armor, air force, and support units. More than 1,000 Merkava, British Centurion, and American Patton tanks were loaded on lowboy trucks and hauled to tactical locations. Hundreds of fighter-bombers were fueled and loaded with bombs and bullets. And once Israel mobilized, Sadat would simply retreat and send his armies home.
“I had no intention to starting a war [then],” Sadat wrote later. “But as part of my strategic deception plan I launched a mass media campaign, then took various civil defense measures which led the Israelis to believe that war was imminent. In the days when war seemed likely to break out there was full Israeli mobilization, while we enjoyed perfect military calm. I did the same thing in August—and the Israeli reaction was the same.”
The feints were part of Sadat’s threat of war that he proclaimed in 1971 as necessary to achieve a negotiated return of the Sinai and the reopening of the Suez Canal, which had been blocked since the 1967 war. All he wanted was a foothold on the east bank of the canal to begin negotiations with Israel. By contrast, where Sadat wanted only bargaining leverage, Syrian president Assad wanted only to drive the Jewish nation into the sea. Regaining the Golan was preliminary to sending his tanks roaring through the Israeli city of Tiberias and then the West Bank. Peace with Israel was an unthinkable abomination. Neither Jerusalem nor Washington took these demands of Sadat’s seriously. Israel’s decision not to mobilize in early October, when Sadat ordered his forces to threaten the Bar Lev line, left only 450 Israeli reservists to defend the 20 forts and 35 strongpoints along the 93-mile long line—probably even fewer, as the IDF soldiers and the entire country observed the Day of Atonement.
Digging more deeply, the October 6, 1973, invasion preceded Sadat’s 1972 expulsion of the 30,000 Russian military advisers who had helped rearm Egypt after its devastating losses in 1967. The world viewed the 1972 ejection as a fracture of the Soviet military supply line. But Sadat would write later that the Russians in Cairo were undercutting his threats of war with Israel. Their expulsion gave him maneuvering room and, surprisingly, more and better weapons sooner from the abashed Soviets. Chastened by their expulsion, the Kremlin became pliable. After a Sadat visit to Moscow, the Russian supply line flowed like the Nile at flood stage. That included the latest surface-to-air missiles that would cripple Israel’s air force trying to repel Egyptian invaders—the SA-6 Gainful could outrace most planes, even maneuvering at Mach 2.8—more capable T-62 tanks, and countless AT-3 Sagger missiles. The Sagger was a small wire-guided rocket that came in a tin suitcase and was steered to its target by a soldier with a telescope and a joystick. Sadat’s disinformation campaign leaked reports that it was too complicated for Egyptian soldiers. But in October, hidden Egyptian soldiers guiding droves of Saggers—sometimes a mile from their target—destroyed hundreds of Israeli tanks. Some clashes left a spiderweb of silvery spent Sagger wires on the desert sand. On both sides, the devastating Sagger became the talk of the battlefield.
In destroying ill-equipped and untrained Arab armies in two previous conflicts, Israel Defense Forces commanders became more than overconfident. As one Israeli colonel put it: “If you come upon a perfectly formed Arab tank battalion on the battlefield, you can be sure of one thing: They are out of gas.” That level of contempt for the threat of Arab armies was transferred to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at Foggy Bottom. Ray Cline, then undersecretary of state for INR, would later put it this way: “Our difficulty was partly that we were brainwashed by the Israelis, who brainwashed themselves.” But the failure of the US intelligence community was monumental. Hours before October 6, the CIA missed a massive evacuation of Soviet citizens from Cairo and Damascus, an alarm bell that more than exercises were under way.
Kissinger would share some of the blame. While Nixon’s adviser on national security affairs, he was warned in June by Soviet president Brezhnev that Sadat was serious about an invasion. Sadat reached out to the Nixon White House to explain his intentions months before the 1973 war. A senior Egyptian general met Kissinger secretly in New York to deliver a message from Sadat that ended, “If this discussion succeeds or shows progress, the president will invite you to Cairo.” Kissinger slipped a note to a nearby aide. “Do you think it would be offensive if I asked him what the second prize was?” Kissinger wisecracked. He was familiar with Sadat’s repeated public statements of a war that could bring peace to the Mideast. “Anwar Sadat made many threats, many statements, none of which, to my shame I must say, I took very seriously,” Kissinger said. “Because it was absolutely axiomatic with us that there was no conceivable way that Egypt would dare to start a war.” Nixon’s national security adviser gave the Egyptian president the American cold shoulder.
Kissinger had underestimated Sadat ever since he had succeeded Nasser, who died of a heart attack in 1970. “I did not understand Anwar Sadat when he first became president,” Kissinger recounted. “Our intelligence reports described him as a weak man who had been put into that position because he could represent no conceivable threat.… And everyone expected two or three other leaders of Egypt to overthrow him at any moment.” In the early hours of the Egyptian invasion, Kissinger dismissed Sadat once more. “For all we knew, [he] was a character out of Aida,” Kissinger said. It was a reference to Giuseppe Verdi’s opera commissioned to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The 224-yard-wide waterway’s connection of the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and Persian Gulf transformed trade and global politics for more than a century. Cairo sank 15 cargo ships to block the canal entrance after the 1967 defeat.
CIA analysts’ missing puzzle piece was an army colonel dedicated to breaking Britain’s 74-year grip on the center of Arab culture. Sadat was a career army officer and a fiery revolutionary. His hate for the British colonial government led him to support Nazi Germany (as did Irish nationalists) during World War II. It also cost him almost three years in different prisons. For 18 months, he was held in a Cairo Central cell without a bed, a desk, even a chair. Sadat was the first to secretly organize Egyptian officers who eventually rallied around Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952. On the eve of the coup, Nasser gave Sadat the job of ridding Egypt of London’s puppet ruler, His Majesty Farouk—by the Grace of God, King of Egypt and the Sudan, Sovereign of Nubia, of Kordofan and of Darfur. There were enough British troops in Egypt to come to the defense of the 300-pound playboy regent. But Nasser’s rebel troops surrounded Farouk’s stunning Alexandria summer palace, Ras El Tin. Only a few shots were feebly fired by the palace guards, who lacked loyalty.
Sadat signed the ultimatum demanding Farouk’s abdication July 26, 1952. In panic, Farouk called American and British diplomats for help. The British chargé in Alexandria showed up in the blazing red and gold uniform of the empire. It was the sort of outfit designed to frighten the natives, Sadat sneered. The chargé stressed Farouk’s historical rights and demanded a curfew to protect foreigners.
“Item one,” Sadat said, “it has nothing to do with you. It is not a British royal family. As for the protection of foreigners, you should remember this is our country. And from today, nobody should claim responsibility for it except us and us alone.” The dramatic demarche was delivered in Sadat’s stentorian baritone with a flourish that hinted at his past aspiration to be an actor. Rejection for parts in plays and movies may have been connected with the darkness inherited from his mother, the daughter of a Nubian slave. To one casting director, a young Sadat wrote: “Yes, I am not white but not exactly black either. My blackness is tending to reddish.” Within hours of Sadat’s performance in 1952, Farouk was aboard his yacht and heading for exile in one of his favorite haunts, Monaco. At the Casino de Monte Carlo he was known for his fondness for oysters—600 in one week—and big baccarat bets. Aboard the warship Ibrahim, Sadat watched Farouk sail away. “It was the proudest moment of my life,” he later told a biographer.
Sadat was again selected by Nasser, this time to tell the world of the officers’ revolt. Sadat’s baritone spread the news on Egyptian radio. It outraged London. At 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Anthony Eden neared hysteria. When his ambassador in Cairo said Nasser could be manipulated, Eden exploded on the telephone. “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or neutralizing him?” Eden shouted into the phone. “I want him murdered, can’t you understand? I want him removed. It’s either him or us, don’t forget that.” Along with France, Britain owned the Suez Canal that was a highway to move British goods to India and oil from the Gulf. When Nasser nationalized the canal four years later, Eden went to war. In a secret alliance, Britain and France joined the Israeli invasion of the Sinai and the Canal Zone. For all three nations, it was a fiasco that turned into a debacle. President Dwight D. Eisenhower took up Nasser’s anticolonial cause and forced a humiliating retreat for the three invaders. Nasser was hardly grateful. He used American aid to set up a pan-Arab, anti-Washington radio network. Nasser opened the door to Egypt for the Soviet Union. His government was distinctly socialist. Russian engineers took over from Americans the construction of the massive Nile dam at Aswan. During these years, Sadat’s military colleagues were elevated above him in rank and power. Most were from wealthy families with important social connections.
Like most born in Egypt over 4,000 years, Sadat started as a fella, a peasant. He arrived on Christmas Day in 1918 in the Nile Delta village of Mit Abu al-Kum, where villagers coaxed at least two and sometimes three crops a year. Their alluvial plains were soaked each year with a flooding Nile rich with human and animal waste and other nutrients. Sadat would always claim he was imbued with the village traits of hard work, loyalty, dependability, and common sense. From his Nubian mother, Sit al-Berain, the daughter of a freed African slave, he inherited the Nubian complexion. His father, Mohammed Sadat, worked for a British medical expedition in the Sudan and helped steer his son into the Egyptian army.
After the officers’ revolt, Sadat’s contemporaries in the army were given senior commands and posts in government. Sadat was sidelined into a public affairs post. Starting with his radio broadcast of the revolution, he became first the voice and later, with television, the face of Nasser’s government. He bought tailor-made uniforms for his lean frame. Some officers snickered at his theatrics and uniforms. They nicknamed him “Cardin,” as in Pierre Cardin the designer. Even so, he remained articulate, thoughtful, and supportive of Nasser even as Egypt blundered into the 1967 war. When Nasser once again closed the Straits of Tiran and Israel’s access to the Red Sea, Jerusalem preemptively launched its most devastating attack on the Arab world thus far. Egypt’s Russian-made air force was destroyed, along with most of its armor and artillery. The IDF occupied the Sinai Peninsula to the edge of the Suez Canal. Jordan lost the holy sites of East Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River. Syria lost the Golan Heights and a section of the Mount Hermon range that borders northern Israel as well as Syria and Lebanon. The loss led to army grumbling and rumors of Nasser’s overthrow. Two days before leaving for an Arab summit in Morocco, Nasser called Sadat aside. Nasser feared a coup or worse, and he didn’t want to leave a political vacuum. Sadat agreed to be sworn in as vice president. Ten months later Nasser, 52, was dead from a heart attack. Although Sadat assumed the presidency of Egypt on September 28, 1970, his real debut on the world stage came on October 6, 1973.
Kissinger’s intelligence community could not see what the Egyptian army was doing at the start of the Yom Kippur War. The Keyhole satellites of today’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) orbit on an adjustable course, their cameras seeing clearly through night and clouds to instantly relay amazing real-time images to secure displays. In 1973, the NRO’s Corona program had to launch a camera satellite on a specific orbit, then eject the film on a parachute that was snared midair by an Air Force transport or from a capsule plucked from the sea. The satellite launches were delayed during the first weeks of Yom Kippur. The CIA finally ordered the Air Force’s Mach 3 reconnaissance ramjet, the SR-71 Blackbird, but Britain and West Germany, two of the most important US allies in NATO, refused operating bases for the plane. Fear of angering Arab oil sources was part of the equation. As a result, the SR-71 began surveying the Sinai battlefield from Griffiss Air Force Base at Rome, New York. Blackbird pilot Jim Shelton refueled from tankers six times during the 11-hour flight. Shelton wanted to be over the target between 11 a.m. and noon. “This allows you to have some shadows so the photo interpreters can go ahead and judge elevation,” Shelton said. He was concerned about a potential new Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM). “Russia was developing the SA-5,” Shelton recalled, “which was a missile that would go up well above you and then come back down at you.” But the Blackbird roared in at more than 2,000 miles an hour at 80,000 feet above the Sinai battlefield. When the Egyptians were ready to fire, the plane was already in Israel. “When we rolled in on the first pass over Israel, my defensive system just lighted up like a pinball machine,” said Reg Blackwell, monitoring the electronics in the backseat. Israel, unaware of the secret US spy mission, fired a barrage of rockets. Blackbird projected an electronic image some distance from the plane that sent SAM warheads searching for a phantom target. It was a bit of electronic wizardry that would make scores of US Air Force B-52s immune from Soviet SAMs fired by North Vietnam. The SR-71’s Operation Giant Reach on October 12 finally provided photographic proof of Sadat’s Operation Full Moon.
The damage which the Egyptians had inflicted on the Israelis on the Bar-Lev Line and beyond was substantial, reported Dino A. Brugioni of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. “Most of the fortified positions had been destroyed. It was also obvious that the Egyptians had used flame-throwers for many of the command and living bunkers had been burned. The Egyptians had crossed the Canal in five places. Egyptian assault boats were seen all along the Canal. Rope ladders and ropes could be seen on top of the sand barriers. Craters from aerial bombardments and artillery fire had literally torn great holes in the fortified positions. And 90 Israeli tanks stationed behind the Bar-Lev Line had come forward to be met by Egyptian soldiers firing Russian supplied Sagger wire-guided missiles along with rocket propelled grenades.” Brugioni’s analysis indicated that most if not all of the tanks had been destroyed. Of the 441 soldiers manning the Bar-Lev, 126 were killed, 161 were taken prisoner, and 154 retreated to safety.
Soviet surface-to-air missiles were deployed along with advancing Egyptian infantry. Israeli pilots were unable to elude the most advanced SAMs, the Russian SA-6. “The SA-6s were wreaking havoc on the Israeli Air Force,” Brugioni said. “By Tuesday October 9, the Israelis had reported that they had lost 49 aircraft, including 14 [American-made] Phantoms primarily from the SA-6.” With the Bar-Lev a smoking ruin, two Egyptian armies surged into the Sinai and took up defensive positions. Israel launched a major counterattack. The Blackbird had spotted the largest tank battle since World War II. “A major tank battle had begun,” Brugioni reported. “Over 1,600 Israeli and Egyptian tanks were involved and the fighting ranged over a large area. We could easily identify the battle lines since the Israeli tank forces consisted of Super Shermans, Pattons, AMX, and Centurion Tanks. The Egyptians possessed Soviet tanks.” Israel’s counterattack failed. In the Golan Heights, Syrian tanks and infantry dislodged Israeli defenders. Israeli jets sent to attack the Syrian armor were destroyed by the Russian SA-6s. Sadat got more than four inches.
In Jerusalem, Dayan and other generals realized that the Israeli air force alone was not, as previously predicted, enough to repel Sadat’s forces. Egyptian and Syrian use of SA-6 rockets had neutralized Israeli warplanes. On the ground, battalions of Israeli tanks were hurled into a counterattack. The roar and clank of the American-made Patton tanks had once been enough to make Arab soldiers flee, but Egyptian infantry and their Saggers picked off 200 Israeli tanks in the first 24 hours. Dayan’s counterattack failed to repel Sadat’s stand in the Sinai. Within days, 500 tanks, or a third of Israel’s armor, were blackened hulks in the desert. Jerusalem was shaken. So were IDF troops used to easy triumphs over Arab armies. “It was a generation that had never lost,” said Major General Ariel Sharon. “Now they were in a state of shock.… How was it that [Egyptians] were moving forward and we were defeated?” Just as frightening were Syria’s initial gains in the Golan Heights, which Israel had seized from Damascus in the 1967 war. Syrian troops and tanks overwhelmed Israeli defenders and threatened Israel’s northern border. Defense Minister Dayan redirected warplanes from Egyptian to Syrian targets in the Golan. No one was more rattled than Dayan. In briefing Prime Minister Meir, he harked back to dire moments in history when the Babylonians destroyed Israel’s First Temple in 588 BC and the Romans burned the Second Temple 400 years later. “This is the end of the Third Temple,” Dayan told Meir of attacks on the north and south of tiny Israel. Dayan, the one-eyed hero of the 1967 war, feared the worst in those early days of the Yom Kippur conflict. At a background briefing with Israeli newspaper editors, Dayan’s pessimism caused one of them to burst into tears. Another called Meir to keep the despairing Dayan from speaking to the nation on television. Three millions Israelis were running out of war stocks, and 70 million Arabs had soldiers and tanks to spare.
One measure of the Jerusalem government’s desperation was spotted by the SR-71 Blackbird’s sweep over the battleground and Israel on October 12. “We were seeing activity at the Jericho missile base,” Brugioni said, describing pictures forwarded to the CIA. Despite official denials by the American and Israeli governments, the CIA had been aware of Israel’s nuclear weapons program since Eisenhower was president. “We had seen the Israeli development of the Jericho missiles, and the CIA had given the Israelis credit for having nuclear weapons,” Brugioni said. Various accounts had up to 12 of the short-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads put on alert at Sdot Micha Airbase. An additional F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber was also armed with an atomic bomb at Tel Nof Airbase.
As events turned grim in the Sinai and the Golan Heights in the first week of the war, Prime Minister Meir’s cabinet considered using one warhead—not as a weapon against the Arabs but as a demonstration. Defense Minister Dayan proposed creating a fireball and mushroom cloud over a remote desert location as a warning. Meir and other cabinet members quickly rejected the proposal. More effective was Israel’s display of armed Jerichos for the high-flying Blackbird spy plane. The most comprehensive account was put forward by Seymour Hersh in his 1991 book The Samson Option. Hersh had the Israeli ambassador in Washington demanding US rearmament—or Jerusalem would resort to nuclear warheads. But Brugioni at the CIA photo center was one of only two US officials to confirm the preparation of the Jerichos. The other was William Quandt, Kissinger’s deputy on the White House National Security Council (NSC). In a review of Hersh’s book, Quandt confirmed some key controversial facts and added this: “We did know around this time that Israel had placed its Jericho missiles on alert. It was also conceivable that the nuclear threat might be made if Egyptian troops broke through at [Sinai] passes. This situation, by itself, created a kind of blackmail potential—Help us or else.”
In Washington, Secretary of State Kissinger was increasingly wielding presidential power. The presidency itself was denied to him by the Constitution’s insistence on only US-born candidates, but he retained control of the NSC at the White House. Nixon was at his Florida home in Key Biscayne, in a haze of alcohol and pills. The painkillers eased the bite of Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox. With every front-page story, Cox inched closer to seizing White House tape recordings. They would prove Nixon sought to obstruct the investigation of the burglary of Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex.
One instance of Kissinger’s authority involved 10 Downing Street calling to set up a phone call in 15 minutes between Nixon and Prime Minister Edward Heath. Kissinger said no.
“When I talked to the president he was loaded,” Kissinger said.
Yet Nixon emerged sober for a crucial meeting that would gouge American family budgets for the next 45 years. With Blackbird photos of Jericho rockets on the launchpad, Kissinger and Nixon gave in to Israeli pleas for US weapons. The decision was blocked by James Schlesinger, the six-foot-four secretary of defense who controlled American war stocks. Schlesinger was so convinced Watergate had addled Nixon’s judgment that he would sleep on a cot in his Pentagon office so he could intercept any Nixon orders to use nuclear weapons. Alexander Haig, who had risen from Kissinger’s military aide to White House chief of staff, recounted the confrontation between the president and his defense chief. It was in the Oval Office on October 12. An economist by trade, Schlesinger feared rearming Israel would cripple the United States.
“Schlesinger had his own policy priorities,” Haig recounted, and was concerned that US intervention “on the scale mandated by the president would alienate the Arab nations and might lead to an oil embargo against the West.” Nixon staged an angry confrontation with his defense chief. “Now get the hell out of here and get the job done,” Nixon said in brushing aside Schlesinger’s warnings.
At a cost of $2 billion, Nixon launched Operation Nickel Grass. More than 22,000 tons of jet aircraft, tanks, ammunition, and other matérial was airlifted to Israeli bases. Some American warplanes were flown directly from their plants in the United States. Other aircraft were taken from active-duty US forces in Europe. Eventually, 33,000 tons of military supplies arrived by ship. Israeli soldiers drove the US tanks directly onto the battlefield. Every 15 minutes, a US Air Force C-5A, C-140, or C-130 landed at Israeli airfields.
Operation Nickel Grass set the stage for phase two of Sadat’s Operation Full Moon. The American rearming of Israel was just what Sadat had predicted in his war council with King Faisal in 1972. Faisal had a religious bent. He was the first Saudi king to revive the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, assuming the role of caretaker of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holy cities. At the same time, Faisal harbored hatred for Israel and the Soviet Union. To him, both countries were identical in political culture and immorality. Faisal agreed with Sadat’s plan to turn Arab oil into a weapon. Ahmed Zaki al-Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, made clear King Faisal planned to use oil as a political weapon after discussions with Sadat. All future American appeals to King Faisal were referred directly to Sadat. “We knew that a war was coming,” Yamani said in outlining the embargo.
With announcement of the oil embargo, Sadat wanted a cease-fire. The American secretary of state negotiated it. “I received a message very early in the conflict from President Sadat saying that he wanted to negotiate eventually,” Kissinger recalled. “And I sent him a message which said, in effect, you can make war with Soviet arms, but you have to make peace with American diplomacy.”
Around October 23, the Egyptian 3rd Army was still threatened by General Ariel Sharon’s drive into Suez. American rearmament of Israel was in full swing. Sadat was unflappable. “Almost the first thing he said to me,” Kissinger recalled, “was ‘This is a psychological problem; this is not a political problem. And you have to help me to bring about a change in psychology.’” At the same time, the Soviet Union was resupplying Egyptian forces. As Sharon’s divisions cut off water, food, and ammunition supplies to the surrounded Egyptian army, Moscow responded to Cairo’s dilemma. From the Kremlin, Brezhnev fired a warning in a letter to Nixon: It might become necessary for Soviet forces to intervene in Egypt’s behalf. The threat of Soviet interference on the ground produced a crisis session at the White House—without the president. “I’ve heard that President Nixon was upstairs drunk,” said Ray Cline, Kissinger’s expert on intelligence. Four days earlier, there had been a flood of impeachment resolutions in Congress after Nixon demanded Watergate prosecutor Cox be fired on October 20. Nixon had taken to his bed. Haig, his chief of staff, tried but failed to wake him for the Washington Special Action Group meeting downstairs on October 24. Assuming control once again, Kissinger ordered an increase in the nation’s defenses as a reply to the Soviet letter. DEFCON (defense condition) 4, then code-named Double Take, was increased to DEFCON 3, Round House. DEFCON 4 called for increased intelligence; DEFCON 3 ordered increased force readiness, although it barely changed actual force deployment compared to President John F. Kennedy’s move to DEFCON 2—Fast Pace, the last step before nuclear war—during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. To the world, however, DEFCON 3 may have bolstered Nixon’s fast-fading image. Even though he was out of it in bed, Nixon got credit for strong-arming the Kremlin. According to the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, Kissinger later assured him that the move to DEFCON 3 was primarily for “domestic reasons.” In any event, the superpower bluster vanished quickly.
A dicey cease-fire—gunfire was exchanged by both sides—was replaced October 26 by generals on both sides meeting at Kilometer 101—the exact distance from Cairo on the seaside highway in the Sinai. Those talks evolved into the foundation for Sadat’s peace initiative with Israel. While the war in the desert was winding down, the pain was picking up in the United States. The oil embargo induced panic among American drivers and real shortages at neighborhood filling stations. Lines formed around the block. Fill-ups were limited to 10 gallons. Gas stations, increasing the average price from 38 cents to 55 cents a gallon, agreed to a federal plea to shut down on Saturday nights and Sundays. Pump prices doubled and doubled again. Christmas road trips to Grandma’s house were canceled.
Sadat’s oil weapon struck the freeways near La Casa Pacifica, President Nixon’s oceanside villa near San Clemente. California State Police organized rolling blockades on roads built for speed. The 75 mph freeways were suddenly limited to 50 mph. Nixon had been born and bred in California, where Rule 1 was “Don’t come between a driver and his car.” But pills and whiskey now made him immune to the national turmoil. In the midst of the Yom Kippur War, he had ordered the firing of Special Watergate prosecutor Cox. The grossness of the move cost him his attorney general and deputy attorney general, who resigned rather than fire Cox and undercut the rule of law. To many in Washington, Nixon was, as UPI reporter Helen Thomas put it, a “dead man walking.”
Kissinger once again stepped in and conducted almost daily crisis sessions with oil experts and the oil industry on the crippling effects of shortages. Turmoil at every neighborhood gas station and soaring prices demanded political leadership and some sort of relief. Kissinger did not have a clue. At times, he was mystified.
“I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t even know what the problem is,” he said at one meeting. “When people tell me we are consuming six million barrels a day, they might just as well say fifty thousand Coke bottles worth of oil. I don’t know what that means. I have no ideas. All I know is when the Prime Minister of Britain says he wants to send somebody over here to discuss the oil situation with one of us and I ask around the Department ‘What are we going to tell him?’—or we go up to Canada and I ask ‘What are we going to discuss?’ and I am told we are just going to discuss—and every other department takes the same position. Interior Department hasn’t got a clue. Everyone agrees that if we can get more supply in this country, or cut down the demand—that this will improve the basic situation. That is clear. What I want to know is what the hell we are going to discuss in these negotiations. What do I discuss with these oil men this afternoon? I don’t know the answer to this. How do we get at this problem?”
Trying to woo King Faisal, Kissinger’s strong suit, became impossible. Faisal learned Saudi revenues would increase with rising prices—from $2 a barrel to $10—even as production and exports were cut back. In diplomatic talks, Faisal would blame Arab radicals for the shortages and the price increases. But it soon became clear that the frail and religious king was the real radical, dismissing pleas from his own pro-Western princes to ease up. As diplomacy failed, frustrations grew. “It is ridiculous that the civilized world is held up by eight million savages,” Kissinger said during a November 29 meeting with Defense Secretary Schlesinger. At one point, Schlesinger and Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, proposed seizing oil sources with US Marine invasions of some Gulf States.
The embargo was finally lifted after four months, in March 1974. But the havoc continued. Throughout the crisis, Kissinger assured Nixon that Sadat was working to ease tensions. “He’s pro-Western,” Kissinger said. The Egyptian president was establishing his role as America’s only real hope of tempering the oil squeeze. Kissinger’s admiration only grew. From his cross-canal surprise to engineering the oil embargo, Sadat was dominating the world stage. It was the sort of successful diplomatic strategy that eluded Kissinger while at the White House and State Department. He became close with Sadat during Mideast peace shuttles. They were together at Sadat’s winter home in Aswan in 1974 when the Jerusalem government finally approved the Kilometer 101 agreement—officially ending the Yom Kippur War.
Kissinger recalled an aide bringing the news in a note. Sadat began reading. “He had tears in his eyes,” Kissinger said. “He came over to me, kissed me on both cheeks, and said, ‘I will now take off my uniform and I will never again wear it—except on ceremonial occasions.’”