It was 5:30 in the evening when Evron, upset by Johnson’s refusal to set a time for his talk with Eban, rushed to the White House. He demanded to see Walt Rostow and bluntly told him that failure to hold the meeting, with the press corps already gathered outside, would broadcast a serious rift in U.S.-Israel relations. Obvious conclusions would be reached by both the Arabs and the Soviets. Rostow had begun explaining how the president needed time to study the issues, how he resented Israel’s pressure tactics, when a message arrived from the Oval Office. Evron was to enter.
Johnson, looking agitated, greeted him: “I understand the seriousness of Israel’s situation, but I can’t promise to do more than Rusk and Rostow already told you.” He would pursue the convoy plan, he said, claiming that Canada, Italy, and Argentina had already expressed support for the idea, but only once certain conditions had been fulfilled. Though the UN was “a zero,” and the U.S. owed nothing to U Thant, the administration had to exhaust all efforts by the international organization to find a peaceful solution. Once the UN failed—and it would, Johnson was certain—he would seek congressional approval for concerted action in the Gulf. “Without it, I’m just a six-foot-four Texan friend of Israel,” he claimed, recalling how Congress had never forgiven Truman for Korea. He assured Evron that the U.S. would keep its promises on free passage, but that it could not risk war with the Soviets simply because Israel had set Sunday as its ultimatum. And if Israel went to war it would do so on its own and at great risk. “Israel is not a satellite of the United States nor is the United States a satellite of Israel.” Johnson spoke for over an hour while Evron was mute, but at the end the president agreed to meet Eban after all. His one condition: There would be no more leaks to the press.100
An interlude of confusion followed, during which Evron went off to find Eban, and the foreign minister together with Harman, entered the White House by a side entrance. “Some guy out here by the name of Eban says he’s supposed to see the president,” one of the guards reported, and the press was on hand to report it as well, concluding that Johnson had let the Israelis “cool their heels” before admitting them.
The Yellow Oval Office looked for all purposes like a war room. There, in addition to LBJ, sat McNamara and Wheeler, the Rostows and Sisco, along with presidential press secretary George Christian. Yet the floor was first given to Eban, and he seized it theatrically: “We are on a footing of grave and anxious expectancy.” He summarized the history of U.S. commitments to Israel’s security, and quoted from the latest telegrams from Jerusalem, casting doubt not only on the state’s welfare but on its very existence. The United States had to issue a statement saying that it was coordinating its military strategy with Israel and would retaliate for any Arab attack. “The question to which I have to bring the answer is, do you have the will and determination to open the Straits?” Eban asked, “Do we fight alone or are you with us?”
Johnson hesitated a moment before answering, leaning close to Eban, who believed he detected “a tormented look in his eye.” Then, emphatically, the president spoke: “You are the victims of aggression.” In “robust terms,” he described precisely what he thought of U Thant and his decision to withdraw UNEF from Sinai, but also his need to first exhaust all UN venues. “I am not a king in this country and I am no good to you or to your prime minister if all I can lead is myself…I know that your blood and lives are at stake. Our blood and lives are at stake in many places and may be in others…I do not have one vote and one dollar for taking action before thrashing this matter out in the UN.”
Only then, Johnson averred, could the convoy be launched, roughly within two weeks. “I’m not a feeble mouse or a coward and we’re going to try. What we need is a group [of maritime states], five or four or less or if we can’t do that then on our own. What you can tell your Cabinet is that the president, the Congress and the country will support a plan to use any or all measures to open the straits.” Preliminary talks with certain senators had revealed guarded support for the plan, the president said, but Israel could contribute as well, exploiting its connections abroad. “You in Israel have the best intelligence and the best embassies so put them to work to line up all those who are concerned about keeping this waterway open.”
Johnson at last moved to the thorniest issue of all: the danger of an Israeli first strike. Citing the conclusions reached by all of America’s intelligence branches—“there is no Egyptian intention to…attack, and if there were, Israel would win”—Johnson warned of the dangers Israel faced through unilateral moves:
If your Cabinet decides to do that they will have to do it on their own. I am not retreating, not backtracking, and I am not forgetting anything I have said…I think it is a necessity that Israel should never make itself seem responsible in the eyes of America and the world for making war. Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone (Emphasis in the original).
He repeated the last line three times, and then presented Eban with a handwritten note from Rusk—“I must emphasize the necessity for Israel not to make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities…We cannot imagine that Israel will take that decision”—further emphasizing his position. “Our Cabinet knows your policy,” said Johnson, “What they want to know is your disposition to take action.”
Eban did not supply an answer. He merely cautioned against getting bogged down in a prolonged UN debate, and proposed the creation of a U.S.-Israel military liaison to prepare for possible hostilities. On cue from the president, McNamara agreed to look into the matter provided it remained top-secret.101
On that equivocal note, the meeting on which much of the world’s attention was riveted, that represented the high-water mark in efforts to avert a third Arab-Israeli war, ended. Before exiting, Eban asked one more time: “I would not be wrong if I told the prime minister that your disposition is to make every possible effort to assure that the Straits and the Gulf will remain open to free and innocent passage?” Johnson responded yes, sealing it with a shake of his hand so strong that Eban doubted “that I would ever regain the use of it.” The president then followed his guest down the hall to remind him, yet again, that “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone.”
Versions differ as to Johnson’s perception of the talk. The president’s diary has him exclaiming, “They came loaded for bear, but so was I!…McNamara said he just wanted to throw his cap in the air, and George Christian said it was the best meeting of the kind he had ever sat in on.” But another source has Johnson slumping into his chair and sighing, “I failed. They’re going to go.” Yet another, John P. Roche, recalled Johnson chatting with Walt Rostow, drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper and imitating Eban, “a miniature Winston Churchill.” He then asked Rostow what he thought the Israelis would do, to which the national security advisor allegedly replied, “they’re going to hit.” LBJ agreed. “Yes, they’re going to hit. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”102
Eban came away from the encounter stunned by Johnson’s “rhetoric of impotence,” by the image of a “paralyzed president” speaking in “defeatist terms.” While he felt that the Americans had gone beyond their 1957 commitment to free passage, the absence of a joint communiqué seriously undermined that pledge. Eban’s impressions were reinforced in New York the next day, when Goldberg warned him about relying too heavily on the “rather impetuous” remarks of the Rostows and other advisers. The ambassador, convinced that no other country would join the Regatta plan, was blunt in his advice: “You owe it to your government, because lives are going to be lost and your security is involved, to tell your Cabinet that the president’s statements means a joint resolution of Congress, and the president can’t get such a resolution because of the Vietnam War.”
Yet Eban remained undiscouraged. Riding to the airport with Gideon Rafael, he mused that since the United States was willing to “take any or all measures in its power to open the Straits,” it could hardly fault Israel for ”taking all measures in its power.” The ple
dge would prove priceless whens the time finally came—and it would, Eban believed, soon—for Israel to act alone.103
Enter Kosygin
At approximately the same time that Eban deplaned at Kennedy, the Egyptian defense minister arrived for his talks as the Kremlin. The issue was remarkably similar and no less crucial: What position would the superpower take in the event of war? Like Eban, Shams Badran sought a definitive answer to this question, yet the Soviet responses—much as the Americans’ to Israel—would prove elusive.
“Since Moscow appears to define the threshold of danger in the Middle East as a higher level than we, Soviet policy has always smacked of brinkmanship,” submitted one Kremlin-watcher at the State Department. But what appeared to outside observers as daring was more than likely an attempt to cover up divisions within Soviet leadership over how to handle the Middle East.
Those schisms were evident in the conflicting signals emanating from Moscow. While the official press continued to expose Israeli plots to conquer Syria-in tandem with America’s bombing of Hanoi—Soviet diplomats stressed their commitment to averting violence. Thus, the Soviet chargé d’affaires in Washington, Tcharniakov, assured Walt Rostow that the USSR had no desire for a confrontation in the Middle East and was urging restraint on the Arabs. “We can stop Egypt from shooting,” Mikhail Frolov, the Soviet commercial attaché in Tel Aviv offered his American counterpart; “Can you stop the Israelis from running a ship [through the Straits of Tiran]>” Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, on home leave from Washington, tole America’s ambassador in Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, that “I thing we can match you in doing the utmost to avoid war.” The USSR was “the last country on earth to want war in the Middle East,” swore Nikolai Trofimovich Federenko, the Soviets’ UN ambassador, to Goldberg.104
In practice, though, the USSR had not urged caution on either Egypt or Syria, while articles in Pravda and other paragons of the state-controlled press appeared to goad them on. “Unless it is accompanied by private warnings and counsels of restraint,” Thompson wrote, ”[these] statements can easily be read by Arab leaders as justification if not support for the course they are following.” He concluded by noting that the Soviets were content to let America tackle the crisis alone and so assume the Arabs’ wrath, secure in knowing that, irrespective of the outcome, they would emerge victorious. “Even if the Israelis should clobber their Arab neighbors, the Soviets might calculate that the hatred this would engender for the West old enable them to reestablish their position in the Arab world.”105
The crisis indeed seemed to be playing deftly into the Kremlin’s hands until May 22 and Nasser’s announcement of the blockade. The Soviets had received no forewarning of the move, and distinctly avoided praising it. Impugning the right of another nation to free passage was problematic for the Russians who, for centuries, had struggled to obtain that same right in the Dardanelles, and who were signatory to the 1958 Geneva Convention on international straits. But while the closure sparked no joy in Moscow—“it was not permissible to start a war simply because a few ships were unable to sail fro Aqaba to the Red Sea,” one Soviet scholar observed—neither could Nasser be condemned. The only answer was to support the Arabs in a general sense, without getting down to particulars. Thus, Chuvakhin, in his conversations with Israeli leaders, distinguished between the “principle” of free passage and Egypt’s unassailable sovereignty in Tiran. Thus, Pravda warned, “Should anyone try to unleash aggression in the Near East, he would be met not only with the united strength of the Arab countries but also with strong opposition from the Soviet Union and all peace-loving peoples.”
The very vagueness of the threat left it open to interpretation. Did it mean, as many Arabs understood, that the USSR would come to Egypt’s aid if attacked? Or was it rather, as the Americans thought, that the Soviets were reluctant to commit to any specific course of action and had distanced themselves from Nasser?106
These were the question that Badran and his ten-man entourage sought to answer. Their principal host was Kosygin, the sixty-three-year-old premier, a former Leningrad technocrat promoted after Khrushchev’s ouster to a position second only of Brezhnev’s. Regarded by colleagues as a highly intelligent, if colorless leader, Kosygin had always counseled prudence, never quite convinced of the Arabs’ real value as allies. Nor was he certain that the Americans would watch passively if Israel were attacked. with their conventional forces tied up in Vietnam, the U.S. might react to athreat in the Middle East with their only remaining means—nuclear.
Brushing aside Badran’s claim that the Egyptian army was ready and able to defeat Israel, the premier warned of British and American intervention in the Straits and advised his guest to compromise. “We are going to back you, but you have made your point and won a political victory,” he opened. “It is better to sit at the negotiating table than to wage a battle by the sword.” He agreed to fill Egypt’s standing weapons orders, but only after three months, and would only “consider” additional requests. Arms for the PLO were out of the question. “We don’t want any part of the PLO or its army. You are free to give them what you want, but think carefully about what you’re doing lest they lead you into a war,” Kosygin said.107
Kosygin’s line—essentially, “quite while you’re ahead”—was echoed by the Foreign Ministry, by Alexei Schilborin, head of the Middle East department and by Deputy Foreign Minister Semyonov. At an all-night discussion held at Semyonov’s dacha, the Egyptians were told that “the Soviet Union was neither ready nor willing to enter into any confrontations. [They] had had enough suffering during World War II and…it was time for Egypt to de-escalate.”
But a sharp distinction emerged between the stand espoused by Kosygin and the diplomats and that proffered by the generals, protégés of Brezhnev. Defense Minister Grechko, a veteran of World War II battles in the Caucasus, viewed the Middle East as a supreme strategic interest. He professed admiration for Egypt’s military preparedness, which, he claimed, had all but paralyzed the West. Though he stopped short of advising Egypt to start a war, he expressed total confidence in its ability to win one, even if attacked. Grechko described the Pravda statement as but the first of many that would establish Moscow’s fidelity to Nasser and his cause. “There should be no doubt about the Soviet Union’s commitment to give political and material aid to the Arabs…even to support them spiritually.”
Grechko’s remarks left a striking impression on Badran who, though a brigadier, had never commanded a squad. At the relatively young age of thirty-eight, unimposingly round-faced, lanky, and bespectacled, Badran had achieved immense power solely from his services to ’Amer, assuring his control over the army. Badran was determined to extract from the Soviets precisely what the field marshal wanted to hear, a paraphrase of the same pledge Eban had sought from the U.S.—namely, that war with Egypt was tantamount to war with the USSR. Grechko’s remarks seemed to approximate that equation, and Badran was inclined to ingest them while ignoring Kosygin’s. “From a military point of view the trip was a failure,” Badran remembered a decade later. “But politically, I achieved the propaganda effect sought.” Wary of precisely such a success, Undersecretary of State al-Feki and Ambassador Ghaleb mailed a copy of the discussions’ protocol directly to Nasser. It would arrive on June 13, too late to have any impact.108
Badran was still in Moscow when, in the first hours of May 27, a cable arrived from Washington and in it, the Israelis’ warning of an imminent Arab attack. For Kosygin, the message confirmed what Badran had intimated, that Egypt was preparing a first strike. More shocking was the realization that the Israelis had learned of Egypt’s plans and were no doubt intending to preempt them. The premier fired off telegrams to Johnson and Wilson warning that “Israel is actively engaged in military preparations and evidently intends to carry out armed aggression against neighboring Arab states.” Such an attack, he alleged, could not be launched without Anglo-American backing (“There can be no two opinions on this”), and he threatened to intervene
to stop it. “If Israel commits aggression and military action begins then we would render assistance to the countries which would be the victims of aggression.” Most astringent were the words Kosygin reserved for Eshkol: “It is easy to light a fire, but to put out a conflagration may not be at all as easy as those who are pushing Israel beyond the brink of war may be thinking.”109
But Kosygin did not rest with written representations. Instructions were also sent to his ambassadors in Cairo and Tel Aviv to contact their host leaders at once, wake them if necessary, and warn them of the danger of war.
Thus, at 2:15 on Saturday morning, Chuvakhin rushed to Tel Aviv’s Dan Hotel where Eshkol was spending the night, and there convinced the guards to disturb him. He read Kosygin’s letter out loud and demanded to know whether Israel intended to fire the first shot. Eshkol, in his pajamas, replied only that, “The Egyptians, sir, have already fired the first shot in this war.” He poured the ambassador some warm orange juice left over from a previous meeting into a bathroom glass. Then he chaffed: “Although we’re not a developed country with historic rights like Syria, mightn’t senior emissary come to hear our point of view? Mightn’t I be invited to Moscow?” The ambassador kept asking questions about Israel’s plans while Eshkol kept avoiding them. “It’s acceptable in the world when ambassadors present their credentials to the president they commit themselves to keeping the peace—and how have you kept that promise?” he assailed Chuvakhin. “Now we have not just the first shot, but shells and mines all over the place.” The ambassador suggested that an equitable solution might still be worked out, at which point Eshkol exploded: “Please! Please! Give us a straw to clutch at. One way, one suggestion, tell me. Just as long as there’s peace and quiet!”110
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