by Jeremy Bowen
An official first version of how the war started was released, saying Egypt had fired the first shots: ‘This morning Egypt has started an air–ground attack. Egyptian armoured forces advanced at dawn towards the Negev. Our own forces advanced to repel them. At the same time a large number of radar tracks of Egyptian jets were observed on the screen. The tracks were directed towards the Israeli shore line. A similar attempt was also executed in the Negev area. IDF air force aircraft took to the air against enemy aircraft. Air battles are still going on. The Prime Minister has called an urgent meeting with a number of ministers.’
But a journalist was already looking for the real story. An Israeli officer who had been in the desert stopped off at a friend’s house in Jerusalem to wash off the dust before he went to Prime Minister Eshkol’s office to brief the cabinet. The friend was Michael Elkins, who was the correspondent in Israel for CBS, Newsweek and the BBC. The officer was cheerful, serenading the Elkins household from the shower. Elkins, a New York Jew who had turned to journalism after he fought in the 1948 war, could not persuade his friend to tell him anything, but he guessed something big had happened. Elkins hurried over to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to see what he could find out. He went into the basement and started listening to the excited conversations going on among the politicians.
Jordanian Military Headquarters, Amman, 1130
General Odd Bull of the United Nations was put through to King Hussein. On the telephone from Jerusalem he passed on a message from Eshkol. Israel, it said, was engaged in operations against Egypt. If you don’t intervene, Jordan will not be attacked. But for Hussein the message came far too late. His experience after the Samua raid, which came a day after he had received an unsolicited secret message from Israel telling him that Jordan would be left alone, had taught him not to trust Israeli assurances. He had made his decision days earlier. And, at that moment, with reports coming in from Cairo that the Israeli air force was being pulverised, it did not seem such a bad one. Hussein told Bull ‘they started the battle. Now they are receiving our reply by air.’
Jerusalem
The Jordanians opened fire along the confrontation line. Its artillery fired into West Jerusalem, mainly, though not always and not accurately, at military positions. The UN observer force, that had maintained the armistice for a generation, tried unsuccessfully to arrange several ceasefires. Bullets narrowly missed Britain’s senior diplomat in Jerusalem, the consul-general Hugh Pullar, and crashed into his offices. At 1130 he cabled: ‘Very heavy automatic fire … Jerusalem totally engulfed in war. Guns and mortars…’ Pullar had just returned from a meeting with a senior Jordanian official. He had asked him if the Arabs’ basic intention was to eliminate Israel. In a ‘distinctly chilly’ way, the official said it was.
John Tleel, a Palestinian dentist, never liked Mondays. He had been at work at his dental surgery in the Christian quarter of the Old City since 6:30 a.m., as usual. Among the patients waiting for him was a schoolteacher, Miss Elisabeth Bawarshi, who was planning a trip to Lebanon. She needed a set of false teeth. At eleven o’clock when he had seen his other patients, he decided to walk across the Old City to pick up Miss Bawarshi’s teeth.
‘Are you mad?’ his brother, who was also a dentist, asked him. ‘Haven’t you heard the war’s started?’
Tleel told his brother not to worry, and set out. The streets, he thought, looked calm and peaceful. But then he realised the shops were closed and he was the only person around. Nobody was there. Garo the Armenian goldsmith, Suleiman the Muslim watch-maker, all the shopkeepers who normally kept their businesses open whatever was going on were all closed. The street leading to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is built on the quarry where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried, was empty too. Then he saw two men, talking loudly and carrying automatic rifles. They had come from the local police station, where, at the last minute, weapons were being handed out. It was still quiet, so he walked into the big open square just on the inside of Jaffa Gate. A few bystanders had gathered. Jordanian soldiers were trying to move them on. Tleel walked across the square, to check his post office box. It was empty.
Opposite the Jaffa Gate on much higher ground on the Israeli side of the city was the King David hotel. Tleel saw it perched there ‘like a giant’. Suddenly, there were great bursts of gunfire. Bullets whizzed past Tleel’s head. Terrified, he ran for his life, out of the square, through the narrow, empty streets of the Old City, sheltering sometimes from ‘the whining gunfire’ until he reached his home. Tleel and his brother were bachelors. They crowded, with some neighbours, into a small room which they thought was more protected than the others. They taped up the windows with sticking plaster, to stop them shattering if there was an explosion, and stretched a blanket across the window frames. The power went off. By candlelight they listened to their transistor radios. They went back and forth along the dials: ‘Amman, Cairo, Israel, London, Voice of America. We even tried Athens and Cyprus.’ They were hoping to find an honest account of what was happening. ‘Soon we realised there were losers and winners and that the losing side was not broadcasting the truth. We argued all the time among ourselves about which side to believe, the Arab or the Israeli.’
Anwar Nusseibeh heard the news that the war had started on his car radio. He was a member of one of Jerusalem’s most prominent Palestinian families. Nusseibeh moved in Jordan’s royal circles. He had just finished a stint as King Hussein’s ambassador in London. He had risen early, to drive to Amman from his home on the Jordanian side of Jerusalem. When he heard what had happened, he turned the car round to go home to his wife and children. Two days before the war, he sat with his brother Hazem, a former Jordanian foreign minister, having lunch on the balcony of their family home, which overlooked Israeli positions in West Jerusalem. They saw a big artillery piece was pointing straight at them. They were not unduly worried, because they assumed that Arab forces were as strong as the radio news claimed. Hazem remembers ‘excitement, expectation, enthusiasm and hope. Fear was the last thing, if it existed at all … We were seeing Israeli helicopters throttling over our skies and watching them from the balcony and simply smiling.’
Back in Jerusalem, Anwar tried to ring Ahmed Shukairy, the leader of the PLO, who had been staying at the Ambassador hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah district. But Shukairy, who specialised in rabble-rousing, blood-curdling speeches about the destruction of Israel, had checked out. Now that the hour of which he had spoken endlessly had come, he was on his way to Damascus. Then Nusseibeh went to volunteer his services to the Jordanian governor of Jerusalem, Anwar al-Khatib, who was at the police headquarters. ‘I went there and they were still talking about organising groups of resistance, issuing rifles, things like that. The day the war was on! Well, there wasn’t much that one could do in that kind of situation. I told them that I was at home, you can telephone me. And I came back home.’
One crackpot scheme that was being discussed was a plan to arm the men of Isawiya, the nearest Palestinian village to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus, a high point on the escarpment to the east of Jerusalem that overlooked the Old City. With artillery support, untrained civilians would advance uphill and throw themselves on the Israeli defences. It would have been suicidal. Since 1948 Israel had been prohibited by the armistice from bringing in military supplies to its garrison on Mount Scopus. But over nineteen years they smuggled enough military contraband on the fortnightly resupply convoys to turn the enclave into a fortress. They even broke down jeeps armed with anti-tank guns into their constituent parts to get them in. Once when UN inspectors confiscated a suspicious-looking barrel Israel retaliated by confiscating the building in which the barrel was stored.
Jerusalem, 1130
Israel was keeping its success quiet because it did not want to do anything to encourage the Arabs and their friends to accept a ceasefire motion at the UN. But the BBC reporter Michael Elkins worked the story out for himself after a morning spent eavesdropping and asking q
uestions in the basement of the Knesset. ‘I heard enough bits and pieces to put it together. Then I went to Ben-Gurion in the basement of the Knesset and told him what I had. He said, yes, it was accurate. I asked him if he would record a message to the Jewish people because Eshkol was busy and wouldn’t see me. The only thing he would say was, “Tell the Jewish people not to worry.”’
As Elkins was compiling his report, the Jordanian authorities had finally overcome their reluctance to give weapons to Palestinians: 260 Enfield rifles, 20 Sten submachine guns and 20 Bren light machine guns were delivered to the resistance committee that had been set up by Bahjet Abu Gharbiyeh. The army gave out another 100 or so guns. A dozen Stens, still smothered in protective grease, turned up at the radio station. Some of the men had improvised positions in the radio station garden, while the women loaded bullets into magazines. Almost nobody had any military training. Men were taking up firing positions in front of windows that were closed and without tape to catch the pieces if the glass was shattered. Amman had sent them nothing to broadcast, so they played military music, recordings of bursts of machine gun fire and improvised interludes of nationalistic rhetoric. In Amman the Jordanian minister of information, Abd al-Hamid Sharaf, was having lunch with his wife. He was shifting between different stations on his radio. Suddenly he heard a shrieking, hysterical voice, calling for popular mobilisation and victory. It was Jerusalem. He phoned them, ordering them ‘to calm down and be more reasonable’. Sharaf, who was in his twenties, venerated Nasser as the best hope of the Arab people. Nasser must be prepared for war, he told Leila, his Lebanese wife, or why would he let it happen?
In Israeli Jerusalem, Michael Elkins was filing his report. ‘About three hours after the war started, I broadcast that the war was won. I knew of the air strike on the Egyptian airfields and planes. It was obvious that by fighting in the Sinai desert without air cover the Egyptians couldn’t win.’ Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, ignored Elkins’s heroic efforts. The IDF spokesman denounced reports of Egyptian losses as ‘premature, unclear and utterly unauthorised’. In Tel Aviv at midday, Amit briefed the US ambassador Walworth Barbour and Harry C. McPherson, President Johnson’s envoy. McPherson was a little ragged around the edges. He had only arrived from Saigon at three that morning. Amit delivered a briefing which, like all the most effective disinformation, contained truth, lies and exaggeration, skilfully calibrated for its audience, whom he knew had its own intelligence sources. Amit told the Americans that Nasser had largely played his build-up by ear, until he had so much momentum he could not stop. Egypt had completed the encirclement of Israel, which had acted because the Arabs were about to launch an offensive. In the previous forty-eight hours the Egyptian 4th Armoured Division and the crack Shazli Brigade, which had 400 tanks between them, had been brought up to encircle and cut off Eilat, thus creating a land link with Jordan.
Amit said early that morning the Egyptians had shelled three Israeli settlements near the Gaza Strip. At the same moment, hostile Egyptian war planes entered Israeli airspace. No Egyptian troops had crossed the border. The day before, Amit told them, Israel had decided to ‘punch all the buttons’ if there was an attack. Amit then punched the cold war button that he knew was hard-wired into the Americans’ minds. Nasser, he said, had started a process that could lead to heavy Soviet pressure on Turkey and Iran to side with the Arabs. It was a Middle East domino theory, which was language Americans in the 1960s understood well. Now, Amit suggested, Nasser might collapse, which would lead to more stability.
Amit had known for more than two hours before the briefing with the Americans that Israel had already won the air war. All the same, speaking with characteristic chutzpah that Barbour, who saw his role as maintaining and strengthening the US–Israel alliance, described as ‘entire candour’, he reproached his visitors. America’s attempts, Amit complained, to restrain Israel had made the job its soldiers, sailors and airmen had to do much more difficult. As Israel had already demonstrated that morning, Amit’s suggestion was nonsense. But the last thing he wanted was for the Americans to know how well Israel was doing. He requested political backing, money, weapons and for the Soviets to be kept out of the area.
During Amit’s briefing the sirens went. When Harry McPherson ‘asked the intelligence chief whether we should go to a shelter, he looked at his watch and said, “It won’t be necessary.”’ The next day, when McPherson saw exhausted Israeli soldiers sleeping in the shade near the Gaza border, the Israeli colonel with him said they had earned their rest. ‘They’ve been driving down here since Sunday afternoon. This place looked like Detroit Sunday night’ – twelve hours, as McPherson realised, before the Egyptian ‘attack’.
Governments without the USA’s intelligence-gathering resources spent weeks trying to puzzle out what really happened. At the end of June a foreign military attaché still had to ask Brigadier General Hod, the commander of the air force, how they could have been so effective when they were responding to a sudden attack. Surely they needed at least six months to prepare such a crushing attack. Hod did not try too hard to keep the secret. He replied, ‘Sir, you are right, but not quite. We have been preparing for it for eighteen and a half years.’
Washington DC, 0430
Washington was waking up. By 0430 Walt Rostow, the National Security Advisor, was preparing to rouse the president. The US government heard first about the outbreak of war from news agency reports. One of the overnight staff in the Situation Room at the White House saw them, picked up a phone and started dialling. He woke Rostow just before 0250. Groggily, Rostow told him to call back when the reports were confirmed. Five minutes later the phone rang again with the confirmation. Rostow was in the White House by 0320. He called Secretary of State Dean Rusk who had already gone into the State Department. Rusk suggested they waited an hour or so until they had more facts before they woke the president. Now at 0435, Rostow had a scrawled page of notes in front of him. He was put through to Johnson’s bedroom. He told the president what they knew. Johnson asked very few questions and made no comment. At the end he thanked Rostow, who suddenly thought it seemed very ordinary, no different to all their other conversations. Then there was some confusion about the time difference with the Middle East. Was Cairo attacked at 0900 or 0800 local? For a while, the president’s advisers tried to work out what time it was in Cairo and Tel Aviv.
By the time Rostow spoke again to Johnson, at 0615 Washington time, hard military intelligence was coming in from intercepts picked up by the National Security Agency. The Egyptian military in Cairo was receiving information that ‘at least five’ of its airfields in the Sinai and around the Suez canal were ‘unserviceable’. The CIA recalled that ‘Israel’s war plans had put high priority on quick action against the Egyptian air force because of the threat to its own more vulnerable airfields and vital centres.’
Johnson, still in his bedroom, was being briefed on the phone by Rostow and his other top officials. Johnson ordered Rostow to bring in the elder statesmen of American foreign policy to offer their help. First of all McGeorge Bundy, who had been one of Kennedy’s key advisers. Bundy took over Rostow’s direct responsibility for coordinating Middle East policy. (Rostow was told to concentrate on Vietnam, though in practice he remained deeply involved with the new war. Later on, the White House press secretary denied speculation that Rostow was taken out of the front seat because he was Jewish.) Also drafted were Dean Acheson, Secretary of State to President Harry Truman, and Clark Clifford, a lawyer who had been deeply involved with US foreign policy since the start of the Cold War. Bundy was made executive secretary of a Special Committee of the NSC. Rusk was the chairman. The idea was to recreate the Executive Committee, or ‘ExCom’, which handled the Cuban missile crisis in 1961. Just like the ExCom, they took their seats around the big table in the Situation Room, the crisis centre in the basement of the White House.
Cairo, 1030
A group of foreign correspondents hurried down to the TV centre, an impressive ultra-m
odern curved building, topped by a high-rise tower. It was just a few blocks down the Nile corniche from the Hilton hotel where they were staying. Crowds were mobbing it. ‘Well, this is it, war with Israel,’ someone said to Ron Chester of Canada’s CBC. They pushed their way inside. Trevor Armbrister of the Saturday Evening Post saw Kamal Bakr, Egypt’s public relations chief, who was ‘pudgy [and] quietly unprofessional’, pinning military communiqué No. 1 to a notice board. It read: ‘Israel began its aggression this morning by raiding Cairo and now the governorates in the UAR [Egypt]. The UAR military crafts face the planes.’ Communiqué No. 2 at 1020 reported Radio Tel Aviv had announced an Egyptian raid on the city. Ten minutes later the people grouped round the teleprinter for the Middle East News Agency ticker read that twenty-three Israeli planes had been shot down; ‘pandemonium’.
‘Twenty-three Israeli planes,’ someone yelled, ‘twenty-three Israeli planes shot down…’ US diplomats reported ‘effervescence and clapping in the streets’ as the news started to spread. The radio went back to playing patriotic songs ‘interspersed with calls for a return to Palestine and a rendezvous in Tel Aviv’. No one seemed to know where the planes had been shot down. Outside, the sky was clear and empty. Just before eleven o’clock there were puffs of white smoke, which they took to be anti-aircraft fire.
A stream of lies was pouring out of the high command. They were passed on to the world through Cairo Radio and through Kamal Bakr at the press centre who kept pinning up the latest communiqués. At 1110 Bakr told them it was forty-two Israeli planes down, not twenty-three. Egypt, he announced proudly, had not lost one. At the press centre the military communiqués ‘kept flowing in … each one couched in superlatives’, with more whooping and cheering every time the latest went up on the notice board. Nothing suggested that the war was going badly for the Arabs. Eric Rouleau of Le Monde had plunged into the streets. ‘We witnessed extraordinary outbursts of joy. In spite of the air-raid alarms, in spite of anti-aircraft fire, everybody was out in the streets and the crowd … shouted: “Nasser, Nasser, we are with you. Nasser, Nasser, finish with Israel.” … Every time that the loudspeakers announced that an enemy aircraft had been shot down, people embraced, jumped for joy, applauded.’ American cameramen trying to film the excited crowds were attacked. New peaks of emotion swept through the streets when an Israeli plane, hit by anti-aircraft fire, crashed into the city centre. Crowds gathered around it, chanting the name of Nasser. They believed he was humiliating the Israelis in the same way that he had humiliated the British and French in 1956.
