Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ to frame an agreement with Israel. In April 1972, Egypt began to communicate to Washington through a secret back channel, and in July Sadat announced Egypt's expulsion of 15,000 Soviet military advisors.²⁷ But the Nixon administration, then heavily engaged in the Paris Peace Talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War, and bent on prying Egypt out of the Soviet sphere of influence, did not vigorously pursue Sadat's overtures. In April 1973, three months after Kissinger and Le Duc Tho initialed the Paris Peace Agreement, Sadat gave a speech warning of war. By September, the Egyptian and Syrian high commands had finalized plans to a two-front war on Israel. The events of October 1973 would alter the entire Middle Eastern political terrain.

      Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in Judaism, fell on 6 October in 1972. That day, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched Operation Spark. Eighty thousand Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal, overwhelming the 500 Israeli troops dug in on the canal's western bank. To the north, 1,400 Syrian tanks engaged the 180 Israeli tanks positioned in the Golan Heights. It was a spectacular intelligence failure for both the Mossad and the CIA that nearly translated into a military catastrophe for Israel. Despite signs that the Egyptians and Syrians were massed for an attack, U.S. intelligence concluded that the Arab states would not risk another defeat by the superior Israeli forces. Nixon, who was in the throes of the Watergate crisis, admitted surprise: “I was disappointed by our own intelligence shortcomings, and I was stunned by the failure of Israeli intelligence.” Israel was thrown back on the defensive. The IDF suffered substantial losses of men and materiel during the first three days of the fighting, and on 9 October appealed to Washington for a massive shipment of weapons to mount a counteroffensive. Nixon did not hesitate to come to Israel's defense. For the Republican president the “disturbing question mark…[was] the role of the Soviet Union.”

      But Nixon had other worries. An appeals court had ruled in favor of the Watergate special prosecutor's subpoena for secret Oval Office tapes that would reveal the president's culpability in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in; the vice president was forced to resign on the same day the Israelis appealed for arms and, as the war entered a dangerous phase on Saturday 20 October, Nixon ordered the “Saturday night massacre” firing of the Watergate special prosecutor. The next day, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to the text of UN Security Council Resolution 338, calling on the belligerents to “terminate all military activity immediately,” and to begin negotiations “aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” As important, the Super Powers agreed to host a peace conference, which would eventually be scheduled to begin on 17 December in Geneva. The Security Council passed Resolution 338 on 22 October and set a 12-hour deadline for termination of hostilities. From the onset of the crisis Nixon adhered to the simple principle that the United States should not impose a diplomatic cease-fire: “it would be better to wait until the war had reached a point at which neither side had a decisive military advantage.” The reasoning was straightforward: “only a battlefield stalemate would provide the foundation on which fruitful negotiations begin.”²⁸

      Israel and Egypt accepted the terms of Resolution 338, but that did not end the fighting. Israel alleged Egyptian violations of the cease-fire and pressed ahead with an attack on the Egyptian Third Army Corps, which it had already driven back across the Suez, encircling the Egyptian elite troops. The United States and the Soviet Union quickly brokered another cease-fire agreement on 24 October. To monitor it, Anwar Sadat requested deployment of an international peacekeeping force. The Soviets responded by proposing that the United States and the Soviet Union deploy armed peacekeepers in the Sinai, and threatened a unilateral deployment of Soviet forces when Nixon rejected the proposal. Nixon's response to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev was stark: “we must view your suggestion of unilateral action as a matter of the gravest concern involving incalculable actions.”²⁹ To help the Soviet leader calculate the incalculable, Nixon ordered U.S. conventional and nuclear forces on alert. Hostilities concluded the next day.

      The CIA and the PLO

      Anwar Sadat waged war to compel the United States to broker a peace that would restore the Sinai to Egypt. In fact, the October War was the catalyst for Kissinger's famous shuttle diplomacy that produced a series of agreements between Israel and Egypt, culminating in Sadat's historic—and heroic—visit to Jerusalem in November 1978 and the Camp David Accords in 1979. The Palestinians felt betrayed. Abu Iyad, who was euphoric when the Egyptian president announced Operation Spark, was caustic now: “The October War in Sadat's eyes must indeed have been a ‘spark’…not the raging fire that the entire Arab world was hoping for.”³⁰ But Iyad was among the first to realize the war had transformed the strategic equation. The Palestinians were compelled to reconsider the policy of no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel. The mere possibility of Palestinian participation in the Geneva negotiations provoked a violent schism within the Palestinian national movement. Abu Nidal's seizure of the Saudi Embassy in September was an early sign of the Rejectionist terror and internecine warfare to come. Other signs would come at the end of November and again in December.

      The PLO disunity over the question of negotiations was matched by the U.S. and Israeli unity: there was no room at the peace table for Arafat's PLO. Golda Meir, whose Committee X had been systematically hunting down PLO figures in the months leading up to the October War, rejected the very notion of a Palestinian national identity. Kissinger, who assumed near total authority to conduct U.S. foreign policy while Nixon sank deeper into the mire of the Watergate scandal, was more concerned with dividing Egypt from the Arab world than with finding a just and durable peace. The Arab League, meeting in Algiers in November, tried to force the issue by declaring the PLO the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Arafat, who had long coveted this recognition of his legitimacy, took it as a mandate to move the PLO in the direction of calculated moderation. A discreet dialogue with the United States became his best option.

      At the beginning of November 1973, Henry Kissinger dispatched Vernon Walters to make contact with the PLO. Walters, a career army officer, had become a lieutenant general in March 1972 after a distinguished career as a soldier, military liaison, and covert operator. That same month, Nixon appointed him deputy director of the CIA, and the Senate confirmed him in May. When the intelligence community's involvement in the Watergate affair forced Richard Helms to resign as director of the CIA in July 1973, Walters served as acting director until September, a month before the eruption of the Yom Kippur War. In November, immediately after the war, Kissinger sent Walters to deliver a stern warning to the PLO. Walters arrived in Rabat, Morocco, in the first week of November. King Hassan arranged for his clandestine meeting with PLO moderates, Khaled Hassan, who chaired the Palestinian National Council's foreign relations committee, and Maje Abu Sharer, who directed Fatah's information department.³¹

      Walters delivered a forceful message, but in his memoir he was secretive about the mission: “On one occasion the U.S. government sent me to talk to a most hostile group of terrorists…. We were able to communicate and there were no further acts of blood between us.”³² Somehow U.S. diplomats learned Walter's verbatim remarks: “The violence against us has got to stop, or much blood will flow, and you may be sure that not all of it will be ours.”³³ But for the Palestinians, who were suffering the blows of Israel's Wrath of God operation, the threat of American retaliation was less important than the prospect of a diplomatic dialogue. Kissinger had foreclosed that possibility: “at this stage, involving the PLO [in negotiations] was incompatible with the interests of any of the parties to the Middle East conflict.”³⁴ But the PLO representatives, who viewed the PLO as a legitimate party to the conflict, came away with the impression that dialogue was possible. As they tell it, Walters had some probing questions for the Palestinians about Soviet support for the Palestinian struggle, about the PLO moderates' ideas about a future democratic Palestinian state, and about the PLO's relations with Jordan.³⁵ The Palestinians left the secret meeting with expectations for future encounters endorsed by Nixon. But Kissinger had dispatched Walters to deliver a stern message, not to initiate a dialogue. The meeting did not produce a secret back channel between PLO moderates and the Department of State or the White House. Kissinger may have disdained contacts with the PLO, СКАЧАТЬ