ANECDOTES FROM CHRIS VICK ON ME SHUTTLES

1. <u>Marilyn Berger left behind in Cyprus</u>

The talks broke earlier than anticipated, catching
staff and press by surprise. As the plane was readying
for takeoff it was discovered that Marilyn was
nowhere to be seen. Apparently she had left the
designated press area at the hotel and gone for a
swim. Noone really knew how long she might
be and HK was in no mood to wait. It was as the
plane was moving away that the Admin officer realized
he had Marilyn's passport. It was literally thrown
out the back door to an embassy official standing
below.

Later that evening I saw Marilyn just as she arrived
at the King David via a commerical flight. She
sputtered something about not being aware we were
leaving so early and that she arrived at the airport
in time to see #836970 taxiing down the runway and lifting
off.

[NOTE: As I recall HK made a point of seeking Marilyn
out the next day--he may remember more details about this.]

2. Press Bus being detained in Cairo

It was a Friday and we were departing Cairo in a
particularly big rush so that HK would have time to
meet with Golda before the Sabbath started. There was
the usual suicide ride to the airport, weaving in and out
of horrendous traffic jams. The press were in a
rundown bus of unknown vintage, situated at the end of the
motorcade. HK, and staff arrived intact but somewhere
along the way the press bus had separated from us and
now were nowhere in sight. Not really knowing what had
happened or how long the press would be, HK refused to
wait. Bob McCloskey insisted otherwise and there was
a standoff with McCloskey striding to the front of the
plane and walking out onto the front ramp. HK gave
the order for takeoff and the ground personnel starting
to move the ramp away from the plane with McCloskey
standing on top--red in the face and yelling.

Just at this moment, the press bus rounds the corner
with tires screeching, and the smell of burning rubber
and burning tempers from the press. They had just barely
survived a hair-raising ride through Cairo traffic in
sweltering heat, cramped in an old bus. Thereafter
the press were given a higher priority in the motorcade
with more suitable transportation.

3. Gambling pool on the Plane

Towards the end of the shuttle things became increasingly unpredictable. Heading the list was departure time from Damascus for Jerusalem. Ever careful, the staff and press would dash off for the airport at first word of an impending break-up of the meetings. However, as days went by there were many "false alarms" and inevitably the press and staff rushed to the plane only to wait for indefinite periods of time (hours on occasion).

To pass the time one of the newsies started a "wheels-up" pool: put in one dollar and pick a time for "wheels-up", the one closest to the acutal time collected the kitty. Staff members should have had the inside story on when HK would arrive planeside but as well as I recall no staff member ever won. The only thing the staff got out of it was the time to eat in peace and nap.

Other Ideas:

Damascus: --Motorcade rides, including guards facing road with guns. And dummy motorcades for security.

-- Faulty plumbing in guesthoust

-- Babbler

Jerusalem: -- Food at King David

-- Amb. Bunker's birthday party (80th)

Valeriani book - page 50

Subject: *Journal on*
*Shuttles*

His regular plane was divided into five sections. The front section housed a back-up flight crew and a solid wall of communications equipment that kept the Secretary in instant touch with the White House and the rest of the world. (The communications technicians also kept the traveling party in touch with such vital matters as pro football scores.)

Just behind this front section was a compartment that served as private quarters for Kissinger and for members of his family when they traveled with him. This compartment had two beds, a small desk, and a private bathroom. The seal of the Secretary of State hung on the door.

On the other side of the private quarters, in the middle of the plane, was a compartment that Kissinger used as an office. It had a curved, L-shaped table that could be raised and lowered by pushing a button — thanks to LBJ's love of gadgetry. A bank of seats lined each side of the compartment, with a large easy chair at the corner of the L. This is where he usually briefed the press in flight.

The fourth compartment served as a kind of State Department flying office. It had a table between the seats on each side of the aisle, filing cabinets, and a cramped space for a typist, who was kept busy throughout every flight. The seats were occupied by senior aides.

This compartment also housed an indispensable copying machine, a temperamental device that seemed to suffer frequently from altitude sickness. It simply would not reproduce unless the plane was absolutely level. This meant that the time available for copying on the flights between Israel and Egypt or Israel and Syria was limited. But the Kissinger party usually needed to have certain key documents reproduced and in hand as soon as we hit the ground, so the staff would frequently advise the pilot to taxi for as long as possible after landing to provide time for the necessary documents to be copied for the next round of talks. In the back of the plane, we newsmen would be making bad jokes about how we were "driving" to Aswan or Tel Aviv, or how the pilot was a frustrated bus driver.

But as we were rolling along on the ground at airports throughout the Middle East, the machine was copying away in the interests of peace.

Valeriani book - page 36

Subject: Watergate & Ap/May
1974 Shuttle

When Kissinger returned from his exhausting but successful thirty-three-day Syrian-Israeli shuttle and held a news conference at the State Department, he was shocked out of his diplomatic euphoria by a series of jarring questions. His testimony on his knowledge of the White House "plumbers" was challenged, and after one reporter asked him five questions in a row about his role in the wiretapping, Kissinger snapped, "I think that this is a press conference and not a cross-examination."

Ironically, one of the questions that shook him up the most came from a young Washington gadfly whom nobody in the press corps took at all seriously. His name was Peter Peckarsky, and he got his press credentials as the Washington representative for the student newspaper at MIT. Peckarsky was known chiefly for shouting out largely irrelevant or nitpicking questions at the daily White House briefings. But Kissinger didn't have any idea who Peckarsky was when he stood up and challenged Kissinger's testimony about a Watergate matter and then said, "I wonder if you could . . . tell us whether or not the Special Prosecutor or any other prosecutor or agency of the U.S. government has contacted you with reference to a perjury investigation of [your] statements and . . . whether or not you have consulted and retained counsel in preparation for a defense against a possible perjury indictment?" Kissinger was outraged. "I have not retained counsel, and I am not conducting my office as if it were a conspiracy," he said. "I stand on the statements that I have made and I will answer no further questions on this topic." But the questions persisted.

During his thirty-three days out of Washington, Kissinger had become deconditioned to the intense pressure of the Watergate atmosphere. Following the news conference, a spate of stories and

The Vit and Visdom of Henry Kissinger

editorials appeared, questioning his real role in the wiretapping of White House aides in 1969. Kissinger saw himself becoming entangled in Watergate and worried about the consequences of the attacks. He sulked. One of his closest aides, Larry Eagleburger, urged him to lance the boil. Kissinger brooded, consulted with friends in Washington, and finally decided he had to do something. He did it in Salzburg, Austria, a would-be "rest" stop en route to the Middle East with President Nixon. Kissinger dramatically threatened to resign unless his name were cleared of all wiretap wrongdoing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It was an animated performance. But when I talked to him immediately afterward, he was calm and reasoned. He explained that he felt the gush of leaks and half-truths feeding the stream of the articles and editorials in the New York *Times*, the Washington *Post*, *Newsweek* ("A blot on Mr. Clean?"), and the Baltimore *Sun* had to be stopped; otherwise, they would begin feeding on themselves, and he would be irrevocably tagged as a Watergate figure because of his tenure in the Nixon White House. He also felt that on the eve of a trip to the Middle East, no serious diplomacy could be carried out if the credibility and survivability of the Secretary of State were suspect at precisely the same time the President of the United States was facing impeachment proceedings.

Kissinger did not mention his own hurt feelings, his battered ego. He had once told an academic colleague, "I know I have a first-rate mind, but that's no source of pride to me. Intelligent people are a dime a dozen. But I am proud of having character." And he felt his character was now being impugned by nameless, cowardly attackers.

The dramatic tactic worked — in the short term. The immediate crisis passed. The Senate cleared him again. The flow of Watergate stories slowed to a trickle. But the process left the Superman costume in shreds and Kissinger was off the "high plateau" of indispensability. A restless, assertive Congress, led by a latent-blooming Greek lobby, crucified him for his policy on Cyprus following the Greek-led coup on the island, the overthrow of Archbishop Makarios, and the Turkish invasion that followed.

Valeriani book - page 67

Subject: General

On one of the early trips, Murrey Marder of the Washington *Post* showed up in the morning with a rather strange-looking shirt. We hadn't traveled much as a group, and we didn't know Marder's tastes all that well, but the shirt was indeed strange. It turned out to be his pajama top. He had forgotten to leave out a shirt the night before. *Newsweek's* Bruce van Voorst showed up for the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in *Cairo* wearing a suit, a raincoat, and little else. He had forgotten to leave out a shirt, socks, and shorts.

I once put my shoes outside my door at the hotel in Damascus, thinking the floor boy would polish them. Instead, the baggage handler threw them into my suitcase, which was also outside my door for an early call. Luckily, I had a pair of sneakers in an overnight bag. When Kissinger's plane landed in Tel Aviv, an Israeli photographer spotted my sneakers and took a picture, and I became a front-page item in one of Israel's afternoon newspapers.

Nancy Kissinger narrowly escaped a more serious oversight during a visit to Isfahan in Iran. While she was in the bathroom, her husband called from the bedroom to ask what she was wearing. "The red dress," she replied. "What red dress?" asked Kissinger. "The red dress on the bed," she said. "There is no red dress on the bed," exclaimed Kissinger. They managed to get the red dress retrieved from a suitcase down the hall just before it was carted off to the airport.

Valeriani book - page 61

Subject: General - Aug '75
Shuttle

The secretaries worked in shifts and were always busy; they seldom got out of their hotels to do any sightseeing or shopping. "Without the ability to sleep in a motorcade," one secretary said, "we'd never survive."

The workload was especially heavy when Kissinger was writing a speech that required some consultation with other agencies in Washington. During the Middle East shuttle that produced a second disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt in September 1975, Kissinger was working on a mammoth speech to be delivered to a special session of the United Nations. He was intensely meticulous about speeches. Each one had to be handcrafted as though it were chipped in stone. Some of them went through as many as twenty drafts. Aide Winston Lord produced one of the best known and most quoted of the early Kissinger stories by describing what it was like writing a speech for the Secretary. "He'll ask for a paper, and after he gets it he'll call the writer in and say, 'Is this the best you can do on this?' The guy says, 'Well, I'll try again.' A couple of days later, the writer returns with another draft. The same ritual is repeated. After about five or six times, the writer, weary and frustrated, takes in another draft, and when Kissinger asks again, 'Is this the best you can do?' the writer finally replies, 'Yes, damnit.' 'Good,' says Kissinger, 'now I'll read it.'"

The speech for the UN special session included a lot of technical economic material, so it had to be checked out frequently with Washington. When it was finished, it filled 117 triple-spaced pages. The whole thing had to be cabled back to Washington. Six typists were kept busy full time in Egypt and Israel. Since Kissinger was obsessed about leaks, the speech was sent NODIS — No Distribution — which means it had to be coded. And once the coded speech

reached Washington, it had to be hand-delivered rather than sent through chutes since it was NODIS.

Kissinger never even got to deliver the speech in person. The Israeli-Egyptian negotiations dragged on longer than anticipated, and Kissinger stayed to wrap up the agreement. The speech was delivered for him by Ambassador Daniel P. ("Pat") Moynihan, who sent him a cable, which read: "Your speech was major success, and you had added advantage of not having to sit and listen to it for one hour and forty-five minutes."

Valeriani book - page 23

Subject: General - Ford Admin

Some of his blowups over trivial and not-so-trivial matters were legendary. And he may not have thrown "objects," but he was known to throw other things. Once, on a flight from Washington to Vail, Colorado, Kissinger discovered that a topographical map he wanted for a briefing for the President on a Mideast negotiation had not been put on the plane. The Kissinger volcano spewed lava; briefing books went flying all over the plane while Nancy and the two Kissinger children tried to stay out of his way. Somebody working in the State Department Operations Center remembers getting a message that day from Kissinger's Jetstar, saying, "We've just had a nuclear explosion aboard the plane." Kissinger was so angry he even had his aide call the department from the plane on an open line — something he never did because of concern about Russian monitoring in Washington. He ordered that the map be sent to Vail forthwith. Another plane was not immediately available, however, so the map was sent in pieces over a telephone reproduction device, which obviously could not reproduce the topographical features. The presidential staff in Vail had a lot of trouble trying to match the pieces of the map. They spread it out on the floor like a giant jigsaw puzzle and got down on their hands and knees to try to line up the grids and coordinates properly. They never did, and Kissinger finally decided to brief the President without the map that somebody had spent so much time constructing.

OFFICE OF
HENRY A. KISSINGER

Geneval

Valerian

book

185

The Middle East

Minister Moshe Dayan came to Washington, and I interviewed him on the *Today* program. Before we went on the air, Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz and I were chatting. I noted that Kissinger had started out in the Middle East believing that Jerusalem would be the most difficult of all the Arab-Israeli problems to resolve, but after the Syrian-Israeli talks, he now felt that the Golan Heights would be the most difficult.

"That's typical of Henry," Dinitz said. "He always thinks the problem he was just working on is the most difficult."

"I guess that's so," I said. "Besides," I added, "he says he's got a solution for Jerusalem anyway."

Dayan and Dinitz did a double-take and sat upright in their chairs, as though I had just spilled coffee in their laps.

"What solution?" asked Dinitz. "What's the solution?"

"Well," I said, "on the plane, Kissinger told us that the main cause of the Jerusalem problem is the fact that King Faisal [of Saudi Arabia] wants to be buried there, so Kissinger says all you have to do is get Faisal to convert, and the problem is solved."

Both men smiled, then Dinitz said, "You tell Henry, Faisal doesn't even have to convert, we'll bury him in Jerusalem."

Dayan quickly added, "Look, tell him Faisal doesn't even have to die, we'll bury him in Jerusalem."

The most innovative feature of Kissinger's Middle East travel was shuttle diplomacy. It came about quite accidentally. On his third trip to the area, in January 1974, Kissinger was trying to get Egypt and Israel to agree to disengagement proposals, which he thought they would then convey to their official teams at the Geneva conference for negotiation. He told reporters it was not "likely" that he would function as a courier between the two countries. When he met with Anwar Sadat, however, the Egyptian President suggested that Kissinger "stay in the area" and make a personal effort to work out a disengagement agreement rather than leaving it to the technicians on both sides. Kissinger, astounded, asked, "Instead of negotiations in Geneva?" "For sure," replied Sadat. And that's how Henry Kissinger began flying back and forth between Aswan and Tel Aviv.

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When Kissinger was later being pressed by a reporter about one
of the more subtle points involved in the negotiations, he glibly
tossed off a rationale for shuttling that stands up as well as any other.
"If it could all be expressed on paper," he said, "they would be
sending notes to each other."

Who coined the actual phrase “shuttle diplomacy”? The answer
is lost somewhere among the shifting sands of the Middle East. The
first known reference appeared in the New York *Times* under the
by-line of Bernard Gwertzman, who wrote on January 11, 1974, about
an “unorthodox bit of shuttle diplomacy.” Barry Schweid of the AP
wrote after the first round trip that Kissinger was “shuttling” back
and forth. That same day, Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco
came to the back section of the plane a few minutes before taking off
from Aswan and said in a loud voice, “Welcome aboard the Egyp-
tian-Israeli shuttle!” Sisco, who had formerly been involved in UN
affairs, was thinking about the Eastern Airlines shuttle between New
York and Washington. Schweid, a New Yorker transplanted to
Washington, was more parochial. He was thinking about the shuttle
train between Grand Central Station and Penn Station in Manhat-
tan. *Newsweek* correspondent Bruce van Voorst filed a line about
“shuttlecock diplomacy.” He’s from Michigan.

Whatever the origin of the term, Gwertzman was certainly pre-
scient about its future. After quoting Sisco's outcry, he wrote: "Mr.
Sisco . . . was reflecting the feeling of most members of the party
traveling with Secretary of State Kissinger that the shuttle had some-
how become a permanent fixture in Middle Eastern diplomacy."

Shuttle diplomacy went hand in hand, of course, with step-by-step
diplomacy in the Middle East. But whereas the shuttles were impro-
vised, the steps were not. In order to proceed one step at a time,
however, Kissinger needed a larger framework for the negotiations,
so he conceived the *Geneva Peace Conference* as a negotiating um-
brella for Middle East peace talks. And it took a considerable
amount of mediating merely to get the umbrella up.

During all the preconference haggling over the wording of the
invitations, Kissinger cracked, "This could well be the only diplo-

Office of
HENRY A. KISSINGER

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187

matic conference in history which begins before invitations are sent." When Syria decided not to go to Geneva, Kissinger said sardonically, "I don't think the Israeli Cabinet will have to meet in special session to reaffirm *their* readiness to attend." En route to the opening session, Kissinger acknowledged the long odds at Geneva, but he took an upbeat view: "With agony, good will, luck, and patience — and I don't want to underestimate luck — you could just shape something out of this."

In Geneva, Kissinger showed his determination to hold the middle ground by quoting both Arab and Jew in his speech. He even showed some linguistic daring by lapsing into Arabic to say, "*Eli fat mat*," which means, "The past is dead." His accent provoked laughter from Egyptians watching on television. On the other side, he quoted the Jewish sage Hillel, but without naming him: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for myself alone, who am I?" Afterward, an Egyptian diplomat noted, "Kissinger was masterful. He used a Jewish proverb to get at the Jews, and an Arab proverb to get at the Arabs."

But Kissinger knew the past was not really dead — not yet. He felt the Israelis could never really negotiate in Geneva with the rest of the Arabs arrayed against them, since they were not secure enough in the wake of the 1973 war to confront all of their problems at once — withdrawal from the occupied territory, the Palestinian problem, peace. Step-by-step diplomacy was designed to protect Israel from facing all of its problems and all of its adversaries at the same time. "It's in Israel's interest," he said then, privately, "that not all these issues be handled simultaneously. It's better for them that we are doing it rather than some international forum. You could argue that what's being done now is the best means of keeping the pressures tolerable on Israel." Ironically, however, a lot of Israelis wanted to argue differently. They complained that Kissinger was putting too much pressure on them to make concessions, and some eventually even called for a return to the Geneva Conference.

It was clear that although Egypt and Israel were supposed to be negotiating "directly" at Geneva, Kissinger's personal involvement

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TRAVELS WITH HENRY

was needed because the two countries did not yet have any real
experience in dealing with each other. And they still distrusted each
other so much that they found it easier — and probably necessary
— to negotiate through an intermediary. Kissinger, however, never
considered himself a mere mediator. He originally thought of himself
as a catalyst, an agent who made diplomatic interaction possible. But
his role obviously turned out to be even more intense than that.

Shuttle diplomacy was made to order for Kissinger's style and
talents. Flying among Middle Eastern capitals, he enjoyed one ad-
vantage that he could never quite achieve entirely in Washington. He
alone knew what each side was saying and thinking at all times. And
he was able to convey each side's thinking to the other in a part of
the world accustomed to dealing with middlemen and back channels
and emissaries rather than in direct, straightforward communica-
tion. A close aide gave the Secretary's role a wry cultural-geograph-
ical overlay: "He was about as conspiratorial as the people he was
dealing with. They found a kindred spirit."

However, Kissinger was continuously suspected of talking out of
both sides of the tent. And he resented such suspicions. When reports
appeared that he told the Israelis one thing and the Egyptians an-
other, he carped, "Contrary to what you see in the newspapers, you
can assume I tell the same story to everybody. It's the only way I
can survive for any length of time." In fact, Kissinger claimed on his
way to Geneva, in reference to the oil embargo problem, "You may
not believe it, but what I say in private is not very different from
what I have said in public." And he was right. Some of us did not
believe it.

Just before beginning the second Sinai shuttle, Kissinger explained
to newsmen on his plane, "You know that my whole style of negotia-
tions depends upon gaining the confidence of both sides and not
ramming it down throats. Anything you ram down their throats
makes you enormously vulnerable." And for the most part he did
have the confidence of both sides. Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal
Allon once welcomed Kissinger at the airport by remarking, "I
couldn't think of any other person in the world today but Dr. Kis-

OFFICE OF
HENRY A. KISSINGER

The Middle East

189

singer who could go to any Arab capital he wishes and from there
go to Israel" with the eager concurrence of both sides, in the hope
and belief that each would benefit by his mission. After he was out
of office, however, Kissinger himself acknowledged (in an article
written for *Time* magazine) that "no nation or leader will ever be
totally certain whether an intermediary's account of the views of the
opposing side reflects reality, gullibility, or his own preference. The
mere fact that an intermediary was necessary — that direct talks
were rejected — reflected and fueled the prevailing distrust."

Kissinger had one other extremely useful personal asset that made him a valuable shuttler. He was willing to take the heat from both sides. Each side said things to him that would probably have caused a breakdown in the negotiations if said directly to the other side. He served as a buffer for their anger and frustration, which, in turn, they moderated because they were dealing with the American Secretary of State rather than a hated enemy.

Not only were the perceptions different on each side. So was the
very process of negotiating. Kissinger never expected it to be easy.
As he explained, "When people have been shooting at one another
for twenty-five years, the problem is not contracting. They don't rush
into compromise."

In a way, however, it was easier for him in the Arab world —
in Cairo and Damascus — than in Israel. Sisco once pointed out that
"the Jerusalem stops were vastly more fatiguing than Aswan. You
had to explain everything a half dozen times." But then, so are the
people different: The Israelis apply Talmudic interpretations to every
written word. They give much more weight to the components of the
negotiation than to the personalities of the negotiators. The Arabs,
on the other hand, place great faith in personal relationships, and
once mutual trust has been established, the details of the negotiation
are less important.

One important feature of Kissinger's catalytic mediation came to
be known as "constructive ambiguity." When a reporter tried to pin
him down on the difference of interpretation between Israel and
Egypt over the nature of the Geneva Conference, he burst out, "For

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Christ's sake, leave everyone their face-saving formula! If it pleases the Israelis to consider it direct if they are in the same room with Egyptians and Sadat prefers to call this indirect if somebody else is there, what the hell difference does it make?" That kind of pragmatism and flexibility also helped his shuttling efforts. He entered the negotiations with a flexible scenario. There was no ideological involvement, no interfering preconvictions. He believed that what worked was what worked. As an aide once explained, "The secret of Kissinger's success is that he combines American pragmatism with German thoroughness." Plus a lot more.

How did Kissinger himself see his role? He once told us, "My
contribution can be in shaping their perceptions and in influencing
their positions before they get to each other, or even later, so that
they come closer to each other's position." He was always careful to
allow each side to project what it wanted. He constantly made the
point that he couldn't allow himself to be in the position of acting
as a "lawyer" for either side. He was also careful not to insert his
personal recommendations into a negotiation until he felt the parties
themselves had exhausted their own possibilities for bridging gaps.

Don Wright, *The Miami News*, The New York Times Syndicate

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191

"In negotiations," he explained, "if you put down specific proposals before you know where you're going, it is almost suicidal." In a self-deprecating aside, Kissinger himself later remarked on his technique, "In any negotiation, there's a deadlock. In my case, I talked so much, nobody noticed."

Whenever he had a spare moment — and even when he didn't — he would break away from the negotiating shuttle to fly to other Arab capitals to explain what he was doing and why. This was done so that "they realized the difficulties that arose were due to the objective nature of the problem . . . rather than to this or that failure on the part of the United States."

On a day when his schedule included meetings with King Hussein in Amman, President Assad in Damascus, and Prime Minister Rabin in Jerusalem, Kissinger observed, "Nobody will say I'm on a government-paid vacation."

All that travel reflected his serious concern that if his Middle East peace mediation failed, either the Arabs or the Israelis — or both — would hold the United States responsible in general and Kissinger in particular. "If I've learned one thing in this job," he said, "it is that you cannot bank good will. You can be a hero today and a villain tomorrow."

Apart from the immediate results, Kissinger's diplomacy had a psychological impact that was significant and probably enduring. Henry Kissinger made the Arabs respectable in America. Until the 1973 war, the Arabs were perceived as backward, inept, bumbling, loud-mouthed, laughable, and pro-Russian. The image was accurately projected in an offbeat way by a Washington delicatessen that celebrated the Israeli victory in the 1967 war by offering a new item on its menu, the Nasser sandwich. It was half chicken, half tongue — with Russian dressing. Kissinger himself acknowledged that he thought of Anwar Sadat as a "clown" following Nasser's death. Stories about the latest coup d'état in Syria were thrown away in American newsrooms, and Hafez Assad was hardly a household word. Or, as ABC's Herb Kaplow punned on the first trip to Damascus, Hafez Assad is better than no Assad at all. Saudi Arabia was

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a flashback to the fifteenth century, and only Jordan had some re-
spectability because of King Hussein's frequent visits to Washington.

But Kissinger's constant travel to Arab capitals, the pictures of him with Arab leaders, and his positive descriptions of them in his briefings helped change the American concept. And so did simple exposure. While the time spent by the traveling press corps in Arab capitals did not turn them into instant Arabists, it did help them to see — as Kissinger did — that there were indeed two sides to the story, and the heavily pro-Israel bias in the American press began to be moderated.

One top Middle East hand said that Kissinger achieved success in the Arab world because "he had an instinctive ability to deal with the Arabs. He knew how to reach them — in their sense of national pride, their strong sense of the individual. Kissinger used to say, 'The Arab world is the last place where there are heroic individuals. This isn't an organizational society . . . It's a society where individual personality makes a difference and is important.' "

Kissinger seemed ambivalent about the personalizing of Middle East diplomacy. He kept complaining that some other way should be found to negotiate, but he never found it. After the second round of talks between Israel and Egypt had broken down, one of his staffers sought to console him, saying, "I just want you to know how much I share your personal disappointment. We feel terribly let down. We know how hard you've worked and how much you've tried." Kissinger quickly replied, "This is not anything personal. Don't get me into this."

Yet, on the flight out of Israel, Kissinger commented stoically,
"There is no question that it will be argued that it was my fault.
That's fair enough because if it succeeds, I get the credit." The
Secretary's irritation flared, however, when a reporter said, "A lot
of Israelis ask, 'What about Kissinger? What is this going to mean
to him?' Can you throw it around a little bit?" Kissinger replied
angrily, "No, I cannot throw it around. It is totally indecent to
discuss the question as though I am running around the Middle East
for my own position. I think that's a disgrace."

Although Kissinger may not have been "personally" involved, his

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193

person certainly was. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told me, "I don't believe any of the agreements would have been reached without shuttle diplomacy. I don't think anybody else could have done it. Only by using shuttle diplomacy could he get both sides to create the atmosphere that in itself made agreement possible, even [transcending] real issues. None would have been possible without Kissinger's stamina."

The Secretary's stamina was legendary. The Middle East shuttles were brutally fatiguing for almost everybody except the central figure. The shuttles were almost like military campaigns. John Maclean of the Chicago *Tribune* recalled lyrically in print:

> For journalists, traveling on those early, successful shuttles was an unmatchable experience. It was like being part of a Shakespearean history play, speeded up by modern technology.

> The untidy, everyday world of wives and children, debts and uncut lawns, disappeared. Instead, you became part of a vital force, exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

> Living history unfolded in a wave which swept all before it. Petty matters of hotel reservations, food and beverage were handled by others. You were free to become part of the "flow," the word psychologists use to describe this sense of absorption.

> Kissinger himself and the members of his party were caught up in the "flow" more than anyone else. As one close aide recalled, the Secretary "was much more pleasant to work with on these trips than back in Washington. It was fun to deal with him on an uninterrupted problem, which got all his concentration." Another top official said that although the members of the Kissinger team occasionally got brusque with one another because their nerves were frazzled or time was short, seldom was heard a disagreeable word. "Among professionals," he said, "it was an incredible human experience. The people became so close to each other that you could divide labor with just a word. There was no arguing, no false pride, for example, about who would draft a message or other menial jobs." The temperament of the people around Kissinger was important. Instead of picking up his turmoil, they calmed it down, spread it out, cushioned it.

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TRAVELS WITH HENRY

Two of Kissinger's brightest and hardest-working aides were the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, Alfred "Roy" Atherton, Jr., and Harold Saunders, a former NSC staffer who became deputy assistant secretary of state and eventually director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. They were both calm, extremely soft-spoken men, who came to tolerate Kissinger's outbursts.

"Calm" and "soft-spoken" would not be used, however, to describe Joe Sisco, the hard-driving assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs whom Kissinger later named as undersecretary for political affairs, the number one job in the Foreign Service for a career officer short of the Secretary's chair (although Sisco had never served overseas). Sisco described himself as a Mediterranean, by which he meant volatile and volcanic. And on occasion he would let go, screaming at Kissinger, "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Kissinger would reply indignantly, "You can't talk to the Secretary of State like that." And Sisco would shout back, "When you act like the Secretary of State, I'll talk to you like the Secretary of State." Or at least that's one overheard version. During an especially bumpy descent on one of the early shuttles, Sisco was thrown against the Xerox machine, which he grabbed to keep from falling. "Quick," shouted a staffer, "turn it off! We can't take more than one Sisco at a time."

One official recalled that the shuttles were characterized by a great esprit de corps among the American team. Everyone felt tremendous pride in what he — and his country — were doing. "There's no other government in the world," the official said, "that would even have tried to do that sort of thing. People were buoyed by the exhilaration of a mission, even at the purely mechanical level."

Kissinger often disguised his own feelings about the shuttles with humor. Wandering to the back of the plane after one trying stop, Kissinger exclaimed, "When I leave this job, I can become the director of an insane asylum. I've been well trained for it." At times, we felt like the inmates.

## 2. The "Secret Trip" to Moscow; Moscow; the Flight to Israel

Sometime not too long after the opening of the
October 1973 War you decided to fly secretly to Moscow
to see if an Egyptian-Israeli cease-fire could be arranged.

We went to dinner at Huang Chen's first, where we were
treated to fish stomachs and other delicacies that were, for
me at least, a less than auspicious start to a long and
wearing flight.

I recall nothing of significance during the flight, but
do remember that the press was madder than hell that you
had put one over on them.

In Moscow itself much is now a haze. But several things do
stand out.

4

First, there was the massive communications problem.

Moscow Embassy then had a very inadequate land line out to Copenhagen, where it then fed into a more modern system. But transmission time--particularly for sensitive traffic that had to be double-encrypted--was very slow.

You will recall that as a consequence of your agreement with the Russians we had to tell a lot of people (Washington, Tel Aviv, and Cairo, to mention only a few) that they were about to have a cease-fire whether they wanted it or not.

And there was not a lot of time.

The cables were drafted, cleared, and sent to the Embassy for transmission. It soon became apparent that the Embassy was having great trouble moving traffic quickly, and that we were likely to be in a serious time bind. So, we packaged up copies of all traffic and sent it out to the plane for transmission over its facilities. And then we learned that something or someone was jamming all the aircraft's

5

transmission frequencies. In short, the plane couldn't
send at all.

All of this had gone on while you were upstairs resting
(it was late evening as I recall), blissfully unaware that
there was a problem. I intended to keep it that way.

As if it were yesterday, I recall sitting at a desk
in a fairly large room in the villa, yelling over the phone
at the communications people in the Embassy. (I was yelling
because of the bad telephone connection, *not* because I
thought it would help move the cables faster. Unlike
certain Secretaries of State, I never believed that a loud
voice had much impact on inanimate objects, no matter
how badly they functioned.) There were some 20-30 people
in the room, all talking, with Joe Sisco (never a quiet
fellow) taking the lead. In short, the room was crowded and
noisy, but I was more-or-less hidden from view (and hearing)
by the crowd.

6

I remember having glanced up and noticing the crowd
and the noise, and telling myself that when I got off the
phone I would have to clear everyone out if I was going
to get any work done. Then I glanced down again and
yelled, once again, into the phone. Unbeknownst to me,
you walked in at that moment and obviously heard what I
was saying (I still haven't figured out how). There was a
bellow along the lines of: "What, the cables aren't out
yet?!?!" I looked up, to find you standing in the middle
of the room with smoke issuing from nose, eyes, and ears, and
**no one** else (with an exception I'll mention in a minute) in sight.
All 20 or 30 people--no doubt led by Sisco--had exited with a
speed and facility that would have put Houdini to shame. The
single exception was Winston Lord, who was sort of huddled
in a corner, but--God bless him--prepared to hang around for
the pyrotechnics and to clean up the blood (mine) when it
was all over. Winston, ever since, has had a special place
in my heart, as well as my great respect for his outstanding
courage.

7

I shouldn't bore (or embarrass) you with a detailed description of what ensued. Suffice it to say that some 15 or 20 minutes later, when I could get a word in edgewise, I told you that we had tried to send from the aircraft, but that we could get nothing out because the Russians were jamming our communications. You replied with great eloquence, greater heat and greatest contempt, that I was-- to put it mildly--in error because the Soviets would never do such a thing.

You can imagine my surprise when I heard you, the very next day, tell Golda Meir that we had had great communications difficulties in Moscow because the Russians had jammed the plane's radio frequencies.

We now move to the next morning (I think it was a Sunday). I was downstairs in the same room where we had our pleasant conversation of the night before. It was about 6 a.m. You buzzed and asked me to come up to your room. You had

8

not been feeling well and I thought that might be the
reason for the early call. But when I got upstairs I was
surprised to learn that you had decided to fly to Israel
(we had been planning to return to D.C. that day; flight
clearances had been obtained, etc.). I told you I thought
it a great idea (I had never seen Israel), and would
take care of everything right away. Little did I know that
it was not the easiest thing to find a responsible Soviet
official at 6:30 a.m., much less get him to "ok" a flight
plan that would take us over a lot of the Soviet Union they
would rather we not fly over--particularly when they had
expected you to go due West rather than Southwest.

In any event, I tried, but with marked lack of success
for some minutes. Then I had a brilliant idea (which is why I
lasted with you so long). I got Spike Dubs (Chargé) out
of bed, gave him the problem, and told him to solve it. He did.

The scene now shifts to the aircraft about half way to
our destination.

9

You called me into your cabin, pointed out that we
would be entering a war zone, that there might be one
or two maniacs around who would like to shoot us down, and
wouldn't it be a good idea if we asked the Pentagon to give
us some 6th Fleet air cover over the Mediterranean and into
Tel Aviv? Recognizing that it was this sort of prior
planning (which I should have thought of) that had brought
you your reputation for wisdom, I immediately moved to set it
up. We were, from the plane, in almost instant communication
with the NMCC, which told us not to worry--everything would
be arranged immediately. And it was--in what I considered an
outstanding demonstration of U.S. military efficiency, we
were met by a large number of US Navy aircraft over Cyprus;
they stayed with us until we landed in Tel Aviv.

Now I have to jump ahead about a year. Vice Admiral
Dan Murphy, a friend and former aide to Mel Laird, was
commander of the 6th Fleet at the time of your Moscow-Tel Aviv

10

trip. Many months later I ran into Dan at a Washington
party and told him the above story, congratulating him
on the superb performance of his men. He then gave me the
"other side".

Dan was in the middle of launching exercises when the
word came from DOD to give Henry Kissinger air cover. When
Dan asked where you were, the Pentagon apparently said they
weren't sure, except that you were somewhere between Moscow
and Tel Aviv. (I do not know, but presume that your pilot
was reluctant to give too exact a fix for fear it would help
other less friendly aircraft also locate us.)

Dan immediately launched the rest of his aircraft on a
sweep of the Eastern Mediterranean, and told those already up to
look for you as well, so long as their fuel (already
substantially depleted) permitted. Dan, who was in Flag Plot
(I think that's the jargon), would frantically ask his pilots

11

if they had found us yet, get a negative, and then answer
the NMCC queries with a nonchalant "we haven't found him
yet, but soon will." Which they did, much to Murphy's
relief. But the planes were low on fuel and only barely
made it back to their carrier. Dan said it was one of the more
hair-raising of his 6th Fleet experiences.

One more short recollection--this time of Tel Aviv. There
is, first of all, the recollection of your arrival at the
airport: the cheers, the weeping, the relief that you were
there. I often thought of that first arrival on later trips
when the "atmosphere" had become less friendly. It reminded
me how short memories--and gratitude--can sometimes be.

On this first trip we went directly to Golda's "Hitler
Bunker" overlooking the sea. And there, after a period of
briefing and discussion (with Rabin sulking on the sidelines;
I don't recall that he said a word throughout the whole
visit), we went to lunch. I was famished, and the food was
not up to Israeli standards--it was good. I would begin to

12

eat one course and then be called away to the phone to talk
to Cairo. I would return for the next course, and the
same thing would happen. This went on through the entire
lunch, including what looked like a tasty dessert. And
when lunch was over, instead of taking pity on *my*
starved and haggard look, you rushed us off to the plane and
we took off for D.C.*

By the way, the subject of all the telephone calls--
and a good bit of the luncheon discussion--was whether Israel
and Egypt were in the same time zone ( a rather crucial issue
if both sides are going to stop shooting at the same time).
No one seemed to know, and I don't now remember whether they
were or were not.

### 3. Damascus and the Mosque

Valeriani has used this, so you may not want to, but --
We arrived in Damascus (1st trip) on a Thursday after a

* London first, then D.C. (Pedantic PMR note)

Valeriani book - page 71

Subject: Moscow trip - Oct 93

Two weeks before that trip, the Chinese threw a dinner for Kissinger, including members of his staff and of the press who would accompany him to China. It was held at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, since the mainland Chinese did not yet have their own building. Several senior congressional figures were also invited, including Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott. Watergate and the Middle East War dominated the headlines at that point, and the correspondents were more interested in finding out what the Senate was doing about Watergate and what was going on in the Middle East than what Kissinger was doing about China.

As we left the hotel after dinner, around eleven o'clock, a Baltimore *Sun* reporter, Jim Keat, asked the Secretary if there was "anything new" in the Middle East. Not particularly, said Kissinger as he got into his limo. But most of us received calls from our offices later in the night, telling us that Kissinger had just left for Moscow to try to work out a cease-fire in the Middle East with the Russians. We were particularly surprised — and annoyed.

Kissinger had informed his Chinese hosts beforehand that he would have to leave early in order to fly to Moscow. It was an especially touchy position for him, considering the Chinese attitude toward the Americans' growing coziness with their archenemies. But not a single word leaked in advance. His aides explained that there wasn't enough time to arrange for the press to go along. But the dramatic midnight flight to Moscow was the last time Kissinger left America on official business without newsmen accompanying him.

Valeriani book - page 134#

Subject: Moscow trips - Oct 73

Fittingly, Moscow was the first foreign capital Henry Kissinger visited as Secretary of State. It was fitting because Kissinger viewed the rest of the world through the prism of the relationship between Moscow and Washington. "The peace of the world depends on stability with the Soviet Union," he said, "and that should be our first order of business." It was also fitting because the purpose of Kissinger's mission was to arrange a cease-fire in the Middle East, where he would come to spend so much of his time and creative energy.

The Moscow trip had some of the flavor of Kissinger's presecretarial days as the nation's number-one secret diplomatic agent. He slipped out of Washington after midnight. Only a handful of aides accompanied him. There was no advance announcement. He took no press. He flew to Moscow at the urgent request of the Russians, who suddenly saw the immediate need for a cease-fire when their guys, the Arabs, started getting clobbered by our guys, the Israelis.

When Kissinger went to the Soviet capital, he dealt with the number one man, Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, and it was no different this time. Kissinger doesn't like to negotiate immediately following a long plane ride, but he knew Brezhnev would insist on

a meeting right away, so he was prepared. He told staff aides beforehand, "I'm making no decisions tonight. I'll filibuster." And that's what he did, "beautifully," recalled one aide, "while the rest of us were propping our eyes open. The Russians were overanxious and wanted a cease-fire agreement that night because their boys were on the run. Kissinger knew when the power was on his side. The Israelis were turning the tables, and he was going to play that one out for a while."

After that one had been played out for a while, Brezhnev sprang a surprise. "I've got a little dinner for all of us," he said. Everybody trooped off to the Soviet leader's private dining room and had a five-course meal. An aide said later, "There was vodka going by the bucketful until 2:00 A.M., by which time we were all dead on our feet and Brezhnev was getting a little sloshed. But Kissinger did what he had planned to do — nothing until the next morning."

Before going to bed, around three in the morning Moscow time, Kissinger called the White House. He had trouble getting through to Chief of Staff Al Haig, and he complained to his NSC aide, General Brent Scowcroft, that the White House people were letting a lot of Mickey Mouse political stuff interfere with foreign policy. "That's typical of your sense of priorities," he shouted at Scowcroft, who couldn't tell Kissinger what was going on because he didn't know. Kissinger recalled that when he finally did get through to Haig "there was some shouting, and I said loudly to him, 'Don't you yell'

at me. What the hell have you got to do around the White House
on a Saturday night? "

What Haig had to do around the White House on a Saturday night
October 20, 1973, came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre,
when President Nixon fired Archibald Cox as the special Watergate
prosecutor and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy,
William Ruckelshaus, both resigned.

Kissinger, who was wrapped up in the cease-fire negotiations, did
not become aware of the full impact of the Massacre until he reached
London the following Monday morning and saw the headlines in the
British newspapers. His reaction: "Oh, my God."

Valeriani book - page 168-70

Subject: Hk/Gromyko -

One of the more rememberable, if not memorable, Kissinger meetings with Gromyko took place in Nicosia, in the days when Kissinger could still go there, before the Greek coup and the subsequent Turkish invasion. The Secretary of State was engaged at the time in the longest diplomatic mission of his or any other Secretary's career, the thirty-three-day shuttle between Israel and Syria. Although Kissinger would never admit to it, the United States was obviously squeezing the Russians out of the whole negotiating process in the Middle East — even with one of their principal clients, the Syrians. The Russians, cochairmen of the Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East, obviously didn't like it. But there wasn't much they could do about it without appearing to be totally irresponsible.

Kissinger joked at the time that the Soviets would obviously like to see him "institutionalize" American diplomacy; that is, stay at home and pay more attention to running the State Department, which he indicated he would do when he was first named Secretary of State. But he felt compelled every once in a while to throw the Russians a Middle East bone to chew on, and Cyprus was one of those times.

The host for the meeting in Nicosia was the President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios. And it was worth the price of admission alone just to hear Kissinger, with his heavy German accent and deep rumbling voice, refer to the archbishop as "Your Beatitude." In the middle of the Kissinger-Gromyko meeting, His Beatitude barged in — like a good Jewish mother, in the words of one Kissinger aide — and offered lunch. Gromyko wanted to keep on talking, but to no one's surprise Kissinger opted for eating, especially when he learned that the main course was one of his favorite dishes, Wiener schnitzel. The Wiener schnitzel proved to be excellent, and ever after Kissinger used to joke with Makarios, whom he neither liked nor trusted, that he was going to steal the archbishop's chef.

Most of the time Kissinger met with Gromyko outside of Washington and Moscow, however, the site was Geneva. While Switzerland may have been neutral, the Kissinger-Gromyko meetings seldom were. Just before Kissinger's arrival in February 1975, Brezhnev had blasted the Secretary of State's one-man brand of diplomacy in the Middle East, charging that "certain persons" were seeking to undermine Arab unity with "piecemeal solutions." When Gromyko and Kissinger appeared before the cameras at the conclusion of one of their sessions, an American reporter asked the Soviet foreign minister, "Who are those persons?" Gromyko sidestepped the question by pointing out that Brezhnev "did not mention any particular persons." But Kissinger wouldn't let him off the hook that easily. "I asked him the same question," the Secretary gibed. "I wanted to share in the condemnation."

MOSCOW

It was time to depart for the airport from the guesthouse
at Lenin Hills. It was very cold outside and lots of
snow on the ground. Everything had gone smoothly and
all the luggage had been sent to the airport. HK was
downstairs speaking with Gromyko and others. In addition
Mrs. Gromyko and some of the other wives were there
to see them off.

Nancy Kissinger went running (or buzzed him on the intercom
I don't know which) in to the office to get Jerry Bremer
to tell him that her boots were missing. It seemed
that in their efficiency to leave nothing behind, those
handling the baggage had taken Nancy's boots. Jerry
frantically checked the shoe size of the other women
on the trip--but with no success. In desperation he
slipped off his own loafers and told Nancy to wear them.
Nancy did and shortly joined her husband downstairs in the
lobby. When he saw her he yelled out "What are those"
pointing to the shoes and drawing everyone's attention to them.
Jerry, meanwhile, silently padded out the door and ran
to the car through the snow. When it really got
tough was at the airport when Jerry had to make a long
fast run to the plane from the car in freezing weather.
Nancy was very grateful for his loafers but they weren't
exactly a fashion trend setter.

Valeriani book - page 61

Subject: Algeria

In Algeria, Kissinger stayed at a government guest house. The staff had ordered breakfast for him at seven. But after Kissinger was awakened, he immediately called to complain that his breakfast wasn't there. It has to be, a staffer said; they called from the kitchen fifteen minutes ago and said it was on the way. But it wasn't. The staff called for another breakfast from a kitchen that didn't know the meaning of the words "short order." Half an hour later, the kitchen reported breakfast was again on the way. But a few minutes later Kissinger, by then furious, called again to ask where the hell his breakfast was. The staff, baffled, ordered a third one.

This time, when the kitchen called back to say the breakfast was en route, Dave Gompert, one of the Secretary's personal aides, went outside to wait for it. He saw the Algerian waiter go up the steps, down a long passageway, and disappear into the Secret Service control room. Gompert raced to save a third breakfast from vanishing. Nobody had explained to the Secret Service agents what was going on, so when the breakfasts appeared, they ate them. For the Kissinger staffers, that was a very long day.

SEVEN

Egypt

Valeriani

By the time Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State, he had already visited China, the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, Israel, and dozens of world capitals. But the first Jewish Secretary of State had never set foot in an Arab country. By the time Henry Kissinger became ex-Secretary of State, he had spent more time in Arab countries than any of his predecessors. The Arab-Israeli war in October 1973 had seen to that.

Shortly before the war broke out, Kissinger told Arab foreign ministers at a New York luncheon, "We recognize the present situation is intolerable to the Arab world in the long run." And he promised to try to make it less intolerable. His guests were impressed. Within days, however, the situation in the Middle East had become virtually intolerable for the United States. The wreckage of America's relations with the Arabs left over from the 1967 war was compounded when Saudi Arabia and other long-standing friends of the United States imposed an oil embargo in retaliation for massive American aid to Israel during the 1973 war.

The Secretary had been invited by President Anwar Sadat to stop off in Cairo after his visits to Moscow and Israel to arrange the

Egypt

249

cease-fire at the end of the 1973 war, but he had declined. He felt the
time wasn't quite ripe for that move.

Sadat sent his minister of tourism, Ismael Fahmy, to Washington to talk to Kissinger about postwar efforts at negotiation. Kissinger grumped about having to deal with a minister of tourism. He was used to playing in a bigger league. When word of Kissinger's grumbling got back to Cairo, Fahmy was upgraded to acting minister of foreign affairs, and he was eventually promoted to the minister's job on a permanent basis.

Kissinger delighted in reminding Fahmy that he had “made” him foreign minister, and he also delighted in retelling the sequence of events to other people in Fahmy’s presence. Fahmy, a feisty, dapper little man with an ego to match Kissinger’s, finally had had enough. At a State Department luncheon in 1974, when the Secretary started to tell the story again, Fahmy interrupted to complain, “Henry, every time I’m invited, you tell the same story.” Henry relented, but soon came up with a new story. After he got into political hot water in the United States, he said he would leave the State Department and become foreign minister of Egypt, and he added that Sadat had already approved the idea. Fahmy didn’t appreciate that story, either.

When Kissinger scheduled his first trip to the Arab countries in November 1973, he decided to wade in rather than plunge. Cairo was not the first stop; the trip began on the friendlier Arab soil of Morocco and Tunisia. Kissinger's aura and his reputation as a skillful negotiator and a Nobel Peace Prize winner helped clear the way for his entrance into the Arab world. That first trip was extraordinary in many respects, as Henry Kissinger, a Jew, was received by Arab leaders who had spent much of their life trying to destroy the Jewish state of Israel. He not only introduced himself to them, he immediately began to build trust among them as he sought to revive American influence in the area.

The airport for Kissinger's first landing in the Arab world was appropriately named: Bab Salam (Peace Gateway) Airport in Rabat.

Rabat turned out to be a crashing success for Joe Sisco, the hard-

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driving assistant secretary of Near Eastern affairs. When Kissinger and his party first arrived at the presidential palace, they were taken to the King's sitting room, where they sat in ornate, red velvet-covered chairs. When Sisco sat, he really sat. The chair gave way, so Kissinger's first meeting with an Arab leader began with one of his top aides sprawled on the floor. Neither Sisco nor Kissinger's diplomacy was hurt, however, and when the Secretary of State visited Rabat a year later, King Hassan greeted him by asking where Sisco was. His Majesty immediately pointed out that he had ordered new chairs for his sitting room so that Sisco could take a seat with confidence. Sisco eventually showed up and did.

Traveling as the Secretary of State for the first time, Kissinger got his first exposure to the benefits — or curses — of protocol, which had been denied him as a mere White House aide. The Royal Palace Guard — Berbers wearing baggy scarlet and green uniforms and wielding sabers and halberds — turned out to welcome him. Kissinger was always more adept at negotiation than protocol, and when

Duane Powell, The News and Observer, Raleigh

Egypt

251

the ceremony was over, he didn't quite know what to do. So he extended his hand toward the leader of the honor guard, who was holding a scimitar. Kissinger almost shook hands with the sword.

He was not overly impressed with the honors due him. At the next stop, as he straightened his tie before descending the ramp, he cracked that he had to "review another camel brigade."

The next stop was Tunis, which had been added to the itinerary after Kissinger received word that President Bourguiba felt offended that he was being bypassed. The stops in Morocco and Tunisia were intended to have a political impact far beyond their borders. Kissinger later told newsmen privately that he wanted to demonstrate to Israel that even the ultra-moderates now identified with the hard-liners on such issues as the Palestinians. As usual, his travel was neither accidental nor incidental.

The terra incognita of Cairo was next, and the flight from Tunis was not without tension. Kissinger tried to relieve it by coming to the press section of the plane and demanding, "Hey, where's the MiG escort you guys promised me?"

In all the Kissinger travels, the first arrival in Cairo stands out for the sheer drama of the occasion. The plane landed an hour late. The airport was pitch black as the big 707 rolled to a stop. Egypt was still on a war footing, and Cairo was blacked out. The cease-fire in the Sinai wavered daily. American-Egyptian relations had been broken since 1967. Sadat himself was an unknown quantity. Before Kissinger's arrival, officials at the American mission and the Secret Service advance team had advised the Egyptians not to permit newsmen out on the ramp, but to keep them behind barricades. The Egyptians ignored the advice. Dozens of soldiers and plainclothes police set up a security ring around the plane instead.

As the Secretary emerged, the bright television lights flashed on, a horde of photographers, cameramen, and reporters closed in, and the security ring collapsed like the Sinai defenses in 1967; while screams and curses in Arabic filled the air, Kissinger's Secret Service agents struggled desperately to keep him from being mobbed. In the resulting chaos, Spanish Ambassador Manolo Alabart, who repre-

252

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sented U.S. interests in Egypt at the time, was knocked down and
trampled. Only his dignity was hurt. It was one of the most anxious
moments the security agents ever had.

As we made the long drive into Cairo, we could see signs of
wartime everywhere. Sandbags guarded doorways. Car headlights
were shaded by blue or black paint. At the Nile Hilton Hotel, win-
dows were crisscrossed with tape, to prevent shattering, and painted
blue. For newsmen there was another sign of war. All of our copy
had to be given a stamp of approval by Egyptian censors before it
could be filed or broadcast.

Kissinger's first historic meeting with Sadat took place in Tahirah Palace in suburban Helopolis, and it began with nonhistoric chitchat. Kissinger said, "I had a very interesting time with Mr. Fahmy in Washington." "Yes," responded Sadat, "he told me about it." The two men then met alone in a Louis XV drawing room while members of their delegations conferred outside on the lawn. It established a pattern that was repeated frequently.

Afterward, Kissinger, Sadat, and Fahmy posed for pictures. A
reporter asked, "Is it war or peace?" "We must await the answer of
our friend, Dr. Kissinger," replied Sadat, establishing another prac-
tice of deferring to the Secretary during question-and-answer ses-
sions. Kissinger took his cue and ad-libbed to the galleries beyond
Cairo, "I think we're moving toward peace."

An Egyptian reporter asked, "Do you expect an interruption of
arms supplies to Israel?" Sadat once again deferred: "Ask Dr. Kis-
singer." Kissinger tried humor. "Luckily, I didn't hear the ques-
tion." The reporter persisted: "I'd be happy to rephrase it." Kis-
singer persisted as well: "And I'd rephrase the same answer."

Later, an anxious American diplomat stationed in the U.S. Inter-
ests Section in Cairo wanted to know what had happened at the
meeting. Roy Atherton answered simply and profoundly, "They
liked each other."

When Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as President of
Egypt, Kissinger tended to dismiss him as a "clown," another loud-
mouthed lightweight who postured ridiculously. But after the Egyp-

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253

tian President threw out the Russians, Kissinger became somewhat intrigued and decided to take a closer look. Three years earlier, Kissinger told a group of reporters in California that one of the principal goals of American policy in the Middle East was to expel the Russians from Egypt. The use of the word "expel" caused a lot of controversy at the time, but when push came to shove, "expel" came to pass, although it seemed to be more Sadat's doing than Kissinger's.

In their first face-to-face meeting, Kissinger decided that Sadat was "going for peace," as he himself once told me. Prior to the Secretary's arrival, the Egyptians were screaming that the Israelis had violated the cease-fire agreement and moved beyond the October 22 lines. But Kissinger found that Sadat did not want to talk only about forcing the Israelis back to the October 22 lines, the issue of the moment; he wanted to talk about the big picture and what lay ahead.

Months later, Kissinger told us on the plane, "Look, there are few national leaders with whom you can discuss ten years of [the future]. In fact, with Sadat, you can come closer to it than with anybody else."

One of Kissinger's top aides explained later, "Kissinger made a judgment at that first meeting with Sadat that this was a man on whom we could build our peace strategy. This was the only person who seemed to understand our conceptual approach . . . That was as much insight as I ever had about Henry . . . He instinctively saw the qualities in the man and the opportunities in the situation, and in his mind, he made a decision on the spot. He was not hampered by preconceptions. He could make a very quick adjustment and exploit the moment, exploit the opportunity. He could see a situation through in his own mind — he saw at once what the next step would be. He has the instinctive intelligence to see things that other people have to think through step by step. People who say he basically has the mind of a genius — they're right."

Kissinger's initial impression of Sadat was reciprocated by the Egyptian President. Sadat wrote in his autobiography:

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Our first session of talks took three hours. The first hour made me feel I was dealing with an entirely new mentality, a new political method. For the first time, I felt as if I was looking at the real face of the United States, the one I had always wanted to see — not the face put on by Dulles, Dean Rusk and Rogers. Anyone seeing us after that first hour in al-Tahirah Palace would have thought we have been friends for years. There was no difficulty in understanding each other.

From the beginning, Kissinger usually dealt directly with Sadat — alone. One reason was that he felt that Foreign Minister Fahmy and the Chief of Staff, General Gamsay, got bogged down in details and tended to string out the negotiations. Sadat made the major decisions, and the Secretary then worked out the details with Sadat's subordinates. It was not an arrangement that pleased Fahmy, and it was not especially satisfying to Kissinger's aides, either, since he never briefed them fully on his conversations with Sadat. That was part of the Kissinger style. Only he knew the whole picture.

Kissinger amused the Egyptians during the first visit by telling "war stories" about urgent Israeli appeals for tanks and ammunition in transatlantic calls during the war. The stories flattered Sadat; "his" October War had scared the Israelis. The stories were also designed to ingratiate Kissinger with his Egyptian hosts.

Although the Egyptian President had been denouncing the United States for its support of Israel only two weeks earlier, he and Kissinger agreed on a restoration of American-Egyptian relations "in principle." Sadat obviously wanted to have in Cairo a senior American diplomat who could get through to Kissinger in a hurry. But he did not want to appear to be moving too fast toward the United States in the eyes of his brother Arabs. And so the highly unorthodox device of a resumption "in principle" was devised. It appealed to Kissinger's sense of diplomatic innovation.

Egypt's decision reflected a growing Arab conviction that only Washington would be able to persuade, or even force, Israel to change its policies, that only Washington would one day be able to get Arab land back for the Arabs.

The principal short-term result of Kissinger's visit to Cairo was a

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six-point plan for stabilizing the cease-fire lines. Since Israel was not on the itinerary, Joe Sisco was sent to Jerusalem to get Israel's concurrence. Kissinger jokingly referred to the uncertain nature of Sisco's mission by telling newsmen that disclosure of details of the plan would have to await Sisco's return — "if Joe ever does."

Reporters kept pressing the Secretary to describe the six points as a Kissinger plan, but he declined. Should it be called the Sisco plan? "Only if it fails," observed Kissinger. Later, he refined his position. "If it becomes known as the Sisco plan," he said, "then I'm certain Joe will enjoy becoming head of a passport office — somewhere."

One of Kissinger's hallmarks was to lay the groundwork very carefully before going on a trip, and the first visit to Cairo was hardly an exception. He had prepared himself very thoroughly in his Washington meetings with Fahmy. But he had not been briefed on the famed "Cairo Tower," which rises meaninglessly from Gezira Island, across the Nile from the Hilton Hotel. The tower was built with three million dollars slipped to Nasser by the CIA in the early 1960s. According to Miles Copeland in *The Game of Nations*, one of Nasser's aides suggested building

a structure, roughly modeled on the Sphinx, that would consist of two large statues on the Gezira side of the Nile, facing the site where the Hilton Hotel would one day be built; the one behind would be a large head featuring a particularly large nose; the one in the front would be a hand of proportionate size with the thumb adjusted to the nose and the four fingers extending skywards. Nasser thought the idea very good but lacking in subtlety. Instead, he ordered "something unidentifiable, but very large, very conspicuous, very enduring and very expensive — costing, oh, say, something in the neighborhood of three million dollars." The result is the "Tower of Cairo" which we American friends of Egypt see across the Nile every morning as we breakfast on our balconies at the Nile Hilton.

We all see it, all right, but we never had breakfast on our balconies, since if you ordered room service at the Nile Hilton, breakfast was likely to turn up around lunchtime.

Copeland also pointed out that the Egyptians themselves came to refer to the tower as "Roosevelt's erection," after Kermit Roosevelt,

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a CIA official who was instrumental in promoting the three-million-dollar slush fund for Nasser.

Kissinger did not get such a colorful description of "Nasser's Needle" when he asked Fahmy about it. The Egyptian foreign minister mumbled something about a television tower.

On that first visit to Egypt, Kissinger established another custom that he followed on almost all of his subsequent visits: He went sightseeing. And Cairo has some of the best sights in the world — the pyramids and the Sphinx. They were ready-made for Kissinger quips.

After posing for "just one more" in front of the Sphinx, he sighed to photographers, "Now can I turn around and look at it?" Conscious of complaints from reporters about a lack of information, he added, "I hope you are clear in your minds which one is the Sphinx." While Kissinger was viewing the pyramid at Giza, one of his aides cracked, "Henry's looking it over . . . he wants one for himself." Not

Mike Peters, with permission from Dayton Daily News

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precisely. He told a reporter, "Now this is the kind of press center I need."

For unknown reasons, the Egyptians refused to allow the entire traveling press corps to accompany Kissinger to the pyramids, and so a press pool went along, which included Herb Kaplow of ABC News. Near the pyramids, Kaplow had to fend off a camel-pusher, who took pictures of people on his camel for a couple of bucks or as much as he could get. "Why not?" said the man, who wore an Arab headdress and a flowing robe. "David Brinkley was on my camel."

Kissinger the historian was genuinely interested in Egypt's histori-cal treasures. Kissinger the diplomat benefited thereby. The Egyp-tians were pleased, not only that he showed such interest, but that he was so knowledgeable about the places he visited. They were doubly pleased when Nancy proved to be knowledgeable as well. The Egyptian daily *Al Akhbar* summed up Kissinger's triumphant first visit: "Like Metternich, Kissinger has been able to restore links which had become as fragile as glass, and to induce flexibility in relations which had become as stiff as steel. Nobel-man Kissinger has proved his capability for this unique type of activity . . . Massive bridges between America and Russia, America and China . . . To-morrow, it may be the restoration of bridges between America and West Europe, the day after tomorrow between Israel and the whole Arab world."

Israel approved the six-point agreement, and within a month Kis-singer was back in the Middle East, hoping to get something from Egypt and Israel to "grease the wheels" at the Geneva Conference — perhaps an agreement of principles to guide the disengagement negotiations. He foresaw the possibility of going back and forth between Egypt and Israel a couple of times, but he did not envision a prolonged "shuttle" until Sadat suggested he remain in the area to wrap up the disengagement agreement himself.

Sadat was recovering from bronchitis and had gone to Aswan on the Upper Nile, six hundred miles south of Cairo, to rest in the gentle winter sun. Aswan was certainly an ironic site for one end of the

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shuttle. It was best known as the site of the Aswan High Dam, the massive project that the Soviet Union financed after Secretary of State John Foster Dulles canceled American participation in its construction. Their aid gave the Russians a big foot in the Middle East door; now Aswan became the site of a negotiation designed in large part to close that door, with the Russians left outside.

The signs of Soviet influence were pervasive. American diplomats were transported in Russian-made Volgas and Czech-made Skodas during the Kissinger visit. And shortly before the Secretary of State arrived, a 250-foot-high concrete lotus flower commemorating Soviet-Egyptian friendship had been dedicated. The friendship did not endure as long as it took to complete the monument to it.

The dam itself had been dedicated in 1971, and the Egyptians wanted to show it off to Kissinger. He was not ungracious. "I think it is spectacular," he said when he saw it from a bridge where he could feel the spray from the huge gushes of water below. And he listened patiently while an Egyptian official recited the dull statistics of the dam. The official noted that the bed of Lake Nasser, which stretched behind the dam, was so deep that five hundred years would pass before sediment could fill it and render the dam useless. Kissinger, thinking ahead as always, commented, "Then you'll be in trouble in five hundred years." The Egyptian official was prepared. "But we expect that modern technology will find a solution to the problem within a hundred years," he said.

The Kissinger party was housed at the New Cataract Hotel, which stood, appropriately enough, next to the Old Cataract Hotel. The new hotel had been built by the Russians, which meant it was cramped and drab. It contrasted greatly with the Old Cataract, which stood decaying in Victorian splendor, a massive structure of dirty crimson brick and ornate sandstone. It had high ceilings and an elegant, faded, domed dining room (where we were served bad-tasting Nile fish). It also had a broad veranda for taking a spot of tea or a nip of gin or a Stella beer while looking across the river at the granite cataract that gave the hotel its name. Sailboats and feluccas slipped silently across the brownish water of the Nile, and in the distance, the sun bounced off the large white villa of the Begum

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Khan, who placed a rose on the nearby tomb of the late Aga Khan every day. Nightfall infused the stretch of desert beyond with a sense of mystery and romance. And for those who got up early enough in the morning, the sights in Aswan included Ambassador Hermann Eilts's Egyptian bodyguard, who did his yoga exercises in the garden near the pool of the New Cataract every morning at dawn.

Kissinger was himself an early riser, but not that early. However, one morning he wanted to go for a walk around seven o'clock, but he wanted to do it quietly, without an entourage. He asked his bodyguard, Walter Bothe, if they could sneak out of the hotel without alerting the phalanx of Egyptian security guards. Bothe thought they could. But as soon as they hit the street, the Egyptians mobilized — armored cars, motorcycles, troops brandishing machine guns, the whole array. Kissinger decided to take his walk anyway, but he kept it short — and brisk.

When they got back to the hotel and into the elevator, Kissinger exploded at Bothe. But Bothe shot back, "Look, Mr. Secretary, I'll make you a deal. I won't interfere with diplomacy, and you don't interfere with security." Kissinger looked at Joe Sisco, who was swallowing a laugh. "Okay," Kissinger said to Bothe, "I guess you got a deal."

The Old Cataract provided the setting for Agatha Christie's *Death on the Nile*. The maitre d'hôtel was seventy-five-year-old Charles Bayer, a man who had learned firsthand about death and disaster. When he worked at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, one wing was blown up, and he barely escaped death. He then moved to Shepheard's in Cairo; the hotel was destroyed by fire. The Old Cataract was his next employer, and the people who knew Herr Bayer wondered when catastrophe would strike there. Instead, the worst thing that happened was its inundation by a huge press corps. The old hotel housed the "press room" and the "communication" facilities, all of which were minimal.

Bayer did avoid one potential disaster. He personally supervised the preparation of Kissinger's breakfast. He didn't trust the Egyptian chefs to do it right each time.

In stark contrast to the teeming and the tumult and the frenzy of

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Cairo, Aswan was a sleepy city, full of green palm trees, white houses, scarlet flame trees along the riverbanks, and cool breezes that bore the scent of jasmine. Sadat's lodging in Aswan was a sandstone house set amidst bougainvillea on a bluff high above the original Aswan Dam, built by the British in 1902. Sadat liked it there not only for the setting; he was less accessible than when he was in Cairo, and he wanted to concentrate fully on the negotiations.

The first Kissinger-Sadat encounter took place in a latticework gazebo just outside the villa overlooking the Nile. (The film editors later complained about the "spotted" quality of the faces, which had been crisscrossed by the shadows of the latticework.) Sadat and Kissinger subsequently spent so much time alone that Sisco and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker occasionally tossed blankets on the lawn and napped al fresco.

From the very start of the negotiations, it was apparent that Sadat had considerable respect for Golda Meir. The members of the American delegation did a double-take when they found out — not because of the sentiment, but because of Sadat's expressiveness. "That woman has balls," he said admiringly.

Kissinger felt at the outset that Sadat's ambitions for an agreement were overreaching, but the Egyptian President's optimism was eventually justified. Kissinger later told us that Sadat often showed more flexibility than his aides, whom he had to overrule at certain crucial times to keep the talks going.

One of the overruled aides was Foreign Minister Fahmy, who had a graying mustache and a hard-line attitude toward Israel. But he, too, was optimistic from the outset. Just after Kissinger's arrival in Aswan, Fahmy told the American reporters, "Your Secretary of State, when he sticks his fingers into something, generally brings it to a successful conclusion, and I think he will this time."

Apart from the diplomatic benefits, the first Middle East shuttle provided a boon for Aswan's tourist industry. Foreign visitors stayed away in droves following the October War, but the hordes of American and Egyptian officials, plus the dozens of newsmen, took up the slack.

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The American diplomats in Cairo and the members of the advance team had all gone to Aswan expecting a short stay. But the "short stay" dragged on for three weeks for the American ground support personnel, who did not fly back and forth. Three weeks in Aswan became a very long time.

The nontraveling Secret Service agents, whose nocturnal habits were severely curtailed in a place like Aswan, devised their own system for getting out. They awarded points for certain activities, with 10 points needed in order to leave. A successful suicide was worth 10 points. An unsuccessful suicide meant forfeiting all previously accumulated points. Other activities were:

Dropping an empty Stella bottle on Fahmy's head from the balcony on the seventh floor — 1 point.

Sexual relations with a camel — 2 points.

Sexual relations with a Nubian maiden — 3 points.

Sexual relations with an Egyptian soldier — 5 points (they were better looking than Nubian maidens).

Overpowering a felucca crew and commandeering the boat — 7 points.

Eating within smelling range of one of the visiting Russian tourist groups — 1/2 point.

Three weeks in Aswan became a very long time indeed.

Two young members of the American staff from Cairo, April Glaspie and Beth Jones, achieved a kind of sexist fame for themselves during the Aswan shuttle. After his first two visits to the Middle East, Kissinger had griped about too much starch in his shirts, especially in Cairo. It took three more washings, he joked, before he could button them. In Aswan, the all-important job of handling Kissinger's laundry was entrusted to Foreign Service Officers Glaspie and Jones. They proved worthy of the task, and Kissinger began praising them ad nauseam for managing to get his shirts done right. Aswan, he used to say, was the only place where a U.S. Embassy officer was able to get his shirts done properly, without starch. Little did he know that everybody in Aswan had his shirts done without starch. There wasn't any starch in Aswan. April Glaspie referred to

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herself jokingly as the Embassy's laundry officer. But praise for lowly junior officers in any fashion from the Secretary of State would not hurt their promotion records.

Later in the year, at a ceremony in Cairo, he publicly thanked the much-put-upon employees of the American Embassy for having spent so much of their life accommodating his demands on the numerous trips. He paid special tribute to Beth and April. "I've been coming here more often than I can remember in the last year, and you've all been taking very good care of me. These young ladies here," he said, "have been bossing me around in such a way that I'm a strong supporter now of women's liberation, which, as I understand it, gives men equality."

To prepare for Kissinger's visit to Aswan, the small staff at the American mission in Cairo had been given just forty-eight hours' notice. And since they were advised that Kissinger would not be staying long, they didn't go out of their way to worry about communications. As one official said later, "We never did that again!"

When the Secretary's plane was not on the ground in Aswan, the Americans had no classified communications, so any messages from Washington or from the Kissinger party in Israel went first to Cairo and then by a tenuous open telephone line to Aswan. Even the Top Secret and NODIS (No Distribution) traffic traveled this open, un-coded route. The secretaries wrote the message down, typed it up in their fifth-floor rooms at the New Cataract, and had it delivered to the Egyptians on the third floor. The short-handedness of the staff led to a lesson in shorthand for political officers. The secretaries were so overwhelmed with the flood of messages, they taught the political officers some elementary shorthand to help them transcribe the messages more quickly.

On one memorable occasion, Arthur Houghton, a political officer who was manning the fort in Cairo, called Aswan to say that the Kissinger party had some procedural questions that required an urgent answer. The Aswan staff duly took them down and was in the process of typing them when Omar Sirry, of the Egyptian Foreign Office, showed up on the fifth floor, saying, "The answer to those

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questions is..." The Egyptians had been listening to everything over the open telephone line.

When the agreement was finally reached, the signings in Israel and Egypt had to be precisely coordinated. To make sure of the communications, the Americans in Aswan turned the crank on the old-fashioned, hand-cranked telephone in their office and opened a line to Cairo seven hours before the designated signing time. The line went from Aswan to Cairo to the Operations Center at the State Department in Washington to Jerusalem. If at any time the Egyptian operators detected silence on the line between Aswan and Cairo or between Cairo and Washington, they immediately cut it and took the next call on their list, since calls were stacked up for as long as twenty-four hours at times. And since most of the Egyptian operators did not speak English, appeals for return of the broken line were usually fruitless. (The broadcasters struggled with the problem throughout the shuttle. Any pause in the conversation with London or New York meant we lost the line we had waited several hours to get.) Much of the burden of keeping open the Aswan-Cairo-Washington-Jerusalem line fell to the laundry specialists, Beth Jones and April Glaspie. They talked with young officers in Washington about the weather and baseball (although Beth didn't know anything about baseball). They read poetry, they read from the Bible — since it was the New Cataract, they read from the New Testament — they read administrative regulations — all of which succeeded in keeping the line open until everything was signed and the first Sinai disengagement agreement was a reality.

When Kissinger paid his farewell call on Sadat, a new ritual was born. The Egyptian President told the American Secretary of State, "You are not only my friend, you are my brother." And he kissed Kissinger on both cheeks. The quips were never-ending after that.

Kissinger was not surprised, however. Before his visit, he had asked Arabists in Washington about the practice of fraternal kissing. He understood that the symbolism was useful in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world; it indicated he was a person accepted by the leadership. But he never seemed entirely at ease. On a later

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mission, when he was accompanied by his wife, he returned to Aswan and hugged Fahmy before kissing Nancy. Another time, he shook hands with Nancy after hugging Fahmy.

His self-consciousness displayed itself in joking. During one of his departures from Egypt, he gave Fahmy a bear hug on the ramp and told Ambassador Eilts, over the foreign minister's shoulder, "When I trust you as much as Ismael, I'll hug you like this, too." Later in the year, he went to Cairo to see Sadat, who was again in bed with bronchitis. En route, a reporter asked, "Are you going to risk kissing Sadat with his cold?" "If I don't," replied the amused Secretary, "there will be an international incident."

One of Kissinger's rewards for working out the disengagement agreement was a visit to Luxor the day after the signing. Once again, the Embassy whiz kids took off to prepare the way. They first had to get permits from the Egyptian government, since foreigners were still not allowed on the road between Cairo and Aswan. Once they had taken care of the accommodations at the Winter Palace on the Nile, their main problem was the transportation. The governor of Quna was determined that Kissinger should ride in the best car in the area, and the governor's version of the best car in the area was a 1957 pink Cadillac with huge tailfins. The two staffers managed to locate a white Mercedes, and they diplomatically persuaded the governor that it would be more appropriate than the pink Cadillac.

Their next problem was the American flag flying outside the hotel for the Kissinger visit. As they pointed out to the manager, Egypt and the United States did not yet have formal diplomatic relations, so it was not appropriate to fly the flag. The manager of the hotel reluctantly had it taken down.

There was one problem they failed to cope with. At 7:00 A.M. the morning after the Kissinger party arrived, an Egyptian pilot flew his MiG low along the Nile past the Winter Palace and then soared skyward, breaking the sound barrier with a boom that sounded as though the war had resumed. Not even the fatigued shuttlers could sleep through that kind of noise. How loud was it? It was so loud that Secret Service agent Walter Bothe reacted by rolling out of bed

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and pulling the mattress on top of him; he thought the hotel was
under attack.

Since the trip to Luxor had been arranged on short notice, some
of the details normally handled by an advance team had to be put
off to the last minute. There wasn't time beforehand, for example, to
make sure that the cars in the motorcade taking Kissinger to the
Valley of the Kings across the river were all numbered for quick
access and easy organization once the traveling party arrived.

In order to get to the motorcade, the party first had to cross the
Nile in a small ferry. As Kissinger walked aboard, he saw Dick
Smith, from the American mission in Cairo, standing on the dock.
He nodded a greeting. Smith smiled and nodded back. Just before
the ferry pulled out, Smith jumped on the back and rode across. As
it pulled up to the other side, Smith jumped off and raced up the hill
to check out the motorcade. He was relieved, and surprised, to find
everything properly arranged. Kissinger was also in for a surprise.
When he got to his limousine, there was Dick Smith holding the door
open. The Secretary did a double-take, then asked, "How did you get
here?" Smith gave him a Kissingerian response: "Like any good
Foreign Service officer, I walked on the water, sir."

During the tour, an extraordinary number of men in peasant dress
lounged on the high crags overlooking the valley. They were Egyp-
tian security men in disguise.

For the Secretary of State, the Luxor visit turned into something
of an ego trip. Having negotiated an agreement between Egypt and
Israel, having been kissed on both cheeks by Sadat and anointed his
"brother," Kissinger was now a folk hero on the streets, and Egyp-
tian men in galabias and women in black robes clapped their hands
and shouted his name as his motorcade drove by. One little-known
result of the successful shuttle took place in Beersheba, Israel. A
Bedouin tribesman went to the local registrar following the birth of
a seven-pound son and announced, "I want to express my gratitude,
and so please call the boy Dr. Henry Kissinger Hassan Abargad, of
the Abargad Bedouin tribe."

When Kissinger returned to Egypt a month later, one change was

Feb/March 74
Shuttle

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immediately apparent. Sadat, an Army general, was wearing civilian clothes for the first time since the October War. The Egyptian President told inquiring newsmen that the civvies were meant to symbolize a new era in view of all that Kissinger was doing to bring about peace in the Middle East, although he added that he did not yet regard the war as "over." However, he never again wore his uniform during a Kissinger visit, and he became a figure of elegance in his well-tailored, pinched-waist dark suits and expensive accessories. He also smoked his pipe more in public. Irreverent newsmen dubbed it his "lucky pipe" for no good reason.

In addition to Sadat's clothes, the February 1974 visit marked another turning point. During an early morning ceremony, the American flag was raised over the U.S. Embassy on Latin America Street for the first time in seven years. The Americans and the Egyptians also began talking about an exchange of visits between President Sadat and President Nixon. At the flag-raising ceremony, Kissinger spoke of Egypt's "great leader." The public language was a reflection of a private ritual. After the first disengagement agreement, Sadat took to calling Kissinger "The Miracle Worker," with the accent on the second syllable in "miracle." (People at the American Embassy also began referring to Kissinger the same way, but with a sarcasm missing from Sadat's inflections.)

Whenever Sadat had a small lunch or dinner for Kissinger, the ritual was always invoked. At one of these dinners, there were just four couples: the Sadats, the Kissingers, the Fahmys, and the Eiltses. The Egyptian President once again toasted "The Miracle Worker," saying, "You did it, Henry, you worked the miracle . . ." And Kissinger replied, as he always did, "No, Mr. President, it was you who did it, it was because of your statemanship and wisdom and vision . . ." As they went into their act, Mrs. Sadat leaned over to Ambassador Eilts and whispered, with a combination of amusement and exasperation, "There they go again!"

Those dinners with the Sadats were intimate and familylike. After leaving office, Kissinger recalled that during meals in the President's home, all the members of his family emphasized how much they

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wanted peace. Kissinger was convinced that the sentiments were genuine, that an entire family could not be programmed to say what they did.

Sadat, who was extremely careful about his diet, always ate the same thing at lunch — a gelatinous, starchless macaroni. His wife used to lament to the guests, "He's on a strict diet. All this wonderful food we prepare, and he doesn't eat any of it."

With Kissinger now virtually a member of the official Egyptian family, for the first time his hosts took him to see a contemporary institution as renowned in Egypt as the pyramids at Giza. They took him to the Sheraton to see Najwa Fuad, the queen of the belly dancers. That's not the description she uses for herself, however. She prefers "Oriental dancer." It's not the classic belly dance, but it'll do. She has taken the traditional dance and modernized it, making it more Western in the process. She is the biggest thing in Egyptian show biz, and while Egyptian show biz may not be a hot ticket in the United States, it's the biggest thing on the Arab circuit, especially since Beirut went under.

When I heard that Kissinger was going to dinner at the Sheraton, I decided to tag along as a spectator. Few of my colleagues did likewise, and I felt afterward that they had missed something. So when I returned to the hotel at about two in the morning, feeling fine, I wrote the following report:

The Kissinger party arrived at the Sheraton Hotel at 10:05 and proceeded directly to the bar on the top floor, which commands an imposing view of the Nile Hilton across the river.

After Foreign Minister Ismael Fahmy bought a round or two, everybody made his way to an elongated table placed strategically near and perpendicular to the dance floor.

Secretary Kissinger sat in the last chair nearest the dance floor. He was facing the Nile Hilton panorama.

The rest of the party was arranged haphazardly toward the salt at the other end of the table.

The dinner, as far as could be ascertained, was uneventful. It consisted of cream of chicken soup, grilled shrimp, veal chops masquerading as

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grilled veal cutlets, an assortment of vegetables, plus hummus, yogurt and cucumber salad, followed by a dessert of ice cream and cigars (Havanas for those who could cadge one from Fahmy, as Kissinger aide Larry Eagleburger is wont to do).

All this was accompanied by Pharaoh wine. (It was a good Pharaoh, but not a great Pharaoh.)

At approximately 10:45, a Middle Eastern facsimile of "My Way" gave way to a rhythmic, erotic explosion of sensuous sounds... a spotlight drilled the smoky cabaret air, and Najwa Fuad undulated out of the darkness in a Scheherazaidic costume.

If you squinted, you saw Rita Hayworth. Nobody squinted.

The motions which followed defy verbal description.

Full breasts rallied tantalizingly against a black halter which restrained but did not restrict. Hips gyrated. Long auburn hair flashed. There may have been some hand movements, too.

The music climaxed. Go to black. Najwa Fuad undulated back into the darkness.

She reappeared in a yummy muu-muu with jangles jangling in all the jangley places.

Your Secretary of State watched intently, almost stolidly, his face masking any lascivious impulses which may have made him wonder why Le Duc Tho never brought him to a place like this. His lap remained inviolate.

Meanwhile, elsewhere down the line: Ambassador Hermann Eilts was enveloped in the darkness, the camera eye of his mind perhaps focusing on the fleshy undulations on stage and then dissolving into a red, white and blue flag undulating in the breeze not long after dawn the next morning — the first time the American flag will have flown over Cairo in seven years.

Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker's interest was unflagging.

Eagleburger moved his chair back for an unobstructed view. So did Winston Lord, another Kissinger aide. Propriety impedes further characterization of their behavior.

Still another Kissinger aide, Peter Rodman, sat erect with a cigar jutting from squared jaw. Cigar well chewed.

Undersecretary of State Joseph Sisco managed to respond to woman whispering beside him without losing concentration.

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Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Roy Atherton did not divide his attention.

Ambassador Robert McCloskey successfully fought disinterest.

National Security Council aide Hal Saunders appeared diplomatically noncommittal.

State Department spokesman George Vest got up from his seat below the pepper and gaped with open mouth.

Only Secret Service agents Walter Bothe and Charlie Potts seemed uninterested. Resisting all temptation — or else succumbing to advancing age — they focused on the audience in a posture of almost unparal-leled devotion to duty. Bothe occasionally sneaked a glance stageward in the name of security.

Postnavel comments:

Kissinger: "Now that diplomatic relations have been restored, we should have an immediate cultural exchange program, and she gets the first visa."

Richard Hottelet, CBS News: "Najwa Fuad is to belly-dancing what Pablo Casals was to the cello."

Eagleburger: Unaccustomed silence.

Vest: "I wish they had given me a better seat."

Marilyn Berger of the Washington *Post* was present in a red caftan.

When Kissinger read the pool report, he said, "Valeriani has talent when he finds a subject he's interested in. God knows it isn't foreign affairs."

One of the staffers told me later that following the performance, Kissinger turned to his aides and said, "You are all going to be locked in your rooms tonight."

Despite the restoration of diplomatic relations, Najwa Fuad never did make it to the United States.

But Richard Nixon made it to Cairo to certify the vast improvement in American-Egyptian relations. During the presidential visit, Kissinger was assigned a bedroom and sitting room all done up in pink ruffles, with matching frills, in the Ras el Tin Palace in Alexandria. Nervous Embassy staffers tried to get it changed, but they couldn't. Kissinger never complained. His room was close to the

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President's. It was also on an upper floor, away from the cockroaches that overran the lower-floor rooms, where female staffers slept on desks to avoid them. Nixon's quarters had a Chinese motif, with huge dragon faucets and a sunken bathtub. If any symbolism was intended, it was inadvertent.

Nixon was by then almost totally preoccupied with saving his presidency, and during the return dinner he gave for Sadat, the two men hardly talked. Several American officials were brought in from other countries for the Nixon trip, including Dick Smith, who had been reassigned from Egypt to Pakistan. The Secretary recognized him in a Kissingerian way: "I've already said good-bye to you."

After Nixon resigned, Kissinger's first foreign trip was to the Middle East. He felt he had to go back promptly to make it clear that the new President was committed to keeping the negotiating process alive.

Ford personally went to the airport to see him off. "He's a very unusual Secretary," the President said, "on a very important mission." Kissinger noted that it was "the first time in a long time that one can go on a mission with an America that is at peace with itself."

Since his trip occurred during the Moslem holy period of Ramadan, he got in a lot of sightseeing, for the Arab leaders did not work during daylight hours in observance of Ramadan. In Cairo, he went to the Citadel, a walled city-fortress sitting on the only hill in the Egyptian capital. It was built in the Middle Ages by Saladin, the leader of the Arabs' successful campaign to expel the Crusaders from Palestine. One of its main attractions was the Muhammed Ali Mosque (named after the father of modern Egypt, not the heavy-weight fighter). Kissinger donned light green felt slippers to go inside. Everyone else was given tan felt slippers. Once inside, a blast of prayers from the muezzin made him jump. The muezzin later came out and embraced and kissed the abashed Secretary of State, who mumbled, "Thank you."

Kissinger also toured a Coptic museum, and since he was running late, the curator started speeding up his presentation, trying to cram everything into a short period to make sure he gave the Secretary his

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whole fund of knowledge before he left. But Kissinger advised his
host to slow down. "I'm relaxed," he said, "because I know nothing
can happen until I get there." It sounded like a motto for his travels
in the Middle East.

Although he used to say, in his double-negative way, "My life
would not be unfulfilled not to travel," he felt that his constant
personal involvement was necessary to nurture the delicate process
of negotiations between Arab and Jew.

Early in 1975, after several months of laying the groundwork, the
Secretary of State revved up his Middle East shuttle once again and
took off for Aswan to begin negotiations on a second disengagement
agreement between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai. Sadat now had still
another reason for repairing to Aswan. The first disengagement
agreement had been concluded there. Why not Sinai II?

The Kissinger mission began with a bang, literally. The pilot of the
707 couldn't see the runway and hit the power just before the plane
touched down an hour and a half late at 1:30 A.M. Under the glare
of the television lights, the Secretary told the already-tired press, "I
will do my very best. I plan to stay in the area until we have achieved
definite progress." During an on-plane briefing a couple of days later,
he said he was ruling out another thirty-three-day shuttle. But con-
scious of the difficulties involved, he joked, "I'm still going to be
ruling it out on the thirty-second day."

The Egyptian hyperoptimism about the mission was reflected in
a cartoon printed in *Al Ahram*, Cairo's leading newspaper. It de-
picted officials waving Kissinger through the customs line with the
caption: "Never mind opening your bags, we know what you have
in them." But they didn't. When a reporter told Kissinger that the
Egyptians were predicting 80 percent probability of success, he un-
dercut the forecast with humor. "By their standards," he said, "this
is profound pessimism." One of the prime purveyors of optimism was
Foreign Minister Fahmy, partly as a means of setting up Israel for
the blame if an agreement was not reached. But American reporters
had come to the conclusion that Fahmy, as a news source, was
something less than reliable.

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Kissinger's new shuttle happened to coincide with a visit to Aswan by a tour group that included some prominent Americans; among them was George Ball, a former undersecretary of state and a reputed contender for Kissinger's job in a Democratic administration. A reporter wondered, "Why is George Ball here?" The incumbent Secretary of State amused himself with his answer: "He's looking over my room to see if the accommodations are any good." Then he added, "President Ford sent me a note saying, 'Don't get worried, George Ball is on a private visit.' "

As always, Kissinger did some touring of his own. Fourteen months earlier, during the previous Aswan shuttle, he had sailed to the ancient temple of Philae, which had been submerged by the waters that rose behind the completed High Dam and which was being reclaimed by a United Nations project. A reporter noted then, "Seeing this whets my appetite to come back as a tourist." Kissinger, well aware of the negotiating difficulties that lay ahead in the Middle East, advised wryly, "Don't worry. We'll see them all before we're through." He turned out to be almost right, though we never got to see Abu Simbel, another great temple saved from the waters of Lake Nasser.

The delicacy of the negotiating situation restrained Kissinger from disclosing many of the details of the talks, but under pressure from the correspondents he did provide some of the flavor.

"Ninety percent of the talking is done by Sadat and me," he said. Sisco interrupted, "Every now and then I say a word, but at my peril." Ignoring the peril, Kissinger resumed, "Fahmy is very acute in pointing out what the practical meaning of certain things might be and the diplomatic ramifications. And very professional. Gamasy talks only of military subjects. He's much more assertive than he was in any previous meeting. The previous defense minister was not very assertive. Gamasy is very military, very professional. We talk for an hour and a half, then Sadat and I meet alone and sort of review the intangibles of the situation. I say, 'Let's forget what the phraseology is, have I understood this properly?' And he tells me — on a human level. That's to help me understand what he's really after, so that we

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don't communicate or convey the wrong framework. I must be sure
what he can take, must have. On the American side, we know what
we're after — Joe is sort of the counterpart of Fahmy. Sometimes,
so much depends upon an interpretation of what is possible that I
may ask Joe afterward, 'You sat in. My view is, this is what the
Israelis can do, this is what they can't. Give me your impression.' "

A reporter interrupted to ask, "Does Joe ever disagree?" Sisco: "I'll
tell you one thing — not in front of Sadat. It would be disastrous!"

While the details of the talks were not forthcoming, Kissinger
signaled the mood by using words like "painful" and "glacial" to
describe the negotiations. But he managed to keep his good humor
to the end. Just a couple of days before the breakdown, a reporter
reminded him, "Yesterday, you said you had some sense of the
duration of your negotiation. Any better now?" Kissinger laughed
as he replied, "It will either be very long or very short."

Another reporter asked, "Does it depend upon the Israeli re-
sponse?" Kissinger, conscious of suspicions among the pro-Israeli
reporters that he was unfair to Israel, turned to Sisco and joked
again, "I know what they're reaching for now — now I'm blackmail-
ing the Israelis again." Then he replied seriously, "At some point,
at some place, it will become apparent that it can either be done, or
that it cannot. That is mathematically certain . . . At some point, we
have to decide whether at this pace, it's really worth it, and whether
that will be in Israel or whether I go back to Aswan again depends
upon what I hear in Israel."

During one session in Aswan, Kissinger, who later talked about
the "paralysis" in Israel, told the Egyptians that when he talked to
the Israeli negotiators, they just sat there like "mummies." It's not
known if the Egyptians took offense at the denigrating reference.

After a break in the talks, when Kissinger was informed that
negotiations were resuming, he remarked to an aide, "Just as I'm
regaining my sanity, you're sending me back into that madhouse."

Signals also came from Sadat. He told a news conference halfway
through the shuttle, "I shall not agree to nonbelligerency as long as
there is any foreign soldier on our land, and I said that doing so

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means that I am inviting them to stay, so I think this is quite clear.”
The questioning got sharper, and Sadat got testier, until he finally
said it was “really absurd” to discuss such matters as commerce
between Egypt and Israel at this stage.

An Egyptian reporter wanted to know, from Kissinger, "Do you
believe at this stage the Palestinians would participate in these talks
concerning their future?" He ducked the question with an answer
reflecting his pained desire to see the conference end. "I think," he
said, "the two press corps are competing in asking provocative ques-
tions." The news conference did end one question later. Not long
afterward, the shuttle itself ended on a sour note.

The U.S. "reassessment" diplomacy that followed the collapse of
the negotiations included a meeting between Presidents Ford and
Sadat. Up to then, Ford had not been personally identified with
Middle East diplomacy, but presidential intervention seemed to be
the only good way to revive American policy initiatives in the area.
It provided a convenient cover for what everybody really wanted to
do — to try again to negotiate another partial agreement in the Sinai.

Before the meeting, Kissinger was asked at a news conference:
"President Sadat has said publicly now several times that he intends
to press President Ford for an answer to what the American position
is on supporting Israel, either in the present situation or back to the
1967 borders. What will the President say to President Sadat, or what
do you think about that question?" Kissinger replied, "If I tell you
that, maybe President Sadat won't come to the meeting."

The two presidents decided on Salzburg, Austria, as the meeting
place, since they both planned to be in Europe on other business in
the summer of 1975.

Ford's introduction to personal diplomacy in the Middle East was,
fortunately, not a reflection of future policy. As he deplaned from Air
Force One, his knee buckled, and he fell down the steps. Nothing
that happened afterward topped the entrance scene.

The Austrians provided a castle, the Salzburg Residenz, and the
two presidents conferred in the throne room. The Austrians had
offered two other castles as well, but they had been subjected to

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peremptory rejections by each side. One of them was known as Watercastle, which the Americans disdained for obvious reasons. The other had too many stairs for Sadat to climb.

The meeting turned out to be all sweetness and light, and the report that Ford and Sadat had hit it off well was also calculated to put pressure on Israel. But there was precious little information about the meeting itself. When it was over, the two presidents held a news conference in the courtyard of the Residenz during a down-pour and exchanged pleasantries with the press.

I wrote the following report for my own amusement:

Standing beneath nonnuclear umbrellas in the rain-soaked courtyard of Salzburg's historic Residenz [sic], President Ford and President Sadat confirmed today that they had indeed met.

Diplomatic observers observed that the two presidents apparently did not have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Egyptian sources insisted the United States had insisted on staging the presidential statements in the open-air setting of the Residenz [sic].

White House sources insisted Egypt had insisted on the open-air setting.

Deputy Press Secretary William Greener emphasized the United States had nothing to do with the rain. But he would neither confirm nor deny that it was Austria's fault.

Press Secretary Ron Nessen denied that it was raining.

Later, at a news conference where he did not threaten to resign, Secretary of State Kissinger explained the setting for the Ford-Sadat statements had been negotiated step by step, and he left the implication that if anybody was to blame for the rain, it was probably Israel.

Kissinger maintained the rain was a pain but in the main had not had a concrete impact on the nonnegotiations, which were not too concrete, either.

Kissinger also confirmed that the name of the Residenz [sic] was the Residenz [sic].

Following the meeting, Kissinger held a news conference at the Kongress Haus Press Center, not far from where he had threatened to resign more than a year earlier. Most of the same reporters had

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been in Salzburg then, and Kissinger confronted the memories with
head-on humor: "I need hardly say how much I have been looking
forward to having another press conference in Salzburg." He milked
it for yet another laugh. "I have been rehearsing for it for a year."

The questioners included veteran Washington *Post* correspondent Murrey Marder, who was known as an incisive Kissinger-baiter with whom the Secretary liked to banter. Marder was not known as a concise questioner, as he demonstrated once again in Salzburg: "Mr. Secretary, that certainly was not a happy, exhilarated-looking group in the courtyard today, the two presidents and those of you who were standing with them. It did not, by any means, look like it had lived up in any way to President Sadat's talk of this meeting marking a historic moment." Marder continued, "Can you say whether, from your perception, the Egyptian leaders had much higher expectations which could not be fulfilled because of the American timetable? And secondly, can you tell us whether the deadline of the expiration of the mandate in the Sinai is pressing with any urgency on your considerations?"

A smartass reporter shouted, "Question?" meaning he wanted the
Secretary of State to repeat Marder's long statement.

Kissinger took the cue: "As I understood Mr. Marder's conclusions, He formed the impression that this was not a happy, exhilarated group that he saw standing in the courtyard at the Residenz — and that is the name of the place — and he wondered whether the expiration of the mandate in the Sinai might have been pressing on the consciousness of the unexhilarated group that was standing there.

"If I can be frank and not be offensive to you ladies and gentlemen," Kissinger said, "you didn't look like a pretty exhilarated group to me, either . . . And it could be that the atmospheric conditions had something to do with it because I don't know how you show exhilaration when somebody holds an umbrella over you and rain is pouring down your back. But I am just beginning my lecture . . ."

"Basically, we thought it was a very constructive meeting. It was
not intended to reach any specific conclusions. It achieved that pur-

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pose... It was not intended to reach any precise conclusions that would lead to any immediate negotiation. It was, however, very positive, very constructive, and I think it provides the basis for useful talks with the Israelis."

Kissinger concluded, "I really think, Murrey, that your impression was just not right." Marder: "You often do." Kissinger: "That is true, but it never seems to affect what you write." Murrey agreed.

Two months later, the grounded Kissinger shuttle was reactivated, and the Secretary of State took off for the Middle East for what turned out to be the last time. Kissinger challenged reports that an agreement was virtually in the bag before he left, but his position was undercut by a telltale addition to his entourage: David Kennerly, the official White House photographer. It was obvious that Kennerly was not going along to make a photographic record of another failure for the Ford administration.

The symbolism of Aswan had not worked during the previous shuttle, so Sadat was content to conduct the negotiations from his

Don Wright, The Miami News, The New York Times Syndicate

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villa on the Mediterranean at Alexandria, the sprawling Egyptian port founded by Alexander the Great in 33 B.C. It was not a new site for Kissinger. He had conferred there with Sadat at the beginning of the Syrian shuttle. But it wasn't easy to get to. The Air Force 707 couldn't land at Alexandria, so it put down instead at Jianyklis, a military air base in the middle of the western desert, about fifty miles from the coast.

On that first visit, at the end of April 1974, the Egyptians provided a helicopter for Kissinger and the other American officials for the journey to Alexandria. But the traveling press was herded into a ramshackle bus, and we spent two hours on a hot, dusty road. We were not in the best of moods when we finally arrived at what seemed, briefly, like an oasis — the Palestine Hotel. It didn't take us long to organize our own Palestine Liberation Organization. We longed to be liberated from the Palestine Hotel. We failed.

The Palestine Hotel Information Sheet prepared by the U.S. Embassy gave us the first tip-off. It read in part: "There is a room service station near 407, 507, and 607. They can provide simple services (bottled water, coffee, etc.) immediately, but more complicated chores (meals, for example) take considerable time. If you are pressed for time, do not count on room service to bring meals at the exact time you desire. Room service does, however, provide Continental breakfasts *relatively* on time." What the information sheet failed to point out was that the Palestine Hotel staff had obviously been trained by the Russians at the Intourist School for efficiency.

The Palestine Hotel notwithstanding, Alexandria immediately became one of the favorite spots on the Kissinger itinerary for almost everybody except the Secretary and the other officials who took part in the negotiations. That's because it was close to Abou Kir and the Zephyros restaurant, which sat on the beach hard by the Mediterranean, which supplied its fare. The fish were so fresh they were still flopping on a table when we went back to select the one we wanted grilled for dinner — after the prawns and lobster, also fresh, also grilled. Local color was provided by wandering vendors selling black market items, such as soap, toothpaste, and toilet paper, and by

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beach urchins selling seashells by the seashore or playing recorders.

One night, after lots of seafood and an equivalent amount of wine, we taught one of the boys with a recorder to play "Hava Nagila," a popular Israeli dance. It was not the usual musical fare in Egypt.

As we left the restaurant, other children surrounded us, begging for change. Barry Schweid, who thought Israel was being pressured into a bad deal in the negotiations, looked at one of the urchins and said, "Don't worry, kid, we'll be back tomorrow and give you Haifa and twenty-five piasters."

Curiously, the security at Alexandria itself was tighter than anywhere in Egypt. Sadat's villa, the Maamoura Palace, fronted on the sea and was surrounded by a large expanse of lawn and flowers studded with palm and eucalyptus trees. The credentials issued by the American Secret Service for the traveling reporters and by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry for everybody else were not sufficient to get in. We had to have a credential with a picture on it as well. All vehicles were stopped at the gate of the grounds, and anyone entering had to walk the several hundred yards to the villa itself.

The lawn at Maamoura was the scene of much of the public activity. Sadat, wearing a pin-striped lounge suit, greeted Kissinger there with the customary embrace and kiss on both cheeks. Most of the impromptu news conferences took place there. Marilyn Berger began one of them by asking, "Mr. President, there was a report before we started coming here today that Egypt has requested a larger number of troops in the limited forces zone, numbering twelve thousand. Is that correct?" Kissinger wanted to keep it light. "I don't know why you give her a visa," he said. Sadat replied, "I do not know where you get this information." Kissinger added, "She tried it already on me, Mr. President."

Another reporter asked, "Mr. President, do you feel that Israel has raised some unexpected demands in the course of this week?"

Sadat: "They are always raising hell, as you say in America."

Reporter: "Mr. President, can you imagine, having come this far, that failure is still possible?"

Sadat: "Believe me, as I have seen and as has happened during the

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March mission, it may come to this. But not from the Egyptian side. We are quite ready and we are quite understanding. But I do not know what goes there on the Israeli side."

Reporter: "Well, the only conclusion we can draw then, sir, since you say you are ready for an agreement and no difficulties are being raised from your side, the only conclusion we can draw is your suggestion that there are difficulties being raised by the Israeli side?" Kissinger couldn't resist stepping in. "Unless," he said, "they are raised by *my* side."

At another impromptu news conference, Kissinger again tried to take the sting out of tough questions from American reporters by explaining, "You see, Mr. President, what I have to go through four times a day."

Afterward, he introduced one of the tough American questioners to Sadat. "This is Bernie Kalb, Mr. President," he said. "He's Marvin Kalb's brother. Marvin doesn't travel anymore because he has a bad back." Then, in a joshing attempt to sound menacing, he added, "And if Bernie keeps asking questions like that, he's going to have a bad back, too."

At the outset of the shuttle, Kissinger acknowledged that the "odds are that it will succeed." But he kept warning us that it could also fail. Nobody in the press took him seriously.

He did not make his usual claim that this was the toughest negotiation he had ever been engaged in. Instead, during one of the on-plane briefings, he labeled it the "weirdest negotiation I've ever seen." Why? "Stuff keeps popping out all the time," meaning that both sides were raising issues that had not previously come up in the discussions.

Much of what the agreement would contain had been thoroughly aired in the press before the shuttle even began, but there was a lot of talk about secret agreements, which Kissinger declined to discuss. Likewise Sadat. When a reporter on the plane reminded Kissinger that "Sadat said there would not be any secret agreements," Kissinger did a dumbstruck number on the reporter. "For God's sake," he said, "do you think he should say, 'I'm making a secret agreement

OFFICE OF

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28I

with Israel?' When you guys ask him questions that involve political
suicide for him, what do you want him to say, 'I'm making a secret
agreement'?

Sadat himself had replied to the question by saying, "Ho, ho, ho
... no secret agreements." Sadat's frequent "ho, ho, ho" was later
replaced linguistically by "for sure," and playful reporters eventually
had a pool on how many times Sadat would say "for sure" during
a news conference.

Lars-Erik Nelson of Reuters had a vivid recollection of the shuttles end game: "On the next to last day of that same shuttle, we were in Alexandria, preparing to fly back to Israel. It was the make-or-break day after spending two weeks going back and forth between Jerusalem and the New Palestine Hotel. Either a deal was going to be done or it was not. The bulk of the press was taken out to the airport, but a four-man press pool plus Dana Schmidt [of the *Christian Science Monitor*], who had once again missed the bus, was taken out to Sadat's summer house on the beach to be helicoptered back to the plane with Kissinger. We were seated outdoors, on a patio on the west side of the house, as Kissinger and Sisco argued with Sadat and Fahmy inside. The impression was that Sadat wanted to make a deal, but Fahmy, concerned with Arab unity and solidarity, was skeptical. As we sipped our glasses of orange juice, the sun turned bright orange and sank toward the western horizon. Suddenly, from around the corner of the house, Kissinger and Sisco appeared, flank-ing Fahmy and leading him on a long walk through the garden. Sisco towered over Fahmy on his right, and even Kissinger, on his left, was slightly taller. They were clearly giving him the hard word, laying down the law. It looked for all the world like Mutt and Jeff in a police station, the two Americans working over the suspect who refuses to break down and talk.

"There was a desert vulture high overhead, flapping its wings desperately in the off-sea breeze and getting nowhere. He hung as though pinned to the sunset sky, flapping furiously and unable to go forward. Kissinger and Sisco and Fahmy came back from the garden. Kissinger then spotted us for the first time and said, in what he

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hoped was a whisper, 'My God, has the press been there all the time?
Make it look good . . .' His voice carried to us. He smiled and waved,
as did the others. Later, on the plane, he told us that the Egyptians
had bought the deal that afternoon. Now it was up to the Israelis."

The deal was bought on the basis of the stationing of American
technicians at early warning posts in the Sinai. That was the key
element that made a new agreement possible.

When Kissinger returned to the lawn of Maamoura for the initial-
ing of the agreement, studio television cameras were in place to carry
the ceremony live on nationwide Egyptian television. A table covered
with green baize was set up on the lawn for the ceremony. Even the
participants represented a compromise: a military man because
Egypt insisted it was a military disengagement agreement and a
diplomat because Israel wanted to emphasize the political nature of
the agreement.

Before Kissinger returned to Alexandria, President Ford had called President Sadat, but as all of us who had tried to communicate from Alexandria knew, the connection was not the best, and their conversation sounded like a Bob Newhart routine:

FORD: President Sadat?

SADAT: Hello, this is President Sadat.

FORD: How are you this morning, President Sadat? I'm calling you to congratulate you on the important role you played in the negotiations that brought about this agreement.

SADAT: Hello, hello . . .

FORD: I hope you hear me better now. Allow me to express, with empha-
sis, in the name of my administration, our appreciation for your politi-
cal skills, in spite of the opposition and the critics, and the spirit you
have brought to the negotiations. I am most grateful for your leader-
ship and I hope to continue to work with . . .

SADAT: Hello, hello . . .

FORD: Hello, do you hear me, Mr. President?

SADAT: No, I don't hear you very clearly.

FORD: I know that we both know that a stalemate or a deadlock in the
Middle East could bring about a catastrophe and we appreciate your

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leadership in the negotiations with Secretary Kissinger and the Israelis.

We are all thankful and as we are going to continue to work together
personally and both our administrations . . .

SADAT: Hello, hello . . .

FORD: I hear you well, Mr. President. I hope that you can hear me, Mr.
President.

SADAT: Hello, President Ford?

FORD: I can't hear you, Mr. President.

SADAT: Is this President Ford speaking?

FORD: Yes, this is President Ford.

SADAT: Go on please.

FORD: The line unfortunately is very poor and I don't hear you well.
Allow me to say, if I may in spite of the difficulties, that Mrs. Ford
and myself are hoping Mrs. Sadat, your children and yourself will visit
Washington in the coming autumn. I am sorry I cannot hear you, the
line is very bad, but I hope you can hear me and my remarks from the
U.S.

SADAT: Hello, hello . . .

The line suddenly improved, and Sadat thanked President Ford
for his message.

FORD: I couldn't hear each word distinctly, but I understood the spirit
of your kind and encouraging words.

SADAT: I want to add one point, Mr. President.

FORD: Yes.

SADAT: I want to stress the importance of . . .

FORD: Unfortunately, I can't hear you. The line is very bad, I hope it's
better over there.

SADAT: I hear you very well.

FORD: Have a nice day. I understand Henry will be with you
shortly.

SADAT: I am expecting him.

Sadat praised "the sincerity and tireless efforts of Dr. Kissinger"
and concluded, "I consider this a turning point in the Arab-Israeli
conflict and a step toward peace based on justice." Sadat left the
initialing to subordinates, but it was he who did the talking at the

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news conference that followed. He summed up the shuttle by saying, "Dr. Kissinger has had a helluva time there and here."

After the news conference, Bruce van Voorst of *Newsweek* approached Sadat with maps signed in Israel by Kissinger, Prime Minister Rabin, Defense Minister Peres, Ambassador Dinitz, and Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur. He asked Sadat to sign as well. Sadat looked up at the reporter with a wide smile and said, "I don't think that would be a good idea."

Sadat had told the news conference the next step in the Middle East should be another interim agreement between Syria and Israel, and Kissinger confirmed that the United States was ready to explore the possibility of more Syrian-Israeli negotiations. But the vehe mence of the Syrian reaction to another separate agreement between Egypt and Israel shot down the next potential shuttle before it could ever get off the ground.

When Kissinger left Alexandria, he did not return again to the Middle East as Secretary of State.

With a second Sinai agreement safely on the books and the presence of American technicians manning early warning stations approved by Congress, Sadat finally visited Washington in October 1975. In addition to the extravagant White House tributes — and an invitation to Sadat to address a joint meeting of Congress — Kissinger laid on one of the most lavish lunches ever seen on the State Department's eighth floor. The guest list read like a *Who's Who* of American achievement, and the caterers served an elegant luncheon, including cold poached salmon and several wines. At the end of the lunch, however, waiters moved among the crowd with humidors, passing out cigars. They were King Edwards. This country may need a good five-cent cigar, but King Edward is not it. American cigar-smokers were even more appalled than the Havana-puffing Fahmy. It was a detail that the nonsmoking Kissinger had overlooked.

The end-of-luncheon toasts came from the by-laws of the Kissinger-Sadat mutual admiration society, although they did not precisely repeat their "Miracle Worker" ritual.

Kissinger forwent his customary humorous warm-up as he said,

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"I have always believed that once we have analyzed all the clauses of all the agreements, that the most important contribution that our honored guest made was to understand that the process of peace was in the first instance a psychological problem, and that what was needed was a climate of confidence between the United States and the principal parties and between the parties themselves."

Sadat responded, "When I met Dr. Kissinger for the first time and we started dealing with each other, it was a turning point in the history of the conflict in our area. We needed one in whom we can put our confidence in the United States so that he can bear the responsibility and break the snow and go forward toward a peaceful solution built on justice. After one hour of discussion with Dr. Kissinger, for the first time we felt as if we were old friends. And since that time up to this moment, I am proud to say that working together, we have achieved something that couldn't be achieved in a whole generation."

Looking back on the Kissinger shuttles, one American Ambassador in the Middle East recalled, "Even with all of its problems, it was a great time. It was exhilarating for those who were in on it . . . He shouted on occasion . . . he did not suffer fools gladly . . . But he had style, he had flair . . . Kissinger was something to experience."

SIX
Israel

Valeviani

It took only a cookie and a cigarette to dramatize the enormous gulf that separated Israel from its geographic neighbors. The time was early December, and Kissinger was visiting Israel for the first time with accompanying press. He had just completed a swing through the Arab world, including the first trip to Damascus by an American Secretary of State since the 1950s.

I was walking down the hall where most of the members of the press had rooms in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Marilyn Berger of the Washington *Post* was just leaving her room. A maid was inside cleaning. Marilyn had bought some sesame cookies during the stopover in Damascus, and she offered one to the maid. But the maid refused to take one. "Not if it comes from Syria," she said.

Two days earlier, I had been riding in the back seat of a car provided by the Syrian government. Hank Trewhitt of the Baltimore *Sun* was riding in the front seat as we sped from the airport to downtown Damascus at speeds up to ninety miles an hour. Trewhitt was smoking, and he offered a cigarette to the driver in primitive sign language. The driver refused. Trewhitt tried to persuade him, but he was adamant. Finally the driver said, "Israel," with the Arabic

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inflection that makes it comes out *Iz-ray-el*, with the accent on the last syllable.

The maid in Jerusalem and the driver on the road to Damascus
personalized the Arab-Israeli conflict for me much more vividly than
any briefing paper or history book.

In fact, for newsmen, part of the exhilaration of the shuttling was
precisely that ability to go directly across forbidden frontiers, to
spend the day in the Arab world and the night in Israel and compare
notes in a way that no other journalists could do.

During the shuttle, Kissinger spent much more time in Israel than
in the Arab countries. One reason was simple convenience. The
communications were better, and the accommodations were, too.
Another was political. He had to spend more time haggling with the
Israelis, who, unlike the Arabs, struggled with a democratic form of
government. He once joked, "I see more of your Cabinet than my
own."

Whereas Kissinger could deal directly, and alone, with presidents
and kings in the Arab world, he had to deal collectively with a team
of individualistic negotiators in Israel, or at times with the entire
Cabinet, many of whose members disliked each other intensely. The
animosity between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his challenger
for primacy within the Labor party, Defense Minister Shimon Peres,
was no secret, and it was frequently on display in the negotiating
sessions.

During the first *Egyptian-Israeli shuttle*, Kissinger once returned
to Jerusalem well past midnight rather than stay in Aswan so he
could begin the time-consuming negotiations with the Israelis early
the next morning.

The large delegation-to-delegation meetings were not only time-
consuming, they were often histrionic as well, and at times the
Israelis seemed to be performing for each other, positioning them-
selves politically. Kissinger used to lament in private that "Israel has
no foreign policy. It only has domestic politics."

To illustrate that point, an American diplomat revived an old
story, probably apocryphal, about Golda Meir's visit to Washington
when she was foreign minister during the Kennedy years. She was

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talking to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who explained how the United States had become so tolerant that "we now have a Catholic President. Maybe," he said, "in twenty years, we'll even have a Jewish President." "We already have one," replied Golda. "It doesn't help."

One top Middle East hand recalled that while Kissinger used to "joke with the Israelis, more often he was emotional or irritated — and so tired. At times," he said, "Kissinger got just plain mad at the Israelis for being unreasonable, shortsighted, and obtuse about their own interests. He'd get mad at them as a government and he'd get mad at them as individuals across the table for not pulling together." Yet, remembers another aide, "there was a family atmosphere — we didn't have to question each other's basic motives, and therefore we could fight. There were fights, but it was always like fighting in the family."

Kissinger himself once described the Israelis as "exhausting negotiating partners." He said, "Periods verge on being obnoxious because of the pettiness and pressure and psychological warfare. They put out stories that they know you are going to betray them." But Kissinger showed understanding: "In a historic sense, you have to say, 'They may be right . . .' Their margin of survival is so narrow that unless they make themselves impossibly difficult, they may be driven right over the precipice altogether . . . They have a deep sense of historic tragedy . . . and they are in mortal danger right now. They do face an actively hostile world in which we are the only ones who are pursuing policies generally parallel to their interests."

Prior to the Geneva Conference in December 1973, Kissinger felt the most important part of his preconference diplomacy was his visit to Jerusalem. The Israelis seemed to be working themselves into a state of hysterical paranoia. Kissinger had a long talk with the Cabi-net at Foreign Minister Abba Eban's home and then with the Gen-eral Staff the next morning. He came away struck by the Israelis' sense of isolation. "They're a people who fled from the ghettoes of Europe to set up their own country in the Middle East," he said, "and now that country has itself become a ghetto internationally."
As an example of Israeli anxiety, he cited Ambassador Simcha

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Dinitz's perceived need to talk to him "ten times a day" when they were in Washington.*

Leaving Geneva after the opening session of the conference, Kissinger spoke again with great feeling about Israel's problems. "The country has gone through a great psychological trauma," he said. "On October fifth, its position was unassailable — militarily invulnerable, diplomatically untouchable. Three weeks later, all that had changed. It was heartbreaking," he went on, "to go there and see how totally dependent Israel is on the United States."

He talked about the "horrible dilemma" facing Israel in choosing between its options, that is, security versus the risks of a peace settlement. But he had no doubt about Israel's survival, at least not publicly. He told a magazine interviewer at the end of December 1974, "The United States — and finally, in the last analysis, Europe — will not negotiate over the survival of Israel. This would be an act of such extraordinary cynicism that the world would be morally mortgaged if it ever happened. But it won't happen."

Apart from his own analysis of the Israeli national psyche, Kissinger was probably influenced by a conversation that Golda Meir recounts in her autobiography, *My Life*. Mrs. Meir was in Washington in October 1973, talking about the problems of the cease-fire lines in the Sinai. "They were not easy or pleasant talks," she wrote, "but then we were not discussing easy matters . . . At one stage I said to him, 'You know, all we have, really, is our spirit. What you are asking me to do is to go home and help defeat that spirit, and then no [American] aid will be necessary at all.'" Kissinger constantly returned to the question of "spirit" whenever the issue of American pressure on Israel was raised. He reflected Mrs. Meir's concern about the "breaking" of Israel's spirit, which he felt would crack its will to resist and lead to the disintegration of the Jewish state.

*That was something of an exaggeration. But Dinitz did have a direct "hot line" telephone to Kissinger's office, and he used it often. Before becoming Ambassador, Dinitz was known as "Golda's Kissinger," a bright, articulate, charming, witty, wisecracking adviser to the Prime Minister. In Washington, he worked as hard as Kissinger did and with a single-mindedness that made him effective with a large constituency that included Congress and the American Jewish community as well as the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government.

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Ambassador Dinitz recalls a time when the United States and Israel were having a "difficult argument, and when some people were blaming us for intransigence, and Kissinger said, 'The Jews have not survived five thousand years because they were soft.' "

Still, Kissinger frequently felt the Israelis sacrificed their long-term interests for short-term benefits that provided only fleeting advantage. As one top aide put it, "Henry really honestly felt that he knew what was the best thing for the Israelis, and he was right, in that sense."

Whatever his private frustrations, he did not shy away from joking in public about the difficulty of negotiating with the Israelis. At the end of his first visit to Jerusalem with a full entourage, he brought Abba Eban aboard the plane for a quick tour before leaving. In the press section, Kissinger explained with amusement that Eban had once defined objectivity as "one hundred percent agreement with Israel's point of view." Kissinger later amused an American Jewish audience by recounting that story and adding, "I thought Eban was joking when he made that remark. I realized later that he was threatening me."

"ANYTHING! I'LL SIGN ANYTHING IF ONLY YOU PROMISE TO GO HOME!"

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Kissinger's difficult dealings with the Israelis were typified in an incident during the second Israeli-Egyptian negotiation on disengagement in the Sinai. One of the most disputed issues involved an uninterrupted access road for Egypt through Israeli-held territory to the Abu Rodeis oil fields. After Kissinger had presented the Israeli proposal on the issue, he found that the line the Israelis had drawn for the road was under water at all times, even at low tide! His reaction was quite predictable. When the Israelis put forward their map documenting their supposed withdrawal from the Mitla and Gidda passes in the Sinai, American officials checked it carefully and found that the Israeli line went right through the middle of the passes. Once the explosive anger had passed, however, Kissinger used to laugh about it in the retelling.

Of all the Israelis, Golda Meir was clearly Kissinger's favorite. During one of their disputes, Mrs. Meir finally said in exasperation, "Look, what do you want from me? I was born in the last century." Kissinger replied with a puckish smile, "The nineteenth century is my specialty."

Golda's specialties were strength and leadership, and Kissinger respected and admired those qualities. A close associate recalls that during the late stages of the Syrian shuttle, Kissinger went to Jerusalem with a new Syrian proposal on the number of troops to be permitted in the limited forces zone. The figures were way too high, and the Israelis blew up. Kissinger lectured them on how important it was to keep the Syrians engaged in the peace process — engaged in disengagement, as it were — and to put the question of numbers in perspective by taking a look at the next step. Golda went off for twenty minutes with her negotiating team, then came back and said, "Go get the best numbers you can."

However, his frequent bouts of exasperation in Israel extended to her as well, especially when she would go back over the history of the Jews in Europe before getting to the matter at hand. That was one of her ploys to counter the "dire consequences" ploy of Kissinger. Her presentation troubled and irritated him, and since he too had been a Jew in Europe, he found it somewhat superfluous, not to

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say annoying. One of Mrs. Meir's closest associates said she fre-
quently let the Secretary of State know that while "there's no greater
expert on American policy than Kissinger, on Israeli policy, she had
her Ph.D." And she once twitted him, "The United States will never
be alone. Israel will always be with you."

In *My Life*, Mrs. Meir described her relationship with Henry Kissinger as "very complicated," but it was clear the respect and admiration were mutual:

At this point [October 1973] the outstanding personality in the Middle
East became not President Sadat, or President Assad, or King Faisal or
even Mrs. Meir. It was the U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger,
whose efforts on behalf of peace in the area can only be termed superhu-
man. My own relationship with Henry Kissinger had its ups and downs.
At times it became very complicated, and at times I know I annoyed and
perhaps even angered him — and vice versa. But I admired his intellec-
tual gifts, his patience and his perseverance were always limitless, and in
the end we became good friends . . . I think that possibly one of the most
impressive of Kissinger's many impressive qualities is his fantastic capac-
ity for dealing with the minutest details of whatever problems he under-
takes to solve.

Kissinger genuinely regretted Mrs. Meir's departure from the
Prime Minister's office, although he joked that his favorite regime in
Israel was a caretaker government. "There's nothing more stable
than a caretaker government," he said, "since the ministers can't
resign."

We once asked Kissinger whether it was easier dealing with the
Sabras (native-born Israelis) than with the old generation. "Easier,"
said Kissinger; then after thinking a bit, he added, "and harder. For
them the existence of Israel is not a miracle but a fact. This group,"
he continued, "is humanly less warm than the generation of Golda.
But they are 'Mideast.' You can't be sure that the world map in
Golda's head is not centered in Europe. For Rabin it is more matter
of fact that the center is Israel."

The Secret Service agents were also sorry to see Golda go. She
used to leave the negotiating sessions, and like a good Jewish mother,

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she checked to make sure they had coffee and cake and that every-
thing was comfortable for them during their long waits.

Mrs. Meir's successor was Yitzhak Rabin, a military hero and
former Chief of Staff who had known and worked with Kissinger
during a long stint as an Ambassador in Washington. But Kissinger
found Rabin somewhat indecisive and not too straightforward, and
he felt Rabin overanalyzed everything. He rather liked the new
defense minister, Shimon Peres, whom he found more direct and
open.

Given Kissinger's compulsion for flicking his poison tongue, his
critiques of various Israeli personalities quickly found their way back
to the principals. He felt Eban didn't count for a great deal in Israeli
political councils, and he also thought the foreign minister's elo-
quence was unfortunately matched by his prolixity. When this got
back to Eban, he was personally hurt by it, but the effects were not
long-lasting. Rabin was once offended when he heard that Kissinger
had described him as a "peasant general" at a time when the Jewish
people needed a Rothschild.

Kissinger's criticisms of individual Israeli leaders were generally
made to other Israelis or to the Arabs, but never to the press. We
did hear him make the point more than once that while the "farmer-
soldier" had played a vital role in the founding of the State of Israel,
he was no longer sufficient for the country's current needs. But he
never personalized "farmer-soldier" to us.

By the same token, Kissinger was the target of criticism within
Israeli circles, although government officials were cautious about
going after him head-on. Usually they did it by selective leaks, which
either distorted the facts or gave a partial version of an unflattering
story.

On a nonofficial level, Israelis who didn't like what Kissinger was
doing repeated a joke that portrayed him as a zookeeper. When he
was asked about his qualifications for the job, he said he could make
the lion and the lamb lie down together and he went on to prove it.
He got the job, and the zoo became so renowned that people came
from all over the world to see the lion and lamb lie together. Even

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Kissinger's mother eventually showed up. She watched in amaze-
ment and then asked her son how he did it. "It's easy," said Kis-
singer. "Early every morning, before anyone comes, I put a new lamb
in the cage." For the Israelis, the moral of the story was unmistak-
able; they were the new lambs.

As Kissinger's popularity in Israel waned, some of the criticism became more public, and even Moshe Dayan, who lost his defense portfolio when Rabin took office, criticized the Secretary's tactics in an article for an American magazine. Kissinger seemed genuinely puzzled. "If you read the record of my conversations with Dayan when he was in office," Kissinger said on the plane, "you'll find that he was more supportive of my efforts than any other Israeli leader, and in a more sweeping way than anybody is now talking about." Kissinger also thought Dayan the most innovative of all the Israeli negotiators, although he described him as "an acquired taste."

Dayan was a part of the Israeli negotiating team for the first two agreements — with Egypt and Syria — along with Prime Minister Meir and Foreign Minister Eban. Eban served as a kind of a diplomatic point man. He met Kissinger at the Tel Aviv airport, and during the hour-long drive to Jerusalem, the Secretary of State would fill him in on what had happened on his previous stops. In turn, Eban would brief the other Israeli negotiators and their aides, so that by the time the formal meetings began, the Israeli side was up to date on the general situation.

The limousine ride to Jerusalem was not only a diplomatic conveni-
ence, it was a preference. The first time Kissinger arrived in Tel
Aviv with his full entourage, helicopters were waiting to take the
entire group to Jerusalem. The Old City, seen from the air by night,
with artistic lighting illuminating thousands of years of history, was
a breathtaking sight. But Kissinger hated helicopters, especially heli-
copters that were buffeted by the wind on their way to a small hilltop
landing pad in Jerusalem. The limousine replaced the chopper after
that, although when large-scale demonstrations were staged against
him during the second Israeli-Egyptian disengagement negotiations,
the choppers made a comeback because of security.

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The road to Jerusalem was marked with periodic reminders of recent history — the agonizing birth of the State of Israel. Significant dates were painted on rocks, and the wreckage of burnt-out trucks and armored cars had been deliberately left by the roadside — and repainted — to serve as dramatic memorials to the courage of the young nation that was almost overrun in its first days.

But Kissinger seldom showed any interest in the landscape. He wanted to talk business with his Israeli counterpart. However, on an early trip, when the car passed a building that stood in semi-isolation in the hills at Latrun, Kissinger asked Abba Eban what it was. Eban told him it was a Trappist monastery, and he explained that only one man was allowed to talk for all the monks inside. "Just like the State Department," quipped Kissinger.

Following a brief ceremony at the airport and the ride to Jerusalem, the Secretary's arrival ritual usually ended with the Grand Entrance Scene at the King David Hotel.

The lobby was roped off to allow clear passage from the front door to the elevators. As soon as the limo arrived out front, the television lights would go on as though it were an opening night. Kissinger would burst through the front door, flanked by half a dozen bodyguards, and, smiling and waving, he would stride briskly past another dozen Israeli agents while the cameramen filmed, the photographers clicked, the guests applauded and jockeyed for a better position behind the velvet ropes for a look, and while radio and television reporters tried to slow him down to get a few words on tape or film. Then he would disappear into one of the two main elevators near the reception desk. The other members of the party would dash to get into the other one, since the elevators were often held on the sixth floor while Kissinger was there, and missing the second elevator meant a long wait.

There was a lot of grumbling about the accommodations at the King David, but Kissinger himself had a huge suite on the sixth floor, with a large living room and purple furniture. It offered a splendid view of the Old City and the Valley of Kidron, which used to be a no-man's-land before Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 war.

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When Kissinger looked out of his window, he could literally see the physical embodiment of the intractable conflict he was trying to resolve.

The suite did not have a balcony for enjoying the view, and that suited the security men just fine, since the hotel was within sniping distance of the Old City. (Two rockets were once found on a nearby hill aimed at this corner of the building.)

However, Kissinger was occasionally concerned about another kind of security. Although there was never any evidence that the Israelis bugged the Secretary's suite, he and Sisco sometimes took precautions anyway when they discussed highly sensitive matters. They would lean far out of the window overlooking the Old City and whisper. Of course, that did them no good at all if the windowsill were bugged.

The hotel itself deserved a footnote in history. It had served as the headquarters for the British Army when Palestine was still under British mandate, and one wing of the hotel had been blown up by the group of terrorists led by Menachem Begin, the long-time leader of the political opposition who eventually became Prime Minister.

Judging by the food at the King David, it's easy to be convinced that the explosion did permanent damage to the kitchen, which never recovered. But then, Israel was not known as a gastronomic paradise anyway. Kissinger used to wonder aloud "how a nation of a million Jewish mothers can turn out such lousy food!" Yet he didn't do badly at the table there. One hotel official recalled "he normally had two soft-boiled eggs and rolls and croissants and a little cheese and coffee for breakfast, plus vegetables and herring. He liked everything." The hotel used to stock his suite with fruits and cookies and petits fours, which, the official said, "were always gone."

Kissinger once told a Jewish audience in New York, "In recent years, I have had, as you can see [referring to his girth], the opportunity that every Jewish mother dreams of for her son — to do something for the peace of the world and never miss a meal."

The King David was strictly kosher, a circumstance that undoubtedly had something to do with the caliber of the food. Marilyn Berger once good-naturedly put the finger on me in print when I violated

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the rules by buying a hamburger and a grilled cheese sandwich at the poolside snack bar and then combining them into a cheeseburger. When Kissinger wanted a better meal, he and Dinitz would slip away to a downtown Italian restaurant, La Gondola, to eat before a negotiating session, even though a meal might be served at the session itself.

During Kissinger's frequent sojourns in Israel, a new Hilton hotel was completed, and the management went after the lucrative Kissinger party business, arguing that the U.S. Secretary of State should stay in an American-owned hotel, that security would be easier (true), and that it was more comfortable and more conveniently located, since it was closer to the Prime Minister's office and the Knesset, the Israeli parliament (also true). A public relations battle ensued as well as a private relations battle. The manager of the King David wrote a personal letter to Kissinger, imploring him not to move, and one story said Kissinger's aged parents were even contacted in New York in an effort to enlist them on the side of the King David.

Eventually, the struggle seemed to acquire political overtones, as though Kissinger's transfer to the Hilton would somehow symbolize a lessening of American support for Israel itself. Once the King David was wired to accommodate all of the traveling party's needs, however, it was unlikely he would move out. The closest he came to moving was during the second disengagement negotiations between Israel and Egypt, when demonstrators camped outside the King David and bellowed through microphones all night long. Kissinger called Dinitz at 4:00 A.M. and told him that unless the shouting stopped, he was moving to the Hilton in the morning. Dinitz replied he couldn't do anything about it. As it turned out, there weren't enough available rooms at the Hilton, anyway.

The security precautions at the King David extended to the cleaning women, who were always accompanied by security agents when they entered Kissinger's suite or other sensitive areas. If the maid who cleaned Kissinger's room had inadvertently seen something sensitive, it would not have mattered. She was illiterate, a Jewish

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immigrant from Iraq. Nevertheless, somebody once pointed out for
the sake of historical perspective that at the Congress of Vienna, the
maids were spies of Metternich.

A woman named Judith was in charge of the cleaning women. As part of the hotel staff, she had a security button. Even so, whenever she went into Kissinger's suite to make sure the maids had done a good job, the security men went with her. Judith came to personify the Israelis who disliked and distrusted Kissinger. She opposed the idea of giving back the Mitla and Gidda passes in the Sinai and returning the Abu Rodeis oil fields to Egypt as part of the second disengagement agreement. So she stopped smiling at Kissinger, who told Atherton, in front of Judith, "She doesn't like me anymore."
"You said it!" said Judith. Only in Israel.

Judith did like Nancy Kissinger, and she once asked her, "How
can a nice girl like you have a husband like that?" According to
Judith, Nancy smiled graciously and replied, "He's not that bad."

When Kissinger was in town, the King David became, naturally enough, a political hot spot. It was not unusual to find a Cabinet minister or other high-ranking official in the ground-floor coffee shop. A reporter once spotted Abba Eban in the lobby at 1:00 A.M. and noted that he had lost weight. "Yes," he said, "that's Kissinger's doing." Moshe Dayan wrote in his autobiography that after leaving the Secretary's room at one-thirty in the morning following a private meeting, "I was almost dropping from fatigue, but Kissinger appeared as sprightly as ever."

While Kissinger often conferred privately with Israeli officials at the hotel, all of the negotiating sessions took place in the Prime Minister's office in an unpretentious building about fifteen minutes away or in the private home of one of the Cabinet ministers. The most impressive setting was Dayan's home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv; in the back he had a mini-museum of archaeological treasures, most of them dug up by Dayan himself.

Kissinger always tried to manage to have at least one session with
the Prime Minister alone so he could get a feel for what Israel's
bedrock position might be and so he could explore certain issues in

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a way that would not provoke prolonged debate in the larger councils.

In the group sessions, Kissinger "played the role of an extremely talented teacher put in charge of a class of disturbed children," as one Israeli leader later described it. One of the Secretary's aides recalled that he operated "at several levels. One minute he was the U.S. Secretary of State. The next moment, he was Professor Henry Kissinger, consultant to the government of Israel."

One Foreign Ministry official said, "Kissinger taught us some facts of life we didn't like to hear. But he did it in the kindest way, in the way we would have preferred." Rabin remembers him as "a compulsive talker — so full of ideas and knowledge he liked to share it with somebody. And he had to be the star in every talk."

The Israelis were initially amused by the way Kissinger would make his exposition, then turn to his aides and say, "Wasn't it that way?" as though they would disagree. But the amusement turned to exasperation, and finally one of the Israeli negotiators told him, "Please, stop asking for their approval. We believe you."

However, the Israelis did not always believe — or at least they did not always believe everything. "It's not that he lied," said one prominent Israeli diplomat. "He had a unique ability of explaining every situation in the manner most pleasing to the one who heard it. We trusted him," the diplomat added, "but with the necessary discount."

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, a former Kissinger student at Harvard, told me, "I would like to say that I trusted him to the extent that I could trust the foreign minister of any other country. I trusted his friendship, but not always his judgment. I never doubted I was talking to a friend of Israel. He was loyal to Israel in his way."

Rabin recalled that "Kissinger had a Metternichian system of telling only half the truth. He didn't lie. He would have lost credibility. He didn't tell the whole truth. He stressed certain points he wanted out of proportion to the proportions of the parties."

"He was a good manipulator of people and situations. He created a kind of personal relationship with those with whom he negotiated,

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so that regardless of the fact that everyone knew he didn't tell the
whole truth, he created a kind of intensive relationship that forced
people to be in a way committed to him."

Shimon Peres remembered that "if you didn't listen exactly word
by word, you could be carried away by what he said. But if you
listened word by word, he wasn't lying."

Kissinger frequently arrived late for his meetings with the Israeli
negotiators, but he would never apologize. They assumed he had
been delayed by phone calls to Washington and that he was more
likely to make sensitive calls to the United States from Israel than
from the Arab countries.

However, said Eban, "there was no one breathing down his neck
from Washington . . . Kissinger was plenipotentiary. He occasionally
would say he had to discuss something with the President, but clearly
he was in charge."

Joe Sisco endorsed that view. "Kissinger," he said, "was a de facto
President. It was terrifying in a way [the presidential situation in
Washington], but Kissinger was a terribly responsible person."

Kissinger often began a meeting by telling amusing or derogatory
stories about the Arabs (just as he told the Arabs amusing stories
about the Israelis). He once cracked that if someone told him the
Arabs were with him a hundred percent, "that's when he would start
looking for the knife."

However, the Israelis never quite believed the stories Kissinger
told about Egyptian Foreign Minister Fahmy or Minister of War
Gamasy storming out of a meeting in anger or his accounts of private
meetings with President Sadat, who had to have "tremendous
concessions to keep Fahmy on board." (Kissinger also claimed that
Fahmy, for his part, had talked Gamasy out of resigning at one
critical point.) They felt that was part of the Kissinger act.

Kissinger flattered the negotiators by contrasting the efficiency he
found in Israel to the renowned inefficiency of the Arab world. In
one session, he told an aide to go get an important document, then
added for the benefit of his hosts, "The Israelis probably have it on
microfilm already anyway."

As usual, he used humor to relieve tension, but his stamina was

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a more important negotiating tool. "He relied on his stamina," said Eban, "as a tactic in the negotiations, continuing through day and night, especially when there was a readiness to conclude something and the question was how to finalize it."

Once a negotiation was under way, "Kissinger's main strength was logical analysis," in the words of one of the participants. His technique, said another, "was to give us a picture of the predicament of the other side, what was the limit of their domestic consensus. He never rejected outright what the Israelis suggested. He would just say that it couldn't be accepted by the other side." "He would never argue directly," recalled still another. "Instead, he would say he was in complete agreement with what you said, and only then would he explain why he opposed what you were saying."

"There was no pressure," said Allon. "You had the feeling that time was unlimited . . . he tried to persuade you." One of the Secretary's top Middle East aides concurred. "I didn't see any pressure in the way he operated. Dipping into the mode as professor-consultant, he shared the traditions, customs, and heritage of many of the people around the table. 'Let me analyze this for you,' he would say. 'If you do this, you will have that . . . If you do not have an agreement, then you will eventually face isolation,' pointing out the alternatives down the road which they themselves were not willing to confront. He'd point out that all of the forces that converged against Israel in 1973 would join together again. He did it not in the sense of using pressure or a threat, but in pointing out reality."

Kissinger was quite accomplished in presenting his version of the Apocalypse. However, one Foreign Ministry official remembered that "Kissinger tended to overplay his hand, to exaggerate in describing the apocalyptic future which Israel faced unless it did exactly what Dr. Kissinger prescribed for it. It was very impressive the first time, less so the second time. He kept repeating it, yet every time the performance was as fascinating as if you heard it for the first time."

The Israeli negotiators even concocted a "Kissinger lexicon," which defined some of his favorite words: "suicidal" meant "difficult"; "impossible" meant "unlikely"; "difficult to get" meant

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"achievable"; "I will see what I can do" meant "I already got that concession long ago."

Apart from his formidable negotiating talents, Kissinger enjoyed one other overriding asset. He represented the United States of America. As Eban pointed out, "There was a unity between the power of the United States and Kissinger's virtuosity. Another American would not have been as successful as he was, and Kissinger would not have been successful if he had represented Luxembourg."

As an American, Kissinger was able to offer the parties compromises that they would not offer each other. In fact, the deadlock in the first Israeli-Egyptian negotiations was broken when both sides said they were more willing to sign an American proposal than one offered by the other side. The sticking points turned out to be somewhat less negotiable than Kissinger anticipated, but he was not concerned how it looked for an American Secretary of State to be shuttling back and forth between two Middle Eastern countries that were haggling over numbers like rug merchants. His view was, if it brought peace, it wouldn't matter how it looked.

At one point, it looked as though Kissinger was shuttling between sickbeds. In Aswan, Sadat was suffering from bronchitis, and in Jerusalem, Golda Meir was suffering from shingles, a painful nerve disease. Kissinger commented, "I guess I make her nervous."

When Ambassador Kenneth Keating greeted Kissinger at the airport, he joked, "You shouldn't try to go to bed with Golda; she has shingles." Ambassador Dinitz quickly added, "You shouldn't try to go to bed with Golda even if she didn't have shingles." For Mrs. Meir, it was no laughing matter.

The first time Kissinger saw Keating in Jerusalem, he told the former New York senator jokingly that he would never again be appointed an ambassador. The reason was simple: "Everywhere you go, a war breaks out." Keating had previously served in New Delhi, and while he was there, an Indo-Pakistani war broke out. His transfer to Israel was followed by the October 1973 war. Keating, the politician turned diplomat, advised Kissinger to give the matter some second — and Machiavellian — thoughts. "Perhaps," he said,

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"there's someplace in the world where you wouldn't mind having a war." Kissinger laughed and said after instant reconsideration, Keating might be reassigned within a week.

When the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement was just about completed, a surprise snowstorm draped a couple of inches of snow over the bright sandstone city of Jerusalem. I imagined that Golda Meir had once said to Kissinger, "It will snow in Jerusalem before I sign an agreement with the Egyptians!" It snowed, and she signed.

The snow infused the city with an unusual beauty. It also paralyzed its operations. The city's hilly streets were virtually impassable. Meetings had to be delayed and their sites changed, all of which slowed down the process of consultations that Kissinger was trying to finish by the end of the day.

The power went out at the King David, and the electric typewriters stopped producing four originals of all documents. Kissinger was screaming and ranting. An emergency generator was wheeled in by Arab workers who didn't speak much English. Communications between them and the staff quickly broke down. Sisco and Tom Pickering, of the Secretariat, plugged the generator into the wrong socket; the only light they produced was a shower of sparks and the generator shorted out. Finally, the secretaries managed to borrow manual typewriters and type as best they could, spurred on by the Germanic voice that kept bellowing, "Where the hell are the documents?"

The manager of the King David, Avraham Weiner, was one of the first people who knew an agreement was imminent besides the negotiators themselves. But not because of the typing. He got a call from the Prime Minister's office "to bring champagne," and as he astutely noted, "Champagne you don't drink for nothing."

The snowstorm caused a special problem for the television reporters. It prevented us from driving to Herzliya, about an hour and fifteen minutes from Jerusalem, so we had to broadcast from the studio in Jerusalem itself, where there were no color TV facilities. Our reports were broadcast in black and white. We were driven to the studio on the snow-covered roads in open jeeps, and we had to thaw out before going on the air.

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The snow had slowed down Kissinger's departure from Jerusalem. Since the roads were unmanageable, the Israelis laid on a train from Jerusalem to the airport. The Israeli Army provided a two-and-a-half-ton truck to carry the Kissinger party's baggage from the King David to the train. But the truck was trapped in an alley behind the hotel by a bakery truck, whose driver had hot bread to deliver and who refused to let the baggage truck out. The Americans drove the bakery truck out of the alley themselves and left it in the street so they could get the baggage to the train on time.

John Maclean of the Chicago *Tribune* wrote poetically of the journey: "As the train passed miles of orange groves, its passengers saw a picture of the waste brought on by war.

"With farmers away at the battlefronts, overripe and rotting oranges made brilliant colored dots on the white carpet of snow. Partridges strutted among the oranges, in their own way as arrogant as victorious soldiers viewing the enemy dead."

On arrival, the train stopped several hundred yards from the airport. The people who were handling the baggage — Chuck Reilly, the State Department officer in charge of travel logistics, his aides, U.S. Embassy employees, and U.S. Marines — had to work in mud up to their knees. The Marines may have trained for the mud, but the Foreign Service officers certainly had not. But neither snow nor mud, et cetera, would keep Henry Kissinger from the punctual completion of his appointed rounds.

The members of the Kissinger party left not only with a feeling of great accomplishment, they also carried away an offbeat gift, the origins of which lay in a telephone call from Joe Sisco to his wife in Washington. Jean Sisco told her shuttling husband that they had been invited to a bar mitzvah by Sheldon Cohen, the former director of the IRS, and she suggested that it would be appropriate to give Cohen's son a gift from Jerusalem. Sisco solicited ideas from Embassy people. One official recommended that he buy a version of the Old Testament reproduced as a series of newspapers. Sisco liked the idea, bought the volume, and took it to the next negotiating session to get Golda Meir and the others to sign it. They all did, and Mrs. Meir began leafing through it, with Dayan kidding her, saying she

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didn't know anything about the Old Testament. The Israeli Prime
Minister held up the start of the session for about fifteen minutes
while she looked through the volume. She was so taken with it that
she gave a copy to all of the negotiators at the final session. They
spent an hour getting everybody's signature in all the copies, with the
Prime Minister reading headlines out loud and Kissinger and Eban
wisecracking about them. Thus, the Old Testament written in news-
paper fashion became a cherished memento of the first Egyptian
shuttle.

At the time of the simultaneous formal signing ceremonies in
Egypt and Israel, Kissinger was literally up in the air. He had care-
fully arranged to be in neither country. After he left, Abba Eban
toasted the agreement by saying, "These were the easiest negotiations
ever conducted by Israel with the United States."

When copies of the agreement had been passed out, Kissinger
sighed to newsmen on his plane, "When you look at it, it's hard to
see where the hours went." An aide familiar with the Great White
Way calculated that there were a hundred miles traveled for every
problem solved.

On the way back to Washington, "the senior American official"
said, "At the moment, Kissinger has no plans to involve himself in
any further 'shuttle diplomacy.'" Oh yeah? One month later, Kiss-
singer was back in the area, trying to arrange disengagement negotia-
tions between Israel and Syria.

Just before we left, I reported that the Arabs had passed the word
that if Kissinger would follow up the Sinai disengagement with a
similar effort involving Syria, the oil embargo would be lifted. When
Kissinger boarded the flight leaving Washington, someone asked him
about the story. "Talk to Valeriani," he replied sarcastically. "He
thinks he's got the best sources in town." One of my colleagues
whispered to me, "He just confirmed your story."

His petulance was not based entirely on the fact that the story had
not come from him. He did not want to appear to be running errands
for the Arabs as the only way to get the oil embargo lifted, especially
since he kept arguing that oil diplomacy and Middle East diplomacy
were separable and indeed separate.

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Embargo or no embargo, the Israelis absolutely refused even to consider negotiations with Syria until they received the list of Israeli POWs held by the Syrians. After stopping in Damascus, Kissinger went on to Jerusalem to see Golda Meir. In a moment of deep emotion, he delivered the list to her. Golda cried. The list contained sixty-three names, and the Israeli Cabinet described itself as "very pleased" to find so many were still alive.

As the Secretary of State left Israel, he was handed a bunch of flowers — dahlias and bird-of-paradise — with a note: "Thank you very much, from the Families of Israeli Prisoners in Syria." Said Kissinger, "The flowers remind us that foreign policy affects human beings."

A week after Kissinger returned to Washington, the oil embargo was lifted.

When the Secretary of State headed back to the Middle East at the end of April 1974, he envisioned a new shuttle of from two to three weeks. And whatever he thought about the Aswan-Jerusalem shuttle, he knew in advance that this one would be difficult. "This is more delicate, more complicated, more uncertain than any other trip I have taken," he said en route on the plane. "This has the potential of being an anguishing week." Week?

In addition to the complicated military issues, the Israeli-Syrian negotiations were burdened with a tremendous psychological handicap: the enormous mistrust between the two countries. And the geographical maneuvering room was limited, since the Golan Heights did not parallel the expanses of the Sinai for making complex territorial arrangements. Besides, the Syrians were extremely reluctant even to discuss making compromises with Israel over territory that they insisted was theirs. As Kissinger pointed out, "For the Syrians to talk to the Israelis at all, it's a tremendous wrench." From the Syrian point of view, the very fact of negotiations was a major concession.

There was another complication. The Israelis had never previously given up any land they had captured and cultivated, which was what they were being asked to do.

Kissinger saw other complicating factors. "The Israelis look at it

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as a military problem,” he said. “We have to put it into the strategic and political context.” This was another variation of the Kissinger theme that almost any agreement between Israel and Syria would be a significant achievement in itself. He thought it was more important politically to have an agreement and maintain the movement away from war than to worry too much about the specific dimension of the agreement or its terms.

On the Syrian side, he said, “Nobody wants to be the first Syrian to negotiate with the Israelis, especially when they don’t know the outcome.” Beyond that, Kissinger pointed out, “the Syrians have no negotiating experience. They have a different concept of what a negotiation is. They want me to do everything by myself. I cannot seriously say what they are asking me to do.” By the time Kissinger left the area, the Syrians had had plenty of negotiating experience. And so had he.

The Israelis had become increasingly anxious about the Secretary's developing friendship with the Arab world, and when he arrived in Tel Aviv to start the shuttle, he tried to put them at ease about the negotiations with Syria: “I have come here not to discuss concessions, but to discuss peace,” he said in his airport statement. “The issue is not pressure, but a lasting peace.”

The Secretary's arrival statement was all business, serious and somber. The light touch was added this time by Foreign Minister Abba Eban: “We have come to Lod to welcome Mrs. Kissinger, who is on her first visit to Israel,” he said. “To our pleasant surprise, we found out that accompanying her is the Secretary of State, and we welcome him, too.” Kissinger reciprocated the humor at a reception. He felt somewhat embarrassed by the Arab men's custom of kissing each other and holding hands, but out of politeness and diplomatic requirement, he had done what was expected of him on his trips to the Middle East. When the subject came up at the reception, Kissinger looked at Israel's foreign minister, then said, “The reason the Israelis don't get better treatment is that Eban doesn't kiss me.”

Kissinger's first order of business in Jerusalem was to introduce Nancy to Golda Meir. Then began the longest overseas mission ever

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for an American Secretary of State — thirty-three days. He flew to Damascus twelve times and to Jerusalem sixteen times, with side trips to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Cyprus.

Sooner or later, almost everybody in the party came down with diarrhea, and the doctor on board ran out of Lomotil, an effective antidiarrhetic. The most popular drink on the shuttle became a "Lomotil cocktail" — a pill and a glass of water. Even Kissinger was afflicted. As his plane was taking off on one of the many flights from Tel Aviv, he saw a giant American C-5-A cargo plane landing, and he quipped, "They're bringing in another shipment of Lomotil for us."

His personal aide, David Gompert, lost 20 pounds on the shuttle, and he was a lean 165-pounder to begin with. Kissinger himself had no such luck.

The State Department doctor on board was Martin Wolfe, an easygoing specialist in exotic internal disorders. Kissinger liked to joke with him. On his first trip to the Middle East, he turned to Wolfe and said, "Are you really a doctor or are you just following me around?" He soon found out Wolfe was really a doctor.

The Israeli press, always on the lookout for sidebar stories during the Kissinger trips, eventually discovered Dr. Wolfe. A Ma'ariv reporter wrote an article, "The Shadow of Dr. Kissinger — Dr. Martin Wolfe." The article included a line saying, "The doctor never travels without large amounts of Lomotil and Demerol in his bag in case Secretary Kissinger has intestinal problems." Dr. Wolfe wrote to the author of the article, pointing out that the drug he carried was Donnatal, not Demerol. Demerol, he explained, was a narcotic and addicting, and, wrote Wolfe, "if I gave Dr. Kissinger as much Demerol as the author claimed, he'd be considered a dope addict and I'd be considered a pusher." After a while, it seemed as though the negotiations were a narcotic and everybody had become an addict.

The gulf between the two countries was immediately apparent. Kissinger took the Israelis a Syrian proposal calling for an Israeli withdrawal from all of the Golan Heights — back to the 1967 lines. The Israelis exploded. "That shows Syria doesn't really want an

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agreement,” they said. “No,” explained Kissinger, trying to soothe them, “that’s just a negotiating position.” “Fine,” snapped Foreign Minister Eban. “Then we’ll draw our disengagement line through downtown Damascus.”

The apprehension about the opening gambits was not eased on the Israeli side by Kissinger's belief that the Israelis would probably have to make the first move since they were the ones who occupied Syrian territory and who would therefore have to do the withdrawing.

Kissinger had predicted beforehand that the negotiations would be “murderously tough.” They were made even tougher when Palestinian terrorists seized an Israeli school at Ma’alot and held the children as hostages, to be exchanged for other Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. Israeli forces stormed the school and freed most of the hostages, but not before the Palestinians killed several of the children. Israel retaliated by bombing Palestinian camps in Lebanon.

During the siege of the school and the subsequent air strikes, the negotiations were suspended, and Kissinger stopped shuttling for a while. With unaccustomed time on his hands in Jerusalem, he had a massage at the hotel. In the small world department, the masseur was Steve Strauss, whose mother went to the same synagogue — Adath Yesharin in Washington Heights, New York — as Kissinger's parents. While Strauss massaged Kissinger, the two men talked about the incident at Ma’alot. Strauss remembers saying, “It’s a pity we have the terrorists in jail so they could be exchanged. We should have killed them all instead.” Kissinger agreed, then quickly amended his view. “That’s what Mrs. Kissinger thinks.”

The subject turned to Arab leaders. Kissinger described Sadat as “very sincere . . . he wants peace.” King Hussein, he said, was “a very reasonable fellow.” At that point, Mrs. Kissinger walked in and added, “He means well,” referring to Hussein. Strauss was not impressed, and he noted acidly, “George Bernard Shaw wrote that the worst thing you can say about somebody is that he means well.”

They also talked about the Secretary’s shuttling. Kissinger asked, “What do you think about peace with Syria?” Strauss replied, “I think every Israeli would be willing to give ten years of his life for

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peace." Kissinger followed up with, "How about ten kilometers?" Strauss answered, "If it was real peace, I think they'd go along with it." "And what about the West Bank?" Kissinger asked. "Not one inch!" thundered Strauss. Kissinger delighted in telling and retelling a shortened version of that conversation for the next few years.

Strauss also said he told Kissinger that if the Secretary kept coming back to Jerusalem, Israel would invoke the Law of Return and draft him into the army. Kissinger borrowed that line as well.

Strauss recalled that Kissinger's first massage was less substantive. "What do I do?" the Secretary asked the masseur. "Undress," said Strauss. Kissinger shot a glance at the Secret Service agent with him. "Do you have to be here through the whole performance?" he asked. "I'll wait outside," the agent said. Kissinger indulged in a bit of gallows humor. "OK," he said. "If he kills me, I'll yell."

After the tragic Ma'alot interlude, the shuttling resumed, and despite a negotiating "breakthrough" — agreement on the location of the disengagement line — the pace did not accelerate. Kissinger noted, "Both sides are negotiating each minor aspect of this accord with the tenacity with which they negotiated the disengagement line."

Bruce van Voorst of *Newsweek* started signing the cables to his editors "the Flying Dutchman," as though doomed to spend eternity roaming the Middle East.

As the mission got longer, patience and tempers got shorter. Kissinger and the Israelis shouted at one another. After one outburst by Mrs. Meir, the Secretary noted that it was he who had to face Syrian President Hafez Assad the next day, not Golda. "And I can tell you," he said, "it's not a pleasant mission."

Much of the haggling focused on the Golan Heights town of Kuneitra. Kissinger argued that no agreement was possible unless the Israelis vacated it. The Israelis were reluctant to do so. The Syrians insisted Israel also give up three surrounding hills as well. Israel adamantly refused. During one of his outbursts, Israeli transcripts show that Kissinger complained that Israel was doling out little pieces of territory as though it were a personal favor to him,

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"as if I were a citizen of Kuneitra, as if I planned to build my house there."

Information Minister Shimon Peres wrote Kissinger a note explaining why "we love the hills," tracing Israel's fondness for strategic heights to Biblical origins: "The Lord is God of the hills, but he is not God of the valleys" (I Kings: 20, 28).

When the negotiations got down to the minutest details, Kissinger complained, "I don't want to become the desk officer for Syria, disputing the number of guns in every square kilometer." But in effect, he did. As Golda Meir pointed out in her memoirs, "There wasn't a road, a house or even a tree there about which he didn't know everything there was to know. As I said to him then, 'With the exception of the former generals who are now members of the Israeli Cabinet, I don't think we have a single minister who knows as much about Kuneitra as you do.' " That had never been one of Kissinger's principal ambitions.

Part of Kissinger's problem in Jerusalem was persuading the Israelis they could make a deal with Assad. The Secretary of State came to like and respect the Syrian President, and he was constantly trying to interpret to the Israelis the logic of Assad's position in a Syrian context.

Four weeks after he had left Washington, Kissinger advised us that four weeks were enough for the Secretary of State to be on the road, and if there were no agreement within the next forty-eight hours, he would suspend the talks for ten days or two weeks while both sides reviewed their positions. But then the White House dropped a bombshell. A spokesman said President Nixon had asked Kissinger to stay as long as necessary to get an agreement. In the words of one of his closest aides, Kissinger was really "pissed off."

The White House announcement undercut his long-standing theory that the United States must not look as though it wanted an agreement even more than the parties did. It fueled speculation that Kissinger was pushing both sides into an agreement in order to give Mr. Nixon a diplomatic victory he could use in his battle to fend off impeachment, since a Syrian-Israeli agreement would pave the way

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for a Nixon visit to the Middle East. Kissinger also worried that he had lost a valuable negotiating tool — the threat of breaking off the talks. He felt the major impact of the White House statement was to make the Syrians more obstinate and therefore to delay the conclusion of the talks by at least forty-eight hours.

When it appeared the mission might end without an agreement despite the White House announcement, Mrs. Meir had a "farewell" luncheon for the Secretary of State and thanked him for his efforts and, most of all, she said, for his "understanding" of Israel's position. Despite the apparent failure of the mission, Kissinger had not lost his sense of humor, as he responded, "The foreign minister many months ago told me that Israel would conduct its negotiations with its characteristic tenacity. I didn't know what he was talking about, or I would not be here . . .

"We have had occasions when, after talking about Kuneitra for several weeks, I sent two members of my team out there to take a look at it, and one of them came back and said, 'Imagine what they're doing now — they're pushing Kuneitra toward the Syrian frontier.' They had seen some bulldozers at work.

"We have gotten to know every hill on the Golan Heights and many other problems, and we have also learned what was to us first an intellectual decision has now been transformed into an emotional necessity; that the progress that has been made must not be lost and that whether or not this last trip to Damascus will bring the agreement that is so close, we will continue the effort until this first step toward a lasting peace will have been concluded . . ."

Despite the weeks of haggling, Kissinger's sense of humor managed to survive in the private sessions as well, but barely. At the Israeli end of the shuttle, bowls of dried fruits and nuts were always plentiful, so much so that there was never enough room on the tables to lay the maps out flat; they were always draped over the fruit and nut bowls. Kissinger, a compulsive nosher, always acquitted himself admirably at the table, and the nuts and fruit became a part of the negotiating folklore among the participants.

At what appeared to be the final session in Jerusalem, Kissinger

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announced that the American delegation had decided to award
prizes to the members of the Israeli team. Rabin won a "prize" for
eating more nuts than anyone else. Peres was commended for his
courtesy in passing plates. Dayan won an award for his artistic
peeling of apples and oranges. Eban won the award for eating the
most nonsalted almonds. But Allon won the prize for eating the
largest number of salted and nonsalted almonds. For other members
of the team, there were awards for the person who always started
eating before the Americans sat down and for those who ate dried
fruits and not nuts. The shuttle had indeed gone on a long time.

When another round trip to Damascus apparently failed to break
the deadlock, Kissinger decided to send Sisco to Syria to be there
when a joint statement was issued to announce the suspension of the
mission. But when Kissinger went to see Prime Minister Meir for the
supposed final time, he wondered aloud if he shouldn't go to Damas-
cus instead of Sisco. Mrs. Meir said she didn't dare ask him to go
back another time, but she pointed out that if Sisco went, there was
surely no hope of keeping the negotiations alive; if the Secretary
went, there would still be some chance of success.

Sisco agreed, and Kissinger decided to take off shortly after word
had gone out to the pilots of his plane that he would spend the night
in Jerusalem. The new word came on extremely short notice.

At the airport, the television reporters raced to put something on
film to satellite to the United States, since there was not enough time
to make arrangements for shipping film out of Damascus. Barrie
Dunsmore of ABC was still in front of the camera when the rear
stairs were wheeled away. If he thought Kissinger would not take off
without him, even at the cost of a minute or two, he was wrong. The
Secretary bounced up the stairs and gave the crew its orders: "We're
going." The front door had already closed and the stairs were just
starting to move away when Dunsmore raced up them and pounded
on the plane. The door opened, swallowed him up, and closed again.
The ABC camera never stopped rolling. It made for an amusing
closing piece on the *ABC Evening News*.

As the plane taxied toward takeoff, one of the crew members

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looked out a window and saw Chuck Rude, the chief steward, riding in a catering truck along the flight line. It was not a serious loss — the food, not Rude.

Even though it was well after midnight when Kissinger returned to Israel, he had sent a message from his plane that he wanted to meet with the Israeli negotiators. The meeting took place at two-thirty in the morning, and Kissinger told them they had a deal.

The agreement was celebrated later at a victory party, carried live on Israeli television, near Prime Minister Meir's office. After the documents were signed, Kissinger kissed her on the cheeks. "Oh," Mrs. Meir said on national television, "I didn't know you kissed women, too." After thirty-three days, it sounded hilarious.

At the airport, Foreign Minister Eban uttered the words the Kissinger party was desperately eager to hear. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "I have an announcement to make. The Secretary of State will not be coming back tonight." But Kissinger wouldn't go along: "Mr. Foreign Minister, knowing how carefully you choose your words, I have to pay particular attention to the insistence with which you point out that I shall not return this evening, and given our past experience of having made so many final departure statements, I just wouldn't count on it completely."

A week later, the cover of *Newsweek* depicted Kissinger in the costume of Superman. Kissinger was wearing a supersmile when the editors gave him the original sketch.

After time out for the Nixon visit to the Middle East and the Arab Summit at Rabat, the Secretary of State turned to a new round of negotiations between Israel and Egypt. He tried to set it up through regular diplomatic channels, but the problems were too complex to deal with at long range, and both sides told him he would have to go back to the area personally to get the talks started.

A new government had taken office in Israel, but it had not taken hold, and a growing sense of uneasiness there clouded the negotiating atmosphere.

Egypt was insisting that Israel vacate the strategically located Mitla and Gidda passes in the Sinai and return the Abu Rods oil

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fields, which the Israelis had been pumping since 1967. In return, Israel demanded from Egypt a formal declaration of nonbelligerency, which Kissinger advised them was not attainable as such.

En route in February 1975, the Secretary took wry note of a certain lack of enthusiasm in Israel for his latest diplomatic exercise. “I think if I told them I wouldn’t be back for three months,” he said, “they wouldn’t send an El Al plane to get me.” When questioned about the possible terms of compromise, he replied pragmatically. It depends, he said, “on what the quid pro quo is. I’m not trying to build a summer house on the Egyptian side of the line, so I’ll consider anything. But I just don’t know.”

“Why,” a reporter wanted to know, “do the Israelis consider a piece of the Sinai so important, why are they so emotional about it, when it’s still far from the 1967 border?” “Talk to Marilyn’s boyfriend about any hill,” advised Kissinger. “You try to get a hill away from Gur and you know you’ve had a struggle.” The reference was to General Mordechai Gur, the Israeli Chief of Staff, who Kissinger thought was a source for Marilyn Berger.

At a dinner marking the end of his visit to Jerusalem, Kissinger discussed the problem facing Israel. He emphasized how difficult it would be to relate the tangible issue of territory to such intangible qualities as the legitimacy and the acceptance of Israel and the desire for peace. He stressed the need for good faith in this round of negotiations, but good faith was not in good supply in Jerusalem then. The Secretary also acknowledged the growing skepticism about him in Israel, and he tried to take the curse off with humor. He noted that members of the political opposition had come to the dinner “to study the depths which human depravity can reach.”

But not only the political opposition was skeptical. The new defense minister, Shimon Peres, had talked publicly about delaying the talks. A reporter asked Kissinger, “What possible motivation could Peres have for trying to delay this when it’s so obvious time is not on their side?” Kissinger’s reply gave some insight into his own domestic position. “If you’re a politician,” he said, “the time you’re interested in is the time in which you’re surviving. Leo Durocher

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said, 'Use your best pitcher today; tomorrow it may rain.' And so
you have a complicated situation in Israel of all these people maneu-
vering."

Some Israeli politicians were even suggesting that it would be
better to revive the Geneva Conference than to negotiate a second
agreement with Egypt. Kissinger interpreted those suggestions as an
attempt to "get through the U.S. elections. They sure as hell don't
want to go to Geneva to settle rapidly." A reporter asked, "Are you
talking of the U.S. elections for a new President — or a new Secre-
tary of State?" "I don't think necessarily either," he said. "I don't
think they are against me, but ambivalent. They will be against
anyone who has to produce movement." Kissinger had gone to the
heart of the Israeli opposition against him.

A couple of weeks later, he climbed aboard his plane at Andrews
Air Force Base to try again "to produce movement" in the Middle
East. He was in high spirits. A reporter asked, "Did you hear that
Elliot Richardson hired a New York *Times* man to be his press
spokesman?" Kissinger shot back, "Not Tony Lewis, I hope."

Another asked, "Was there anything to the Jack Anderson piece
in the *Post* this morning?" It quoted from allegedly classified mate-
rial. Another Kissinger joke: "I wish he'd let me see my secret cables,
because they sure didn't get to me."

What about American contacts with the PLO? (The Israeli report-
ers in Washington and a couple of the Jewish reporters on the plane
never failed to ask about contacts with the PLO or a change in policy
toward the PLO.) "It's all true," Kissinger said with a wicked smile.
"We're going to announce it on Passover so it gets a bigger play."

When the traveling party reached Israel, Foreign Minister Allon
was waiting at the airport with an unusual appeal. He urged news-
men not to "speculate, but to report only what was officially an-
nounced." He might just as well have asked the Israeli Cabinet to
stop arguing.

Protestors were demonstrating in the streets as Kissinger arrived
in Jerusalem. Some of them carried signs reading: MR. KISSINGER,
WE DON'T WANT YOU HERE. "I'm glad to see the demonstrators,"

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he said sarcastically to an aide. "I was afraid they were starting to
like me in Israel." Then he added, "At least they call me Mister."

Prime Minister Rabin had arranged a dinner at his home for Kissinger and the members of the new Israeli negotiating team. They were all prepared for a lengthy siege. As they were going into the dining room, Peres joked, "Mr. Secretary, this is not the Last Supper." "You're telling me?" replied Kissinger.

From a journalist's point of view, it was a curious shuttle. If you listened to the Egyptians, there was no way it could fail. If you listened to the Israelis, there was no way it could succeed. And if you listened to Kissinger, you couldn't be sure, although his use of the word "glacial" to describe the pace of progress was a significant tip-off.

Halfway through the shuttle, the Kissinger plane made history of sorts. It flew directly from Amman to Tel Aviv, over the Jordan River, rather than circling out over the Mediterranean — the first time a plane had been permitted to fly that route. When the plane landed in Tel Aviv, the crowd of waiting Israeli dignitaries was much larger than usual. But they weren't waiting for Henry. As Allon told him, "I hope you know your way to Jerusalem. I'm waiting to welcome President Ephraim Katzir back from his first trip to the United States."

During any negotiating trip to the Middle East, Kissinger tried to avoid staying in Israel on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, since he couldn't get any work done with Israeli officials during the day. He usually tried to get out of town by Friday night. On the first Friday night of the March 1975 shuttle, however, he didn't make it out of town, so he left the next morning, driving through Jerusalem when all the stores and restaurants were closed and all the streets virtually deserted. On the way to the airport, an Israeli official told him the story of a British officer, a veteran of the British mandate over Palestine, who returned to Jerusalem twenty-five years later. It was a Saturday, and the officer looked around in surprise and said, "By Jove, they still haven't lifted the curfew!"

About a week into the shuttle, correspondents were working in

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their rooms at the King David when they heard a knock at the door. When they answered, there stood Nancy Kissinger with her security guards and a couple of Israeli women, inviting them to a fashion show of bikinis in another room of the hotel. Despite the allure of models in bikinis, the reaction of most of the correspondents — including the men — was, who needs it? But since Nancy was obviously making a personal effort, most of us showed up, although it certainly seemed incongruous, sitting in that room watching two shapely Israeli women swirling around in bikinis and matching capes while covering a mission to bring peace to the Middle East.

Meanwhile, back at the negotiations, things were not going well. The main sticking point was Israel's insistence that Egypt make a written and public pledge of nonbelligerency to Israel. The Israelis felt the Egyptians were negotiating with the United States, not with them. As Peres pointed out sardonically, "We are not going to marry the father-in-law. We are going to marry the girl."

As if there weren't enough problems, a reporter asked if the Israelis were ready to agree to some statement about the Palestinians. Kissinger, who constantly griped that the press paid more attention to the Palestinians than anybody else, replied, "I don't believe the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday will accept writing something about the PLO into the agreement." And he underscored his sarcasm with a derisive chuckle.

As the pace slowed down and the chances for an agreement receded, Sisco chimed in at a Kissinger briefing that he thought both sides were reaching the limits of what could be done in the present "framework." "There's no possibility of a deal as the Israelis just defined it," Sisco said. The Secretary teased him about his outspokeness. "Let Sisco talk," he said, "and I'll move my lips." Just before the end, a reporter asked Kissinger if he were "upbeat." "Upbeat is wrong," he replied. "Downbeat is also wrong. I'm just beat." So were we all.

On the second Friday night of the shuttle, Kissinger once again found himself in Israel, this time with the final proposals from Egypt. The Israeli Cabinet took a Sabbath break, and Kissinger decided to

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take a sightseeing break, although the decision was not made until
very late. It was 2:30 A.M. when the Israeli Foreign Ministry got the
word to have helicopters ready for an 8:00 A.M. departure for
Masada, the ancient hilltop fortress overlooking the Dead Sea, where
more than two hundred Jewish fighters and their five hundred sixty
dependents committed suicide on the eve of Passover, A.D. 73, rather
than surrender to the fifteen thousand men of the Roman Tenth
Legion who surrounded them.

The helicopter landing at Masada had a little more suspense than
usual. Only a short time before, former West German Chancellor
Willy Brandt had been flown there, but upon landing, the brakes
hadn't held, and a gust of wind had carried the chopper right to the
edge of a steep precipice, where a restraining wall stopped it. When
we arrived, however, there was no wind; a hot sun blistered the
hilltop, and the temperature flirted with the hundred-degree mark.
Kissinger put on sunglasses, and somebody gave him a two-tone
clownish hat to protect his head. The hat, called a kova tembel hat,
had the words "Shalom, Israel" printed on it.

The Secretary was given the grand tour of Masada by the most
knowledgeable man possible, archaeologist-soldier Yigael Yadin,
who made the original find and supervised the digging. The two men
kept up a steady stream of archaeological chitchat and jokes and
puns. Yadin pointed out that his archaeological team had included
a number of young Israeli women who preferred to work in bikinis
in the intense heat. "I don't know whether they were more interested
in exposing the present or revealing the past," Yadin joked.

He explained that he was not a religious man, but he said he had
to think twice after digging below the floor of a ruin and finding the
pages of a manuscript with only one passage of Ezekiel still legible:
the prediction of the resurrection of the dry bones of Israel. "I
understand," Yadin said to Kissinger, "that's a phrase you often use
yourself." "But I do it sarcastically," replied Kissinger good-
humoredly.

Referring to articles and allegations that Israel had a Masada
complex — that is, that Israel was willing once again to commit

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national suicide rather than make concessions for peace — Yadin argued, “I don't think Israel has a Masada complex. The only Masada complex” — he pointed to a large ruin — “is that complex of buildings.”

He also explained that recruits for Israel's armored brigades are brought to Masada to take their oath of allegiance. And they pledge, three times, that “Masada shall not fall again.” (Israeli paratroopers take their oath at the Wailing Wall.) Speaking professor to professor, Yadin added, “Masada is a reminder and a challenge to remember what should not be.” He went on to point out that King Herod had built the fortress on the rock of Masada not only as a protection against the Jewish people; he was also worried that Cleopatra would persuade Anthony to give her the entire area. “I’m sure — to quote you — that they had ‘constructive talks,’ ” Yadin said to Kissinger. Kissinger shot back, “They never got a framework.” (“Framework” was a favorite Kissinger word during the negotiations. Nobody was ever exactly sure what it meant.)

Yadin was concerned about tiring Kissinger, but the Secretary wanted to see everything. The only way to get to one of the finds, the hanging palace with three terraces, was down a stairway with one hundred fifty steps. Yadin told Kissinger puckishly, “We don't have to do it in one leap. We can do it step by step.”

During the excavations, Yadin said, his team found fifteen broken wine jars with inscriptions in Latin, giving the names of the consuls of that year, 20 B.C., and the name of the owner of the Italian vineyard from which the wine had come, in the Brindisi area. I asked Yadin if 20 B.C. was a good vintage. Ted Koppel recalled a line from *A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum*: “Was the year zero a good year?” But Yadin had an answer. He said he had gone to Rome to talk to scholars to find out if 20 B.C. was a special vintage: There were no records. He concluded that the wine jars provided evidence that Herod had finished building his fortress in that year and had the wine brought there either to celebrate completion of the work or simply to stock the wine cellar.

Yadin had also guided Nancy Kissinger around Masada, and she

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told him Henry had once said that if she did not see Masada, she
would not understand the sum of the problem of the Jewish people.

Yadin later wondered why Kissinger, a Jewish Secretary of State,
had gone to Masada on the day he was waiting for a crucial decision
from the Israeli government. Was it a pilgrimage? he asked himself,
or was it an expression of interest by a scholar or tourist? "Was he
so cunning as to emphasize to the Israelis to beware," Yadin said to
me, "or was he trying to fortify his Jewish conscience? I didn't ask,"
Yadin added, "but the Jewish argument of Masada was very much
in his mind that day. He asked very few questions of an archaeologi-
cal nature."

That night the negotiations collapsed, and unfortunately for Kissinger, the pictures that accompanied the page 1 stories around the world showed him at Masada, wearing that silly, pointed hat with the now-ironic words, "Peace Israel."

During the fateful, final session of the Israeli Cabinet, a courier brought an urgent cable from Washington. It was a message from President Ford, warning of the consequences of failure to reach an agreement. Dinitz read it and passed it on to Rabin. The Prime Minister read it aloud, then angrily told his colleagues, "This is an ultimatum. We cannot bow to an ultimatum. If we give in now, our credibility will be damaged — our credibility with the Arabs, with the United States, and with world Jewry."

During the discussions, Dinitz was called out of the room for an
urgent phone call. The familiar voice with the German accent asked
if the message from Ford had arrived yet. It had. Kissinger urged
that it not be read to the Cabinet. "Too late," said Dinitz. "I didn't
think the meeting would last so long," lamented Kissinger. "It's
Friday night." Dinitz told him the Cabinet was still in session and
was likely to continue for a few more hours. "The mood," Dinitz
said, "is not good." Kissinger said he was going out to eat and asked
Dinitz to call him when it was over. He went back to La Gondola.
The call came before he had finished his dessert. It was all over.

The Secretary went immediately to the Prime Minister's office to
meet with the Israeli negotiating team. According to the Israelis,

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Kissinger said he had nothing to do with the presidential message, but Rabin said he didn't believe him. Kissinger said grimly, "Let's not kid ourselves, we've failed." And he laid out the dire consequences of the failure — for Israel, for the United States, and for the Middle East. The four Kissingers of the Apocalypse were riding again.

As Kissinger lamented the breakdown in the negotiations and discussed the future course of U.S.-Israeli relations as well as Israel's relations with the American Jewish community, two people were deeply moved. One was the Israeli stenotypist, an attractive woman in her forties, who had been born in America and who had gone to live in Israel after marrying an Israeli. She seemed to understand what had happened from both an American and an Israeli perspective. She was almost in tears. And the other person as deeply moved was Kissinger himself.

Before leaving Jerusalem, the Secretary called on Mrs. Meir. He privately longed for the days when she had headed the Israeli negotiating team. In her modest apartment in Ramat Aviv, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Mrs. Meir served tea and consolation as well as homemade cookies. She told him she supported Rabin in his decision, but she pointed out, "Henry, it's still two to one in your favor."

Prime Minister Rabin went personally to the airport to see Kissinger off and to thank him for his efforts. Kissinger, on the verge of tears for the first time in public, said, "This is a sad day for America, which has invested much hope and faith, and we know it is a sad day also for Israel, which needs and wants peace so badly . . . As we leave, we wish the people of Israel all the best."

Kissinger was indeed sad and disappointed, but he and his team were also deeply annoyed and irritated with Israel's stand since the entire negotiating scenario had been closely coordinated with Israel. On the flight home, Kissinger talked about the shuttle that failed:

"The major thing I want to make clear before you all go off is that I am not assessing blame on either side. It was a situation in which the negotiations broke down because neither side had enough maneuvering room to make the concessions that were necessary or to

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make the decisions that were necessary to break the back of this. Or
you could say," Kissinger summed up with ad-libbed eloquence,
"tragedies sometimes occur when both sides, following the laws of
their own nature, produce precisely the consequences they fear
most."

Kissinger suggested that step-by-step diplomacy was finished, and
the United States announced a "reassessment" of its policy in the
Middle East. President Ford had alluded to such a reassessment in
his message to Rabin. The Secretary of State insisted throughout this
period that "in no way are we considering the punishment of any
country." But in Jerusalem, Rabin said, "Reassessment, hell, it's
simply pressure." The reassessment had been recommended in a
National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM), known as "nissim"
for short. (Ironically, *nissim* is the Hebrew word for miracle.)

For the Israelis, the danger of the "reassessment" did not involve
the fundamental question of military aid, which they knew they
would eventually get. The real danger was that the United States
would go public with its own plan for the overall settlement in the
Middle East and then return to the Geneva Peace Conference with
all the Arabs present and leave the Israelis diplomatically isolated.
Much later, Kissinger told newsmen on his plane, "Without the
reassessment, we would have lost the Arabs."

During this period, Matti Golan, the diplomatic correspondent of
*Ha'aretz*, finished his book, *The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger, subtitled Step-by-Step Diplomacy in the Middle East*. It was
clearly a hatchet job, and although Golan had apparently benefited
from the leak of transcripts of negotiating sessions, the book was full
of inaccuracies. On Kissinger's first visit to Jerusalem following its
publication, he frequently noted after saying something to Israeli
officials, "I hope this will not be published in the next book."

Ironically, Kissinger himself was soon accused of some selective
leaking of his own. An article by Edward R. E. Sheehan on Kissinger's step-by-step diplomacy appeared in *Foreign Policy*. It was a
generally favorable account, and it included what appeared to be
verbatim quotes from MemCons — Memoranda of Conversations.

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At the time, the Secretary of State was embroiled in a dispute with a congressional subcommittee over his refusal to provide classified documents about Cyprus, and the timing of Sheehan's article was enormously embarrassing to Kissinger, although substantively flattering.

Two of Sheehan's principal sources were Kissinger aides Roy Atherton and Hal Saunders. They had not actually shown the author classified material, but they had apparently read to him from the MemCons. It was widely assumed that Kissinger had authorized them to do so, even though he claimed he was "thunderstruck" when the material appeared. Atherton, ever loyal, said later that the Secretary of State had never really "focused" on the Sheehan project.

There was nothing magnanimous in Kissinger's subsequent reaction. The Secretary of State officially reprimanded Atherton and Saunders for leaking classified material. Neither man suffered from the reprimand, however, and one State Department veteran even commented afterward, "The Secretary who succeeds Kissinger might think a reprimand from him is really a recommendation."

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Much later, on another Middle East mission, Atherton walked through the press section of the plane on his way to the bathroom. He was wearing a white shirt. Immediately afterward, Saunders walked through, also wearing a white shirt. One of the reporters made some comment about "two peas in a pod." Whereupon Barry Schweid of the AP cracked, "Well, they always did leak together."

Not long after the failure of the Sinai II talks, Senator Henry Jackson called for an end to what he termed "this Mickey Mouse shuttle diplomacy" and said the parties should go to the conference table. Kissinger was asked to comment on that remark before a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He said he understood Jackson's problem of having to campaign for eighteen months (for the presidential nomination). Then he added, "With respect to the last point, of getting the parties around the conference table, during World War Two, somebody suggested that the way to deal with the submarine problem was to heat the ocean and to boil the Axis subs to the surface . . . So the man was asked how to do this, and he said, 'I have given you the idea. The technical implementation is up to you.' "

The parties did not go to the conference table. Instead, cables began arriving from both Cairo and Jerusalem, urging Kissinger, in effect, to pick up where he had left off.

On a flight to Europe, a reporter asked the Secretary if it was "now up to the Israelis to make a decision." "You know the Israelis," he replied knowingly. "All I would need to say now is that I think they have to make a decision, and I guarantee a three-week stalemate."

For a while, Middle East diplomacy went through a new phase of negotiations — between Israel and the United States. Rabin went to Washington. Dinitz flew secretly to the Virgin Islands to confer with the vacationing Secretary of State. And Kissinger and Rabin arranged to cross paths in Germany in the summer of 1975. Their three-hour session in Bonn provided the final impetus for another round of shuttle diplomacy, but there were still difficulties to be overcome, and an American reporter asked the Israeli Prime Minister about them after the meeting. Rabin responded, "I am not going

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to elaborate about details. I believe for the time being, the statements
that have been made are enough. You are going on the plane; you'll
get an opportunity to . . ." Laughter drowned out the rest of his
answer. Kissinger broke in: "It may produce a senior official familiar
with the Middle East." It did.

The combination of the U.S. "reassessment," Egypt's economic
difficulties, the promise of considerable American largesse to Israel,
and the general lack of enthusiasm for reviving the Geneva Peace
Conference soon had Kissinger on the Middle East road once again.

In late August 1975, the last of the Kissinger shuttles got under
way with a fixed deadline: The Secretary had to be at the United
Nations to deliver a speech on September 1. Arriving in Tel Aviv, the
Secretary departed from practice. He read his arrival statement from
a prepared text, leaving nothing to misinterpretation. "I know these
are not easy times for Israel," he said. "I know also that relations
between Israel and the United States have gone through a difficult
period. This has ended, and we have emerged from our dialogue
strengthened in our friendship and determined to pursue common
policies. Peace in the Middle East depends on many factors, and both
sides must make a contribution."

"The difficult period" he referred to had not ended, however.
While Kissinger was speaking at the airport, thousands of protesters
were demonstrating against him in Jerusalem, blocking streets and
snarling rush-hour traffic. Armed soldiers were posted all along the
road from the airport to Jerusalem, but they were just a decoy.

For the sake of security, the Secretary of State was flown by
helicopter from the airport to the soccer field of the YMCA, then
driven the couple of hundred yards to the King David Hotel. The
area around the hotel was blocked off to all but official traffic, and
the usually tight Israeli security for a Kissinger visit was even tighter.

On the night of his arrival, Kissinger and the rest of his party were
invited to a light supper at the Knesset (Parliament), up on a hill
overlooking Jerusalem. The blintzes had been made personally by
Leah Rabin, the wife of the Prime Minister. We left the hotel in a
heavily escorted motorcade that followed a twisting maze of back

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streets and dirt roads to escape the demonstrators, many of whom
carried umbrellas as a silent Chamberlain-like symbol of "Kiss-
singer's sellout." Once the motorcade reached the Knesset, however,
the demonstrators quickly sealed off the dirt roads as well, and the
party was virtually trapped there. Nobody could leave. The police
wouldn't even let the newsmen try to get back to file their reports.
When it was obvious that the demonstrators were not going to go
away, the Israelis regrouped the motorcade and made a run for it.
Some of the protesters did approach the Secretary's limousine, but
Secret Service agents with their .45s out of their holsters made sure
nobody got too close.

The demonstrators were not allowed close to the King David
Hotel either, but they found a way to overcome their strategic disad-
vantage. They shouted anti-Kissinger slogans through bullhorns all
night long, despite the best efforts of the police to shut them up.

The next morning, Kissinger paid a return visit to Yad Vashem,
the memorial to the victims of the Nazi holocaust. No press was
allowed. The visit seemed to be designed to reassure all those demon-
strators that Kissinger was not really selling them out.

In his first meeting with the Israeli negotiating team, Kissinger
made light of the demonstrations. "I'm from Harvard," he reminded
them, "and I'm used to that." Later, in a private session with news-
men, Kissinger spoke more seriously. He claimed again that he was
not bothered by the demonstrators, and he said he felt they would
eventually come to see that a new Sinai agreement was in the best
long-term interest of Israel, that Israel's strategic security would not
be reduced significantly, and that its political position would be
improved.

One demonstrator who did not agree was Menachem Begin, the
leader of the right-wing opposition. When Begin met Kissinger at a
reception in Israel, he pointed out, "I knew you about as long as
Allon did . . . since 1962." And he added with needling courtliness,
"We had a few slight differences of opinion." The differences were
no longer so slight, and Begin organized a mass rally to demonstrate
opposition to a new Sinai agreement.

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For this round of talks, there was a new player on the American side, Ambassador Malcolm Toon, who was assigned to Israel after the death of Ken Keating. Toon had a reputation as a hard-nosed diplomat. He was known for his tough anti-Soviet views and he was not regarded as an Israeli sympathizer. His appointment was seen in Israel as another sign of pressure from Washington.

About an hour after the talks began, Kissinger called a recess. The Israelis were being negative, and the Secretary met with his advisers in a separate room. Stomping up and down, he ranted that "those sons of bitches are out to get me, they're trying to bring me down." He told Toon and Sisco to send a cable to the White House saying he was going home. Toon was baffled. Nobody said anything. Finally, the Ambassador spoke up. "Do you want me to go along with you, or do you want me to tell you you're wrong?" he asked. He conceded that he was the "new boy on the block," but he said he had been there long enough to believe that there would be an agreement and "it will be the agreement you want." Sisco agreed. "Mac's absolutely right . . . you'll get a good agreement." For Toon, it was a quick lesson in Kissinger's modus operandi.

Later in the mission, the Secretary returned earlier than scheduled from Egypt. Toon raced to the airport, arriving just in time to see Kissinger's helicopter taking off. The Ambassador then drove to Jerusalem, following an Israeli official's car, and reached the Prime Minister's office at about the same time as Kissinger. When they all hooked up, Israeli Ambassador Dinitz joked to Kissinger in front of Toon, "Since your Ambassador was not at the airport to greet you, I was on hand to represent him." Kissinger cracked, "You mean, my former Ambassador!"

Apart from the complexities of the negotiation itself, the mission was further complicated throughout by the security considerations. Whenever possible, Kissinger was transported in a helicopter, and the meeting sites were constantly shifted.

At one point, Kissinger ran into General Arik Sharon, the extremely hawkish general who had led the Israeli crossing of the Suez Canal. As they shook hands, Kissinger said, "So this is the most

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dangerous person in the Middle East?” Sharon smiled. Those were
the same words he had used about Kissinger just a few days before.

From the time he began his shuttle, Kissinger's diplomacy and the
demonstrations against him dominated the headlines in Israel, but
relief was on the way. He was soon outglamorized on the domestic
scene when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton flew in for their
first visit to Israel. They also stayed at the King David, but, for a
change, they didn't get the best suite in the house. Kissinger already
had it. Kissinger naturally invited them up for a chat. He knew Liz,
but didn't know Dick. Nancy didn't know either one, but she was
obviously not star-struck. She was in bare feet, a "ratty sweater," and
jeans when Liz and Dick came to call. Liz was dressed to the teeth.

Defense Minister Peres arranged a small dinner party at his apart-
ment in suburban Tel Aviv for the Burtons, who were later going to
drop in on the Kissingers. The Secretary of State reportedly told the
minister of defense, "I understand we are both paying host to the
Burtons this evening. Let's make a deal. You take Dick and I'll take
Liz." Ever the negotiator.

One of the tricks of the negotiations was to allow Israel to claim
one length for the passes and Egypt another, so the Egyptians could
claim that as far as they were concerned, Israel had withdrawn from
the entire length of the passes, while the Israelis could claim they still
retained the eastern ends.

Despite Kissinger's deadline, the amount of time required to get
the two sides to finish all their nitpicking took longer than an-
ticipated, and Kissinger was not able to get back to New York
to deliver his speech to the Special Session of the UN General
Assembly.

As the negotiations went down to the wire, Rabin asked for a
break in the talks so that he, Peres, and Allon could see Kissinger
alone in the Prime Minister's office to discuss some further details.
Although it was 3:00 A.M., Kissinger agreed. As they walked toward
the office, Peres said to the Secretary, "You know, of course, it will
be three against one." "If Sisco were with me," Kissinger rejoined,
"it would be four against one."

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The final session lasted until six in the morning. Allon said later that Kissinger exerted a "spiritual influence more than a political one" at the end. "Everybody else was exhausted and nearly broken," he said. When Kissinger and Allon finally emerged, a handful of reporters was still waiting. "Well, as you can gather," said Kissinger, "there were a few minor technical problems that required attention." That line provoked a lot more laughter from the fatigued newsmen than it should have.

When Allon declined to say whether the Cabinet would approve the draft agreement, a reporter asked, "All of you seem to be exuding nothing but good will this morning. You are certainly not going to recommend that it be turned down, are you?" Allon replied, "Well, let us keep you waiting a little bit longer and you'll find out later — late afternoon." Kissinger interjected, "The keepers are going to come for us any moment anyway."

Another reporter wanted to know if Kissinger was going to bed now, since he looked so energetic. The Secretary got a big laugh with a straight line: "I am thinking of going to bed now." Allon quickly pointed out that Kissinger still looked so vigorous because "he was well treated tonight, you see." When Kissinger returned to the King David, an American in the lobby thanked him. "Any genius could have done it," he replied.

Later that day, more than five months after walking out of the Prime Minister's office, despondent over the breakdown in the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations, Kissinger was back in the same office, toasting the signing of a new agreement with Israeli champagne.

During the long, final session, Lars-Erik Nelson of Reuters was the only traveling correspondent still waiting outside the Prime Minister's office when the meeting finally broke up. Everybody else was back at the King David, sleeping or waiting for Kissinger to return. Other reporters still waiting at the Prime Minister's office included three American Jews living in Israel who represented ABC and the two wire services, AP and UPI. At about half an hour past midnight, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Gad Ranon, came out and said, "We're going to accept it. There are a lot of details they're still

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talking about, but the decision is to accept." And he gave the details about the withdrawal, the warning stations, and so on. The three American expatriates immediately began attacking the agreement as a bad deal, a betrayal of Israel's security. Nelson said, "Thank you." Ranon looked at him and nodded, so Nelson walked away and filed. When he finished, he returned to the waiting area, where the three other newsmen were still arguing. Nelson ended up with a beat of more than an hour — a huge margin for a wire service.

The official who passed word of the Cabinet's readiness to accept had formerly been the press spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. In addition to his Embassy extension, he had a direct-line telephone as well, which most newsmen used to call him. We were all on a first-name basis with him, and we all pronounced it God. Once, Jim Anderson of Westinghouse Broadcasting dialed Ranon's direct number and asked, "Is God there?" A woman's voice at the other end answered, "Mister, I think you want Dial-A-Prayer."

After the agreement was signed, President Ford issued a statement complimenting Kissinger on "one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of this century." En route to Washington, a reporter teased the Secretary of State about the comment, asking Kissinger the historian if he really thought it was "one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of this century"? The answer came from Kissinger the humorist: "Why only this century?"

In a highly unusual gesture, Ford and Vice President Rockefeller were waiting at Andrews Air Force Base to welcome Henry home.

Even before we had left Washington, Kissinger was referring to the new U.S. aid commitment to Israel as a "new order of magnitude." The figures turned out to be staggering — about $2 billion a year, compared to a range of between $300 and $600 million before that, not counting the special $2.2 billion emergency appropriation during the 1973 war. This was clearly a case of Dollar Diplomacy, although Kissinger insisted he had "never seen political concessions for economic aid in any major negotiation."

After Kissinger's return, John Chancellor and I had a two-way

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conversation on the air, and I used the words, "It was the best agreement money could buy." Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz called me the next day to complain — the only direct complaint I ever had on a diplomatic report. Dinitz felt my line reinforced the impression of people who thought that Jews would do anything for money.

After the successful Sinai II shuttle, Kissinger did not return to the Middle East. A bitter reaction throughout the Arab world left Egypt temporarily isolated, and election-year politics left Kissinger — and his Middle East diplomacy — rather isolated as well. So the Middle East marked time while the United States elected a President. American Jews generally supported the challenger, Jimmy Carter, against an incumbent administration that they would soon come to regard as benign for all their differences with it at the time.

In a 1976 speech to the American Jewish Congress, Kissinger jokingly took note of his differences with the American Jewish community — and with some Israelis: "Rabbi Hertzberg has delicately referred to some occasional disagreements — usually directed, if I understand them, not at things that I have done — but of things that I am suspected of planning." The audience was charmed.

"And I realize also," Kissinger said, "that there is a peculiar difficulty of conducting foreign policy vis-à-vis a country of three million people and six million opinions. It came to expression again as Prime Minister Rabin was here, and the Israeli press — which, as all of you know, is a wild group of individualists, united only by a common paranoia — kept asking me what we had achieved. And it presented a very profound dilemma for me, because if I said this was true that we had achieved substantial agreement, I ran the risk of undermining his position . . . But if I indicated that there was some slight possibility of disagreement, which would not have been true, it would only have confirmed all the suspicions with which the journalists came here to begin with."

He got the laughs he was aiming for, but the patter raised once again the intriguing question of Henry Kissinger's Jewishness and how it affected — or did not affect — his Middle East diplomacy. On

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his first overnight visit to Jerusalem, in December 1973, Kissinger went to Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Jews killed by the Nazis. The Israelis take all of their important foreign visitors to the shrine to help them understand what Israel is about.

For Kissinger, the visit had particular relevance. Gideon Hausner, who administers the shrine, had dug out a lot of material from Kissinger's birthplace, Fuerth, where, he said, "the Kissinger name figured prominently." Hausner showed the Secretary books from Fuerth and Frankfurt that listed the names of members of the Kissinger family. Kissinger asked that no press be allowed in while he was visiting Yad Vashem. Outside, a cold hard rain pummeled the hillside memorial. A person who was inside said that Kissinger bowed his head as a cantor sang a mournful chant in front of the eternal flame. He refused to talk about his feelings afterward, not even during the off-the-record session on the plane. But an American official who was present described Kissinger as absolutely silent and almost "paralyzed." "Something traumatic had been disturbed," he said.

Many Jews felt that Kissinger was certainly ambivalent, if not downright defensive, about his own Jewishness. They pointed out that he was sworn in on a Saturday, the Sabbath, that he took his oath of office on a King James version of the Bible, that he worked on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, and that his second wife was a non-Jew. Kissinger's parents made a concession to their own Jewish orthodoxy by attending his swearing-in ceremony on a Saturday, but they did observe the injunction against riding in automobiles on the Sabbath by walking to the White House from their hotel.

Suspicions about Kissinger's Jewishness were reflected in a double-edged joke the Israelis told about him — and themselves — after his first visit to Jerusalem. Golda Meir, the story goes, took Kissinger to the Wailing Wall, one of the holiest of all Jewish religious places. "What do you do here?" asked Kissinger. "You pray," said Golda, "and your prayer goes directly to God." So Kissinger went to the Wailing Wall and prayed, "Let there be peace in the

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Middle East." Then he went back to where Golda was watching and said, "That's wonderful." "I told you so," said Golda. "In fact," said Kissinger, "I'd like to do it again." "Fine," said Golda. "Go right ahead." Kissinger returned to the Wailing Wall and prayed again: "Let there be peace in the Middle East, let Arabs and Jews stop fighting one another and live forever in peace." Then Kissinger went back once more to where Golda was watching. "Marvelous," said Kissinger, "I feel like I'm really getting through." "Do you want to do it again?" asked Golda. "I do," said Kissinger, and he returned to the Wailing Wall to pray: "Let there be peace in the Middle East, let Arabs and Jews stop fighting one another and live peacefully side by side, and to get peace, let the Israelis withdraw from the Sinai and the Golan Heights and the West Bank." At that point, Golda turned to one of her aides and said, "Look at that schmuck — talking to himself beside a pile of stones!"

At the very outset of Kissinger's venture into Middle East diplomacy, there was apprehension in the American Jewish Community that the only place pressure could be applied was in Jerusalem. In response, the Secretary met constantly with prominent American Jews to try to convince them he was acting in Israel's best interests.

He argued that Israel had to exploit the current negotiating opportunities because time was not on its side. Down the road, he said, the Israelis would be at a military disadvantage because they would lose hundreds, even thousands, of men if they had to fight a series of wars. In addition, he constantly pointed out that Israel had become confined to a "diplomatic ghetto" once most countries decided to side with the Arabs because of the influence of oil, and he emphasized that the Israelis had to get out of their international ghetto just as they had escaped from the ghettoes of Europe. At the same time, he made the point that as the Secretary of State of the United States, whatever he thought of his religious background, he kept it to himself.

His aides acknowledged that many Jews found it hard to accept a situation in which a Jewish Secretary of State was welcomed by such bigoted enemies of Israel as King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. But

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Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon pointed out that if Kissinger was to function effectively as a mediator, he had to have the trust of the Arabs as well.

The main concern in Israel was that because of his background, Kissinger would bend over backward to be fair to the Arabs — at Israel's expense — and there was constant debate about whether he could be “trusted.” This concern was expressed facetiously in a cartoon in the Israeli newspaper *Ma'ariv*, which was reprinted in the English-language Jerusalem *Post*. It showed an Israeli soldier racing toward an air-raid shelter, with the caption: “Kissinger's coming.” Kissinger told an Israeli newspaper editor he had been amused by the cartoon, but he also expressed concern over some of the attacks in the Israeli press doubting his impartiality.

Prime Minister Meir once called a group of Israeli editors together and told them in private that she thought they were being unfair to the Secretary of State, and she asked them to moderate their criticism. In her memoirs, Mrs. Meir discounted Kissinger's Jewishness. “I don't think it either aided or hindered him in all those months of negotiations,” she later wrote. “But if he was emotionally involved with us, such an involvement never reflected itself, for one moment, in anything he said to us or did in our behalf.”

Abba Eban felt Kissinger's Jewishness was “part of the intimacy that he and the Israelis had with each other . . . There was a kind of inner understanding, a tragic experience. We weren't going to compromise our security and he wasn't going to be responsible for compromising our security.” Dinitz thought “his Jewishness was a part of his own personality. It had to influence his performance positively because he did have a special feeling for the history of the Jews . . . On the other hand, he often had to be careful and lean over backward so his judgment did not appear to be colored by his faith.” Allon also found him detached from his Jewishness in an analytical way. “I think he did want to be responsive as a man who cared for Israel,” Allon told me, “not only as an American, but as an American Jew. But he wanted to be free to determine what was good or what was bad for Israel, like any other Jew.” Peres was as pragmatic about Kissinger's religion as Kissinger was about everything else. “If

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you have a horse,” Peres said in his epigrammatic way, “you don’t
worry about his color. He is a white horse. If he gallops, he gallops.”

One of the State Department's top Middle East experts had no
doubt that "Kissinger was fundamentally committed to Israel's secu-
rity. He used to cover it up and joke about it, but I think he felt very
deeply his Jewish roots . . . In this relationship, he sometimes would
get very angry at them [the Israelis] just because they were being
shortsighted and were adopting policies which would be destructive
of their long-term prospects." Rabin sensed that "his tendency was
first to put the blame on Israel when Israel didn't do more."

Ironically, Israel, the Jewish state, was the only place in the world
where Kissinger heard ethnic slurs. Demonstrators opposed to any
Israeli pullback jeered at him when he arrived at the Prime Minis-
ter's office during the Syrian shuttle, calling him "Jew-boy." (Presi-
dent Nixon had allegedly used this term in referring to Kissinger,
according to a Washington report on the White House tapes.) Kis-
singer later took note of the irony, but he was deeply hurt. The
jeering reminded him of his boyhood days in Fuerth, and he asked
the Israelis to have it stopped. The demonstrators were moved far-
ther back the next time the Secretary arrived at the Prime Minister's
office.

Kissinger once asked Steve Strauss, the American-born masseur
at the King David, "What do the Israelis think of me?" Strauss
answered, "A lot of them think you have forgotten who you are and
where you came from." Kissinger replied, "I could never forget
that."

This sensitivity was rarely on public display, but Ken Freed of the AP has a vivid recollection of one occasion. President Ford's visit to Poland in 1975 included a wrenching tour of the German death camp at Auschwitz. In the building where Jewish women were housed the night before they were taken to the gas chambers, Freed was overcome. He started to cry and almost collapsed. One person grabbed his elbow and helped him stand. It was Kissinger.

The Secretary did not escape Jewish demonstrators even in his
adopted homeland. Two weeks before the presidential election, as
Kissinger began addressing the Fiftieth Jubilee dinner of the Syna-

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gogue Council of America in New York, he was interrupted by shouting members of the militant Jewish Defense League.

But ten days before Kissinger left office, the American Jewish community paid tribute to the first Jewish Secretary of State at a luncheon that turned into a nostalgia trip. It was given by the conference of presidents of major American Jewish organizations at the Hotel Pierre, where Kissinger had first agreed to serve Richard Nixon. Max Fischer, a wealthy, politically active businessman who happened to be out of the country, sent a telegram reading: "I must mention that as Secretary of State, you created an openness to the Jewish community which they have never had since Israel was established."

Rabbi Alexander Schindler noted,

> He may have been objective, but he was never detached. "How can I, as a Jew, do anything to betray my people?" Many of us have heard him say these words, and these words were not lightly spoken...

> May our appreciation, as we express it, ease that moment of parting which must be difficult for him — even though assuredly there must also be a part of him which senses a release, a gladness to be "rid of us" as well.

> Let's admit it, we were at times exasperating. Even as we will continue to be exasperating, we can do no otherwise.

Perhaps, Dr. Kissinger, you will remember us with exasperation tinged with affection.

As usual, Kissinger eased into his serious remarks with humor. He first expressed his "appreciation for the thoughtfulness of the Presidents' Organization in insuring that every speaker here would have an accent... I have dealt with the Presidents' Organization throughout my term as Secretary of State," he said,

> and I need not tell you that they are composed of a rugged group of individualists, united only by a wary suspiciousness of all forms of government.

I have had also the privilege of dealing with the Israeli Ambassador, who is the Ambassador of the only country in the world where the

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representative in Washington can be criticized for having too close a relationship with the Secretary of State.

Now, as I understand it, the Ambassador has been accused, at the risk of his political career — I would think correctly — as being a friend of mine. All I can tell you is, I don't know how he treats his opponents.

"You and I have gone through a great deal together in recent years," he went on,

and I thought that if this meeting made any sense, it would be if I spoke to you from the heart about some of the considerations on my mind...

I thought it was important for the future of Israel and for the future of the Jewish people, that the actions that the U.S. Government take were not seen to be the result of a special, personal relationship, and that the support we gave Israel reflected not my personal preferences alone, but the basic national interests of the United States, transcending the accident of who might be in office at any particular period.

I have never forgotten that thirteen members of my family died in concentration camps, nor could I ever fail to remember what it was like to live in Nazi Germany as a member of a persecuted minority...

I believe, however, that the relationship of Israel to the United States transcends these personal considerations.

The support for a free and democratic Israel in the Middle East is a moral necessity of our period, to be pursued by every administration, and with a claim to the support of all freedom-loving people all over the world.

And Kissinger mended some fences as well. "Rabbi Schindler pointed out that maybe I am glad to be rid of this group, but I do not believe I will ever be rid of this group." They laughed and applauded. "And frankly, I do not want ever to be rid of this group — though I may retract this in a few months."

Once Kissinger left the scene, he was missed in Israel. Yitzak Rabin gave me this retrospective summing up: "He was a person of great talent. He really penetrated the problem. He knew the limitations, he knew the personalities, he knew the situation, he had a creative mind. It was a real pleasure to work with him."

TEN
Jordan

A Kissinger visit to Jordan cannot be reconstructed on paper. It had to be seen and heard to be appreciated. Of all the countries he visited — almost sixty as Secretary of State — none of them gave him a bigger welcome or a more colorful sendoff. Whenever Kissinger's plane landed or took off from the Amman airport, a band and honor guard of the Arab Legion gave a performance straight out of *Lawrence of Arabia*. After the U.S. and Jordanian national anthems had been played, Kissinger reviewed the honor guard. While the band played a slow waltz — in three-quarter time, naturally, for the British hand-me-down ceremony — the Secretary of State tried to master the little hesitation slide required to stay in step with the music.

In his first effort, Kissinger looked like a hippopotamus on a tightrope. The newsmen and staffers managed to smother their laughter, but they guffawed in recounting "The Kissinger Waltz" afterward. They shared their hilarity with the Secretary himself, who allowed as how he didn't quite have the hang of it.

Once the funny part was over, the musicians uncorked their bag-

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pipes, and the legionnaires passed in review with a snappy heel-and-toe-stepping and arm-swinging panache. The ceremony made for great television pictures, and Kissinger's visits to Jordan probably got a little more air time than they deserved because the pictures were so good.

A member of the Kissinger party commented to Bernie Gwertzman, "It's crazy, isn't it? An Arab King honoring a Jewish-American official, with his British-style band playing its Scottish bagpipes to a desert background."

One reason for the big show may have been that Zaid Rifai, the Prime Minister, was a former student of Professor Kissinger at his Harvard seminar for foreigners. A more important reason was that King Hussein, an annual visitor to Washington, admired and respected Kissinger.

The United States and Jordan had been friends for a long time. The Jordanians had not broken relations with Washington like the rest of the Arabs, and Jordan even got some American military assistance, although not as much as it would have liked.

Hussein, a courageous survivor on the Hashemite throne, was known in the lexicon of American journalistic clichés as the “plucky little king,” PLK for short. (That was like JLP, which was shorthand for “just and lasting peace,” a standard phrase in all arrival and departure statements as well as aftermeal toasts in the Middle East.) During flights into Jordan or waiting periods on the ground, some newsmen occasionally amused themselves by trying to coin substitutes for the PLK cliché. Lars-Erik Nelson of Reuters was a prolific competitor. He came up with “Lilliputian Levantine leader” and “mighty minuscule monarch” and even “hearty half-pint Hashemite.” None of them ever caught on. (It was Nelson who once described the journalist’s craft as “the creative application of clichés.”)

The King was not only plucky. He had a lot of flair and showmanship. On our first visit, he took the controls of a helicopter to fly Kissinger to the airport. The Secretary, who appreciated helicopters only slightly more than camels, plagiarized Abraham Lincoln with his reaction: "If it hadn't been for the honor, I'd just as soon have

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walked." On another visit, Hussein buzzed the airport in his chopper during the farewell ceremony on the ground. Kissinger looked up and waved, obviously pleased he was not in the helicopter.

Hussein, wearing casual sports clothes, also flew Henry and Nancy on a trip to historic Jerash, the ancient Roman stronghold in the Jordanian interior. Kissinger learned about the perils of small talk during that trip. He told newsmen afterward, "The King flew Nancy and me at treetop level. When I said I didn't think he could fly so low, he dropped down even farther." The Secretary laughed in a way that indicated he wouldn't do that again.

As another courtesy to the Secretary of State, Jordanian jet fighters usually escorted his plane out of Jordanian air space.

When Kissinger began his regular tour of the Arab circuit, Amman was still an important stop. Jordan attended the December 1973 Geneva Peace Conference, and Kissinger explored the possibility of arranging negotiations between Jordan and Israel to follow the pattern of Israel's negotiations with Egypt and Syria. But he never managed to get them together, although he kept warning the Israelis that if they didn't deal with Hussein, they were going to end up confronting the Palestine Liberation Organization. And sure enough, at the Arab Summit in Rabat in the fall of 1974, the PLO was named the sole negotiator for the Palestinians. That decision virtually removed Jordan from the active negotiating picture.

Following the Rabat Summit, some reporters became virtually obsessed with the PLO question, and their suspicions that Kissinger would move to make contact with the organization's leaders never abated. At one point, Kissinger complained during an in-flight briefing, "I keep getting badgered about the Palestinians by everybody except the Arabs." Following a visit to Damascus, a reporter wanted to know if Kissinger had met with representatives of the PLO. "Absolutely!" he replied with a straight face. "But not with Yasir Arafat, only with a deputy." The reporter remembered that Kissinger had also answered "Absolutely!" when he was asked if he was getting married, and nobody had paid heed. He pressed the question. The Secretary once again restated the unchanged policy

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that no American officials would meet with PLO representatives until the PLO recognized Israel's existence.

Although Jordan became an "odd man out" in the Middle East negotiating line-up, Kissinger never stopped visiting Amman when he went to the Middle East. And it was not because of the airport ceremonies. He hoped that Hussein could eventually be brought back into the negotiating process. He kept telling the Arabs that they had "a choice between making declarations and making progress" on the Palestinian issue. They chose declarations. At another point, he said waspishly, "They [the PLO] have the mandate. Now let's see what they can do with it." He knew the answer. The Israelis would not deal with the PLO.

Kissinger always thought that Hussein was the most moderate of the Arab leaders and that "Jordan would be the easiest part of the problem to settle if it weren't for the National Religious party" in Israel, which insisted that Israel had a Biblical claim to sovereignty over the West Bank — Judea and Samaria.

And so Kissinger always made a point of seeing Hussein so it wouldn't appear that Jordan had been excluded from the negotiating process, even though Jordan had indeed been excluded. He also wanted to reassure Hussein, and everybody else in the area, of continuing American support.

In addition to staging colorful airport ceremonies, the Jordanians also ferried Kissinger around in a splendid cream-colored Bentley limousine. On the first visit, Kissinger posed grandly beside the limo and said with as much truth as wit, "It's nice to know that some countries know how to treat me in the manner to which I'm accustomed."

When he spent the night in Amman, he usually spent it at a royal guest house. As in so many places where the Kissinger party stayed, the plumbing stopped working one night. Kissinger complained to the Embassy, and administrative officer Perry Linder showed up at about two in the morning. "Who are you?" Kissinger wanted to know after Linder had fixed the plumbing. "A plumber?" "No," said Linder. "I'm a Foreign Service officer attached to the Embassy."

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Despite the lack of a wider audience, Kissinger couldn't resist. "It's nice to meet an FSO who knows what he's doing," he said.

As befitted a king, Hussein also maintained royal quarters in Aqaba, a resort area on the Gulf of Aqaba, and he occasionally invited Kissinger to visit him there. (Kissinger went to Aqaba more than once but never learned how to pronounce it. He called it Akwaba instead of Ah-kaba.) The gulf scenery was enchanting, but the communications were frustrating, if not impossible. Most of the print copy was sent by special Embassy courier to Amman, several hours away, for transmission from there, with an information officer riding shotgun to make sure it was actually sent in reasonably intelligent form. Telephone communications were virtually out of the question, although everybody kept trying and some occasionally got through.

The King had a bowling alley and a pinball machine at the palace in Aqaba, and the Kissinger staff set up the radio-teletype in the pinball machine room. The radio-teletype depended on lines from Amman, and it quickly went "Tilt." It turned out yards of gibberish all night long until the staff gave up and went to the bar. Thereafter, on visits to Aqaba, the staff relied on the plane's communications system and forgot about the palace.

The only line from Aqaba to Amman was a bare wire strung on telephone poles across the desert. But every night, at sundown, birds roosted on the line, disrupting the communications. So royal orders went out, and the next time Kissinger showed up in Aqaba, the Jordanian Army organized a special unit that spent the night chasing the birds off the line. I always wondered if the members of the unit got a special campaign medal, such as a distinguished shooing cross with tailfeather clusters.

It was in another Jordanian town that Kissinger earned the sobriquet "Henry of Arabia." Specifically, it was Petra, the "rose-red city half as old as time." It's one of Jordan's major tourist attractions, and Hussein had urged Kissinger to see it from the time of his first visit. The Secretary's escort for the occasion was Prime Minister Rifai, who showed up for the outing looking indeed like a tourist, wearing a Trumanesque blue and yellow sport shirt. Kissinger was conspicu-

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ously overdressed. He wore a blue business suit, white shirt, and tie.

They flew from Amman to a spot near Petra in a French-designed Alouette helicopter. The only ground approach to the ancient town is through a narrow mile-and-a-half-long gorge set between soaring cliffs. It was strewn with rocks and boulders, and Rifai playfully offered Kissinger his choice of conveyance for the bumpy journey — camel, donkey, or mule. The Secretary rejected all three, so Rifai provided a Land Rover, which wasn't all that much more comfortable, especially since Kissinger was suffering from the "Damascus bug," as he described his malady to newsmen.

Petra is carved out of red sandstone, and it's an archaeological gem, loaded with monuments and tombs from the Nabatean and Roman periods. Kissinger, ever the antiquities buff, peered into the tomb known as Khazneh, or Treasury, so named because of the local belief that a treasure is buried somewhere inside, and despite his leather-soled shoes, he walked up a two-hundred-foot stretch of rocks to the Tomb of the Urn, a huge crumbling structure with two floors of vaults. "It's a great place to visit," he said, "but I wouldn't want to live here."

At a rest house, Rifai made photographic history. He placed a kaffiya, the red-and-white-checked Bedouin headdress worn by Arabs, on Kissinger's head, and the photographers snapped away. Thinking ahead to his next stop, Israel, Kissinger cracked, "It will make a great picture for my arrival tonight." Then he added, "My father [an Orthodox Jew] will really be proud of me."

To spare the Damascus-bugged Kissinger the long, bumpy ride out of Petra, the Jordanians flew a helicopter right into the city. Looking at the surrounding cliffs, Kissinger reworked the line he had used at the airport on an earlier visit. "If it weren't for the honor," he said, "I'd just as soon take a camel."

When he got to Israel that night, a member of the Israeli negotiating team let him know that the headdress had not gone unnoticed. "I watched you on Jordanian television," he said, "and I see that you have become an honorary Arab leader."

Kissinger's unorthodox diplomatic style — and his multilayered

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personality — once came into play in Jordan through the presence of another American diplomat, Dean Brown. Brown was a short, colorful, feisty former Ambassador to Jordan whom Kissinger later designated as a special U.S. representative in war-torn Lebanon. At the State Department, Brown was known as one of Kissinger's few "abominable No men," the few who talked back.

After retiring from the Foreign Service — against Kissinger's wishes — Brown visited Jordan, where he stayed in a private home. Just before leaving Washington, he had been interviewed by a New York *Times* reporter. Brown claimed the reporter distorted what he really said, and the resulting article came out critical of Kissinger, especially on his handling of the Syrians.

While in Jordan, Brown got a call from the Embassy, saying two telegrams had arrived for him from the State Department. The first was from Roy Atherton, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. It said, in effect: The Secretary has asked me to tell you how terribly annoyed he is at you over the interview in the New

Don Wright. *The Miami News*. The New York Times Syndicate

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York Times, how destructive it is of American policy, and he would
like an explanation. The second cable, which was numbered consecu-
tively, meaning it had been sent immediately after the other one, was
marked "Personal for Dean Brown from HAK." It said, in effect:
While you're in Jordan, I'd appreciate it if you would go to see King
Hussein and say certain things — from you, not from me — but you
can hint that we talked about it. And the cable listed the things
Kissinger wanted Brown to say about the Middle East negotiations.

In the Middle East, Kissinger was indeed a "kindred spirit."

Larry Eableburger anecdote on Syria

3. Damascus and the Mosque

Valeriani has used this, so you may not want to, but --
We arrived in Damascus (1st trip) on a Thursday after a
number of days in Egypt and Israel. We were dead tired but
worked until about 2 a.m. Friday and then went to bed. We
did not know that the main Damascus mosque was next door.

At 5 a.m. the muezzin (spelling?)--on record--began
booming out. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed in
my shorts, with my head in my hands as the noise went on and
on. Then, a knock at the door. I opened it, and there you
were in your shorts as you said: "Larry, can't you get them
to stop that?"

Nixon's Arrival in Damascus -- June 1974

From Ralph Albertazzie's book, *The Flying White House*, pp 80-81.

During Nixon's nine-day swing through the Mideast in June 1974, Albertazzie got word from the Air Force advance party in Damascus that the Syrians wanted to provide Nixon with an escort of Russian-made fighter planes. There was some reason for the recommendation. Syria's propaganda machine had only recently ceased spewing vitriol and hatred against America, the champion of Israel. Syria was the hard-line Arab state on Israel's border, the most resistant to Kissinger's diplomatic blandishments for peace. There was concern that some rebellious antiaircraft unit, or some fanatic pilot, inflamed with an Islamic sense of *jehad* (holy war), might try to kill Nixon and thereby save Syria from any peaceful accommodation with Israel. That very morning, even as Nixon prepared to fly to Damascus, leaflets had suddenly appeared throughout the poorer districts of the city: "Was all the war, all the blood that was shed under American bombs, all the dead we suffered, so that Nixon and the prophet of imperialism, Kissinger, could visit Damascus and give us a hundred million dollars?"

Albertazzie, under orders, relayed word back to the advance party in Damascus that President Assad's offer of an escort should be turned down firmly, with thanks. *Air Force One* would come in alone, unattended, following the chartered press planes that would land first. The arrival would be governed, as was customary for civilian aircraft, by the procedures of the International Civil Aviation Organization.

Twenty minutes away from Damascus, with his craft already down to 15,000 feet, Albertazzie got the shock of his life. Four camouflaged jets were closing fast. They were Soviet-built MIGs. "My God!" he said and barked orders to the co-pilot, Lt. Col. Frank Hughes. "Call Damascus and find out what's up."

In the staff section over the wing, Major George Joulwan, Haig's deputy, spotted the planes at almost the same instant. "Look—we've got fighters on the left!"

Another staffer spotted another pair of jets moving in from the right. William Henkel, the trip coordinator, started up toward the cockpit to investigate. He knew a fighter escort was not supposed to be out there.

As Henkel moved into the aisle, Albertazzie suddenly pushed *Air Force One* into a dive, banking sharply. Henkel was tossed across the aisle and fell into a seat next to Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's assistant for national security affairs. Scowcroft was bracing his legs and clutching the arms of his chair. "Wouldn't this be a helluva ending," he was saying softly.

For nearly eight minutes Albertazzie put the big Boeing 707 through an erratic pattern of steep turns and evasive maneuvers while Hughes sought an explanation from the Damascus tower. Kissinger struggled forward to the flight deck. "Albertazzie, what's happening?" Finally assured the Syrian fighters were not hostile—although unscheduled, Albertazzie leveled out the plane and continued his landing approach toward Damascus. On the ground, Syrian Air Force officials apologized for the incident, explaining that the fighters were after all, only students. Kissinger told the Syrian air marshal, "That's worse yet." Nixon, who had remained safely in his suite during the episode, made no mention of it to Albertazzie or the Syrians.

* * *

EIGHT
Syria

Valeriani

President Hafez Assad of Syria still tells visitors he spent so much time with Henry Kissinger that he's the only Arab leader in the Middle East who speaks English with a German accent. It's a line he borrowed from Kissinger himself.

The Secretary of State knew that his strategy in the Middle East could not succeed without Syria being part of the negotiating process. He also recognized early in the game that Assad — and Syria — had become the new repositories of Arab nationalism — and romanticism — following the death of Nasser, and so Kissinger courted Assad assiduously in an effort to neutralize him, if not to proselytize him.

It was not an easy assignment. Syria was easily the most radical of the so-called confrontation states — the Arab countries that bordered on Israel and that actually fought against the Jewish state. Libya and Iraq and Algeria were certainly more radical, but they generally just made a lot of noise in prodding their Arab brothers into combat while they safely remained hundreds of miles away.

Kissinger was not sure exactly what to expect in December 1973, when he became the first American Secretary of State to visit Damas-

Dec 13 - prior visit

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cus since John Foster Dulles twenty years before. Syria had been
diplomatically estranged from the United States since the 1967 war,
and it was unknown diplomatic territory, although it was known to
be a principal base of operations for Palestinian terrorists. A tremen-
dous sense of excitement — and some anxiety — fermented aboard
the Secretary's 707 as it approached the Damascus airport. The
anxiety involved physical as well as political concerns. The plane had
to fly fairly low over a large Palestinian camp during its landing
approach, and the tragedians aboard pointed out that one well-
placed rocket by a PLO "crazy" could make world headlines that
none of us would be around to read. It was not especially comforting
to watch the Secret Service men don bulletproof vests just before
landing.

The newsmen got off first. One agent cracked to John Barton of
the UPI, "We're testing the water." Then, more grimly, he patted
his "attaché case" and said, "If I hit the side of this thing, you hit
the dirt. No questions — because I may not be alive to reply." It all
seems melodramatic in retrospect, but the security people never
made a trip to Damascus without worrying and without feeling
relieved when they left.

Kissinger's arrival was in keeping with the state of relations: aus-
tere. And local newsmen were not allowed to film it. The Secretary
of State was greeted at the foot of the ramp by Abdel Halim Khad-
dam, one of the few foreign ministers in the world whom Kissinger
literally looked down to when he talked. But Khaddam was as fiery
as he was short. As they shook hands, the Secretary said, "Finally,
we have an opportunity to meet." The greeting had a slight bite to
it. Khaddam had boycotted Kissinger's luncheon for Arab foreign
ministers at the United Nations two months before, and he had
stayed away from the Secretary's speech to the General Assembly as
well.

Even before they drove away, the plane was cordoned off by Syrian
soldiers wearing red berets and carrying submachine guns over their
shoulders. On a later visit, one of the soldiers was startled out of his
beret when Kissinger walked up and shook his hand. "I have to

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shake hands with my guardian," he said. Familiarity eventually bred less security, and the cordon was dropped after Kissinger's visits became commonplace.

As is often the case in countries with volatile politics and frequent coups, the airport was located far from the capital, about twenty-three miles away. While a military helicopter hovered overhead, Kissinger and Khaddam left the airport in a motorcade that raced toward Damascus at speeds of up to 90 miles an hour. The entire route was patrolled by plainclothes security agents stationed at fifty-yard intervals.

In making the advance arrangements, American Secret Service agents had said they were concerned that they had no way of identifying the plainclothesmen, all of whom were armed. (Some of the agents felt the biggest threat to Kissinger existed within the ranks of the secret police itself.) The Syrians told the Secret Service agents that none of the roadside sentinels would pick up a gun unless necessary. Each would keep a rifle at his feet. "What happens if we see a sentinel holding a rifle?" the Americans wanted to know. The Syrians, confident of their discipline, replied matter-of-factly, "If you see anyone holding a rifle, shoot him!" The agents never saw anyone holding a rifle.

The most tension-filled part of the drive came just before reaching Damascus, where the road ran right between two large Palestinian camps, one housing refugees who evacuated the Golan Heights during the October War, the other containing about fifty thousand Palestinians who had been refugees much longer.

The Syrians provided cars instead of the usual bus for the traveling newsmen, but for once, a bus might have been preferable. The Syrian drivers, like a playful school of porpoises out on a lark, all seemed eager to outrace each other, and they all kept passing one another at high speed for no good reason — unless they were simply showing off or engaging in a subtle form of intimidation of their passengers.

The combination of the competitive drivers and the Palestinian camps guaranteed that the ride to and from the airport was never a relaxing experience, although it certainly became routine during the thirty-three-day shuttle.

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On that first visit, only the black humorists among us were amused when we later found out that Kissinger had been taken into the city by an alternate route — we were part of a decoy motorcade — and if there had been an attack of any kind, it would probably have been made against us.

For security reasons, Kissinger's car took a different route every time. One night, on the way back to the airport, the motorcade was passing through an exceptionally dark section of the city — there wasn't even a street light — when the road got bumpy; suddenly there was a screech of wheels and the flashing of taillights, and the motorcade jolted to a halt, with some of the cars turning sideways. The driver of the follow-up security car, which tailed the Secretary's limousine as close as a foot away, stopped in a straight line without even nudging the car in front.

Agents Walter Bothe and Charlie Potts leaped out of the follow-up car before it came to a complete stop and raced to take up positions by the doors of Kissinger's car. Bothe carried an Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun; Potts, a Georgia boy, had a shotgun. Bothe could see Kissinger, his eyes wide open, his nose pressed against the glass, trying to look out. The agent figured in his mind that "they" had successfully blockaded the motorcade, and now "they" would come after Kissinger. Sure enough, shapes began to materialize in the darkness.

Inside the limousine there was deathly silence, broken only when Kissinger cracked to Khaddam, "Don't worry, Mr. Foreign Minister, they'll protect you, too."

Bothe could hear voices, and then, from the other side of the car, he heard Potts's slow Georgian drawl, "Y'all better get your asses away from this here car." Bothe, on the other hand, began screaming a string of four-letter and twelve-letter (hyphenated) curses at the shapes in the darkness, warning them to "get the hell out of here."

The shapes turned out to be curious people in the neighborhood who wondered why all the cars were stopped there. They didn't understand Bothe's four-letter words or Potts's drawl, but the tone of voice was unmistakable, so they didn't get too close. Another agent quickly came back and explained that a Syrian policeman had

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hit a bump and his white Honda 450 had gone out from under him, causing everybody to brake.

Kissinger reveled in describing this incident at his next meeting with the Israelis in Jerusalem. The Uzi that Bothe had waved around was prominently featured in the Kissinger version, although the agent's language was diplomatically bowdlerized. The Secretary later kidded Bothe, "You certainly made an enormous contribution to international understanding and good will out there."

Kissinger's purpose in going to Damascus the first time, in addition to reestablishing some kind of American-Syrian rapport, was to persuade the Syrians to endorse a Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East. Unlike Cairo, which was sunny and balmy in December, Damascus was gray and cold, with a political climate to match. The Syrians showed little enthusiasm for the whole negotiating approach, mostly because of internal domestic pressures.

The ruling Ba'ath party did not accept the existence of Israel, and negotiations would amount to de facto recognition. In fact, the only time Israel was mentioned in the press or in broadcast news reports, it was referred to as "southern Syria" or "Occupied Palestine." (When newsmen talked to their home offices from Syria and some other Arab countries, they used a code name for Israel, such as "Dixie," to avoid the risk of having their line cut off by some irate censor.)

Soon after we arrived, the Syrians took the newsmen to see the former Soviet cultural mission, which they said had been destroyed by an Israeli bomb during a raid in what was obviously a residential neighborhood. They had turned the wreckage into an exhibit for visitors. But the ruins of the bombed-out Russians elicited little sympathy from the visiting Americans.

The influence of the French colonization of Syria was immediately apparent as the Secretary of State went to the unimposing "presidential palace," an undistinguished white stucco building near the foot of Mount Kessioun (not far from the spot where Cain is supposed to have slain Abel). It had formerly been an apartment building, but its entrance was now flanked with gendarme shacks painted red, white, and blue — the colors of the *tricoleur*.

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Kissinger quickly found out that Assad had a good sense of humor. The Secretary introduced Joe Sisco to the Syrian President by describing him as "the most powerful man at the State Department." The only reason he brought Sisco along, Kissinger explained, was his concern that if he left him in Washington, he might stage a coup d'état. "One day," Kissinger said, "I arrived at my office in the State Department and found Sisco in there measuring the rugs and the curtains. I figured he was planning to take over."

Assad, who had come to power himself through a coup d'état and then survived longer than any other Syrian President in a country where coups had been epidemic, laughed out loud. He took Kissinger aside and wanted to know, "Is he really a problem for you? Maybe," he suggested, "we can do something about him." Kissinger had to assume that was a joke, and he did. The Kissinger-Assad meetings thereafter usually contained some reference to "Sisco's coup."

At one of the first sessions with the Syrian leaders, Kissinger, still a bachelor, played on his reputation as a "secret swinger." "You lift the oil embargo," he said, "and I'll give you three phone numbers. On second thought, that's no good. You can put the embargo back anytime you want, but if I give you the phone numbers, I can't get them back."

Beyond geopolitics, Kissinger seemed genuinely intrigued and fascinated and amused — and at times exasperated — by Assad, a former Air Force general in his mid-forties. After their first couple of meetings, Kissinger described him as "very intelligent, extremely engaging, with a good sense of humor." We attributed the glowing description to Kissinger's usual practice of characterizing local leaders in the most favorable terms in the hopes that the flattery would find its way into print and then back to the descriptee. And it usually did. But Kissinger's perception came to be shared by most of the traveling party. And more than a year later when Kissinger said on the plane, "I take Assad seriously. He's extraordinarily clever," nobody disagreed with him.

Kissinger also found that Assad "makes these turns in conversations that are weird." His conclusion was based on an early experience, when he was discussing with the Syrian President the draft of

["Syria", "293", "a letter of invitation to the participants in the Geneva Peace Confer-
ence. Giving a tactical nod to the Syrians' reputation for toughness,
Kissinger said to Assad, with gentle sarcasm, \"I don't want you to\nconcede too quickly, since the Syrians have a reputation for being\neasy negotiators and agreeing right away.\"", "He then explained the Israelis wanted any reference to Palestinians taken out. \"Okay,\" said Assad. The Israelis also wanted to postpone a ceremonial role for the UN. \"Okay,\" said Assad. And so it went, paragraph by paragraph. An American official who was there said afterward of Kissinger, \"I could tell by his eyes, he was saying, 'Jesus Christ, what is this?' \"", "After they had breezed through the entire letter and Kissinger was ready to go, Assad spoke up. \"I only have trouble with one sentence,\" he said. \"What's that?\" asked Kissinger. \"The one that says we've agreed to attend the conference,\" said Assad. \"We haven't.\" Kissinger, according to one participant, \"about fell out of his chair.\"", "The Secretary eventually came to learn that the Syrians could be full of other surprising twists and turns. As he once put it flying into Damascus, \"I don't know what's going to happen here, but I'm sure whatever it is, it will be a little bit nuts!\"", "Just before one of the early visits, he got a message from the American mission saying that the only thing certain about the schedule was that there would be no dinner. But as his plane was approaching the Syrian capital, he got another message from the American mission saying the only certainty about the planning was a dinner with the foreign minister.", "While Syria was a country where prophecy was usually unrewarding, it was generally safe to predict that a Kissinger-Assad meeting would not be brief. The first one was startling in its length. American officials, expecting a two-hour meeting, arranged to have the American reporters and other members of the traveling party taken to the plane with that time frame in mind.", "We newsmen were accustomed to long waits, but none of us was prepared for that December night at the Damascus airport. After the first hour, the routine griping intensified into serious griping. After the second hour, the griping turned to amusement. Then it dissolved"]

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into booziness. After four hours, it became the subject for jokes and
wild speculation. And then we began to wonder if we weren't missing
a story, like the kidnaping of Henry Kissinger in Damascus. Even
some of his aides began showing anxiety as the delay stretched out.
He finally showed up five hours later than originally expected. Mes-
sages had been sent hourly to Amman, where King Hussein was
waiting to have dinner with him. (They finally ate after midnight.)

More than a dozen of the Syrian plainclothesmen who guarded the
route to the airport were taken to the hospital for treatment of
exposure and chill. And the long delay produced a long string of
now-forgotten lines about kidnaping. The subject came up again
during a conversation on the flight back to Washington. Glancing at
his agents nearby, Kissinger made light of the security problem. "I'll
probably get knocked off on the way in from Andrews," he said.

A later experience in Damascus was no joking matter. Kissinger
was planning to visit one of the world's largest mosques, the historic
Omayad Mosque in the teeming, covered *souk* (marketplace) in the
morning, following a round of talks with President Assad. But when
the talks again ran longer than expected, Kissinger postponed his
visit to the mosque so as not to delay too much his departure for
Israel. The postponement may have kept him alive. Palestinian ex-
tremists had planned to assassinate him on his way to the mosque;
American officials learned of the plot after Kissinger left. For secu-
rity reasons, they never did say how they found out about it or who
was involved.

Later, commenting on the extension of his talks with the Syrian
President, Kissinger said, "Assad may have saved my life." How-
ever, if the Syrians knew about the plot, they never told the Ameri-
cans directly.

One reason the Kissinger-Assad talks ran so long was the Secre-
tary of State's professorial instinct. While he found Assad highly
intelligent, he also found him limited in his knowledge of the world
in general and the United States in particular. And so he frequently
reverted to his role as the Harvard professor who directed a seminar
on national security affairs for foreign leaders. He sometimes spent

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the first hour of a meeting discussing American constitutional pro-
cesses or current diplomatic events, in effect, tutoring Assad about
the world beyond Syria's rather parochial society. He even briefed
him on the strategic arms limitation talks with the Russians, Syria's
chief arms supplier. During one of the SALT briefings, Assad play-
fully proposed that the two superpowers spread their weapons
around the Middle East in an even-handed way. "We'll store them
for both of you," he joked.

Assad occasionally lectured on his own, tutoring Kissinger in
Arab history from a perspective he had not shared before. Assad
spoke from the point of view of a soldier, which he was. And Kis-
singer spoke from the point of view of a historian, which he was.

During the long Syrian-Israeli shuttle, the seminars occasionally
provided relief at times of deadlock. An American official who sat
in on these sessions said the two men "enjoyed each other," and he
was sure that Assad deliberately prolonged the meetings because
Kissinger was such an enjoyable, eye-opening experience for him in
a section of the world where mind expansion is associated principally
with hashish. Assad was also fascinated by Kissinger's accounts
— often humorous — of his meetings with the Israelis. One Ameri-
can participant feels certain Assad "discounted them to some extent.
But he just enjoyed them." Assad later told author Edward Sheehan
that Kissinger used to refer to Golda Meir as "Miss Israel" and "the
beauty of Jerusalem."

Kissinger also came to appreciate Assad's straightforwardness. He
once told us, with amusement, "Where Sadat understood you have
to fuzz things up because nobody could live with the answer, Assad
says frankly, 'You're fuzzing things up!'"

State Department Arabists believe that one reason Kissinger got
along so well in Damascus was that "the Syrians were flattered that
Kissinger, someone of extraordinary importance and intellectual ca-
pacity, came to see them." For his part, Kissinger found Assad to
be "a challenging interlocutor." His assessment may have derived in
part from his determination — some felt it was compulsion —
to win over adversaries.

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Whatever Kissinger's sentiments about Assad, he was not charmed by Assad's capital city, and his first night in Damascus was almost his last. The Secretary of State and his top aides were put up in a government guest house near the presidential palace. Their quarters were cramped and inconvenient for communications; Kissinger had already acquired a taste for more grandeur as well as instantaneous communications. Sleeping was difficult because light flooded into the bedroom through a transom. A secretary was summoned from the small American mission in Damascus and told to block out the light. She improvised with some black velvet she had bought to make a skirt. But Kissinger wasn't going to get much sleep anyway.

At the crack of dawn, a tremendous blast of noise rattled through the guest house. Aide Larry Eagleburger bolted out of bed. He had gone to sleep only about three hours earlier, when the Kissinger-Assad talks of that night had finally ended. When the shock wore off and his head had cleared, Eagleburger realized that the "noise" was coming from a nearby mosque where the muezzin was calling faithful Moslems to prayer at the first light of day. As he sat on the side of his bed in a room reverberating with the sound of prayer, Eagleburger heard a knock on his door. He opened it. "There," he remembers, "stood this short, fat German, pleading, 'Can't you get them to stop that?' "

When Kissinger saw Assad later that morning, he informed the Syrian President, "I'm looking for a less demanding religion."

The Secret Service agents were even more pleased that Kissinger did not spend more nights in Syria, and not only for security reasons. The Syrians thought nothing of assigning two or even three agents to the same room — with only one bed. The other one or two agents had to sleep in a chair.

Before he first went to Damascus, Kissinger had promised the Israelis that he would try to get a list of the Israeli prisoners held since the October War. Based on previous experience, the Israelis were extremely concerned about the fate of the POWs in Syrian hands. When Kissinger was told beforehand that a top Syrian official

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had said it would be a "big mistake" to raise the question of Israeli POWs on his first visit to Damascus, he dismissed the advice. "I've made mistakes before," he said.

Kissinger knew the Israelis wouldn't even consider negotiating with the Syrians until they got the list, and he knew the Syrians were opposed to providing the list unless they got something in return. But he was still not prepared for Assad's comeback when he said, "If you give me the list, I'm sure you can start negotiations with the Israelis." Assad looked him in the eye and remarked, "Then I'll have two problems!" The humorous reply gave Kissinger new insight into the difficulty of arranging Syrian-Israeli negotiations, and he later told us that the Syrian leader who negotiated with the Israelis "is not going to be a hero in Syria."

Kissinger came away from his first visit to Damascus with the impression that the Syrians were "pretty tough guys," but he felt his talks had been "extremely amiable" and that he had made a good beginning. The follow-up was good as well, and Kissinger felt encouraged by the Syrian reaction to the first disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel.

During that first trip to Syria, reports popped up frequently in periodicals back home that he was about to marry Nancy. He brushed them aside by joking that if he married anybody, it would be Joe Sisco, since he was spending most of his nights with him.

The reports finally came true in March 1974, just after the Secretary returned from Moscow. On the flight to Washington, a reporter asked him point-blank if he was getting married, and he replied, "Absolutely!" Everybody laughed and left it at that. But he meant it, and it was true. Exceptional candor from Henry Kissinger had proven too much to cope with.

The Secretary of State honeymooned in Acapulco, and a month later he hit the road with his new wife. That next trip was no honeymoon. It was the shuttle between Israel and Syria that lasted thirty-three days. As Kissinger said later, "Just writing arrival statements is a full-time job." He also quickly found out that on his

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arrival, he was no longer the only attraction. He lamented, not seriously, "Since I started taking Nancy along, nobody photographs me anymore."

The Secretary of State found the experience of negotiating with the Syrians a unique one. When his traveling doctor asked him if he needed anything during this period, he had two favorite replies: (1) "What do I do about foaming at the mouth?" (2) "Yes, you can get me a straitjacket."

One account of a negotiating session claimed that a shirtsleeved Kissinger stormed out of the meeting in Damascus and shouted, to no one in particular, "How can anybody do business with these people?" before he returned to the negotiations. In more diplomatic language, Kissinger once told an in-flight briefing, after Khaddam constantly reopened issues he thought had already been agreed on, "Meetings with the Syrians are always dramatic."

During another on-plane briefing, he described Assad's unusual negotiating technique. "In my experience with Assad," he said, "he jumps over the precipice and hopes to find a tree to hold on to." He told Assad the same thing, elaborating with a joke about a man who falls off a cliff and grabs a tree on the way down. He prays for help. A voice comes from above, saying, "If you have faith, just let go and you will be saved." The man, wild-eyed, raises his head and pleads, "Is there anybody else up there?" The Syrians cracked up.

When Kissinger resorted to humor in negotiations, he liked to have a foil for his jokes. In Damascus, his favorite foil was Khaddam, who thought of Israelis the same way Saladin thought of the Crusaders. To break the tension of a difficult session, Kissinger once proposed, "I'll take Khaddam back to Israel, and Golda will cook dinner for him." When the Syrians insisted that the Israelis had to accept one of the negotiating points, Kissinger jibed, "I'll take Khaddam back with me. He can convince Golda." And he teased the foreign minister with lines like, "Golda would like his pretty blue eyes."

Like everything else on that shuttle, the Kissinger lines were a little overworked by the end of the thirty-three days.

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The Secretary also teased his Arabic interpreter, Isa Sabbagh, a serious, stern-faced Arab with a graying Vandyke beard, although he never did pronounce his first name right (it's pronounced Eesa, but Kissinger always called him Eye-sa). "Are you translating the same jokes I'm telling you?" he used to say. Then he'd add, "I don't care if you are or not — you get the desired reaction." He once told the Syrians, "He's the one person I cannot fire. He knows too much about me already." Sabbagh said he was "thinking about joining the ranks of your biographers." "That's what worries me," Kissinger shot back.

Kissinger's use of humor apparently encouraged Assad to respond in kind. When the Secretary took to Damascus an Israeli proposal for dividing the Golan Heights town of Kuneitra into three parts, one for them, one for the Syrians, and one for the UN, Assad reacted with heavy sarcasm. "Quick," he said, "bring me a pen so I can sign it immediately."

Kissinger had explained to the Israelis that there would be no agreement unless they withdrew from Kuneitra, and they eventually agreed to do so, although they insisted on maintaining control of three surrounding hills. "If they like hills so much," Assad remarked sardonically, "we'll build them some farther back." It was the kind of line Kissinger would appreciate.

The proposals that flew back and forth with Kissinger often infuriated the other side. In a burst of evenhandedness on board his plane, he once pointed out that "you can't have successful negotiations unless both sides are equally unhappy." He then looked down at his watch and joked, "It's six o'clock. I only have six hours left to make the Syrians furious."

Neither side wanted to make the kind of compromises necessary to reach an agreement. As the negotiations dragged on, Kissinger noted wearily, "I'm dealing with two countries that do not specialize in making concessions." Syria, like Israel, had not had much experience as an independent state. Syria became independent only in 1941 and then had to fight off French efforts to reestablish control following World War II.

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A couple of weeks into the shuttle, the Soviet Union announced that Foreign Minister Gromyko would be visiting Syria. Kissinger teased Assad about the visit, saying he expected Gromyko to be wined and dined, after which the two governments would issue a statement criticizing the United States and "interim" settlements in the Middle East, and then Syria would get a new supply of Soviet warplanes.

Kissinger agreed to meet with Gromyko, but not in Damascus; they compromised on nearby Cyprus. The Soviets, who were co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference, disliked Kissinger's solo diplomacy in the Middle East, and they wanted a piece of the negotiating action. The Secretary felt the Russians had not gone out of their way to help the negotiating process up till then, but he knew they were able to cause problems if they really wanted to, and in order to avoid unnecessary complications, he was willing to give them a more visible — if not more active — role. At their meeting in Nicosia, Gromyko complained noisily about Israel's negotiating stance and demanded that the Israelis retreat from at least half of the Golan Heights. Kissinger casually advised the Soviet foreign minister that *he* should go to Jerusalem the next day and tell the Israelis what to do. Gromyko returned to Moscow instead.

As early as the third trip of the shuttle, American officials began talking about the possibility of suspending the mission to give each side more time to reconsider its position. Kissinger complained that "everything is a guerrilla war on each side. At some point, it's counterproductive for me to stay. I don't want any winners and losers. I don't think the Syrians have done a great deal of staff work. Many just freeze when figures are raised."

Assad began expanding his delegation, a move Kissinger viewed as positive since it widened the area of responsibility for decisions and also exposed more high-ranking Syrian officials to Kissinger's persuasiveness. On the other hand, it slowed down the pace of the talks by reinforcing Assad's tendency to haggle over every point. Unlike Sadat, he did not make the major decisions and leave the details to subordinates. As Kissinger later pointed out, "Every issue

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was contested with a tenacity that I find unequaled in my experience." And he also griped, "It's no longer a question of concept, but of haggling."

After seven round trips, Kissinger again considered suspending the mission, but, he said, "both sides are pleading with me to go on. There's no question that without our being here, this wouldn't get done. There's no way of getting this done by diplomatic channels." And he added, "If I had to do it again, I'd do it again the same way."

Meanwhile, back at the State Department, officials were kept busy juggling Kissinger's calendar, and meetings with the Spanish foreign minister, the Japanese foreign minister, a Saudi Arabian economic delegation, and the foreign ministers of the Central Treaty Organization all had to be rescheduled, some of them for the third and fourth times.

Three times Kissinger was ready to read an announcement suspending the negotiations without an agreement. But each time one side or the other found "a tree to hang on to" after jumping over the cliff. One weary staffer climbed aboard the plane one day and said out loud, "I've been thinking about hijacking this plane. To Washington," he added wistfully.

When it appeared there would not be an agreement, potential farewell lunches were scheduled in Israel and in Syria. In Damascus, the site was the comfortable U.S. residence in the Abu Rumaneh diplomatic section of the city. The idea of such a luncheon was unprecedented, since government ministers would not ordinarily attend a social function in the residence of a country with which Syria did not have diplomatic relations. It was a sign of improving American-Syrian relations if not negotiating progress.

One of the guests was Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas, a forty-four-year-old major general who looked thirty-five. He was a handsome, debonair officer with a chest full of medals and considerable personal appeal. Kissinger, producing some of his own charm, said, "I don't know what the seating arrangement is, but don't let him sit next to my wife."

In his toast, Kissinger carried his humorous gibes at Khaddam

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from the private meetings into the public forum. "When I first met the foreign minister," he said, "his natural affection for anything American nevertheless had to give way to some suspicion engendered by six years of isolation." He turned to the shuttle: "It has been a difficult negotiation, eased somewhat by the natural conciliateness of both sides." On a more serious note, he promised to keep working for a Syrian-Israeli agreement, which he predicted would eventually be reached, and he praised Syria's "constructive" role.

After twelve round trips between Israel and Syria, Kissinger still did not have a disengagement agreement. His diplomatic road show had turned into a melodrama with no final act, and he found himself in precisely the trap he had hoped to avoid — shuttling back and forth between the two countries so often that it appeared he was being exploited by both sides. He stayed out there so long and changed his deadline for ending the talks so often that it did indeed seem, as some critics charged, that the United States wanted a disengagement agreement even more than the two countries directly involved.

Kissinger's fifty-first birthday began during a session with Assad that lasted five hours, until three in the morning. But he didn't get the present he wanted most, although a still optimistic staffer said later in the day, "We've ordered the cake — a map of the Syrian-Israeli border and one word: Peace!"

After the meeting with Assad, the Secretary conferred with his negotiating team. They concluded the talks were hopelessly deadlocked. A cable to that effect was sent to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Another cable went to American officials in Israel, instructing them to have the Secretary's bags packed for the return trip to Washington. And a statement announcing suspension of the negotiations was drafted.

After a few hours' sleep, Kissinger went back to see Assad alone to tell him he was going home. They spent about an hour working on the draft of the communiqué announcing the breakdown in the talks. Finally, as they were walking toward the door of Assad's office, the Syrian President said, "What a tragedy that this should fail after

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all this effort." Kissinger quickly picked up on that. "Does it really
have to?" he asked. "Well," said Assad, "what is necessary, what
could we do?" "Forget some minor points and concentrate on basic
issues," advised Kissinger. "I have the rest of the day free . . ."

Another cable went to Mrs. Meir, canceling the birthday luncheon
she had planned for Kissinger, and several hours of intensive talk
with Assad followed. But the pieces of an agreement still did not fall
into place. As Kissinger left Syria on his birthday, he said, "This is
my last visit to Damascus on this trip," and he announced that Sisco
would return the next day to discuss what might happen next.

Despite the announcement, there was a small birthday celebration
on the flight to Israel anyway, and the traveling newsmen gave him
a card hand-drawn by UPI's Dick Growald. It read: "By a vote of
8-6, we wish you a happy birthday." We also gave him a poster,
which showed a smiling, waving Kissinger above the caption: "I am
Henry. Fly me to Damascus." It was supposed to read, "I'm Henry,"
as a takeoff on the National Airline ads then, but the Israeli printer
was more literal than we anticipated. (Also more expensive, since we
had to pay double-overtime for the rush job. Each of us also kept a
copy of the poster, which Kissinger eventually signed individually.

"Fly me to Damascus" turned out to be an apt phrase for Kissinger's thinking when he returned to Israel. While talking to Mrs. Meir, he decided to give the mission one more try. He returned to Damascus himself instead of sending Sisco, and shuttle number thirteen proved to be the lucky one. The draft announcement of suspension became a historic curiosity piece. The cameraman who filmed the Kissinger-Assad meetings came out of the final session with a clue to the successful conclusion. For the first time, he said, Assad looked directly at the camera and smiled.

One of the measures that finally sealed the agreement was the
stationing of a United Nations force in a buffer zone on the Golan
Heights. The Israelis insisted that the name of the force include the
word "disengagement," while the Syrians demanded it include the
word "observer." And thus was born the United Nations Disengage-
ment Observer Force, which became UNDOF, the world's newest

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acronym. Kissinger was enormously amused by the haggling between the two sides over the name. "It has taken five thousand years," he mused, "for civilization and the mind of man to devise something called UNDOF." And he chuckled deeply.

Whenever the time for Syrian renewal of the mandate for UNDOF came up, Kissinger used to think back to the Syrians' negotiating technique and point out that one way to guarantee that they would not approve a renewal until the last minute was to try to press them on the issue.

As he boarded his plane to leave Damascus for the last time, he shook hands with the chief of the American mission in Syria, Tom Scotes, and whispered, "It takes a Jew and a Greek to get the Middle East straightened out." He ended the thirty-third day of his mission at the same time he had ended most of the previous thirty-two — at 2:00 A.M. — but now at Andrews Air Force Base.

Following Kissinger's return, Sisco and I appeared on the *Today* program, and Sisco was asked how a typical shuttling day had gone. He replied, "In this particular instance, as Dick will verify, an early morning arising, meeting with the Israelis in the morning, an hour's ride to the airport, an hour's flight to Damascus, a half-hour's ride again to the guest house where we met, long meetings — six to eight hours — with President Assad, the same flight back to Damascus, usually a midnight meeting with the Israeli officials, winding up about two in the morning, and then our work began in terms of preparation for the next day." He added, "Don't ask me what we did with our spare time."

A member of the plane's crew recalled that he had watched farmers in the rolling hills outside of Tel Aviv "cut, rake, and bale the wheat, plow the ground, and plant new seed. The wheat was beginning to come up when he finished."

The disengagement agreement paved the way for President Nixon to include Syria in his tour of the Arab circuit in the summer of '74, and although diplomatic relations had been resumed in a practical sense, the formal announcement was timed to the presidential trip.

The President's flight into Damascus was eventful. As the presi-

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dential jet was approaching the capital, Kissinger aide Larry Eagleburger was writing a note to the Secretary about the scenario at the airport. He had just scribbled, "You will get off the plane right after Mrs. Nixon," when the plane suddenly went into turns and dives. Up front, the pilot, Ralph Albertazzi, had seen blips on his radar, and he took major evasive action.

Since this was the President's plane, Eagleburger was not concerned about the sudden motion. But then he looked at Kissinger's NSC aide, Brent Scowcroft, an Air Force general. He was "white as a sheet." Kissinger, who was not especially fond of flying in the first place, was gripping a table so hard his knuckles were white. Eagleburger suddenly figured it might be serious. But although he was in a state of near-panic at that point, he resumed writing the note to Kissinger as soon as the plane leveled off. "You will get off the plane right after Mrs. Nixon ... I hope." The blips turned out to be Syrian escorts that the Americans had not known about beforehand.

The visit was brief. The all-military welcoming ceremony at the airport was correct and restrained, in keeping with the lack of formal diplomatic relations. Following the airport ceremonies, Assad and Nixon drove off at high speed in the U.S. President's limousine. The motorcade raced through downtown Damascus, with the two presidents standing up and waving to a crowd that was friendly, demonstrative, and fairly large, considering the long period of estrangement between the two countries and the fact that, for security reasons, the route had not been publicized beforehand.

Once relations were officially restored, career officer Richard Murphy became the first American Ambassador in Damascus since 1967. Murphy was a hard worker who didn't allow for a lot of time waiting at an airport, even for the Secretary of State. But he cut it too close on one visit when Kissinger's plane got in twenty minutes early. As Kissinger got off and spotted only Khaddam, he said to the Syrian foreign minister, "I'm very happy to see you. My own Ambassador has broken relations with me." But there were no recriminations.

Kissinger's visit to Damascus following the change in American presidents was highlighted by one of the most bizarre incidents of all

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of his travels. The Secretary had just said his good-byes in Egypt, and as the plane was taxiing onto the runway at the Cairo airport, he was standing in the aisle in the rear section, chatting with newsmen. Suddenly, there was a loud noise in the rear galley. It sounded like a loud slap, and I was sure it was a shot. The stewards yelled for a doctor. Agents jumped from their seats and rushed Kissinger to his compartment, where they made him lie flat as they quickly drew the shades on all the windows. Dr. Martin Wolfe dashed to the rear and found one of Kissinger's bodyguards, Walter Bothe, lying in the galley, bleeding from his head and arm. "Don't worry about me," the agent said. "Check the Secretary!"

The rest of us sat in our seats, stunned and bewildered, wondering what had happened. Other agents quickly found out. As Bothe was getting a cup of coffee in the galley, an Uzi submachine gun had fallen from an overhead rack and gone off. The bullet grazed Bothe's nearly bald head and clipped his arm. Another inch, and it would have been bye-bye, Bothe. The agents also found a bullethole in the ceiling of the plane, but the pilot said it would not cause a problem for the plane's pressurization system or endanger the aircraft in any other way. So we took off half an hour late, with Bothe lying in a bunk over the rear seats, his head and arm bandaged.

"You were damned lucky," Kissinger told him, adding, "We were all lucky. He's the only one of my original agents left. He's a sweet-heart." (Bothe became one of Kissinger's private bodyguards after the Secretary left office.) Once Kissinger was assured that Bothe was all right, his humor took over. After take off, he needled Bothe, "Walter, I know you want to get off my detail, but you didn't have to shoot yourself to do it."

Later, Bill Sprague of the Voice of America commented that the incident had been designed to demonstrate how fast fourteen newsmen could jump from a sitting position into the overhead racks.

In addition to grazing Bothe's arm and head, which required six stitches, the bullet also put a hole through one of Joe Sisco's suits, which had been hanging in a plastic bag in the rear. When a staffer who didn't like Sisco heard about it, he remarked sardonically, "Too bad he wasn't in it."

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A couple of days later, Bothe, his head still swathed in bandages, was something of a minor celebrity as he stood guard in the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. He was even asked for his autograph. And he commented, "The trouble was, it took all of my hair with it."

Later at a dinner party in Washington, a guest nodded in the direction of Bothe and asked, "Is that the one?" Kissinger replied, with mock pride, "I'm the only person in the world who would have as a bodyguard a man who, when he decides to shoot himself at a distance of six inches, misses."

In Damascus, in the wake of Nixon's resignation, Kissinger found the conspiratorially minded President of Syria questioning the Secretary's own survival. Assad reasoned that Nixon had been removed from office not only because of his own corruption, but also because of pressure by the "Jewish-Zionist conspiracy," which wanted Ford to become President because of his long, unwavering record of staunch support for Israel. And since Kissinger had been a major factor in shaping the Nixon administration's policy in the Middle East, how long could the Secretary of State himself manage to hold on? Kissinger assured him that the new President had the utmost confidence in the old Secretary of State.

A few months later, when American policy in Southeast Asia was beginning to disintegrate, Kissinger again found Assad in a rather conspiratorial mood. The Syrian President cited the example of Cambodia as evidence that the Arabs could play a waiting game in the Middle East — anticipating that American support for Israel would eventually erode as well.

During this March 1975 visit, Assad held one of his rare news conferences for the traveling press. Despite their frequent presence in his capital during the shuttle, the American reporters had never met with the Syrian President. We eventually asked Kissinger to intervene on our behalf. He did, and Assad finally sat down with us, playing with his worry beads as he skillfully answered questions through an interpreter. The visit was taking place during a break in the negotiations between Israel and Egypt on the second disengagement agreement in the Sinai, and Assad stressed Syria's opposition

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to another separate deal. He preferred a return to the Geneva Con-
ference.

He also got in a subtle dig at the Egyptians when a reporter asked if Syria would sign a peace treaty with the Israelis if they agreed to withdraw from the Golan Heights. Assad noted that the pertinent UN resolutions on Middle East negotiations did not refer to peace treaties, and he added, "We are not enamored of peace treaties — nor of those of friendship. What is important is to move toward a condition of peace and not just to sign treaties."

Assad, the leader of a country constantly portrayed as a client of the Soviet Union, was craftily pointing out that it was Egypt, not Syria, that had signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Russians. When he met privately with Kissinger later, he wanted to know if we had understood his needling point. Kissinger assured him that he had educated us well in the perception of such nuances.

It did not require an appreciation for nuances, however, to under-
stand Assad's reaction when Israel and Egypt finally reached a sec-
ond agreement. He charged that step-by-step diplomacy was really
"foot-by-foot diplomacy," and he wanted no more of it. He even
turned down overtures for a meeting with President Ford.

Just prior to one of Kissinger's last visits to Damascus, a reporter wanted to know what would happen. "It will be a warm, construc-tive, and useful talk," he joked, "and I'll be glad to be out of it."

After the August 1975 trip, he was "out of it," although I doubt
that "glad" described his true feelings.

NINE

Saudi Arabia

As the Secretary of State's plane was approaching Riyadh for the first time, Kissinger walked to the rear compartment and scanned the fourteen reporters sitting there, seven of whom were Jewish. "Do we have any WASPs on board?" he asked. Saudi Arabia's reputation for anti-Semitism underlay the joking tone in his voice.

Only a couple of reporters raised their hands. "WASPs," Kissinger cracked, "are an endangered species." And he suggested it would be a good idea to "let Keatley get off the plane first." The *Wall Street Journal*'s Bob Keatley, a studious blond reporter in his late thirties, looked more WASP-ish than any other member of the press corps. After leaving Saudi Arabia, Kissinger took to teasing the Jewish reporters on board by "threatening" to make them get off first on the next trip to Riyadh. One of them finally complained he was overworking the joke, and he stopped.

Even though Saudi Arabia was not a direct participant in the Middle East negotiations, Kissinger included it on his itinerary on every swing through the area. The Saudis had a lot of influence because of their oil and their money, and Kissinger carefully nurtured U.S. relations with the Desert Kingdom.

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Kissinger also regarded King Faisal, like President Sadat, as the kind of moderate Arab leader he hoped would benefit by negotiated agreements in the Middle East at the expense of the more radical elements.

Kissinger knew what to expect in Riyadh, more or less. Before setting out on his first Middle East expedition, he had conferred with a former American Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who told him, "You have an obstacle to overcome. King Faisal is anti-Jewish. He always says, 'How can I be anti-Semitic? We are a Semitic people.' But he is anti-Jewish." The Secretary of State came to find that out for himself. One of the Jewish reporters once asked Kissinger privately, "Does Faisal hate only Zionists, or does he hate Jews?" Kissinger didn't hesitate: "He hates Jews!"

The former Ambassador had also told Kissinger not to be "put off by Faisal's dour visage and manner," and he advised him that "whenever Faisal was thinking of a rejoinder, he picked lint off his robe." Above all, he cautioned Kissinger that whatever he said to Faisal, he should be prepared to stand by it and to fulfill any promise, since Faisal attached great importance to a man's word.

So Kissinger was prepared, but not fully, for their first meeting. The King's visage and manner were indeed dour as the two men posed for pictures, sitting side by side on white and gold upholstered armchairs beneath dazzling chandeliers in the state room of the Saudi monarch's Al-Mazaar Palace on the outskirts of the desert capital. The King wore flowing black robes and a white Bedouin headdress. Kissinger was in his blue business suit with a blue polkadot tie. Outside, aged Bedouin retainers in ankle-length greatcoats, armed with golden scimitars and curved daggers and with bandoliers slung across their chests, stood watch.

The Secretary of State leaned across the small marble-topped table between him and the King and through an interpreter conveyed greetings from President Nixon.

The King noted, gratuitously, "These days he has a lot of problems." That was the small talk, but it had a large meaning. The Saudis didn't know much or care about Watergate, but they were

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concerned that the President was in so much trouble that he might
not be able to follow through on whatever Kissinger was trying
to do.

The fact that Kissinger was Jewish did not spare him from Faisal's
routine diatribe against Jews, Zionism, and Israel. Faisal's line was
quite simple: The Jews were out to take over the world. It was they
who had created the Communist Party, and in the parts of the world
they did not already control, they infiltrated governments and held
high positions. He also pointed out that Golda Meir had been born
in Russia (Kiev) as a way of underlining the link between commu-
nism, Zionism, and Israel.

One of his aides recalls that "Kissinger was sardonically amused
by the comments Faisal and the Saudis would make about Zionism,
Israel, and the Jews, not offended."

Kissinger's sardonic amusement was reflected in the anecdotes he
told afterward. During one of Faisal's lectures about the Zionists,
Kissinger diplomatically tried to change the subject. "I saw a paint-
ing at the far end of a long, smoke-filled hall, and I asked, 'Is that
a landscape of Saudi Arabia? I really do like the desert.' The King
replied, 'That's the Holy Oasis.' It was," Kissinger said, "like going
into a Catholic home and seeing the Virgin Mary on the wall and
saying, 'Is that your aunt?' That remark probably caused a three-
month extension in the oil embargo."

An Israeli Cabinet minister recalls Kissinger telling him about his
first meeting with Faisal. The Saudi monarch greeted him by saying
he was receiving him not as a Jewish person but as a human being.
Kissinger said he responded by saying, "Some of my best friends are
human beings."

But it's more likely that the reported repartee reflects what he
thought about saying rather than what he actually said, since none
of Kissinger's aides remembers his ever cracking a joke with Faisal.
In fact, "dour" went with Faisal as automatically as King did, and
the Saudi monarch was one leader whom Kissinger never character-
ized as having "a good sense of humor."

Kissinger also liked to recount his first dinner with Faisal. Ambas-

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sador Jim Akins, who looked as Saudi as the locals with his clipped
beard and mustache and stern visage, told the Secretary beforehand
not to expect a "serious discussion." During the meal, Faisal again
launched into his anti-Zionist tirade, delivering the whole litany, full
of the familiar vitriol. Afterward, Kissinger asked Akins, in amused
amazement, "Is that your idea of light dinner conversation? I'd hate
to see what you consider an argument." Akins cautioned, "It will get
worse." And it did.

However, as Kissinger's visits to Riyadh became regular, the
King's tirades subsided, and the Secretary was able to report to the
Israelis with great glee, "I'm getting along with Faisal so well now
that he's picking lint off *my* clothes!"

Kissinger had found out at first hand what was already in his
briefing books, that Faisal never made the distinction between Zion-
ism as a political movement and the Jews as a people. For Faisal and
the Saudis, it took some adjustment in their mind set to deal with
an American Secretary of State who happened to be a Jew, since to
them Jews were Zionists and enemies.

The delicacy of dealing with the Saudis was made clear from the
outset. Joe Sisco had peeled off from the Kissinger party in Egypt
and gone to Israel, planning to rejoin the group in Saudi Arabia. It
was not easy to get from Tel Aviv to Riyadh; complicated connec-
tions were necessary for commercial travelers. Since Sisco flew in a
U.S. government plane, the Saudis allowed it to land without asking
where it had come from.

The anti-Zionist diatribes notwithstanding, Kissinger was well
received in Saudi Arabia. His acceptance was signaled symbolically
at the end of his first visit in November 1973. The Saudi foreign
minister, Omar Saqqaf, a sad-faced man with a short gray beard and
soulful eyes, clasped the Secretary's hand as they walked from the
airport lounge to the plane. This common gesture in the Arab world
was a new experience for Kissinger — and for Kissinger-watchers.

Saqqaf told reporters, "We found that the man was sincere." The
reticent, soft-spoken foreign minister had clearly come under the
Kissinger spell, and his farewell statement during a later Kissinger

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visit was inordinately long-winded. Saqqaf concluded, "I have always been ... a man of few words; I don't know what has happened to me; maybe the presence of our friend is inspiring. Let me end by wishing him every success, bon voyage, and we welcome him anytime."

In advance of any visit to Riyadh, Kissinger always used to point out that Saudi Arabia, apart from its vast oil riches, was the guardian of orthodox Islamic faith and exercised a great deal of moral influence with the Arab countries involved in the Middle East negotiations. In his more flippant moods, he would also point out, "You'd be surprised at how much moral influence sixty-five billion dollars a year can give you."

Kissinger knew that Faisal was an important figure from an economic as well as a diplomatic point of view, and in typical fashion, he wanted to get out the word that he had a favorable impression of the Saudi King. After the first couple of meetings, he told newsmen on the plane, "King Faisal always has the face of the desert. He's a very serious man. He takes words seriously and he chooses words seriously. He's intelligent ... he understands the world in which he lives, the world in which he must succeed."

Kissinger also described Faisal as "quite a savvy guy." But the savviness was extremely limited, and Kissinger later observed, "He's a feudal lord, a skillful manipulator within the Arab context." He added at another point, "If it weren't for his money, Faisal would be a feudal ruler of a rickety kingdom, like the King of Libya."

The traveling newsmen were quickly exposed to some of the more "rickety" parts of the kingdom. A little old red bus that would have been a museum piece anywhere else was waiting at the airport to haul us around. The first place it hauled us was the Sahari Palace, a hostelry that resembled the first part of its name considerably more than the second. When Kissinger heard about our accommodations, he cracked, "The Sahari Palace? Is it part of the Las Vegas chain?" It was a long way from Las Vegas — in every conceivable way.

When we first walked into the Sahari Palace, we passed through an elongated lobby to an area where the press room had been set up,

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and we got our first indication of what the international telephone
service was going to be like when we heard Juan de Onis of the New
York *Times* roaring into a telephone. A reporter nearing his deadline
raced to a typewriter and started writing, then quickly turned to de
Onis and asked in an annoyed voice, "Do you have to shout so loud?"
De Onis turned from the phone and shouted even louder, "No,
goddamnit, I'm just doing this because I enjoy it." And then he
resumed shouting into the telephone.

The two telephones available for international service were con-
connected by land to the small Emirate of Bahrain on the Persian Gulf,
where the calls were then relayed to the United States. The wait was
unpredictably long, and the print journalists who didn't trust the
Telex operators had to spend an extraordinary amount of time dic-
tating stories to their home offices because the quality of the line was
so poor. The broadcasters simply went through the motions. They
were lucky to be heard, let alone understood, at the other end.

Bernie Gwertzman of the New York *Times*, who has a rather large
chest, not to say stomach, cavity, bellowed his story until the walls
reverberated; one reporter heard him on the third floor of the hotel.
But back came the voice of a New York dictationist, "Can you speak
up, please?"

As bad as the telephone service was, it did at least exist. When the
members of the Kissinger advance team arrived in Riyadh to make
the arrangements for his first visit, they toured the royal guest house
and found it quite satisfactory; it had a total of four telephones,
including one in the bathroom. However, they were not hooked up
to anything. The advance team installed its own telephone communi-
cations to the Embassy and to the plane.

On that first visit, the telephones and the automobiles almost
seemed out of place in Riyadh. Visiting Saudi Arabia was somewhat
like stepping into a time capsule and being transported back to the
sixteenth century. Bedouins traded in live hawks on street corners.
The few women who appeared on the streets at all were always
completely veiled. The outdoor toilets in "downtown" Riyadh were
primitive.

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At the Royal Palace, one of the most striking figures was the royal executioner, a leathery old man with creases in his dark chocolate face. He wore an Arab headdress and a bandolier slung over his robe. When he smiled broadly for the photography buffs, he revealed a mouth rich in gold. And he carried a huge scimitar. When we were told that thieves still had their hands cut off for stealing, we wondered what the punishment was for adultery.

But a few months and billions of petrodollars later, the cityscape began to change. The impact of oil wealth on the communications system in particular was quite audible. The Saudis bought equipment to hook into the global satellite network, and they hired outside experts to train Telex and telephone operators. The communications in Saudi Arabia went from the worst on the Arab circuit to the best before Kissinger was through shuttling.

Not only the telephone system became more sophisticated. So did the personnel. On all of our visits, our calls were placed by young Saudi men wearing kaffiyas and galabias. Some of them wore Pierre Cardin jackets over the robes. But on one visit after the new system was installed, the chief of the telephone bookers came out looking Western-style cool. He wore trousers with a jeans cut, a sport shirt, a baggy sweater, and shades above the requisite mustache and goatee.

While we were chatting with him, he wondered if somebody would be willing to make a few dollars by bringing a video cassette player on his next visit, since the customs service didn't check the Kissinger party. Why, we wondered back, did he want a video cassette player in Saudi Arabia? Well, he explained, on his last trip to the States, he had bought video cassettes of *Deep Throat* and *The Girl Behind the Green Door* and had smuggled them into the country, only to find out there were no video cassette players in Saudi Arabia, and he had no way of viewing them. We did not see him on subsequent trips.

There were, of course, no X-rated movies in Saudi Arabia. There were no movies of any kind. And certainly no gambling or drinking in public. This puritanism was an obvious target for Kissinger's worldly humor. Just before landing in Riyadh on one trip, he came to the rear of the plane, and with a malevolent grin on his face, he

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asked, "So, what are you going to do tonight?" And he chuckled
because he knew the answer.

During all eleven visits to Saudi Arabia, Kissinger always made
the point that he was trying to keep Middle East diplomacy separate
from oil diplomacy. And during all eleven visits, the members of the
traveling press were skeptical. (He probably thought we were my-
OPEC about the subject.) At one point, the skepticism had a physical
manifestation. On the flight into Saudi Arabia in March 1974, Kis-
singer advised the traveling press not to expect any "breakthrough"
on the oil embargo, although an OPEC meeting at which the em-
bargo was scheduled to be lifted was less than a week away. Kis-
singer didn't want to take any chances on rocking the OPEC boat
by having more oil stories appear in American newspapers.

Two reporters decided to commemorate the lack of a "break-
through" with a sardonic reminder. They went to a nearby gas
station and bought two quarts of oil for about one third the price in
the United States. (As for gasoline, it was only 12 cents a gallon.) On
the plane, they gave a quart to Kissinger as a symbol of his non-oil
policy.

However, oil diplomacy and Middle East politics were kept sepa-
rate in one significant regard. After the October War, the Saudis
— and other Arabs — tried to link a phased relaxation of the oil
embargo to a phased Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab terri-
tory. Kissinger regarded that formula as a form of blackmail, since
the implication was that the United States would be rewarded with
more oil as it pressured Israel to give up more territory. He felt that
such an arrangement would subvert the American role as middle-
man, and he warned the Arabs that they needed a peace conference
to get their land back more than the United States needed Arab oil.

He also kept explaining over and over that the primary thrust of
American oil diplomacy was toward organizing the consuming coun-
tries, and therefore there was no real reason to discuss oil prices in
depth with the Saudis. In short, he had a very weak energy hand to
play, and the Saudis knew it.

In reality, so did Kissinger, but virtually every time he left Riyadh,

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he claimed he had assurances from the Saudis that they opposed any increase in the price of oil. But the price invariably went up at the next meeting of OPEC. Our skepticism eventually produced a standard joke on the flights out of Saudi Arabia. Kissinger would say the Saudis told him they were against a price rise, and a reporter would ask, "So, how much is the price going up?"

It wasn't long before Kissinger himself was joking about it. While sightseeing in Egypt in the fall of 1974, he visited the Papyrus Institute, a museum on a barge anchored in the Nile. Its founder-director was giving him the guided tour, showing him how papyrus was made and explaining that a large supply of the raw material had recently been discovered in the Sudan. Papyrus, he explained, is a perennial plant and would be available long after the world's oil supply had been depleted. "Just don't raise the prices," Kissinger joked. "My nerves are not good."

After a visit to Taif, where the Saudi royal family was spending the summer, Kissinger was asked about his discussions on oil.

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"They're going to lower prices," he said, anticipating the reporters' jibes. "Listen," he went on, "I made a joke to an Arab minister a few weeks ago, saying, 'Every time you talk about lowering oil prices, they go up.' And he took it as a statement of our policy." He was vastly amused.

Oil diplomacy was complicated early in 1975 by intimations of American military intervention in Middle East oil fields. The intimations came in oblique comments by Kissinger and Ford, and the resulting controversy was intensified by an article in *Harper's* suggesting that the only way to break the oil producers' cartel was through the use of military force. The Saudis thought the magazine article had been officially inspired, and they were visibly exercised when Kissinger went to see them in March, during a break in the unsuccessful negotiations between Egypt and Israel. The Israelis were then demanding the Egyptians make a public pledge of nonbellicerency, which they refused to do.

Before leaving, Kissinger offered public reassurance to the Saudis. "I would like to state categorically here," he said at the airport, "that our relationship with Saudi Arabia is based on friendship and cooperation in which threats, military or otherwise, play no part, and we base our relationship on cooperation and not on confrontation." The acting foreign minister, Sheik Ahmad Zaki Yamani, replied, "We heard the official views about the fantasies of the newspapers, and articles written by certain groups of writers, and we are pleased they are now in public. We thank you for your efforts and wish you best of luck."

On board the plane, a reporter congratulated Kissinger on achieving a nonbelligerency statement with Saudi Arabia. "You guys are a cynical bunch," Kissinger said not unkindly, "and a bit paranoid." He went on to say that in his private talks with the Saudis, he did not retract his statement that military force would have to be considered in the event the industrialized Western world faced "actual strangulation" because of an oil shortage. "But don't repeat this, for God's sake," Kissinger implored. "This is just for your understanding."

Acting Foreign Minister Yamani was actually the minister of

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petroleum. He was bright, articulate, Harvard-educated, and charismatic, which meant he got a lot of press attention. For some reason, Kissinger seemed to resent Yamani's popularity. He claimed to like Yamani personally, but he always put him down, emphasizing that when he met the members of the royal family at receptions — and there were a lot of royal members — Yamani was always "somewhere in the back of the room" or "far down the list."

Kissinger himself was originally suspect in the eyes of the Saudis, and one of Ambassador Jim Akins's primary jobs was to dispel the Saudis' suspicions, to persuade them that Kissinger was an honorable man who was not blindly pro-Israel because he was Jewish and who would put American interests above Israeli interests. But Akins and Kissinger were themselves bound to clash. Both were extremely intelligent, headstrong men, with oversized egos, but Kissinger had the higher rank, and Akins did not survive the Kissinger era at the State Department. Eventually he lost his post in Saudi Arabia and resigned from the Foreign Service.

During Kissinger's first meeting with Faisal, Joe Sisco told Akins that the Ambassador didn't have to attend the session. "Fine," said Akins. "My resignation will be typed by the time the meeting is over. . . . How can you expect me, having just presented my credentials, to function if you keep me out?" Akins then raised the matter with Kissinger, who said, "Of course, come along."

Another of Akins's prime assignments was to work toward getting the oil embargo ended. The Saudis were essential to the effectiveness of the boycott, and they were influential in determining when it would be removed. One American diplomat recalls that some of the State Department's instructions on this were "hysterical." Akins was told to tell the Saudis that the State Department would release some documents "proving duplicity" if they didn't lift the embargo. Akins passed along this threat in an informal way to Foreign Minister Saqqaf, saying he just wanted to give an indication of the mood in Washington, but adding that he was going to try to get his instructions changed. Saqqaf counterwarned that if the department released embarrassing documents, so would the Saudis. The matter ended there since Akins's instructions were indeed changed. But Saqqaf

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later told the American Ambassador that the issue had been raised with King Faisal, and the Saudi King said that if the United States had carried out its threat, he would have broken relations.

In February 1974, Akins had a meeting with Faisal at which the Saudi leader seemed responsive to American requests for an end to the embargo. Akins sent a top-secret cable to Washington about Faisal's attitude. When, a few days later, the cable appeared in a newspaper column, the Saudis taunted the American Ambassador, asking, "What will we see in the papers next?" American officials who were in the Saudi capital at the time felt the leak caused the embargo to be prolonged.

The end of the embargo had been forecast publicly by the Nixon administration so many times — unsuccessfully — that an exasperated Kissinger finally said during one of his on-plane briefings, "The best way to get the goddamned embargo lifted is for me to say on the record, 'I don't give a good goddamn if they lift the embargo or play cards on March tenth.'" He said that off the record. And they did lift the embargo on March 10, although they kept on playing the price card for several months to come.

As other Arabists had done, Akins also tried to impress upon Kissinger the importance of personal relations in Saudi Arabia. He told the Secretary about Foreign Minister Saqqaf's disappointment with Joseph Luns, the former foreign minister of the Netherlands who became Secretary-General of NATO. At the time of the October War, Saqqaf thought he had a close relationship to Luns. But when the Dutch diplomat made a speech that Saqqaf considered anti-Arab, the Saudi foreign minister was stunned. Saqqaf later told Akins that Holland was singled out among the nations of Europe as a target of the oil embargo specifically because of that speech.

Akins was eventually replaced in Riyadh by veteran diplomat William Porter, who, ironically, shared some of his predecessor's feelings about the Secretary. After Porter retired, he gave a pointed speech in Washington, in which he said, "It is worth repeating that the U.S. government should cease sending high-level envoys to the Middle East before the home front is properly prepared. Every gov-

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ernment in that region keeps close tabs on the congressional state of
mind concerning Middle East developments. As one of the more
outspoken foreign ministers put it to an American visitor who re-
peated several times that he had the President's complete confidence
and backing, 'Yes, yes, Mr. Secretary, I'm sure of it. But you haven't
said anything about Congress.'

"The arrivals of our special envoys in small countries are rather splendid occasions," Porter went on, "but alas, they do not always improve our image. The planners of such expeditions seem to have little regard for the natural modesty which is the hallmark of our people outside of Washington. Their idea seems to be to overwhelm our hosts with officials, mountains of baggage, and the noise of scores of walkie-talkies.

"We've seen planes disgorge as many as ninety-five people, includ-
ing the head man, his administrative team, his substantive team, his
blood plasma team, his security guards, the gentlepersons of the
media, and of course, the caterers."

Although Porter certainly had Kissinger in mind, he was thinking
more of Treasury Secretary William Simon, who reportedly had once
insisted that his entourage for an overseas trip include at least one
more person than Kissinger's.

While Kissinger's entourage remained large, his clout with the
Saudi government eventually diminished, especially after the death
of Saqqaf and the assassination of Faisal. In fact, some otherwise
intelligent and sophisticated Saudis even came to suspect American
implication in the deaths of the two men. They pointed out that the
foreign minister had died in New York and that the King had been
assassinated by a member of the family who had recently left the
States.

By the end of his Middle East hegiras, Kissinger's diplomacy had
been somewhat discounted by the Saudis. They realized that he was
not going to deliver the Israelis, that the Arabs were not going to get
their territory back, that the Jewish settlements would not be
removed from occupied lands. Nevertheless, the Saudis remained
fascinated with him to the end.

Valeriani book - page 67, 68

Subject: Iran

Stoicism escaped him, however, when he went to visit Iran's principal caviar-processing plant in Bandar Pahlevi on the Caspian Sea. The Shah had personally requested that he see the plant, and Kissinger agreed to go only after being assured by Ambassador Helms that no fish would be slit open in front of him. Helms explained that it was the wrong time of the year for that — the temperature had hit 100 degrees — and besides, Helms himself had visited the plant previously without seeing any eviscerations. What the Ambassador didn't know was that the Iranians had saved two large sturgeon especially for Kissinger, and by the time the Secretary arrived — late, as usual — the workers had removed the fish from their tanks and had whacked them over the head with a two-by-four.

Kissinger, who had once quipped that there wasn't anything he would not do to get caviar, now found out that there was: He couldn't watch it emerging straight from the fish's belly. His face paled and he refused to look down; his eyes locked on the Iranian expert, who was producing a steady stream of commentary. The evisceration hardly affected his appetite, however; the Secretary recovered quickly enough to go into the dining room and partake copiously of a caviar brunch laid out by his hosts. Not surprisingly, so did the rest of us. Inspired by all the fresh caviar — including some of the Shah's special "golden" caviar — Ken Freed of the AP wrote afterward: "Two Caspian Sea sturgeon died today for Henry Kissinger." (In addition to learning a lot about caviar production, we also found out that the Shah himself is allergic to fish and never eats his country's most famous product.)

Valeriani book - page 249 -- November 1973 Visit to Morocco

Rabat turned out to be a crashing success for Joe Sisco, the hard-driving assistant secretary of Near Eastern affairs. When Kissinger and his party first arrived at the presidential palace, they were taken to the King's sitting room, where they sat in ornate, red velvet-covered chairs. When Sisco sat, he really sat. The chair gave way, so Kissinger's first meeting with an Arab leader began with one of his top aides sprawled on the floor. Neither Sisco nor Kissinger's diplomacy was hurt, however, and when the Secretary of State visited Rabat a year later, King Hassan greeted him by asking where Sisco was. His Majesty immediately pointed out that he had ordered new chairs for his sitting room so that Sisco could take a seat with confidence. Sisco eventually showed up and did.

November, 1973

First visit to Rabat, Morocco -- the first day of the
first Middle East trip:

At breakfast on the morning of November 6, the staff was milling around with not much to do. HK was at the table eating breakfast with various staff members. He was about to depart for his meeting with the King. From his meeting we would depart for Tunis.

HK looked around at the assembled staff and suggested we take advantage of the momentary lull and do a bit of sightseeing while he was in his meeting. His generous offer was received with "stupefaction" and silence. Noone wanted to be the first to jump at it for it was the first day of the first trip and everyone was trying to impress everyone else with their zealous dedication to work. Finally after some minutes HK brought it up again and this time literally insisted we go off on a tour of Rabat -- telling us it was a beautiful and interesting city. He got the last word, however, by telling us that we better enjoy it for it would probably be the last time we got to go sightseeing and certainly the last time he would be so generous to his staff. (Staff included: Lord, Bremer, Pickering, Vick, Campbell, etc)

We were off in a flash. And HK was right, from then on we mostly saw airports, hotel rooms, and offices. Our sightseeing was limited to what he could view from the motorcade rides.

(from Chris Vick)