By Danie Nortje
Photo Danie Nortje
Chapter 1
"...in the early phases of the [Yom Kippur] war, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the assembly and arming of 13 nuclear bombs. Under consideration was one or more high altitude nuclear blasts over unpopulated areas of Syria, Egypt or both.Such blasts would be conducted at a time after dark to make the demonstration visible in the capital cities of Damascus and Cairo...It was referred to as 'The Sampson Option'..."
Jeffrey Lewis - Arms Control Wonk, 20 13
" There's nothing like rumors of a nuclear strike to clear the sinuses...
The author
* * *
Saturday, 6 October 1973.
Tishri 10 in the Jewish calendar.
It was the most sacred day of the Jewish year.
It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Jewish people all over the world traditionally observe this day with a 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, often spending most of the day in synagogues.
It was also an important day for Moslem's.
In the Arab world, Saturday 6 October 1973 was also the 10th day of Ramadan, a time when Moslem's all over the world fast for 30 days during the daylight hours. For centuries this was a time to purify the soul, to refocus attention on God, and to practice self-sacrifice.
Photo courtesy ramadanmubarakimages.com
Across the world, it was a deeply spiritual time for Jews and Moslem's; millions of people were in an introspective, contemplative state of mind.
For a dozen Arab leaders and about a hundred million of their Moslem followers, it was the perfect cover for a re-run of Hitler's 'Final Solution' to the Jewish 'problem'.
Two hours after noon on that windless, autumn Saturday, Egypt and Syria violently threw off their veils of deception. With cries of Allah u Akbar! their armed forces rose up like a tidal wave unlike any other and collectively went straight for the heart of Israel - Jerusalem.
Knowing that on this day Israel’s defenses would be down, millions of Arabs pooled resources to destroy the State of Israel once and for all and to reclaim all the territories they lost to this little country in the 1967, Six Day War. Emerging from ancient and quiet rituals of atonement to blaring reality in mere minutes, an unsuspecting Israel faced two choices: a second Holocaust, or a fight to the finish.
So, what shall we call this war? The Yom Kippur War, Ramadan War, the October War or the 1973 Arab–Israeli War? For the moment, it is the 'Yom Kippur war' and for no other reason that I ended up on the 'Yom Kippur' side by default for reasons better explained later. I concede, there are many other angles to this story - for example the story of the four hacks that drove their rented jalopy for three days through the Libyan desert in a desperate effort to cover the 'other' side of the story only to be turned back by Egyptian border control.
By the time a million clarion calls to arms began to echo down countless ancient narrow passageways, through synagogues and across the world, the first of 1400 Syrian tanks were already rumbling into Israel - many of them along the old Damascus-Tiberius trade route.
Witnessing this seemingly unstoppable, angry, armed-to-the-teeth roller coaster bearing down on them from all sides on the Golan Heights, were less than 200 Israeli tanks. In the Sinai desert, 500 unsuspecting Israeli soldiers watched weakly as 80 000 Egyptian soldiers blitzkrieg'ed across the Suez Canal, broke through the Bar-Lev sand barrier and sped across the desert towards Israel. It was a complete surprise attack from two sides. Within hours the news hit the wires; the story of the Arab invasion of Israel broke worldwide in blaring headlines - including the Sunday Times in South Africa.
* * *
In 1973 I was a young staff writer working for Republican Publications' regional office in Johannesburg. I had just recently returned from Lebanon and Israel. In Beirut, I interviewed Jasser Arafat's deputy, a man called Abdul Qader Daher in the PLO's headquarters near the famous Cornice walkway. I reported on the ill-fated 1972 general election – Lebanon’s first - the one that soon led to a disastrous coalition government, which in turn fueled escalating sectarian tensions across the populace and that gave birth to Hamas. In 1975 a bloody full-scale war broke out across the country that lasted 15 years.
In Israel, I spent three months working on kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch, a frontier kibbutz on the Lebanese border founded by South African Jews after the Second World War.
I chose this kibbutz for its close proximity to the biblical Dan, the legendary source of the river Dan. The Dan meets the Hasbani river along the way and together they become the mighty Jordan river that feeds the lake of Galilee...and, by default, the Dead Sea.
Photo Danie Nortje
I spent five months with a backpack, a portable typewriter, and a camera, walking from Dan in the north, along the Jordan river, the shoreline of the lake of Galilee and the ruins of ancient fishing villages,right down past the Dead Sea and a mosquito invested night among the ruins of Masada where so many Jews committed communal suicide; my pilgrimage through the pre-biblical Palestine - from Dan to Beersheba - was a journey of only 278 km - or 3 hours - by car. You'll be surprised: one can take five months to walk a mere 278 km. That's altogether another story but please keep reading.
Between these two ancient points, two of civilization's three great religions were born. Abraham, the founding father of the three desert religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, lived with his wife Sarah in the Negev desert and is believed to be buried in the hills surrounding Beersheba.
Along this short route, some of the bloodiest clashes between the great Muslim leader, Saladin of Tikrit and the Christian Crusaders took place more than a thousand years ago.
Throughout the late sixties I was a conscientious but increasingly disillusioned lay missionary for the Dutch Reformed church in Pretoria, South Africa; every Sunday afternoon I would venture forth, armed with the Bible and a song book to 'save' a few black souls for this very strange, white, Dutch Reformed version of Jesus in separate, make-shift garages furnished with rickety wooden benches; all of this in a predominantly black township spread along a safe hour's drive from exclusively white and middle-class Pretoria.
Every Sunday evening I went home, nursing a growing depression. I sensed that there was a structural fault in what it was I'm doing but I was too close to the problem to see it. And I couldn't talk to my family about it. We were, like so many Germans during WW2, victims of our times. I instinctively needed distance, I simply had to get a different perspective on my life and personal spirituality.
Photo courtesy of eurekastreet.co.au
Where else could I go to find out what really happened two thousand years ago? And how did my pristine, pure white Dutch Reformed Afrikaner soul fit into all this Old Testamentical begetting, fire, and brimstone? This remarkable stretch of arid land, covering barely three hundred kilometers, holds more history per square meter than anywhere else in the western world. I wanted to walk it, slowly, like a nomad, or a pilgrim. I wanted to drink from the source, regardless of the taste or the outcome.
My walking route down the spine of the old biblical Palestine took me along the ancient Tiberius to Damascus trade route through Kiryat Shmona on the western slopes of the Hula Valley on the Lebanese border down to Tiberias, past Galilee to Beit Shean where I broke the law and entered the West Bank ten minutes after curfew.
I passed through Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah unscathed, all flashpoints then, and very much so today, 43 years later. From Jericho, my route took me via the Negev desert, to the top of the Dead Sea, En Gedi, Masada, Jerusalem and finally, Beersheba. En route I camped, squatted in corn fields, slept in barns, kept company with herds of cows, ancient ruins and monastery’s, got scurvy, moved with the Bedu, slept badly, ate badly, met many friendly people and stayed in scores of wonderful and strange places.
I got to experience first hand this arid, ancient corner of civilization where the world's three major religions were forged in anger from Abraham's loins and doomed to eternal fratricide. Again, the walk is another story but an Israeli one, nonetheless. When the war broke out I, for one, may have had perhaps a clearer geographical picture in my head about the country than most foreign correspondents pouring into Israel at the time - a picture that covered at least half of Israel for those first four, vulnerable days.
As an Afrikaner steeped in strict Dutch Reformed dogma and raised in an apartheid era country completely obsessed with 'God’s people', the Old Testament and the Holy Land, I really needed this walk through Israel. I needed to see and experience the 'truth' first-hand for myself. After all, conservative Christian Nationalist South Africa was the very first country to officially acknowledge the birth of Israel on May 14, 1948.
It was one of the very first international acts the National Party performed after they came to power less than a month later, on June 4, 1948. South African Christian Nationalism adopted the doctrine of apartheid, a social order designed by and inherited from the masters of racial discrimination, colonial Britain. Italian Fascism and German National Socialism of the mid-1900's were the two other western 'isms' that, combined, equaled and even surpassed the death, destruction and human suffering caused by Josef Stalin and Mao TseTung. Christian Nationalism, however, outlived them all. Apartheid only ended with the release of Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990. No matter how you look at it, the Jewish State was forged in the furnace of all three these 'isms'. Today Israel is the pariah state of the world. It's actions in Gaza against the Palistinians are described as "unbridled apartheid".
No surprise then, when news of the war hit the streets of a still sleeping Johannesburg in the early hours of Sunday morning, 7 October 1973, the shattering headlines touched me deeply - not because yet another war had just broken out in the Middle East, but because the country, having been invaded out of the blue less than twenty-four hours earlier literally from all sides, happened to be the 'invincible' Israel of '67.
I could just picture the terrible danger my friends were in at that moment ... the people I got to know so well less than eighteen months earlier were now in the path of the Syrian invasion. 'My' kibbutz, Ma’ayan Baruch, where I had spent three months preparing for the walk, is right in the cross wires of an intersection of the Syrian, Lebanese and Israeli borders. The kibbutz and its 200 odd elderly people, women and children, was in the direct path of the combined invading forces.
I picked up the phone and dialed my news editor. I didn’t care how, but I just had to get to Israel – and fast.
Chapter 2
The plan was total annihilation...
This was a total, well-conceived onslaught on the State of Israel by the Arab world – and by all accounts a concerted attempt at a second annihilation, a second Holocaust. Or so it seemed.
Through an interesting arrangement of political and other events since 1945, a constellation of Arab countries had Israel placed exactly where Adolf Hitler, in his wildest dreams, could not have imagined: so many Holocaust survivors, or relatives of Holocaust survivors, concentrated in a camp called Israel.
Himmler himself could not have arranged things better. Destroying the Jews wasn’t the exclusive obsession of Adolf Hitler; the zealous Mufti of Jerusalem readily shared Hitler’s passion for ridding the world of Jews back in 1940. And the two men often pooled notes on the viability of the concept over never ending cups of sweet mint tea.
Contributing to the invasion of Israel, Iraq covertly transferred a squadron of Hunter jet fighter planes to Egypt a few months before the war started. Iraq also sent a squadron of Russian MIG Fighters as well as 18000 soldiers.
All this happened in plain view of UN observers stationed in Egypt. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait bankrolled the allied war effort and, true to form (today they bank-role Islamic State as well) the Saudis secretly sent 3000 troops to the northern front line.
In the two years running up to the war, Libya spent more than a billion dollars upgrading and fine-tuning Egypt’s military machine and refurbishing it with modern Russian weapons, all with the October invasion in mind. Strangely, Israel, the USA and their combined intelligence services seemed oblivious of all this movement next door.
Sudan, Morocco, and Tunisia also contributed to the collective attack on Israel. At the last minute, on October 16, in a lame effort to illustrate his 'concern for Arab solidarity', a somewhat reticent King Hussein of Jordan – never really a true friend of al-Sadat and Assad - stepped into the fray by reluctantly dispatching two token armored brigades and three artillery units to support the Syrian invasion on the Kuneitra-Sassa road.
For the sake of perspective, Israel at 20,770 square kilometers, is only 1285 square kilometers bigger than South Africa's Kruger National Park. At its widest, the distance is only114 km. Its narrow point is all of 15 km wide. In 1973 Israel was surrounded by 22 hostile Arab countries with 125 million Moslem's baying for its blood. Israel's total population 1973 was just over 3.5 million people.
Jordan’s border with Israel was kept conspicuously non-combative for the duration of the war, thus saving a thankful Israel the burden of a third front. Israel left a token 28 tanks to 'guard' the Jordan front while concentrating the bulk of its forces on the Golan and the Sinai desert.
Jack V, close friend and colleague, a flamboyant ace reporter and also my mentor (he took me, a cub reporter fresh from university under his wing and turned me into a passable crime reporter in Cape Town three years earlier) spent most of the war on the non-existent Jordan front, obsessively nursing his conviction that Jordan will invade at just the right moment and break Israel’s back.
Photo courtesy of theuglytruth.wordpress.com
He quoted Moshe Dayan who predicted that Jordan will soon join the battle against Israel. 'The fight is over the entire land of Israel' Dyan said. Jordan never invaded, but had it happened, Jack would have been one of the very few correspondents witnessing the invasion. Instead of going home famous, he missed most of the war. It practically was the end of his illustrious career as the intrepid reporter.
On Saturday, 6 October - we learned months later - Israel was surrounded by no less than eleven hostile Arab countries, each of them eager to have a bite at its uncovered throat. Algeria too sent three aircraft squadrons of fighters and bombers, as well as an armored brigade and 150 tanks.
About 1,500 Tunisian soldiers were placed in the Nile Delta, safely beyond the lines where they could do no harm. Sudan positioned another 3,500 troops in southern Egypt where even al-Sadat knew not a shot will be fired in anger. But numbers, loyalties and putting up pretenses were what mattered at that moment.
Morocco sent three brigades to the front lines, including 2,500 soldiers to Syria. It was a loaded – but lethally incoherent - deck of cards. The Arab wolf pack, not so skillfully stage-managed by the alpha wolf, Anwar al-Sadat, and his Soviet trainers, finally had their prey exactly where they wanted it - in their cross hairs and on their knees in humble submission to their god. They were right. That’s exactly where many Israeli’s were at two o’clock that fateful Saturday afternoon.
The prey - the Israeli nation - still seemed blissfully unaware of the threat to its existence; while Israel was steeped in prayer, their intelligence services were arguing. At the moment of biblical – or rather Talmudic - penitence, the temple doors were left wide open. At exactly 1:55 pm, on Saturday, 6 October, the wolf pack pounced. Within minutes the first of many questions about this strange war circled the globe.
How was this possible? Where was Mossad, Israel’s 'invincible' secret service? Where was Chief Zvi Zamir? With all this preparation, all these troop movements, going on for months, right under their noses, all the 'chatter' on the airwaves, where indeed was Israeli Intelligence – generally known as 'Aman'? Where was the legendary Moshe Dayan? And what were they arguing about?
Chapter 3
Getting there was only half the problem...
After numerous fruitless efforts to get the owners of the publishing house I was working for to sign off on my assignment to the Middle East (being owners of a diamond mine as well, they were seldom available) my news editor Chris V. decided to go it alone.
He emptied the bureau’s petty cash box of all its contents and handed me a couple of envelopes bulging with cash. 'For the hotel', he said. 'Don’t eat too much.' We then raided the photographic section and I was given enough film spools to cover three wars. But there was still the small matter of a plane ticket to Israel.
Thanks to the mediation of an influential friend, a visibly worried Nedbank manager signed a 'fly-now-pay-later' ticket at ten o’clock that night at his home in Sandton. 'Never done this before,' he said thinly. Was he ever going to see his money again? He gave me a freeze-dried smile at the door as we left. I was on my way.
Boosted by a collective confidence that Israel’s armed forces were caught inexplicably completely off guard, the northern Arab Allied forces quickly advanced 15 miles into the strategic Golan Heights in two days but were soon rigorously slowed down by less than two hundred Israeli tanks sent to the Golan at the end of September as a matter of routine.
Those few Israeli tanks held back the sea of enemy armor for long enough to give Israel time to rally its forces in the Golan Heights. Simultaneously, Egypt exploited the time it took Israel to mobilize its reserves by pushing 15 miles into the Sinai in the first 24 hours. But then, without warning or reason, they stopped their advance, leaving a forty kilometer gap between the Second and the Third Egyptian Armed Forces.
With such odds stacked against it, Israel was now seemingly in dire straits. By the evening of Sunday, October 7, with over 100 000 fighting soldiers from eleven countries descending down the valleys towards the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem, it certainly looked as if Israel was about to be annihilated from two sides.
That’s when about half the world’s war correspondents scrambled to get into Israel ... or Egypt ... or Syria, anywhere from where they could witness – and report on - the inevitable demise of the unbeatable Israel…the second Jewish holocaust. No one was going to pass on this show...
Chapter 4
By the time we arrived in Rome, the skies above Israel were firmly locked down. No one was flying in or out of Israel. We were stuck in Rome. D. B. from the Sunday Times and Bob H. from the Rand Daily Mail, a Johannesburg morning paper were the only other South African journalists waiting to get into Israel. I looked around. The departure hall was filling up with Jews from just about everywhere, volunteers just itching to get into the fray in defense of Israel. Some had never been to Israel. 'We are Jews, just the same,' one 19-year-old chemical engineering student from Wausau, Wisconsin, told me. 'This is an attack on all Jews.'
There were no flights scheduled to leave for Tel Aviv anytime soon. The departure lounge was ominously empty of tourists. We were doomed to sit out the war on Fiumicino Airport. Everyone settled in for a long wait. But less than two hours later an excited Bob tapped my head with his paperback and said: 'I hear there’s a plane leaving for Ben Gurion just about now. We better move.'
There was no ticket control, no baggage check. And there was not a single female in sight. Just a mass of shoving, driven, loud, swearing and testosterone fueled male mammals cramming into the Boeing. This could have been a plane-load of English soccer hooligans on their way to a game in Germany, for all I knew.
If ever there was a laid-back flight, this was it. We took off with guys filling the aisle smoking cigarettes and sipping beers. Bravado was in the air and the cabin reeked of the sweat of anxious, energized and animated amateur warriors.
The pilot called out and too many of us crammed into the tiny cockpit. We were passing high over the Mediterranean as he pointed out the twin rudder fins of two majestic, black-painted Soviet Antonov An -22 planes flying a steady airlift from Cyprus to Cairo way below us. Russian arms were pouring into Egypt at the rate of one plane every three minutes. We were witnesses to the Cold War in lethal action.
We arrived in the chaos of a war crazy Ben Gurion Airport. The clamor was ear-splitting. Unbeknown to our fresh group of arrivals working our way through customs, America would initiate its own supply chain to Israel a week after our arrival in retaliation to the Russian airlift - and only after the first of two secret nuclear alerts by the Israeli government - the first since the 'Bay of Pigs' standoff with the Cuban invasion of April 17, 1961.
Soon American C141 Starlifters and C-5 aircraft would land at the very same war crazy Ben Gurion airport via the Azores – the first of 567 missions.
Courtesy nixonlibrary.com
And land they did. One plane every three minutes and loaded to the brim with whatever was necessary to win this war. Called Operation Nickel Grass, The Military Airlift Command of the US Air Force shipped 22,325 tons of tanks, artillery and ammunition to Israel between October 14 and November 14, 1973.
We managed to navigate our gear through a frenetic funnel of bureaucratic hysteria, out of the airport building and into a shirut - a shared taxi - bound for the press center. Without press center accreditation you are nobody, we were told at the airport. So off we went to be photographed, interrogated and accredited. Exhausted to the bone, I finally strolled out of the press center, into a furnace of a day; I bought myself a glass of freshly squashed carrot juice from a street vendor and swooned cross-eyed over my press card.
I was 26 years old, married with a baby on the way and an officially accredited war correspondent covering a rapidly developing war story of global proportions. I had absolutely no idea what to do, or where to go next. I honestly was that raw.
I needn’t have worried: journalists weren’t allowed near any of the front lines for at least another two days, and then only under strict army supervision.
Turnaround
On Thursday 11 October, the situation quite rapidly began to improve for the Israelis when freshly recruited reservists started taking the initiative in the Sinai. Civilians we met were praying for a miracle and it now it seemed something was happening
Photo Danie Nortje
Over the following ten days, the IDF began gaining ground against Egypt’s forces. Suddenly, on Friday 19 October, in a swift, breathtaking maneuver called Operation Gazelle, Ariel Sharon’s forces attacked, circled around the Egyptian forces, crossed the Suez Canal into Egypt at Temsah Lake south of Ismailia and check-mated Egypt’s 3rd Army, cutting off any retreat back into Egypt for thousands of Egyptian soldiers.
Ariel Sharon with Moshe Dayan
They were trapped in the Sinai desert without any support and with nowhere to go. Being the maverick general that he was, Sharon proceeded against all orders to the contrary. He invaded Egypt and in doing so, he gave Israel the negotiating trump card it sorely needed. It was technically the end of the war (but yet to be realized by many) and he paved the way for the politicians to move in. Israeli forces took control of the main road running between Suez and Cairo and soon got within 65 miles of the pyramids.
Photo courtesy Jerusalem Post archive
Chapter 5
Rumors of a nuclear kind...
On Thursday 18 October, the day before Sharon's historic maneuver, rumors of 'something big' near the Suez Canal were flying up and down the press center’s passages all day, but no one could or would confirm or deny whether anything 'big' had happened, will happen, or if the media were even invited.
Whatever it was, it was bound to be a story not to be missed, every reporter realized. I finally cornered an elderly Israeli Staff Sergeant assigned to babysit the press; he vaguely confirmed the existence of a list somewhere. After a few telephone calls, he pointed me to a dimly lit office where a grumpy, impatient and obviously retired gentleman in uniform shoved a pile of papers at me. I added my name to an already sizable list and signed a bad copy of an indemnity form in Hebrew. We were all to meet at the press center at midnight.
The trip through the Sinai desert to wherever Sharon's HQ's were near the Suez Canal, would take more than five hours. I was really looking forward to this excursion: my first big war piece...
I headed to the hotel early to catch up on some sleep; it was going to be a long, hard day. A few minutes into my nap, there was a soft knock on my door. It was Bob. He’d heard about the trip and rushed to get his name on the list. But he was too late, the list was closed.
As the correspondent for a morning paper, Bob had to head off to Tel Aviv’s Central Post Office several times a day to telex his stories back to South Africa. Those were the days before faxes, the internet or cell phones.
There were only two telephone lines allocated for calls out to South Africa. All stories – including photographs - had to be submitted to the Israeli military censors prior to dispatch. And 'dispatch' meant presenting your story to a ticker tape operator - the second line of censorship. Pictures were laboriously transmitted via international telephone lines using a scanning machine with a spinning barrel around which a single picture was wrapped. It took hours to transmit a single picture.
Missing the biggest story of the October War so far- whatever it was because no one really knew, yet - would have been a disaster for any foreign war correspondent and not less so for Bob, a senior man in the trade. No one turned down an invitation from Ariel Sharon.
In any war, the daily press with their many deadlines takes immediate preference over weekly feature writers like myself. We don't break news. They do. That was the unspoken rule. The daily print guys follow breaking news stories; often their reputations as reporters ride on how many - or amazing - scoops they get. Sometimes even their very jobs depended on it. That's how it was then.
Bob saw my name on the list. He badly needed a seat on that bus. It was an awkward moment for both of us. As much as I wanted to be on that bus myself, as a feature writer for a weekly I couldn’t, from a professional point of view, justify not giving my seat to Bob. Besides, we became friends. We even co-hired an Avis car and covered a few hairy moments on the Syrian Golan together.
The day before, on the way to Kuneitra in Syria, we witnessed Israeli Mirage F1 fighters strafing a distant Syrian village with something that looked – and smelled - suspiciously like napalm, despite all denials to the contrary.
Photo Danie Nortje
At a crossroads, Bob, D.B and I stopped, looked around and continued east along the narrow Tiberius to Damascus road. We found a few shuttered adobe villages, took snapshots of the scrawny, free ranging chickens and returned to the crossroads. Suddenly, from every direction, soldiers came running. They wanted to know who we were and why we were 'coming from Damascus'. They explained that we were in fact right on the front line and that the fuss was all about the IDF preparing to advance...to where we just came from.
Many years later, in 2001, John Simpson, world affairs editor for the BBC at the time, and five colleagues 'liberated' Kabul in Afghanistan in a similar manner before the city officially fell to the Northern Alliance.
Photo courtesy BBC News
Although this wasn't exactly Kabul, it turned out that three naive South African reporters had just 'taken' the IDF’s next strategic position, a nondescript, boarded up and evacuated Druze village just up the road. 'It’s OK guys,' Bob said dryly. 'There’s nothing there old chap, only chickens and they’re not armed. You can stand down now...' A red-faced, very upset soldier dressed in a tank-top and army fatigues didn’t see the lighter side at all. 'You could have gotten yourself killed, asshole!’ he hissed at Bob and stormed away. He was right, of course. But we really didn’t think about it, then. We were just being...journalists.
We got into the long suffering Avis rental and left, feeling not just a little pleased with ourselves. We must have traveled less than three hundred meters when all hell detonated behind us.
Photo Danie Nortje
Exactly where we were standing only minutes earlier, seven columns of smoke, dust and debris blew everything out of the way. Three bound and blindfolded POW’s on the back of a parked army truck disappeared behind a screen of black smoke and thunder.
Photo Danie Nortje
We stopped the car and scrambled out. I started clicking away. DB quietly talked into his tape recorder. It was surreal, everything happened in slow motion. People scuttled and scooted on hands and knees in all directions. I looked at Bob. He was calmly taking down notes without so much as a glance at the carnage in front of us. It was all over in seconds. Silence descended like an invisible sheet over the shaken, burning crossing. We started up the battered Triumph, and slowly bumped and rattled our way back to Tel Aviv, trying our best to avoid the bomb craters as we went. No one said a word. I think we all got the message.
Photo Danie Nortje
Chapter 6
The personal side of war...
I wouldn’t know about Cairo or Damascus at the time, but Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were eerily quiet and dark places during October 1973, especially at night. In the evenings we stumbled along the blacked-out, sandbagged streets of Tel Aviv in search of Mandy’s Club off Sderot Rothchild, the trendy nightclub belonging to ex-model Mandy Rice Davis where we quaffed some cold Maccabi beers and listened to Noel Coward languidly played on the grand piano by a suave crooner half my age with dark looks and matching voice.
Overhead and out of sight, America’s airlift continued with the deep drone of the incoming Galaxies a white noise against the velvety mumble of the darkened nightclub.
Those evenings were deliciously diffused and smoky and Bob was forever the lady’s man. With their men-folk on the front-lines, lonely women were on offer everywhere. Perhaps one of the reasons why he missed the bus to Suez.
No matter how I look back at it now, 43 years later, I was still very much the rookie then and he was very much the graying, distinguished ace reporter. Already in his late fifties at the time, he was also quite the role model.
* * *
It was an awkward moment for both of us. I somehow felt intimated by Bob’s request and even a little guilty for unwittingly having 'scooped' the master. I nodded and gave my seat away. He shook my hand, smiled a fatherly thank you and left smartly. I didn’t hear the door close. I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling disappointed and deflated and not quite sure of what to do next. I got dressed and went looking for the bar.
Two days later, at the breakfast table, there was a small package and a curt thank you note addressed to me. It was an inexpensive, black leather wallet, bought from an Arab street vendor down the road.
Bob left for home shortly after hitting the front pages of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg. His story about the epic crossing into Egypt with Ariel Sharon's forces was a brilliant piece of journalism and ran for days. He had his big story. The events that followed were widely reported by the wires; he wasn’t needed in Israel any longer. His paper needed him back home.
I never used the wallet.
* * *
Hitching a ride to the Sinai front line
In the desert, east of the Suez Canal and a long way from where we were, bloated bodies and discarded boots littered the scorched horizon as far as the eye could see, the first reports said. I was balancing on the back of a military truck, facing the wind and the dust and holding on for dear life.
The previous night the truck driver, a lance corporal, pulled in at the press center. Villum, a Danish journalist from my hotel was sharing a cup of instant coffee with him. Earlier that morning, just after breakfast, I told him glumly about how I had managed to surrender a once-in-a-lifetime bus trip to Suez. When he saw me, his face lit up and he called me closer: 'Do you still want to go to Suez?' I just looked at him. 'Well, Abram here has to join his unit at the Canal tomorrow morning. He’s taking two soldiers with him. If you don’t mind riding shotgun in the back of the truck, we’ve got a ride'. I gratefully accepted and agreed to meet him at the hotel’s reception desk at 4 a.m.
The distance from Tel Aviv to the Suez Canal is only about 280 km. It turned out to be a journey of not insignificant endurance. The road winds through the blacked out, sand-bagged and shuttered city outskirts and out onto the main road leading past Gaza. There was little traffic or business that time of the morning. The lack of traffic was reflected in the many closed-up shops, their owners gone, fighting to save their country on one of the two fronts. Many shops remained shuttered long after the war.
With his headlights painted dark blue, Abram skillfully maneuvered his truck past stacked sand bags and the dark shapes of closely parked cars. The road west passes by single story sandstone factories on the outskirts of the city and then runs through arid, sun-baked, wind-blown Bedouin country.
Photo Danie Nortje
When the autumn sun finally began to cast a pale orange hue over the ancient landscape, I was cold to the bone and my skin felt tight and dry from the pounding wind. My right hand hurt from holding onto the crossbar spanning the roof of the driver’s cabin. With the rising sun behind us, the speeding truck chased its own stretched out shadow along the ravaged road.
So, this is where Moses and the Israelite's got lost for forty years, I wondered. It was hard to believe, coming from Africa’s wide open spaces. With the setting sun - and the evil Pharaoh in hot pursuit behind them, and with the sun rising in their faces every morning, even the dimmest of leaders could have worked out where to go in a few weeks– especially with Akhenaten – or was it Tuthankamun - already occupying most of the biblical 'promised land' or Canaan, at the time. How on earth did Moses get so lost?
Forty years? Ancient tales seem to thrive on the unlikely, the improbable and the unverifiable – starting with the Old Testament. My mind wandered; anything to help me forget my aching knees.
In the distance, to our right, a range of mountains shimmered into view. We thundered past a faded sign saying 'St Catherine’s Monastery – Jebel Musa.' The mountain of Moses.
Precariously balanced on my head, and fixed under my chin with a thin canvas strap, was a First World War battle helmet – a tin hat of the M.O.T.H type.
‘Standard army issue,' Abram said as he handed us our hats and ration packs for the trip some hours earlier: one stale bun, a warm, green cream soda drink, a hard-boiled egg and two boiled sweets each.
Sewn into the inside of the hat was an elementary first aid kit. The hat bounced and slid and generally failed to handle the bumpy road at all. How did they fight in Flanders’ trenches wearing this?
I was holding on to my tin hat with one hand; the other hand anxiously gripped the metal cross bar. Between my shifting feet my camera bag took a beating of its own. Tears from the buffeting wind streamed past my ears. We barreled through the desert at breakneck speed. In front and below me, faintly visible through the dirty rear window and sharing the driver’s cabin, were two pretty female soldiers, sitting quietly, both balancing snub-nosed Uzzi machine guns on their laps.
We stopped briefly for a pee, hot soup, coffee and a fresh roll served under an army tarpaulin to a variety of passersby in uniform. Humungous military vehicles thundered past in opposite directions, kicking up clouds of swirling dust and causing the tarpaulin cover to flap and roll. The sun was an unforgiving ball of white light in the bleak desert sky. I quietly thanked Abram for the silly looking hat.
The Suez Canal was still a long way away and the day was young. High above our heads opposing jet fighters were locked in mortal combat, their common hostility drawing haphazard vapor trails, like mute signatures on a death sentence signed in heaven.
Chapter 7
Impressions and progress
In the Golan Heights, it took Israel the best part of two days to get their armed forces – especially the air force – up and running. By the beginning of day three, Israel had near full control of the Golan but not quite yet of the Syrian tanks descending down the Jordan Valley to the Sea of Galilee.
Photo Danie Nortje
On the Sinai front line SAM 3 and SAM 7 missiles, fired from batteries stationed in Egypt and along the Suez Canal, continued to sow havoc among Israeli fighter jets.
In the passages of the press center in Tel Aviv another kind of anxiety was permeating the already stressed atmosphere. Journalists were frustrated with the daily press briefings being one sided and putting severe stress on balanced reporting.
Add to this uncomfortable rumors that Golda Meir, the chain-smoking, sandal wearing grandmother/ prime minister of Israel had just ordered a nuclear device or devices on permanent standby at some undisclosed military facility, to be ready at a moment's notice. Ready for what, we wondered.
Since the early 70's, it's been fairly common knowledge among intelligence communities just about everywhere that Israel does have, not one, but at least 25 nuclear devices, ready to be deployed at any time despite vehement denial to the contrary by Israel and her mentor, the USA. Perhaps a lesser known fact is that scientists at Israel's main nuclear facility at Demona in the Negev desert have managed to scale down or miniaturize nuclear devices to a truly frightening point where they can literally fit into a suitcase or a backpack - easy to smuggle across borders, fired across any distance with a canon (the murdered Gerald Bull's G5 long distance canon comes to mind) or delivered with the help of relatively short distance missiles.
One of the reasons why we weren't allowed to report on the war for the first five days of the conflict is that during the first three days alone Isreal lost five hundred tanks and more than fifty aircraft, fourteen of them F-4 Phantoms. The IDF didn't want that information on the front pages of any newspaper.
Israel was in trouble. Moshe Dayan called it the 'end of the Third Temple'. Many Israelis thought it was all over — as one general publicly proclaimed: 'The situation is desperate. Everything is lost. We must withdraw.'
It was Israel's darkest hour indeed. Or so we were led to believe. It seemed the State of Israel needed help and it needed help fast. But how?
This was how: "Our dead Jews for your nuclear wasteland. And we mean it." A standoff of note.
On Monday October 8, 1973, during a dusk-to-dawn crisis meeting attended by Golda Meir, her close confidant Israel Galili, the army chief of staff, General David Elazar, Brigadier General 'Gingy' Leor, military aid to the prime minister and Yigal Allon, deputy prime minister, Golda Meir invoked the 'Samson Option' as a last resort.
She sent an executive signal to an air force base near Rehovot ordering eight specially prepared F-4S fighter jets to be on twenty-four-hour standby; she also ordered that the nuclear missile launchers at Hirbat Zachariah be primed for imminent operations. Golda Meir made sure that everyone - from the Russian spies in her department she knew about right up to Richard Nixon believed she was serious about using Israel's nuclear capability without hesitation. It was called the Samson Option for a reason; like the biblical Samson, who took everyone in the temple down with him when he died, Israel had no intention of going down alone.
After meticulously priming her weapons, Golda Meir informed Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State for a beleaguered president Richard Nixon, exactly what she just did, why she did it and what she needed like yesterday! It worked.
Despite the extreme urgency, it still took more than a week for the first of many hundreds of C-5a Galaxy transport planes loaded with much-needed military supplies landed at Lod airport to arrive. Journalists didn't know it then, we learned many months later, but the flow of the war was about to change dramatically.
No one in the know was talking and the topic soon became just a rumor, a quiet taboo in the passages. In everyone's mind, this war had taken on another dimension too scary to contemplate. There were no mobile phones in those days or social media; we were operating in a cocoon, cut off from the rest of the world, in an isolated environment, where news of the war's progress was strictly controlled by Israel. Was this a deliberate rumor? Was Golda using the international media to warn the Arabs of a pending Hiroshima of their own making if they go any further with their genocidal plans? Little did we know.
With her back to the wall, Golda Meir narrowly interrupted a well-planned holocaust, a second attempt at the annihilation of the Jewish people. She never for a single moment hesitated to use the only weapon left to her - a nuclear attack that would have annihilated at least one or perhaps more of her neighbors. What she didn't know then was that she - and Israel - was a pawn in a much bigger power game between Russia, the USA and Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. What upset the apple cart was Golda's unexpected nuclear threat. That was not part of the plan. The US had no choice but to change tack fast.
Israel was rescued. The bothersome problem with the SAM 7 surface to air missile umbrella was soon solved - not less so by the Egyptians themselves when they inexplicably abandoned their own protective umbrella. The rest, as they say, is history.
The first reporters in the Sinai found the desert floor covered in a strange spaghetti web of shiny copper wires scattered across the flat, featureless landscape. 'Saggers', said a tired looking soldier gruffly. 'They murdered our tanks.'
AT-3 Sagger missiles, it turned out, were highly mobile, Soviet-made wire-guided anti-tank missiles. During the first days of the war, they were used to deadly effect against Israeli tanks all over the Sinai desert and especially in the Mitla and Gidi passes. Once fired, signals are sent to the missiles along thin copper wires; Saggers were accurate and lethal up to four kilometers. In the end, a combination of pure grit and the smart use of smoke bombs won the day for the Israeli forces.
We were on the outskirts of the city of Suez.
Grand cathedrals of billowing black smoke roared upwards, shading out the sun. This was what the battle for Stalingrad must have been like, I recall thinking. High above our heads, invisible but quite audible through the haze, the piercing metal-tearing screech of Odin’s valkyries bore down on the colossal storage tanks. As the Israeli fighter pilots pulled up at the last moment they dropped their deadly payloads into oceans of stored oil. The desert shuddered again and again as the viscous fluid turned into mighty balls of orange rage.
Photo Danie Nortje
Somewhere out of sight a lone machine gunner doggedly pumped away at an invisible foe; against the staccato beat of the gun, a scratchy Mozart piano concerto floated serenely from a small pocket radio dangling from our driver’s rear view mirror.
* * *
Syria. With the help of a steady stream of nation-saving intelligence from America’s SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the Syrian tanks were pushed back as the Israeli’s reclaimed captured land. The ancient trade route running from Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, through Kuneitra to Damascus in Syria, became Israel’s highway to victory.
Photo Danie Nortje
Again, armed with strategic intelligence from America, the Israeli forces soon cleared the Golan Heights of any foreign presence and got to within 20km of Damascus.
Photo Danie Nortje
The stony outcrop was carefully roofed with 'camo' netting, making them invisible from the air. Between the tanks were tables and chairs. Spread out on the tables were the evidence of recent human occupation; a pack of playing cards, a half consumed tin of fish and a spoon, an open letter from home, a plastic bottle of shampoo and a drying washcloth.
Photo Danie Nortje
Above our heads, a mottled sun burned through the netting. Around us, there was an eerie, menacing silence. What happened here? Where was everybody?
Chapter 8
Baptism of fire and the loss of a colleague
The school bus was the color of a Jaffa orange. It had, like many school buses at the time, a single pneumatic, concertina door at the front, next to the driver. The bus was filled with reporters from all corners of the globe. This was one of the first officially sanctioned media trips to the Golan. Guiding us, watching us, reporting on us and admonishing us were half a dozen middle aged IDF babysitters. We were not unlike a bunch of school children on a bus tour of the Golan Heights on a sight-seeing tour.
Well behind us, in a hired car was the eminent journalist Nicholas Tomalin, reporting for the Sunday Times.
I never knew or met him and few in the bus knew much about him, except by reputation of course. But then again, the press center in Tel Aviv was filled with many anonymous notables.
The shelling was tentative at first. When it finally got going, it was quite relentless. The pillars of smoke and blast came towards us like a walking curtain. We first heard the familiar warning whistle sound, followed by a very scary split second of silence and then a molar-shaking bang. Our bus screeched to an abrupt halt on the narrow dirt road; the concertina door flew open. “Out, out!" someone yelled and a mad scramble for the single exit started. I was three seats from the back.
The door seemed a mile away. The whistles sounded closer. High above our heads, towards the left and safely ensconced on Mount Hermon, a Syrian spotter read out our precise position to a battery of gunners twenty-odd kilometers away near Damascus. How could they miss?
The bright orange bus stood out like a beacon in the pale, stony desert. 'My god,' I thought. 'My wife is five months pregnant! What am I doing here?' The thought flashed through my mind and was gone as I fell out of the bus.
I scrambled on all fours to a rough depression, dragging my camera bag behind me. As the wall of exploding shells marched towards us, a few meters at a time, a bubble of excitement - pure adrenaline - exploded deep inside me. 'This must be what journalism is all about!' I remember thinking. Had I been on coke, or any other performance enhancing drug, I probably would not have noticed the difference, I was that high.
Thinking back now I realize what a powerful drug adrenaline is. I focused my zoom lens and clicked away. I was vaguely aware of things flying low over my head and hitting the rocks behind me.
Photo Danie Nortje
The approaching wall of thunder and smoke suddenly stopped and died. Pillars of black smoke and dirt floated in the abrupt silence. What happened? As if in a dream, someone, somewhere slowly turned up the volume. Far behind me, where I couldn’t possibly see, a series of deep, rhythmic thuds punched through the smoke and dust around us. I vaguely remembered ... behind me? Must be 'friendly' fire then ... But before I could gather my senses, another shout went out. 'Let’s go, let’s go!'
The driver had managed to turn the bus around, despite the rocky terrain. The bus was facing the other way. As I scrambled to get out of the hollow, I instinctively reached out and grabbed slithers of hot and flame-sharp shrapnel from the smoking soil. I dropped it into my camera bag and ran for the bus.
Somewhere along the mad race back to Israel, further away from the shelling, we must have passed the smoking wreck of Nicholas Tomalin’s rented vehicle; during the euphoria of being invincible, not one of us noticed.
Photo Danie Nortje
Apparently one of the shells aimed at us overshot. Nicholas remained in the vehicle to change the film in his camera and had suffered a direct hit. His colleagues, taking a leak some meters away from the car, escaped without injury.
How the news got to the press center so quickly without mobile phones, I will never know. But by the time the orange busload of hacks arrived at the press center three hours later to file their stories, the sobering news had sunk in everywhere. Tomalin was this war’s first media casualty. Though I had never met him, his death 'in action', as a reporter, whilst covering the same story, was a personal epiphany for me. The 'high' I experienced under fire was followed by an erratic, confused kind of depression and a numbing fatigue. I stumbled into my hotel room on the first floor, turned on the tap to fill the bath and lay down. I closed my eyes. It was a very long day.
Unbeknown to all of us, on a secret airfield in the Negev desert, a select group of Israeli fighter pilots met quietly that morning to prepare the 'adaption kits' for nuclear payloads on their Mirage aircraft. These pilots are all pre-trained on nuclear missions on these French aircraft. They were on standby for nuclear strike missions until further notice.
Hours later I was shaken out of comatose sleep by persistent banging on my door. I got up and stood ankle deep in tepid bath water. It has been running down the passage for hours and was flooding the breakfast room below.
Tomalin was the first journalist to die in this war. He wouldn't be the last.
* * *
Chapter 9
A 'most miraculous' turnaround of events and a different perspective...
On October 24, a mere eighteen days after facing complete annihilation as a nation and a country, a particularly timely cease-fire was signed. Surrounded by more than 250 million hostile Arabs and invaded by more than a hundred thousand soldiers, this tiny nation managed, not only to win this war but to survive the greatest onslaught against its existence as a nation and a country since 1947. With a little help from a few friends, notably America, Syria’s army was completely destroyed in the process. Anwar al-Sadat was saved from having to declare defeat by signing UN Resolution 338 on October 22.
Millions of Arabs ended up scraping the biggest omelet in history off their faces. How was this possible?
The official toll - or was it collateral damage - was reported to be 2,688 Israeli soldiers killed and 7,250 wounded. Quite acceptable, the Machiavellian Henry Kissinger must have thought, considering the stakes at play. I never discovered what the Iraqi, Moroccan, Tunisian, Saudi, Sudanese, Algerian, Egyptian, Libyan or Jordanian casualties were. Or exactly how, why, and where, Anwar al-Sadat’s coalition forces lost their initial overwhelming initiative. An answer to this riddle arrived some time later on my desk from an unexpected source.
Soon after 22 October Ben Gurion Airport opened up to outbound flights. Journalists from all over the word packed their gear and queued for tickets, puzzled about what just happened.
The world was told that Israel only had two choices: to fight and win – and live to fight another day. Or lose and cease to exist. The Yom Kippur war was a fight to the finish, we were told.
This is my personal eye-witness account of the 1973 October War, 43 years ago. I have many questions, and like so many other people, least of all Israeli’s, I would like to know what really happened. Were we really that close to a nuclear war in the Middle East? Few international journalists ever made it to General Gonen, Ariel Sharon or Moshe Dayan’s inner circle. I doubt even the local hacks had the inside story – and if they did, they weren't talking, for obvious military and/or patriotic reasons. Like all war stories, the Yom Kippur war ran its course, fizzled out and eventually took its place with so many Middle Eastern wars on the dusty shelves of history. But the niggly questions remained.
Exactly nine years later, on October 6, 1981, during a celebration of Egypt's crossing of the Suez Canal, Anwar al-Sadat was assassinated. For a brief moment the curtain on 1973 was lifted and drawn closed again; al - Sadat's violent demise still underscores one of modern warfare's great mysteries.
So why am I digging all of this up again, and why now? Here’s why: Few wars are really finished business. Just as WW2 was a continuation of WW1, the Six Day war of 1967 seeded the Yom Kippur war. This war prepared the ground for the intense hatred against Israel and America that followed, all of which culminated in 9/11. I believe that the Yom Kippur war had everything to do with Islamist passions resulting in 9/11 and the so called 'Arab Spring'; the probability is that these same passions will culminate in a regional nuclear warhead aimed at Israel sooner than we think. I also believe that, should the planet find itself on the brink of nuclear war again sometime in the near future, which is conceivable, Israel probably would be involved, one way or another. I believe that the threat of Israeli annihilation is even more real today than it was in 1973. Israel unpacked its nuclear arsenal in 1973 and will do so again in defense of its people and its borders.
The big difference is Israel is not the only kid with a nuclear baseball bat on the block anymore. I'm referring to Pakistan and, of course, Iran - both deeply devout Moslem countries.
Israel, in its countless fights for survival since 1948 and in particular the Yom Kippur war, managed to instill in the greater Muslim world intense feelings of inadequacy. The global Muslim sense of self – a self-image that transcends even ancient and deep-seated Shiite and Sunni differences - never quite survived the embarrassment of Israel’s 1973 survival, not to mention its victory. Moslem's worldwide view Israel as America's proxy in the Middle East. Hating Israel also means hating America.
The Islamic world never forgave Israel for surviving what was meant to be a second Holocaust and they blame America - and Anwar al-Sadat - for that. Not only did Israel survive against all Arab odds – they were overwhelmingly victorious - again. Hence Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repeated statements that Iran will 'wipe Israel off the map.' How? Quite conceivably with a nuclear bomb, and with the help of thousands of willing Jihadi’s, beginning with Hamas and including Al Qaida and Islamic State, if we're reading the signals right.
Is Donald Trump right in his distrust and condemnation of Iran?
One last note: Egypt had the full support, materially and diplomatically, of the mighty Soviet Union. Egypt also had the physical and other support of at least eleven other countries during the October War. Israel only had America supporting it in that war and then only after Golda Meir threatened nuclear war. Even today, Israel only has one truly unconditional friend and ally: America. (Under the Obama administration, even this statement is highly debatable. Netanyahu and Obama weren't exactly best buddies). Today both the USA and Israel happen to be the two most politically unpopular countries in the world. This is historical fact, not a sentimental statement.
World politics is an ever changing game of alliances and betrayal. Perhaps the following story will shed a little more light on how the Yom Kippur war was really played. This is the story of the Yom Kippur war told from the other side by a journalist who fought as a soldier at the time under Ariel Sharon in the Sinai. I include this story for one reason only: it gives an alternative perspective on Israel’s near miraculous survival and victory. As to the truth behind the Vinogradov Memo’s: I leave that to the reader to decide.
Vladimir M. Vinogradov Soviet Ambassador
Our story begins with Vladimir M. Vinogradov, Soviet Ambassador to Cairo in 1973 and close confidante of Anwar al-Sadat. The story is told by my colleague Israel Shamir in Moscow. Shamir and I have two things in common: we are both reporters and we were both in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 – Shamir as an Israeli soldier. We were both witness to many of the events described in this blog, each from his own perspective.
Today Israel Shamir is a distinguished and respected international journalist, living in Moscow. He kindly gave me permission to reprint his story titled 'What Really Happened in the “Yom Kippur” War?'
Shamir’s story was first published in COUNTERPUNCH magazine on February 12, 2012 as the 'Vinogradov Memos', (also called "The Middle Eastern Games" ).
Chapter 10
The 'secret' memo's of a Soviet diplomat: 'What Really Happened in the “Yom Kippur” War?'
Israel Shamir, Moscow, February 22, 2012
'Here in Moscow I recently received a dark-blue folder dated 1975. It contains one of the most well-buried secrets of Middle Eastern and of US diplomacy.
'The secret file, written by the Soviet Ambassador in Cairo, Vladimir M. Vinogradov, apparently a draft for a memorandum* addressed to the Soviet politburo, describes the 1973 October War as a collusive enterprise between the US, Egyptian and Israeli leaders, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.
' If you are an Egyptian reader this revelation is likely to upset you. I, an Israeli who fought the Egyptians in the 1973 war, was equally upset and distressed, – yet still excited by the discovery. For an American, it is likely to come as a shock.
'According to the Vinogradov memo , Anwar al-Sadat, holder of the titles of President, Prime Minister, ASU Chairman, Chief Commander, Supreme Military Ruler, entered into conspiracy with the Israelis, betrayed his ally Syria, condemned the Syrian army to destruction and Damascus to bombardment, allowed General Sharon’s tanks to cross without hindrance to the western bank of the Suez Canal, and actually planned a defeat of the Egyptian troops in the October War.
Egyptian soldiers and officers bravely and successfully fought the Israeli enemy – too successfully for Sadat’s liking as he began the war in order to allow for the US comeback to the Middle East.
'He was not the only conspirator: according to Vinogradov, the grandmotherly Golda Meir knowingly sacrificed two thousand of Israel’s best fighters – she possibly thought fewer would be killed — in order to give Sadat his moment of glory and to let the US secure its positions in the Middle East. The memo allows for a completely new interpretation of the Camp David Treaty, as one achieved by deceit and treachery.
'Vladimir Vinogradov was a prominent and brilliant Soviet diplomat; he served as ambassador to Tokyo in the 1960s, to Cairo from 1970 to 1974, co-chairman of the Geneva Peace Conference, ambassador to Teheran during the Islamic revolution, the USSR Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. He was a gifted painter and a prolific writer; his archive has hundreds of pages of unique observations and notes covering international affairs, but the place of honor goes to his Cairo diaries, and among others, descriptions of his hundreds of meetings with Sadat and the full sequence of the war as he observed it unfold at Sadat’s HQ as the big decisions were made. When published, these notes will allow re-evaluating the post-Nasser period of Egyptian history.
'Vinogradov arrived in Cairo for Nasser’s funeral and remained there as the Ambassador. He recorded the creeping coup of Sadat, least bright of Nasser’s men, who became Egypt’s president by chance, as he was the vice-president at Nasser’s death. Soon he dismissed, purged and imprisoned practically all important Egyptian politicians, the comrades-in-arms of Gamal Abd el Nasser, and dismantled the edifice of Nasser’s socialism. Vinogradov was an astute observer; not a conspiracy cuckoo. Far from being headstrong and doctrinaire, he was a friend of Arabs and a consistent supporter and promoter of a lasting and just peace between the Arabs and Israel, a peace that would meet Palestinian needs and ensure Jewish prosperity.
'The pearl of his archive is the file called The Middle Eastern Games. It contains some 20 typewritten pages edited by hand in blue ink, apparently a draft for a memo to the Politburo and to the government, dated January 1975, soon after his return from Cairo. The file contains the deadly secret of the collusion he observed. It is written in lively and highly readable Russian, not in the bureaucratese we’d expect. Two pages are added to the file in May 1975; they describe Vinogradov’s visit to Amman and his informal talks with Abu Zeid Rifai, the Prime Minister, and his exchange of views with the Soviet Ambassador in Damascus. Vinogradov did not voice his opinions until 1998, and even then he did not speak as openly as in this draft. Actually, when the suggestion of collusion was presented to him by the Jordanian prime minister, being a prudent diplomat, he refused to discuss it.
'The official version of the October war holds that on October 6, 1973, in conjunction with Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Anwar as-Sadat launched a surprise attack against Israeli forces. They crossed the Canal and advanced a few miles into the occupied Sinai. As the war progressed, tanks of General Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army. The ceasefire negotiations eventually led to the handshake at the White House.
'For me, the Yom Kippur War (as we called it) was an important part of my autobiography. A young paratrooper, I fought that war, crossed the canal, seized Gabal Ataka heights, survived shelling and face-to-face battles, buried my buddies, shot the man-eating red dogs of the desert and the enemy tanks. My unit was ferried by helicopters into the desert where we severed the main communication line between the Egyptian armies and its home base, the Suez-Cairo highway. Our location at 101 km to Cairo was used for the first ceasefire talks; so I know that war not by word of mouth, and it hurts to learn that I and my comrades-at-arms were just disposable tokens in the ruthless game we – ordinary people – lost. Obviously, I did not know it then, for me, the war was a surprise, but then, I was not a general.
'Vinogradov dispels the idea of surprise: in his view, both the canal crossing by the Egyptians and the inroads by Sharon were planned and agreed upon in advance by Kissinger, Sadat, and Meir. The plan included the destruction of the Syrian army as well.”
Some very valid questions
'At first, he asks some questions: how the crossing could be a surprise if the Russians evacuated their families a few days before the war? The concentration of the forces was observable and could not escape Israeli attention. Why did the Egyptian forces not proceed after the crossing but stood still? Why did they have no plans for advancing? Why there was a forty km-wide unguarded gap between the 2d and the 3d armies, the gap that invited Sharon’s raid? How could Israeli tanks sneak to the western bank of the Canal? Why did Sadat refuse to stop them? Why were there no reserve forces on the western bank of the Canal?
'Vinogradov takes a leaf from Sherlock Holmes who said: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. He writes: These questions can’t be answered if Sadat is to be considered a true patriot of Egypt. But they can be answered in full if we consider a possibility of collusion between Sadat, the US, and Israeli leadership – a conspiracy in which each participant pursued his own goals. A conspiracy in which each participant did not know the full details of other participants’ game. A conspiracy in which each participant tried to gain more ground despite the overall agreement between them.
Sadat’s Plans
'Before the war Sadat was at the nadir of his power: in Egypt and abroad he had lost prestige. The least educated and least charismatic of Nasser’s followers, Sadat was isolated. He needed a war, a limited war with Israel that would not end with defeat. Such a war would release the pressure in the army and he would regain his authority.
'The US agreed to give him a green light for the war, something the Russians never did. The Russians protected Egypt’s skies, but they were against wars. For that, Sadat had to rely on the US and part (company with) the USSR. He was ready to do so as he loathed socialism. He did not need a victory, just no defeat (sic); he wanted to explain his failure to win by deficient Soviet equipment.
'That is why the army was given the minimal task: crossing the Canal and hold the bridgehead until the Americans entered the game.
Plans of the US
'During decolonisation, the US lost strategic ground in the Middle East with its oil, its Suez Canal, its vast population. Israel had to be supported, but the Arabs were growing stronger all the time. Israel had to be made more flexible, for its brutal policies interfered with the US plans. So the US had to keep Israel as its ally but at the same time, Israel’s arrogance had to be broken. The US needed a chance to “save” Israel after allowing the Arabs to beat the Israelis for a while. So the US allowed Sadat to begin a limited war.
Israel
'Israel’s leaders had to help the US, its main provider, and supporter. The US needed to improve its positions in the Middle East, as in 1973 they had only one friend and ally, King Feisal. (Kissinger told Vinogradov that Feisal tried to educate him about the evilness of Jews and Communists.) If and when the US was to recover its position in the Middle East, the Israeli position would improve drastically. Egypt was a weak link, as Sadat disliked the USSR and the progressive forces in the country, so it could be turned. Syria could be dealt with militarily and broken (sic).
'The Israelis and Americans decided to let Sadat take the Canal while holding the mountain passes of Mittla and Giddi, a better defensive line anyway. This was actually Rogers’ plan of 1971, acceptable to Israel. But this should be done in fighting, not given up for free.
'As for Syria, it was to be militarily defeated, thoroughly. That is why the Israeli Staff did send all its available troops to the Syrian border while denuding the Canal though the Egyptian army was much bigger than the Syrian one. Israeli troops at the Canal were to be sacrificed in this game; they were to die in order to bring the US back into the Middle East.
' However, the plans of the three partners were somewhat derailed by the factors on the ground: "it is the usual problem with conspiracies; nothing works as it should,” Vinogradov writes in his memo.'
Chapter 11
Final comments from Israel Shamir’s on the "Memos" - from an Israeli soldier’s point of view.
'Sadat’s crooked game was spoiled to start with. His presumptions did not work out. Contrary to his expectations, the USSR supported the Arab side and began a massive airlift of its most modern military equipment right away. The USSR took the risk of confrontation with the US; Sadat had not believed they would because the Soviets were adamant against the war before it started. His second problem, according to Vinogradov, was the superior quality of Russian weapons in the hands of Egyptian soldiers — better than the western weapons in the Israelis’ hands.
'As an Israeli soldier at the time, I must confirm the Ambassador’s words. The Egyptians had the legendary Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, the best gun in the world, while we had FN battle rifles that hated sand and water. We dropped our FNs and picked up their AKs at the first opportunity. They used anti-tank Sagger missiles, light, portable, precise, carried by one soldier. Saggers killed between 800 and 1200 Israeli tanks. We had old 105 mm recoilless jeep-mounted rifles, four men at a rifle (actually, a small cannon) to fight tanks. Only new American weapons redressed the imbalance.
'Sadat did not expect the Egyptian troops taught by the Soviet specialists to better their Israeli enemy – but they did. They crossed the Canal much faster than planned and with much smaller losses. Arabs beating the Israelis – it was bad news for Sadat. He overplayed his hand. That is why the Egyptian troops stood still, like the sun upon Gibeon, and did not move. They waited for the Israelis, but at that time the Israeli army was fighting the Syrians. The Israelis felt somewhat safe from Sadat’s side and they sent all their army north. The Syrian army took the entire punch of Israeli forces and began its retreat. They asked Sadat to move forward, to take some of the heat off them, but Sadat refused. His army stood and did not move, though there were no Israelis between the Canal and the mountain passes. Syrian leader al-Assad was convinced at that time that Sadat betrayed him, and he said so frankly to the Soviet ambassador in Damascus, Mr. Muhitdinov, who passed this to Vinogradov. Vinogradov saw Sadat daily and asked him in real time why he was not advancing. He received no reasonable answer: Sadat muttered that he does not want to run all over Sinai looking for Israelis, that sooner or later they would come to him.
'The Israeli leadership was worried: the war was not going as expected. There were big losses on the Syrian front, the Syrians retreated but each yard was hard fought; only Sadat’s passivity saved the Israelis from a reverse. The plan for total Syrian defeat failed, but the Syrians could not effectively counterattack.
'This was the time to punish Sadat: his army was too efficient, his advance too fast, and worse, his reliance upon the Soviets only grew due to the air bridge. The Israelis arrested their advance on Damascus and turned their troops southwards to Sinai. The Jordanians could at this time have cut off the North-to-South route and King Hussein proposed this to Sadat and Assad. Assad agreed immediately, but Sadat refused to accept the offer. He explained it to Vinogradov that he did not believe in the fighting abilities of the Jordanians. If they entered the war, Egypt would have to save them. At other times he said that it is better to lose the whole of Sinai than to lose a square yard on the Jordan: an insincere and foolish remark, in Vinogradov’s view. So the Israeli troops rolled southwards without hindrance.'
Conclusion: Could it have happened like this?
'During the war, we (the Israelis) also knew that if Sadat advanced, he would gain the whole of Sinai in no time; we entertained many hypotheses why he was standing still, none satisfactory. Vinogradov explains it well: Sadat ran off his script and was waiting for US involvement. What he got was the blitzkrieg, razor sharp invasion by Sharon.
'This breakthrough of the Israeli troops to the western bank of the Canal was the murkiest part of the war, Vinogradov writes. He asked Sadat’s military commanders at the beginning of the war why there is the forty km wide gap between the Second and the Third armies and was told that this was Sadat’s directive. The gap was not even guarded; it was left wide open like a Trojan backdoor in a computer program.
'Sadat paid no attention to Sharon’s raid; he was indifferent to this dramatic development. Vinogradov asked him to deal with it when only the first five Israeli tanks crossed the Canal westwards; Sadat refused, saying it was of no military importance, just a 'political move', whatever that meant. He repeated this to Vinogradov later, when the Israeli foothold on the Western bank of became a sizeable bridgehead. Sadat did not listen to advice from Moscow, he opened the door for the Israelis into Africa.
'This allows for two explanations, says Vinogradov: an impossible one, of the Egyptians’ total military ignorance and an improbable one, of Sadat’s intentions. The improbable wins, as Sherlock Holmes observed.
'The Americans did not stop the Israeli advance right away, says Vinogradov, for they wanted to have a lever to push Sadat so he would not change his mind about the whole setup. Apparently, the gap was build into the deployments for this purpose. So Vinogradov’s idea of “conspiracy” is that of dynamic complicity, similar to the collusion on Jordan between the Jewish Yishuv and Transjordan as described by Avi Shlaim: there were some guidelines and agreements, but they were liable to change, depending on the strength of the sides.
Bottom line
'The US 'saved' Egypt by stopping the advancing Israeli troops, it seems. With the passive support of Sadat, the US allowed Israel to hit Syria really hard.
'The US-negotiated disengagement agreements with the UN troops in-between made Israel safe for years to come.
(In a different and important document, “Notes on Heikal’s book Road to Ramadan”, Vinogradov rejects the thesis of the unavoidability of Israeli-Arab wars: he says that as long as Egypt remains in US thrall, such a war is unlikely. Indeed there have been no big wars since 1974, unless one counts Israeli 'operations' in Lebanon and Gaza.)
'The US 'saved' Israel with military supplies: says', Israel Shamir. He goes on to say:
'Thanks to Sadat, the US came back to the Middle East and positioned itself as the only mediator and 'honest broker' in the area.
'Sadat began a violent anti-Soviet and anti-socialist campaign’, Vinogradov writes. 'He was trying to discredit the USSR'. In the Notes, Vinogradov charges that Sadat spread many lies and disinformation to discredit the USSR in the Arab eyes. His main line was: the USSR could not and would not liberate Arab soil while the US could would and did. Vinogradov explained elsewhere that the Soviet Union was and is against offensive wars, among other reasons because their end is never certain. However, the USSR was ready to go a long way to defend Arab states. As for liberation, the years since 1973 have proved that the US can’t or won’t deliver that, either – while the return of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for separate peace was always possible, without a war as well.”
After the war, Sadat’s position improved drastically. “He was hailed as a hero, Egypt took a place of honor among the Arab states. But within a year, Sadat’s reputation was in tatters again, and that of Egypt went to an all time low”, Vinogradov writes.
'The Syrians understood Sadat’s game very early: on October 12, 1973, when the Egyptian troops stood still and ceased fighting, President Hafez el Assad said to the Soviet ambassador that he is certain Sadat was intentionally betraying Syria,' writes Shamir. 'Sadat deliberately allowed the Israeli breakthrough to the Western bank of Suez, in order to give Kissinger a chance to intervene and realize his disengagement plan', said Assad to Jordanian Prime Minister Abu Zeid Rifai who told it to Vinogradov during a private breakfast they had in his house in Amman. The Jordanians also suspect Sadat played a crooked game, Vinogradov writes. However, the prudent Vinogradov refused to be drawn into this discussion though he felt that the Jordanians 'read his thoughts.'
When Vinogradov was appointed co-chairman of the Geneva Peace Conference, he encountered a united Egyptian-American opposition aiming to disrupt the conference, while Assad refused even to take part in it. Vinogradov delivered him a position paper for the conference and asked whether it is acceptable for Syria. Assad replied: “yes but for one line”. “Which one line”, asked a hopeful Vinogradov, and Assad retorted: “the line saying Syria agrees to participate in the conference.” Indeed the conference came to naught, as did all other conferences and arrangements.
Though the suspicions voiced by Vinogradov in his secret document have been held by various military experts and historians, but never until now have they been openly aired by a participant in the events, a person of such exalted position, knowledge, and presence at key moments.
Vinogradov’s notes allow us to decipher and trace the history of Egypt with its de-industrialization program, poverty, internal conflicts and military rule tightly connected with the phony war of 1973. Perhaps one should ask what has changed in Egypt.
A few years after the war, Sadat was assassinated, and his hand-picked follower Hosni Mubarak began his long rule, followed by another participant of the October War, Gen Tantawi. Achieved by “lies and treason”, the Camp David Peace treaty still guards Israeli and American interests. Only now, as the post-Camp David regime in Egypt has collapsed spectacularly, one may hope for change. Sadat’s name in the pantheon of Egyptian heroes was safe until Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. In the end, all that is hidden will be made transparent, it seems.
Postscript: 'In 1975, Vinogradov could not predict that the 1973 war and subsequent treaties would change the world,' writes Israel Shamir. 'They sealed the fate of the Soviet presence and eminence in the Arab world.' The last vestiges were destroyed by American might much later: in Iraq in 2003 and in Syria, Russia was being undermined until recently. Make no mistake: Russia is on the comeback trail with a vengeance in the Middle East. (Read Syria 2018)
'The USSR, an almost-winner of the Cold war, eventually lost it. Thanks to the American takeover of Egypt, petrodollar schemes were formed, and the dollar that began its decline in 1971 by losing its gold standard – recovered and became again a full-fledged world reserve currency' says Shamir.
* * *
After all this, I still have the distinct feeling that the puppets at this particular war party were Israel and Egypt, that America was playing both parties long before the first shot was fired. I believe that Israel genuinely felt threatened enough to prime their nuclear arsenal as a defense against annihilation- not a step anyone would take easily. That single act of immense courage by Golda Meir made America sit upright and pay attention. It was a sliding door that changed the course of history. I have a problem believing that Golda Meir's nuclear mobilization was fake. I also do not completely buy Shamir's 'collateral damage' argument - sacrificing x-number of Israeli soldiers as part of a greater geopolitical strategy. However, I do believe Kissinger was an able, capable and ruthless puppet master and strategist.
As for the reasons why Anwar el-Sadat attacked Israel: Golda Meir disliked el-Sadat and didn't trust him because of his pro-Hitler sentiments during the Second WW. When his predecessor Nasser died, El-Sadat made history by trying to offer Israel a peace deal. This didn't sit well with the Egyptian people nor with any of the surrounding Arab leaders. Israel had to agree to the withdrawal of its forces to pre-1967 lines, as a condition to peace with Egypt. El-Sadat's peace proposal was stillborn; Israel completely rejected it, causing El-Sadat to lose serious face across the Middle East.
As a last resort, the embarrassed and disappointed Egyptian leader turned to America for help but without success. Finally in an act of desperation that surprised the world and especially the Americans, el-Sadat, in a dramatic move to prove that Egypt is not a communist country, suddenly expelled its old Russian allies.
El-Sadat was hoping that America will step into the gap left by the Russians. Instead, he was ridiculed by western leaders; Henry Kissinger thought openly that getting rid of Russia as a lure to pull America in, was a foolish step.
An even more disillusioned and embittered el-Sadat then turned to the region; the only way to get America's attention was to go to war with Israel, he believed. He got a coalition of eager Arab leaders together who, over several months, secretly hatched a plan to get rid of Israel once and for all. Or that was the ruse he used to rope in his Arab partners.
The coalition very nearly succeeded.
In the end, it was all about getting America's attention, it seems.
It wasn't the war with Israel that did it; it was the very real threat of regional nuclear war that suddenly got Richard Nixon's attention. Neither el-Sadat nor America could foresee Golda Meir's desperate action. That wasn't in the script.
Golda Meir got what she wanted. Israel survived. America was back as a major player in the Middle East.
And so it is today.
Post Script
The oil of the Saudis and other sheikdoms being sold for dollars became the new lifeline for the American empire. Looking back, armed now with the Vinogradov Papers, I believe we can confidently mark 1973-74 as a decisive turning point in our history. In more ways than one, the Yom Kippur War was the prelude to the Arab Spring; today, as I'm writing this, Russia and the US are glaring at each other over the dead bodies of the children of Aleppo.
Russia is deeply ensconced in Syria. Donald Trump is bound to have a profound effect on the future of politics in the Middle East. Will America give up the foothold they gained at the expense of Russia in the Middle East in 1973? Or will the new President, perhaps in an effort to wipe the Obama slate clean, push back - and move the world, and the Middle East, a little closer to another global nuclear standoff?
I believe we live in exceptionally perilous times. Just as the Arab world and many Muslims never forgave Israel for surviving the collective attempt at its annihilation, Russia never forgave America for unseating them, for destroying their hold and influence in the Middle East. Little did the Soviet Union know: worse was still to come. America was poised to win the Cold War 18 years later - adding insult to injury.
Russia is obsessed with America. Their State sponsored TV channel, RT, is wholly focussed on America. Russia features strongly in the Trump-Clinton presidential race, from Donald Trump's endorsement of Vladimir Putin to Russian electronic hacking of Democratic Party emails.
Millions of Muslims openly hate America today. We can safely add Putin's Russia to this club of America bashers. With Russia's dramatic return to the Middle East after 40 years of enforced exile, it has squarely positioned itself in opposition to America in particular and NATO in general.
In October 1973 an anxious and besieged Golda Meir drew a very important, very deep line in the sands of the Middle East. Low key moment as it was, it sent a message to the world: the rules of the game in the Middle East have changed.
That line is still there. Who will cross it first?
Personal note: These are my own memories, my recollections of October 1973 when Israel was on the brink of annihilation and I believe the world was as close as it could ever be to nuclear war.
I was a young, inexperienced war reporter, the day I arrived. But it was a steep learning curve. I witnessed the opening salvos of another kind of war - a war about oil. I returned home to a new reality: serious petrol restrictions. Today I'm thankful for the experience, glad to have lived through it but filled with more questions than answers. Over the years I came to believe that the 'Yom Kippur War' was a watershed war; much of the turmoil in the Arab world today can trace its origins back to 6 October 1973 - like the return of Russia to the Middle East political theater.
I thank Israel Shamir for sharing his thoughts with me; much of what he says makes sense because I witnessed much of it myself. History has also proven a lot of what he says to be correct. I'm exceptionally aware of the dangers of conspiracy theories and I don't believe Israel Shamir is guilty of any of that. His integrity as a journalist shines through all his writings.
End
