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THE SAMSON OPTION: ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY |
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Chapter 17: Nuclear Blackmail Moshe Dayan's fears and Israel's gloom were turned around during a dramatic meeting on Monday, October 8, at Golda Meir's office in Tel Aviv, just a few hundred feet from "the Bor," the military's huge underground war complex. Meir's closest aides, the so-called kitchen cabinet, assembled for what turned out to be an all-night session. Among those in attendance, besides Dayan and Meir, were General David (Dado) Elazar, the army chief of staff; Yigal Allon, the deputy prime minister; Brigadier General Yisrael (Gingy) Leor, the prime minister's military aide; and Israel Galili, the influential minister without portfolio and longtime confidant of Meir. Over the next hours, the Israeli leadership-faced with its greatest crisis-resolved to implement three critical decisions: it would rally its collapsing forces for a major counterattack; it would arm and target its nuclear arsenal in the event of total collapse and subsequent need for the Samson Option; and, finally, it would inform Washington of its unprecedented nuclear action-and unprecedented peril-and demand that the United States begin an emergency airlift of replacement arms and ammunition needed to sustain an extended all-out war effort. The kitchen cabinet agreed that the nuclear missile launchers at Hirbat Zachariah, as many as were ready, would be made operational, along with eight specially marked F-4s that were on twenty-four-hour alert at Tel Nof, the air force base near Rehovot. The initial target list included the Egyptian and Syrian military headquarters near Cairo and Damascus. It could not be learned how many weapons were armed, although Dimona was known to have manufactured more than twenty warheads by 1973. No weapons were targeted on the Soviet Union, but there was little doubt that the Soviets would quickly learn what was going on. Israeli intelligence was intercepting indecipherable signals from what were presumed to be Soviet operatives inside the country; the encoded messages were beamed throughout the early morning. *** All of the key players are now dead, and none left any record of what took place. (In his daily diary, published in Hebrew, General Elazar blacked out the night of October 8 and recorded only the following phrase: "Crucial meeting.") There is widespread knowledge among the Israeli defense and political leadership of what took place at the crucial meeting, but in subsequent years those who were there-including stenographers and advisers-have never talked publicly about it. The only significant objections came from within the nuclear community, some of whose senior officials -- but not Freier -- were said by an Israeli source to have accused the senior officials, in essence, of panicking. Their view was that the situation had not yet been reached for weapons of last resort, which were then code-named, appropriately, the "Temple" weapons. One former Israeli government official who was in the prime minister's office that night depicted the chain-smoking Meir, who slept very little during the early stages of the war, as confused and concerned by Dayan's report of imminent collapse. The basic decision to arm the weapons of last resort was reached easily, he said; there were far more complicated discussions of how many warheads to arm and where they were to be targeted. There was a separate, preliminary briefing by technical experts from Dimona, led by Shalheveth Freier, who described the weapons and targets that were available for immediate assembly. The senior official also described the fear that swept through the prime minister's staff when the arming of nuclear weapons became known: "There were a few days there when it seemed that the end of the world was near. For those of us who lived through the Holocaust, we knew one thing -- it will never happen again." The aide learned what happened from General Leor, Meir's military assistant: "Gingy told me about the arm ing of the weapons. We were very intimate." The young general, who later died of cancer, had a child on duty at the front and was, as he told the aide, "scared to death." One Israeli assumption was that the Soviets, who would learn -- as they had learned other secrets inside Israel in recent years -- of the nuclear arming, would then be compelled to urge their allies in Egypt and Syria to limit their offensive and not attempt to advance beyond the pre-1967 borders. And a Soviet warning was given, according to Mohammed Heikal, editor of At-Abram, the leading Egyptian newspaper, and eminence grise to Nasser and Sadat. In an interview, Heikal revealed that the Soviet Union had told the senior leadership of Egypt early in the war that the "Israelis had three warheads assembled and ready." The information was given to General Mohammed Abdel Ghany el-Gamasy, the Egyptian chief of staff, by a Soviet intelligence officer who had worked closely with el-Gamasy when he served earlier as chief of military intelligence. The Soviet message also reported, Heikal recalled, that Moshe Dayan had visited the front and returned to Tel Aviv "with a scary report" that was presented to Golda Meir's equally alarmed kitchen cabinet. There was an equally important second purpose for the arming of nuclear weapons, according to former Israeli government officials: such a drastic step would force the United States to begin an immediate and massive resupply of the Israeli military. There was widespread rage inside the Israeli cabinet at the Nixon White House -- aimed especially at Henry Kissinger -- over what was correctly perceived in Israel as an American strategy of delaying the resupply in an attempt to let the Arabs win some territory, and some self-respect, and thus set up the possibility of serious land-for-peace bargaining. Kissinger, just sworn in as secretary of state, would direct the negotiations. *** Kissinger made no secret of his initial strategy in the war, telling James R. Schlesinger, the secretary of defense, that his goal was to "let Israel come out ahead, but bleed." Kissinger's goal was defended by some of his fellow diplomats as business as usual. "Trying to take advantage of the situation?" rhetorically asked Nicholas Veliotes. "We always do this." In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Kissinger made no mention of a nuclear threat, but he did describe a series of urgent telephone calls from Simcha Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, that began at 1:45 A.M. on Tuesday, October 9 -- just as the all-night meeting in Golda Meir's office was breaking up (it was 8:45 A.M. in Israel). Dinitz focused on one question, wrote Kissinger: "What could we do about resupply?" The same question was asked again, in a second telephone call, at 3:00 A.M. "Unless he wanted to prove to the [Israeli] cabinet that he could get me out of bed at will," wrote Kissinger, "something was wrong." Kissinger, accompanied by Peter W. Rodman, his longtime assistant, and Dinitz, accompanied by General Mordecai Gur, the Israeli military attache, met at 8:20 A.M. in the Map Room of the White House, where Kissinger was told of the desperate situation of the Israeli military and the need for more tanks and aircraft. "Israel stood on the threshold of a bitter war of attrition that it could not possibly win given the disparity of manpower," Kissinger said. "It had to do something decisive." At one point during the Map Room meeting, Kissinger wrote, Dinitz insisted that he and Kissinger needed to be alone. Rodman and Gur, who both could be trusted with the most sensitive information, were dismissed. Once they were alone, Dinitz's message, according to Kissinger, was merely that Golda Meir "was prepared to come to the United States personally for an hour to plead with President Nixon for urgent arms aid...." It was a request that Kissinger could, and did, as he wrote, reject "out of hand and without checking with Nixon. Such a proposal could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail." A more complete account of the Dinitz message would undoubtedly show that it was closer to blackmail, as Kissinger knew, and it worked. "By the evening of October 9," Kissinger said in his memoir, "Israel had been assured that its war losses would be made up. Relying on this assurance, it stepped up its consumption of war materiel, as we had intended." How was Israel's warning of a potential Armageddon delivered to the United States? Neither Kissinger nor Dinitz could be reached to discuss the subject, although Dinitz's insistence on the one-on-one meeting with Kissinger -- as well as Kissinger's description of the Dinitz message as "blackmail" seems obviously linked to the nuclear issue. Word of the Israeli nuclear arming also came from the Soviets, according to a former Israeli intelligence official. The official said that Detachment 8200, the Israeli communications intelligence agency that had picked up the Soviet warning to Cairo -- as acknowledged by Heikal -- also intercepted on the morning of October 9 a Soviet warning to Washington about the Israeli arming of nuclear weapons. Asked why he thought the United States has never publicly mentioned such a warning, the Israeli responded: "Who in the U.S. is ready to admit that the Soviets were ahead?" Kissinger has never talked publicly about the Israeli nuclear arming, and his closest advisers at the time, including Rodman and William G. Hyland, then handling Soviet affairs for the National Security Council, said they knew of no such information. The best source for what happened, nonetheless, is Kissinger himself, who privately acknowledged that there had been an Israeli nuclear threat both to Anwar Sadat and to Hermann F. Eilts, the American ambassador to Egypt who worked closely with Kissinger during the intense Middle East shuttle diplomacy of the mid-1970s. [1] Eilts had been handpicked in October 1973 by Kissinger for the assignment to Cairo, and he arrived there at the end of the Yom Kippur War. His first detailed conversation with Kissinger about his new assignment couldn't have been more dramatic. It took took place, at Kissinger's request, at a hastily arranged breakfast in early November in Islamabad, Pakistan, where Kissinger had stopped overnight en route to a much-delayed visit to China. "Henry spoke a lot about how on the fourth day of the war [October 9] the Israelis panicked," Eilts recalled, "and that's when the judgment was made to assist them. At that point" -- and in similar discussions with Kissinger over the next three years -- "there was never a word about nuclear arming." There was a final meeting in late 1976, at the end of the Ford administration -- and the end of Kissinger's tenure as secretary of state -- and Kissinger brought up the 1973 war again. "And then, in a sort of casual reference," Eilts said, "Henry threw in that there was concern that the Israelis might go nuclear. There had been intimations that if they didn't get military equipment, and quickly, they might go nuclear." Eilts recalled his surprise that "none of this had come out earlier." He also was surprised at the casualness of Kissinger's attitude: "It was just sort of a passing comment." Kissinger was far less casual at the time he learned of Israel's intention. He told none of his colleagues in the cabinet about the nuclear threat, of course, but changed his mind overnight about the need to get military arms - in huge quantities -- to Israel. "Israel's [ammunition] consumption rate was gauged for a seven-day war," recalled James Schlesinger -- a reflection of Washington's confidence in the fighting ability of Israel's army and air force. "But Kissinger just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical" in urging an immediate and massive resupply. "Henry seemed to be more concerned than I was over the possibility of a nuclear exchange" in the Middle East, Schlesinger added. Kissinger's actions led some senior officials to conclude that Israeli use of a nuclear weapon was not out of the question. "From where we sat," Schlesinger said, "there was an assumption that Israel had a few nukes and that if there was a collapse, there was a possibility that Israel would use them." William E. Colby, then director of the CIA, shared the assumption: "We were afraid Israel might go for broke." It was believed, Colby added, that nuclear weapons would be used "only in an extreme situation." Kissinger referred to the Israeli nuclear threat in his first extended private meeting in Cairo on November 7, 1973, with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; it was a precursor of Kissinger's famed Middle East shuttle diplomacy that would begin the next year. [2] Sadat later briefed Mohammed Heikal about the off-the-record meeting and, according to Heikal, told of a senior "American" -- it could only have been Kissinger -- who explained the sudden American airlift to Israel as a decision aimed at avoiding a nuclear escalation. Sadat further quoted Kissinger as saying, "It was serious, more serious than you can imagine." Israel had at least three warheads and was preparing to use them, Sadat told Heikal. (Kissinger apparently was relying on Carl Duckett's 1968 CIA estimate of Israeli warheads -- the only U.S. government estimate in existence in 1973 -- that had placed the number of warheads at three or four.) The Egyptian president, faithful to his promise of confidentiality to Kissinger, never explicitly told Heikal where his information came from, but Heikal had no doubt at the time or later: "The only American with that kind of credibility, who would make Sadat believe him [about the Israeli threat], was Henry Kissinger." Heikal subsequently wrote about the Kissinger comment, without indicating that Sadat had been his source, in Al-Abram, saying that the Nixon administration had feared during the fighting that the Israelis "might lose their nerve and use one of the three bombs they had in order to repel the Arab offensive." *** Sometime in this period, the American intelligence community got what apparently was its first look, via the KH-11, at the completed and operational missile launchers hidden in the side of a hill at Hirbat Zachariah. The launchers were left in the open, perhaps deliberately, making it much easier for American photo interpreters to spot them. (The Soviets also had satellite coverage in the Middle East, and presumably saw the same missile field.) One U.S. official also recalled seeing hollowed-out nuclear storage bunkers and huge blast doors, with railroad tracks leading to a nearby mobile launching site. *** By mid-October, the Israeli military had successfully counterattacked in the Golan Heights and the Sinai, ending any immediate threat-and the necessity for the nuclear alert. The weapons were removed from their forward positions by October 14. The Egyptians, however, bolstered by a renewed airlift of Soviet arms that began on October 10, mounted a second offensive in the Sinai, which eventually was offset by a brilliant Israeli strike across the Suez Canal through a gap in the Egyptian lines. With Egypt suddenly on the defensive, Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin flew to Cairo on October 16 and persuaded Sadat to call for a cease-fire. Kissinger flew to Moscow on October 20 and to Tel Aviv two days later, where he received Israeli acquiescence for a cease-fire in place. In the meantime, the Egyptian Third Army was in danger of being surrounded and left essentially to the mercy of the Israeli Defense Force. The Israelis continued their offensive in Egyptian territory, moving north and west to a point within sixty miles of Cairo. The continued encirclement of the Third Army led Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev to increase the alert status of his airborne divisions and warn the White House that unless Israel stopped violating the cease-fire, "we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally." The implication seemed to be that Brezhnev would send some of his troops as a blocking force behind the front lines in Egypt to prevent the Israelis from going on to Cairo. The perceived threat came a few days after Nixon, more deeply embattled than ever over the Watergate scandals, had publicly fired Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor, and accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and William D. Ruckelshaus, Richardson's deputy, in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre." The President earlier had been rocked by the indictment on corruption charges and subsequent resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Another complication was the publicly announced Arab boycott of oil sales to the United States and the Arab decision to increase crude oil prices dramatically. There is no evidence that the Soviets did, in fact, contemplate any significant deployment of their airborne troops, despite their high alert status. Most scholars now agree that Brezhnev's warning to the White House was aimed at forcing Washington to urge the Israelis to adhere to the cease-fire. Kissinger did pressure the Israelis (there is no evidence that Nixon, consumed by Watergate, played any significant role in the issue) on the cease-fire, but at the same time he ordered the 82nd Airborne Division and the nuclear-armed B-52s of the Strategic Air Command to go on alert. The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy also was dispatched to the Mediterranean, and at least fifty B-52s were redeployed from Guam to the United States. The nation, still reeling from the continuing Watergate revelations, was stunned-and distressed-by the White House's unilateral action; there was widespread belief that the alert had been ordered primarily for domestic political purposes and not because the Soviets were ready to move into the Middle East. [3] Israel responded to the American alert by going on nuclear alert for a second time in the Yom Kippur War, according to Yuval Neeman, the physicist and nuclear expert who served in later Israeli governments as minister of science and technology. This time, the crisis resolved itself quickly, as Golda Meir ordered her army to stop all offensive action against Egypt, permitting a United Nations peacekeeping force to impose the cease-fire. At this point, however, a small undercover U.S. Navy intelligence unit, known as Task Force 157, operating in the waters of the Bosporus off Turkey, relayed data to Washington suggesting that one of the Soviet ships leaving the Black Sea en route to the Mediterranean was carrying radioactive material. The report from the Navy swept through the American intelligence community and the White House. Over the next few days, as the Soviets and many in Congress and the American media accused Nixon and Kissinger of overreacting, descriptions of the Soviet threat, including dramatic details of its shipment of nuclear warheads into Egypt, began appearing in the press. The most complete account of the alleged Soviet escalation, as seen from the White House, was published in Kissinger, a 1974 biography written by Marvin and Bernard Kalb, then correspondents for CBS. Kissinger, the main source for the book, was said on the morning after the alert to have been informed by the CIA of "an alarming report from Egypt-that the Russians might have landed nuclear weapons there." American intelligence, the Kalbs wrote, "had kept track of a Soviet ship carrying radioactive material and heading toward Port Said." It was presumed, the authors wrote, that several Soviet nuclear warheads had been provided to Egypt for deployment in Scud missiles. "The report tended to harden Kissinger's judgment that the Russians were going to send airborne troops to Egypt," the Kalbs added. "Nuclear weapons could serve as backup protection for a sizable Soviet force. On the other hand, Kissinger could not dismiss the possibility that the Russians were moving nuclear weapons into Egypt because they believed that the Israelis had nuclear weapons and intended to use them against Egypt." The only flaw in the Kissinger account, as told to the Kalbs, is that it was not true. In fact, the Task Force 157 report had been discounted almost immediately by the intelligence community. One high-ranking American officer, who was in charge of a major intelligence agency at the time, said that reconnaissance had established that the Soviets had loaded nuclear warheads on a cargo ship in a Black Sea port-but never shipped them. "A different ship goes through," the officer explained, "and dumb little 157 flashes a message" that Soviet warheads were heading for the Mediterranean, and possibly Egypt. "Everybody in the United States goes crazy, but it turns out to be a totally false reading. It was a different ship" that moved into the Black Sea. There was a direct approach to Soviet officials: "The Soviets said, 'We didn't send anything out.'" The intelligence community concluded that there was no evidence of a Soviet attempt to bring nuclear warheads into the battle zone. [4] The evidence that did exist, in fact, as was not reported at the time, or cited later by Kissinger in his memoirs, demonstrated that the Soviets had ordered their destroyers and other vessels in the Middle East to steam to the nearest ports and offload their nuclear weapons. There was a consensus among senior intelligence officials in the Pentagon, recalled Patrick J. Parker, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, that "[t]he Soviets were understandably frightened of the situation and eager to contain it." Kissinger also made no mention of the alleged Soviet warhead shipment in the second volume of his memoirs, nor has he -or any American official-revealed that Israel issued two nuclear alerts during the crisis. He did emerge, however, from the October crisis with renewed official concern about Dimona. Some weeks afterward, Kissinger asked the CIA for a formal National Intelligence Estimate on the Israeli nuclear program; the paper, which concluded that Israel had at least ten nuclear warheads, took Carl Duckett's Office of Science and Technology months to prepare and then was submitted only to the White House. [5] The Israeli government concluded by the end of the war that the American intelligence community had somehow learned- independently of what the Soviets or Ambassador Dinitz had revealed-of the arming of the Israeli warheads. "Somehow, and this I know for sure," a former member of Golda Meir's personal staff said, "the Americans found out about it and Mossad did an investigation as to how the U.S. found out. Golda asked Mossad to investigate how much damage it caused." There was another aspect to the inquiry, the Israeli added, based on Israel's understanding that American intelligence had discovered Soviet warheads being moved through the Black Sea: "Was there a threat? How much did they [the United States] tell us? What did the U.S. know and when did they tell us?" The results of the Mossad inquiry could not be learned, but Golda Meir's concern about America's ability to penetrate Israel seemed to diminish as Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy got under way. There was one tantalizing public reference, however, published with little fanfare seven years later, suggesting that the United States had known independently of the nuclear alert as it took place. On March 10, 1980, journalist Jack Anderson's syndicated daily column-largely about the American oil industry's influence inside the Department of Energy-included a four-paragraph addendum entitled "Close Call." The filler item said in part: "Locked in secret Pentagon files is startling evidence that Israel maneuvered dangerously near the edge of nuclear war after the 1973 Arab assault. The secret documents claim that Israel came within hours of running out of essential arms. 'At this crucial moment, the possibility of nuclear arms was discussed with the U.S.,' declares one report. American authorities feared the Israelis might resort to nuclear weapons to assure their survival. This was the most compelling reason, according to the secret papers, that the United States rushed conventional weapons to Israel." *** Further evidence of the Israeli willingness to use nuclear weapons in the 1973 war-or to threaten their use-was provided at a meeting early the next year between David Elazar and Lieutenant General Orwin C. Talbott, deputy commander of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Talbott was on an extended visit to Israel to discuss some of the lessons learned in the 1973 war and to inspect captured Arab and Soviet military equipment; there was considerable contact with Elazar, still the Israeli chief of staff. At one meeting, Talbott recalled, Elazar suddenly began talking "out of the blue" about Israel's threat to use nuclear weapons in the desperate moments of the 1973 war: "My impression at the time was that he was trying through me to let Washington know how serious the situation was-approaching the point where they were ready to use them [nuclear weapons]." Talbott understood the significance of the information and quickly filed a top-secret one-page memorandum for General Creighton W. Abrams, the Army chief of staff. "I made no copies of it and gave it to nobody else," the general, now retired, said. "I figured this was not discussable information at that time. I assumed Dado was trying to get a message to us." [6] General Talbott had done his part, but his report to Creighton Abrams went nowhere. Carl Duckett, who at the time had direct responsibility for the CIA's intelligence on the Israeli nuclear arsenal, first learned of the Talbott message from the author; he also said he had never been informed of any intelligence suggesting that Israel had gone on two nuclear alerts during the Yom Kippur War. The disconnect when it came to a nuclear-armed Israel was near-total: a CIA official assigned to Israel also had direct knowledge of the nuclear alert and did not tell his superiors what he knew, just as Henry Kissinger had told no one. The CIA official was an expert in communications intelligence and spent three years in Israel in the early 1970s as an undercover liaison officer with Detachment 8200; one of his assignments was to help the Israelis monitor the sophisticated Soviet radar and communications gear that had been supplied to the Egyptians during the War of Attrition. Israel also was operating, with the aid of equipment leased from the National Security Agency, at least three supersecret listening posts capable of intercepting communications throughout the Middle East and as far north as southern Russia. [7] The intercepted intelligence was shared with the United States, and the American undercover operative was able to learn a great deal about the operations of the Israeli signals intelligence community. After the war, the official prepared a highly classified report on some of the Israeli deception techniques that had been successfully used for, among other things, relaying bogus orders to Egyptian and Syrian forces. "I wrote a small report for Jessup" -- Peter Jessup had returned for a second tour as CIA station chief in the early 1970s -- "but I knew the Israelis would pick it up out of Washington if it was filed. So I was very careful in what I said. I did not mention that the conversations [with his Israeli counterparts] got to nuclear threats. I knew that the weapons available were something to be reckoned with, and they [the Israelis] told me that this had been communicated to the Egyptians. They said, 'We've developed this method of communication with each other.'" The CIA official was rotated back to Washington after the 1973 war and was summoned by James Angleton, the counterintelligence head, who was still handling Israeli affairs. Angleton had seen his report on Israeli deception techniques and wanted a special debriefing. It was a bizarre experience, the CIA official recalled: "I went through two days of debriefing by one of Angleton's guys with Angleton sitting outside the room at a secretary's desk." It was clear that the room was wired so that Angleton could monitor the conversation. The aide would occasionally leave the room to check a fact or line of query with Angleton, who never made an appearance, and whose presence was limited to an occasional scraping of his chair. "I did not talk about the nuclear issue," the CIA official acknowledged. "And I did not put it into any messages. I felt it was something that other people knew about -- and nobody wanted to hear it from me." The Israeli and American governments returned to the policy of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. In June 1974, however, Anwar Sadat announced that his country had obtained intelligence indicating that Israel had developed tactical nuclear weapons. A week later, Shimon Peres, defense minister in a new Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin, categorically denied the existence of any such weapons and accused Sadat of "gathering information of his own making." The squabble between the two countries was treated perfunctorily by the press and provoked no concern from President Gerald R. Ford or his senior aides. A National Security Council official did broach the issue, very gently, with an Israeli diplomat over lunch more than a year later. "I told him I thought my people had the perception that Israel had nuclear weapons," the aide reported in a subsequent internal memorandum. The Israeli diplomat denied the existence of any Israeli bomb and seemed to be "visibly disturbed.... He was not pleased with the course of the conversation, and switched the subject to music and the arts, where it remained." *** Carl Duckett made a career-ending mistake in March 1976: he talked openly about Israel's nuclear weapons. On March 11, 1976, Duckett was one of a group of CIA officials who participated in an informal seminar before a group of local members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Such sessions, held at an auditorium near the CIA's main headquarters building at McLean, Virginia, were standard Washington fare; any remarks were understood to be limited to unclassified materials. During a question-and-answer session, Duckett was asked about Israel's nuclear capability and replied without hesitation that Israel was estimated to have ten to twenty nuclear weapons "available for use." Within days, an account of his remarks was published in the Washington Post, forcing George Bush, the newly installed CIA director, to issue a public statement assuming "full responsibility" for the disclosure of the secret information. The obviously angry Bush added that he was "determined it will not happen again." Duckett was rumored to have been drinking at the time of his appearance -- the assumption seemed to be that only someone drunk would be so reckless as to discuss Israel's nuclear weaponry in public -- and his subsequent request for retirement was accepted by Bush. Duckett, discussing those events years later, acknowledged that the rumors of his heavy drinking "led to a discussion with Bush and my decision to leave." The real issue, however, he insisted, was not his drinking but Bush's unwillingness to promote him to deputy CIA director. There was one enduring legacy: the CIA would continue to know very little about the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Duckett's 1974 estimate giving Israel ten to twenty nuclear weapons would remain the official American intelligence estimate until the early 1980s -- years in which Israel was exponentially increasing its nuclear warhead stockpile. Duckett acknowledged that there was no specific intelligence behind the estimate. "We were trying to think what their targets would be," he explained, and using that information to predict the number of warheads that would be manufactured. "We were speculating," he said of his staff. "Our guess was that the Israelis would not have a reason for building more bombs [than ten to twenty] -- and that's why our numbers stayed fairly fixed. It was based on very little." _______________ Notes: 1. Eilts, a career diplomat, retired in 1979 after spending six years as ambassador to Egypt to become director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. 2. During a tense moment in the shuttle diplomacy, Kissinger, in Israel, suddenly declared to Golda Meir, according to an American eyewitness: "First, I am an American; second, I am the secretary of state of the United States of America; third, I am a Jew," Meir replied without missing a beat: "That's all right, sonny, we read from right to left." 3. Many of Kissinger's senior aides and others in the government, including William Colby, defended the alert. Colby recalled that there had been a steady stream of intelligence reports suggesting that the Soviet Union was preparing some of its most highly trained paratroop units and its transport fleet for deployment to the Middle East. On the night of the alert, he said, the American intelligence community "lost the transport fleet. We were afraid it'd gone" to the Middle East with Soviet paratroopers. Another senior NSC aide confirmed Colby's account and added: "1 thought they were coming" -- a point of view, he added, that he successfully urged on Kissinger. The NSC aide added that neither he nor Kissinger anticipated that word of the heightened alert would become known so quickly. "We weren't trying to signal the Soviets," the aide said. "We just didn't realize that the military would begin calling back privates and corporals from leave"-making it impossible to keep the alert secret from the press. Another equally senior American official, who had access to all of the available intelligence, viewed the actions of both Washington and Moscow simply as "posturing. We were publicly threatening to go [into the Sinai] ourselves and the Soviets were countering." 4. A former member of Task Force 157 acknowledged that there was no way that the unit on duty in Turkey, whose function was to photograph and monitor all Soviet ship deployments from the Black Sea, could independently establish the bona fides of its reports. The unit, he explained, was manned by specially recruited Turkish citizens who were not competent to make on-the-spot assessments, but instead relayed their tapes and other data by commercial aircraft to Washington for analysis. The conclusion that there were warheads aboard the Soviet cargo ship came from a Navy laboratory in Washington, the former 157 member said, and not from Turkey. "We never had any knowledge at all [in the field] whether anything was hot or not," he added. 5. Another as yet unresolved question about the Yom Kippur War revolves around the question of nuclear deterrence: did Egypt and Syria limit their initial operations in fear of a nuclear response if they penetrated too deeply? Mohammed Heikal, for example, insisted that the Soviet reports about the Israeli nuclear arming-while taken very seriously-had no impact on the overall Egyptian military operation. Egypt's military goals, he said, had been sharply limited from the outset. There is clear evidence that Syria also set very limited goals for its military, for its army came to a literal stop -- with no opposition in front of it-more than a day before Golda Meir's kitchen cabinet met in Tel Aviv to authorize the nuclear arming. The best guess at this point is that Syrian and Egyptian planners certainly were aware that any deep penetration inside the pre-I967 borders would have occasioned a massive, and perhaps nuclear, counterattack-but the fact that no such advance was planned or sought had much more to do with the myth of Israeli military invincibility than with a specific concern about the weapons at Dimona. 6. Talbott was accompanied during the meeting with Elazar by Colonel Bruce Williams, the U.S. Army attache in Israel. Williams similarly remembered Elazar's remarks as revelatory: "I can't recall the exact words," he said, "but the message was clear: Israel was prepared to use nuclear weapons against the Syrians if they'd broken through." 7. One of the joint sites, at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, was overrun by Syria in the first day of the war. Within fifteen minutes, according to former Israeli intelligence officers, Soviet helicopters had arrived and began dismantling the equipment. It was a stunning loss: there were as many as seven underground levels full of most sensitive listening and recording gear -- all of which ended up in Soviet possession. Israel reclaimed the destroyed facility by war's end.
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