Six Days (30 page)

Field Marshal Amer, the obvious scapegoat for what was happening in Sinai, grabbed at the accusations against Britain and the United States. He summoned the Soviet ambassador for a dressing-down. Why, he demanded, hadn't the USSR done for Egypt what the West was doing for Israel? Was it because of ‘détente' between Washington and Moscow? If that was the case, the Soviets were, effectively, colluding with Israel too. What about the incident in the early hours of 26 May, when the Soviet ambassador had woken Nasser at 3 a.m. with an urgent message from Kosygin, warning Egypt not to attack? Moscow had practically condemned Egypt to defeat. ‘It is you who prevented us from making the first strike,' Amer went on, desperate to blame anyone other than himself. ‘You deprived us of the initiative. That is collusion!'

The Egyptians sent out official messages to their embassies abroad containing evidence they said proved the allegations. A captured Israeli pilot had ‘freely confessed' that British aircraft had used the airbase from which he had taken off. Syrian radio had intercepted messages in English appealing for help from US aircraft carriers. French fighter planes had been brought back from South Africa and delivered to Israel. King Hussein had personally seen British warplanes in action. The reports were believed, an Egyptian diplomat claimed, ‘in the highest Arab circles'.

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At the headquarters of the Cairo military district, the head of Egypt's Central Command, General Salahadeen Hadidi, had long since stopped believing what he was hearing on the radio. He was spending most of his time on the phone to other senior officers, trying to find out what was really happening on the battlefield in Sinai. A deserter was brought to his office, a private soldier who had been arrested at Cairo's main railway station by the military police. Hadidi had been in charge of Eastern Command – the Sinai desert – from 1964 to 1966. He knew about the Qaher plan for the defence of the area. The general interrogated the exhausted private about his unit, where he had been and what had happened. The soldier had been on the front line. He gave a bleak account of a hellish landscape dominated by swooping, predatory Israeli warplanes. Nothing, he said, could be done to stop them. His unit had been broken and so had the units around him. Everybody was in retreat, trying to get away from the Israeli jets. It was every bit as bad as the general had feared. The soldier was court-martialled and sent to the military prison. General Hadidi spent the rest of the war trying to reconstruct recognisable units from the exhausted and demoralised individuals who were streaming in from the desert. ‘I was very shocked. The whole country was very shocked.'

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By 8 p.m. the US press corps had retreated to the Nile Hilton for dinner. Kamal Bakr, the head of the press centre, rushed into the dining room and told them he had very important news. Courteously, the American newsmen asked him to join them for something to eat. Bakr replied, ‘It is impossible. You have to leave the country – tonight.' They were told to call their embassy, which advised them to stay where they were. The air-raid sirens wailed again. Flashes and explosions seemed to be coming from the direction of the pyramids. Egyptian air defence batteries were shooting back.

Sinai

The Egyptian army in Sinai was collapsing so quickly that no one really noticed an expeditionary force of 1250 men that had been sent by the ruler of Kuwait. More than half of them were kept safely in reserve in the Suez canal zone. But 550 commandos were sent into Sinai by train. They were bombed by the Israelis as they were unloading their gear from the train in Al-Arish. During the night of 5 June they tried and failed to phone the Egyptian gunner regiment to which they were supposed to be linked. On the morning of the 6th they drove to where the Egyptians were supposed to be. They had gone. In the absence of a war to fight and an ally to fight it with, the Kuwaitis decided to pull back to the canal as well. Two weeks later, between 100 and 150 of them were still missing in Sinai. General Mubarak, their commander, told a British diplomat in Kuwait that he was ‘quite relaxed about their fate, because they are Bedouin and will, he is sure, be able to survive. Understandably, however, he has little good to say about the Egyptians.'

Lieutenant Mohammed Shaiki el-Bagori was part of the Egyptian 6th Division, in the desert not far from where the Kuwaitis had been supposed to deploy. All day his division's armoured vehicles and supply trucks were hammered by the Israeli air force. He lay on the ground, trying to find some cover, listening to a small transistor radio he had brought from home. As he tried to make himself smaller, and the Israelis ripped his unit to shreds, he listened to Cairo Radio predicting victory. ‘The Egyptian army has been storming the Zionist concentrations … advance and strike the enemy.' Someone, he realised, was lying to them. He could not believe it could have been Nasser.

By 5 p.m. the Egyptian garrison at El Kuntilla had destroyed or buried what was left of their equipment. An hour before they had been ordered to retreat. Corporal Kamal Mahrouss, a professional soldier, felt a strong sense of personal humiliation. The soldiers got into trucks which drove slowly away, trying to get to Ismailiya on the Suez canal. They were sitting ducks. After dark they were picked out by searchlights. Israeli tanks started firing. Another Egyptian column was under attack ahead of them. More Israeli tanks were behind them. The men who still could leapt out of the trucks and ran away.

Near the front of the Israeli advance, Brig. Gen. Gavish now realised that the Egyptians were retreating. ‘It took a day and a half for the Egyptians to understand that their air force had gone and we had three divisions in the Sinai. Now we had two problems – stopping them getting out of Sinai and fighting tanks that were scattered all over the desert.' Gavish and his divisional commanders decided the best way to destroy the Egyptian army in Sinai would be to overtake it in the race to the passes through the mountains in western Sinai. That would mean sending armoured spearheads down the three main roads across the desert, driving right through the Egyptians to set up blocking positions at the entrance to the passes before they got there. The rest of the Israeli forces would advance on a broad front, driving the Egyptians on to the guns that would be waiting for them.

Moscow

An unexpected message came through to the Austrian Embassy in Moscow. First deputy foreign minister Kuznetsov wanted to take up an invitation that had been discussed vaguely a couple of weeks earlier to lunch with the ambassador. It was a surprise. Impromptu lunches with senior Soviet officials were not the norm in Moscow in the sixties. They spent two and a half hours together. The Soviet minister confided that when he arrived at his office on Monday morning (Moscow is in the same time zone as Cairo) the news of the fighting had taken him totally by surprise, especially since he had thought a deal on the Gulf of Aqaba was close. He could not believe that the Israelis would have attacked without assurances from the Americans. The question now, though, was how to end it. Kuznetsov, who seemed in a confident mood, was hoping that the Security Council in New York would call for a ceasefire followed by a withdrawal. The Russian hoped ‘this unfortunate matter' would not stop progress towards East–West détente.

Moscow was sending out a deliberate message. In 1967 Austria was a neutral central European state that was sometimes seen as a point of contact between East and West. Kuznetsov did not seem to know that he was using an informal back channel to the West to push for the kind of deal that the US was offering at the UN, and which the Soviet ambassador, without firm instructions from Moscow, was in the process of turning down.

United Nations, New York, 1000 (1700 Israel, 1800 Cairo)

The US ambassador Arthur Goldberg had another meeting with his Soviet counterpart Nikolai Fedorenko. Once again he rejected Goldberg's offer of a Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire and withdrawal to the positions both sides held on Sunday 4 June, before war broke out. This time the problem was that Goldberg said a disengagement of forces had to include ending the blockade of the Straits of Tiran. A report to the White House at 1:15 p.m. said ‘the continuing delay in convening the Security Council is very much in Israel's interest so long as Israeli forces continue their spectacular military success … The Russians suffer a genuine disadvantage in having slower and more distant communications than we do. They have shown signs of trying to adjust their position to the changing situation on the ground in the Mid-East, but their adjustments have not caught up with the deteriorating position of their allies…'

Fifteen minutes later, Fedorenko called Goldberg. He had received a telephone call on an open line from Moscow, which in itself was ‘an extraordinary occurrence'. It came from the deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Semyonov. New instructions were on their way. As soon as they arrived, he stressed, Fedorenko had to arrange a meeting with Goldberg. Finally, and very belatedly, the Soviets had realised what was being done to the Arabs, now that Israel's troops were racing towards the Suez canal and closing in on Jerusalem. When the new instructions arrived, Fedorenko was told to accept the US plan for a ceasefire plus withdrawal. If for any reason that was not feasible, he was to go back to the original Security Council resolution calling for a simple ceasefire.

Following his orders, he tried to find Goldberg. But now the Americans were making themselves scarce. At 3 p.m. they met again. Fedorenko said again he would support the American resolution, but could not accept that it would apply to the Straits of Tiran. Goldberg's compromise was ceasefire followed by ‘urgent consultations' on withdrawal. Fedorenko said that was even worse. Then he suggested going back to the original resolution that had been first put to the Security Council on Monday morning. It called only for a ceasefire and a cessation of all military activity. In the resolution only the phrase that it was ‘a first step' suggested that other matters might have to follow. A withdrawal to the positions of 4 June was not mentioned. It was adopted unanimously at 6:30 p.m.

There was one more twist. In the morning, at 10:02 a.m., Johnson had sent a hotline message to Kosygin, urging him to accept the US resolution calling for a prompt ceasefire and withdrawal to the armistice lines. Kosygin took eight hours to reply. When he did, he told Johnson that he agreed and that instructions had been sent to Fedorenko to accept the resolution that Johnson had described. Kosygin's acceptance of Johnson's formula had come over the Washington end of the ‘Molink', the hotline's nickname, just after six. The Americans had a rough translation of the message, taken off the printer, by 6:12. It was in the hands of the president three minutes later. But as they read the incoming message, Johnson's advisers could see on their televisions the Security Council preparing to vote for a plain ceasefire without withdrawal. In the Situation Room there was a rapid discussion of whether they should stick to Johnson's offer, or let events at the UN take their course. Everyone agreed they should take advantage of what looked like a first-class Soviet diplomatic foul-up. There was time to get a call to Goldberg at the Security Council. In the Situation Room they sat back, watched the TV and waited for Fedorenko to vote. When he did, they cheered, then wondered whether Fedorenko would end up in Siberia.

The Americans had offered the USSR much more than the Israelis wanted them to give. But Moscow's incompetence made sure the Israelis had exactly what they needed. Once Egypt's air force had been destroyed, much more troubling for Israel than the fight in the desert was its fear that diplomatic pressure in the UN would stop it before it had achieved its military objectives. Worst of all would have been a rerun of what happened after the war in 1956, when they were forced to pull out of occupied territory in the Sinai. But the Kremlin's bungling neutralised the weapon the Israelis feared most. By the end of Tuesday, the second day, they still controlled around a quarter of Sinai, though they were hours away from conquering Jerusalem. Had the Soviet Union not turned down the chance of a ceasefire and a withdrawal of forces to the positions they had held until 4 June, significant parts of the Egyptian army might have survived in the Sinai. Egypt would have had to lift the blockade of the straits, but in the circumstances, it would not have been a high price.

Realistic American officials at the UN reported that ‘nobody expects the call to be heeded or this to be the decisive Security Council resolution'. Israel would probably have ignored a ceasefire resolution it did not like for as long as it could. But other stronger resolutions would have followed, increasing the international pressure on Israel and when the war ended it would most likely have been impossible for them to hang on to what they had captured for very long. As the Security Council showed when Israel ignored the call for a ceasefire on the Syrian front later in the week, it was capable of piling on the pressure when it lost patience.

Gaza Strip

In Khan Younis, some Israeli soldiers were still killing civilians. About 100 yards away from the house of the Abu Nahia family, where four Palestinian men had been shot in cold blood, Abd al-Majeed al Farah and his wife Faika, who were both in their late thirties, had spent two days hiding in their basement with their six sons and six daughters. Then the Israelis came and ordered Abd al-Majeed to go with all the other local men to the school, where they would be interrogated. They walked there in single file, at gunpoint.

‘Some soldiers were good,' he remembers. ‘Others were bad and aggressive. One of us who knew a little Hebrew heard one of them saying, “these are military, we should shoot them.” Another one said, “We can't do that, we have to call the headquarters in Beersheba.”'

Some of the prisoners at the school were taken out and shot, including his brother's son. The rest were kept at the school, chained together. They were not unchained when they needed to use the lavatory. They all went together. One of the prisoners was untied so he could open the men's trousers to let them urinate. After three days most of the men were released. When Abd al-Majeed al Farah arrived home he found the women crying and the bodies of twelve members of his extended family dead in their farmyard. They were all boys and young men, aged between fourteen and eighteen. They seemed to have been shot because they had not obeyed the order to report to the school. One of the women had tried to hide her seventeen-year-old son, but he was dragged out of the basement and shot dead in the street by an Israeli soldier. Abd al-Majeed says none of the dead was a fighter. Because of the curfew, they were not allowed to bury the twelve dead teenagers, or the four dead soldiers who had also been killed on their property. From their house they could smell the bodies as they started to rot. After three days, when the smell was getting very strong, they were allowed out to bury the men. The Israelis returned every day to count the people who were left in the house. Some of the soldiers let them go to their neighbour's well to get water. One of the women was allowed to leave the house to get food for her children.