Golda (47 page)

Galili, who had been in Golda’s office when Dayan arrived, ran to the

Pit to bring back Dado. The chief of staff did not soft-pedal the trouble they were facing, but neither did he preach biblical apocalypse. With- drawal to the Sinai passes, he warned, would be absurdly costly in lost facilities. “Today we hit bottom,” he said. “Tomorrow I predict that we’ll be able to get our chins above water.”

Dado asked Golda to draft Bar-Lev, the former chief of staff, to fly north to look for alternatives for regaining the initiative. By 10 p.m., Bar- Lev was back in Golda’s office after a lightning visit to the front. Serious but manageable, he characterized the situation before laying out his ideas for redeployment and a counterattack once a fresh division of re- serves arrived.

“The great Moshe Dayan!” Golda cried out, in relief. “One day like this, one day like that!”

That night, when the cabinet ministers arrived for their second meet- ing of the day, they found Golda poring over maps of troop deployments. The Syrians had been stopped, for the moment, although at the loss of a full brigade. Dado reported that he was going to throw everything he had into keeping them contained while the southern command launched a limited defensive counterstrike.

Dayan exploded without restraint, describing the awesome size of the enemy forces, the quality of their equipment, and the striking caliber of their troops. “The Third Commonwealth might be destroyed” if they didn’t take drastic measures, he warned, echoing his terror of the mo- ment. The Israeli forces must withdraw into the Sinai and establish a secondary line out of range of Egyptian missiles, he proclaimed.

The ministers were uncomfortable with the concept of abandoning in order to defend. If Israel seemed to be in that much danger, other Arab nations might be emboldened to join the fray, placing them in far greater danger. And if the war ended with a loss of Israeli ground, they would be sitting ducks.

Rejecting Dayan’s pessimism, they endorsed Dado’s strategy. The only question remaining was whether the United States would keep Israel resup- plied to continue the fight, and Golda already sensed Kissinger’s hesitation.

She did not misread him. Despite his avowal of hearty support for Israel, Kissinger smelled opportunity.

* * *

With its overconfidence tempered and its reserves pouring into position, Israel began to turn the tide on Day 3, although it was hard to discern the outlines of that turnaround through the waves of destruction and the ris- ing casualty figures. With the southern part of the Golan front collaps- ing, Israel still faced the real prospect of a Syrian invasion of the Hula Valley, where Golda had lived on Kibbutz Merhavia. And in the Sinai, Dado’s limited counteroffensive had turned into a disaster when his or- ders not to try to dislodge the Egyptian bridgeheads or cross the canal were ignored by both the commander of the southern forces and Ariel Sharon, who was sure that he could mop up the entire front in two days if only central command would unleash him. Their overconfidence cost Israel 70 of its remaining 170 tanks and left Egyptian troops several kilo- meters deeper into the Sinai.

Meanwhile, Dayan was spreading alarm. “We do not now have the strength to throw the Egyptians back across the canal,” he told Israeli newspaper editors in an off-the-record interview, a preview of what he expected to tell the nation that night on television.

Dayan’s voice trembled as he talked about Egypt’s “unlimited equip- ment. It’s fantastic. It’s terrible to fight against such things. . . . The ques- tion is: What will come next.” No doubt they’ll launch an attack with maximum strength, he predicted, and Israel will have to retreat.

Dayan believed that he was providing Israelis with an honest assess- ment of their situation, but Gershom Schocken, the editor of
Ha’aretz,
counseled against sharing that view with the nation. “If you say on televi- sion tonight what you have told us, that will be like an earthquake for the consciousness of the Israeli nation, the Jewish people, and the Arab na- tions,” he warned him. Another editor called Golda, who replaced Dayan on television with the former chief of military intelligence, who offered a more sanitized version of the truth.

“[Dayan] was beaten and defeated,” said the editor of
Ma’ariv.
“It’s lucky for us that Golda wouldn’t let him appear on television. He would have announced our surrender.”

Some sources contend that despite Golda’s outward calm, she also panicked that day by authorizing the arming of Israeli nuclear weapons at Dayan’s request. The German magazine
Stern
reported that she ordered thirteen small nuclear devices taken out of secret bunkers in the Negev and loaded onto modified Phantoms and Kfir aircraft, while an Arab publication disclosed that she allowed Israel’s Jericho missiles to be armed with nuclear warheads. Both those accounts, however, are open to serious question since Israel had not yet begun to produce Kfir planes and the guidance systems of the Jericho missiles were so unstable as to be useless for such delivery.

The American writer Seymour Hersh alleged that Israel maintained three nuclear-capable battalions and threatened to use 203mm nuclear artillery shells to blackmail the United States into airlifting weapons to Israel. But the source he cited for that information, an Israeli scientist, vigorously denied Hersh’s published account, and Hersh provided no evi- dence at all for his blackmail assertion.

Assuming that Israel had developed nuclear weapons, Kissinger did worry that Golda would authorize a nuclear strike should the country seem in danger of being overrun. But the evidence that she went so far as to issue that order is insufficient to the widespread assumption, popular- ized in a dozen publications and on Broadway, that she did so. Nor would it have made much sense. If her goal had been to blackmail the United States, the threat alone—better still, a rumored threat—would have been sufficient. And despite the ominous news, Tel Aviv was not in imminent danger. While making provisions for her own suicide in the event of an Arab seizure of Israel was entirely consistent with Golda’s character, mak- ing that decision for the rest of the country—and lofting nuclear-enhanced artillery shells at enemy troops would have subjected Israel itself to devas- tating radiation—was simply beyond even her arrogance.

In any event, by the late afternoon of the third day of the war, any real

threat to Israel’s survival had begun to recede. And by the following after- noon, Israeli troops had begun pushing the Syrians back across the 1967 armistice line and the Israeli air force started bombing deep inside Syria, inflicting heavy damage not only on the morale of the Syrians, but on the general staff and air force headquarters in Damascus, oil refineries, a ra- dar station, and power plants.

In the Sinai, the bungled counterattack designed by Dado had been costly in scarce matériel and human life, but it had halted the Egyptian advance, and Bar-Lev had taken over command of the southern forces to bring some discipline to their endeavors. They still faced a costly and demoralizing haul, but the Egyptians had gone as far as they would ad- vance.

For Golda, the new battlefront became Washington as she struggled to secure military supplies to replace Israel’s dwindling stocks. The Israel Defense Forces had lost two-thirds of their tanks in the Sinai, and Bar- Lev would need heavy weapons and ammunition for a counterattack against Egypt. With the Europeans embargoing weapons to Israel and the British refusing to sell her spare parts for Centurion tanks, Golda had nowhere to turn other than to the United States.

Assuming that Israel would again defeat the Arabs handily, Kissinger had decided to play a dangerous game, hoping to avoid too grand an Is- raeli victory that would humiliate the Arabs into intransigence and invite more Soviet intervention in the region. His only weapon was to withhold the supplies Golda was seeking and he would get caught, he assumed, only if the Israel lobby in the United States began to scream or if the So- viets started a significant resupply of the Arabs. The key to containing the former was Dinitz, the Israeli ambassador, who could sound the alarm to mobilize the Jewish lobby. The Soviets, he assumed, were as committed to containing the war as he was.

Initially, Kissinger didn’t face much difficulty because Golda’s re- quests were minimal: small arms, ammunition, bomb racks, and Side- winder missiles, none of which would change the course of the war, all of which Israel could pick up secretly in unmarked El Al planes. He facili-

tated the sale of those weapons so “they will have something to lose after- wards,” he told Alexander Haig.

But on October 9, the fourth day of the war, Kissinger’s grand design began to unravel. The CIA confirmed that Israel wouldn’t win an easy victory and was running dangerously low on supplies. To make things worse, the Soviets mounted an airlift of armaments to Syria and Egypt, and Washington discovered that they’d already launched a sealift, a clear indication that Kissinger’s estimation of the Soviets had been seriously misguided.

Still, Kissinger resisted Golda’s entreaties and it fell to Dinitz to pres- sure him. Golda’s favorite son, Dinitz was no match for the American secretary of state, who stroked Dinitz’s ego with open access to his office and invitations to his home. When Kissinger promised swift attention to Israel’s plight, Dinitz assumed that Kissinger was being forthright. Only later did he discover that the State Department hadn’t issued the neces- sary export licenses or that the total number of planes promised by Kiss- inger was wildly exaggerated. Kissinger kept mollifying him by complaining that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was tying up the resupply in bureaucracy—and Dinitz never caught on to the game.

When Golda realized that the promised weapons were entangled in some sort of Washington political play, she asked Dinitz to arrange an immediate secret meeting for her with Nixon. Kissinger was horrified at that prospect, which would undercut his careful calculations. Nixon didn’t agree to her request, but he did order Kissinger to begin supplying Israel with replacement weapons immediately, another potential hazard to his strategy. The language of Nixon’s order, however, was vague and included no timetable for delivery, and Kissinger was a master at exploit- ing such loopholes. So the delays continued as Kissinger kept up the pretense that he was waging a “one-man fight” against the Pentagon bu- reaucrats.

Golda grew frantic. In the middle of one night, she woke Dinitz up twice, instructing him to contact Kissinger immediately. When Dinitz reminded her of the hour, she said, “Never mind the time. Wake him up

and tell him what I’m requesting. We need the help today because tomor- row may be too late. And tell him I said he can sleep as much as he wants after the war.”

By Thursday the eleventh, Golda was calling members of Congress, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, and Jewish leaders. “I would not have come to you if I did not think the situation would improve in the next few days,” she cabled Nixon. “You know the reasons why we took no preemp- tive action. . . . If I had given the chief of staff authority to preempt, as he had recommended, some hours before the attacks began, there is no doubt that our situation would now be different.”

Still Kissinger delayed the weapons while hiding behind his vocifer- ous complaints about the Pentagon—although his supporters argue that he was, in fact, innocent of such charges. In their accounts, all the delays were the fault of elements within the Pentagon, especially William Cle- ments, deputy secretary of defense, a Texan with close ties to the oil in- dustry, who did everything possible to subvert Nixon’s order.

But former Defense Department officials counter that Kissinger man- dated an unattainable level of secrecy in the delivery of the equipment, knowing full well that such stringent requirements would cause long de- lays. And it strains the imagination to believe that a deputy undersecre- tary of whatever would defy a presidential order, or that Kissinger would not have involved Nixon personally if he had.

* * *

For the first forty hours of the war, Israel fought on the northern front on Arab terms, understrength units facing massive forces. But as the re- serves arrived and the air forces began blunting the Syrian drive, the Is- raelis inexorably pushed the Syrians back, kilometer by kilometer. On the fifth day, they trapped the last two Syrian brigades holding out on the Golan front. Tank crews began chalking “On to Damascus” on the sides of their Centurions.

Still, Dayan remained mired in pessimism, exhorting that Israel should dig in along the old truce line in the Golan and prepare a fallback

line in the Sinai. Meanwhile, they should build up the IDF, mobilize the elderly and teenage boys, and distribute antitank weapons to the entire populace to prepare for an enemy advance on Haifa and Tel Aviv.

“The only way to win is to fight,” countered Dado, convinced that Is- rael needed a decisive victory to deprive the Arabs both of land and of any sense of triumph. He wanted to strike a crippling blow against the Syrians by moving his troops toward Damascus, getting close enough to force Syria to beg for a cease-fire. Once they did, he could shift armor south and launch an offensive to break what was turning into a dangerous dead- lock with the Egyptians

As usual, it fell to Golda to make the decision, and Golda was worried about speed. When the change in the tide of the war sunk in, she knew that the UN Security Council would pass a cease-fire resolution that would not be friendly. They always did, and few UN members had so much as denounced the Arabs for attacking or acknowledged Israel’s re- straint in avoiding a preemptive strike this time around. So she took an- other drag on her cigarette and said, “If it is within our power to deal a crushing blow to the Syrians and force them to plead for a cease-fire, that will be a tremendous achievement. On to Damascus.”

While Israeli troops in the south chafed at the bit for a chance to turn the tables on the Egyptians, Golda continued her battle against Kissinger since no offensive was possible until her military was resupplied. None of her pleas or complaints seemed to break the logjam. Only when Nixon realized how massive the Soviet airlift had become did he ram open the pipeline. On Saturday the thirteenth, he ordered an immediate, massive military resupply operation that was hampered only by the refusal of all the European countries but Portugal to permit U.S. aircraft flying weap- ons to Israel to refuel on their soil.