Six Days (20 page)

As Elkins was compiling his report, the Jordanian authorities had finally overcome their reluctance to give weapons to Palestinians: 260 Enfield rifles, 20 Sten submachine guns and 20 Bren light machine guns were delivered to the resistance committee that had been set up by Bahjet Abu Gharbiyeh. The army gave out another 100 or so guns. A dozen Stens, still smothered in protective grease, turned up at the radio station. Some of the men had improvised positions in the radio station garden, while the women loaded bullets into magazines. Almost nobody had any military training. Men were taking up firing positions in front of windows that were closed and without tape to catch the pieces if the glass was shattered. Amman had sent them nothing to broadcast, so they played military music, recordings of bursts of machine gun fire and improvised interludes of nationalistic rhetoric. In Amman the Jordanian minister of information, Abd al-Hamid Sharaf, was having lunch with his wife. He was shifting between different stations on his radio. Suddenly he heard a shrieking, hysterical voice, calling for popular mobilisation and victory. It was Jerusalem. He phoned them, ordering them ‘to calm down and be more reasonable'. Sharaf, who was in his twenties, venerated Nasser as the best hope of the Arab people. Nasser must be prepared for war, he told Leila, his Lebanese wife, or why would he let it happen?

In Israeli Jerusalem, Michael Elkins was filing his report. ‘About three hours after the war started, I broadcast that the war was won. I knew of the air strike on the Egyptian airfields and planes. It was obvious that by fighting in the Sinai desert without air cover the Egyptians couldn't win.' Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, ignored Elkins's heroic efforts. The IDF spokesman denounced reports of Egyptian losses as ‘premature, unclear and utterly unauthorised'. In Tel Aviv at midday, Amit briefed the US ambassador Walworth Barbour and Harry C. McPherson, President Johnson's envoy. McPherson was a little ragged around the edges. He had only arrived from Saigon at three that morning. Amit delivered a briefing which, like all the most effective disinformation, contained truth, lies and exaggeration, skilfully calibrated for its audience, whom he knew had its own intelligence sources. Amit told the Americans that Nasser had largely played his build-up by ear, until he had so much momentum he could not stop. Egypt had completed the encirclement of Israel, which had acted because the Arabs were about to launch an offensive. In the previous forty-eight hours the Egyptian 4th Armoured Division and the crack Shazli Brigade, which had 400 tanks between them, had been brought up to encircle and cut off Eilat, thus creating a land link with Jordan.

Amit said early that morning the Egyptians had shelled three Israeli settlements near the Gaza Strip. At the same moment, hostile Egyptian war planes entered Israeli airspace. No Egyptian troops had crossed the border. The day before, Amit told them, Israel had decided to ‘punch all the buttons' if there was an attack. Amit then punched the cold war button that he knew was hard-wired into the Americans' minds. Nasser, he said, had started a process that could lead to heavy Soviet pressure on Turkey and Iran to side with the Arabs. It was a Middle East domino theory, which was language Americans in the 1960s understood well. Now, Amit suggested, Nasser might collapse, which would lead to more stability.

Amit had known for more than two hours before the briefing with the Americans that Israel had already won the air war. All the same, speaking with characteristic chutzpah that Barbour, who saw his role as maintaining and strengthening the US–Israel alliance, described as ‘entire candour', he reproached his visitors. America's attempts, Amit complained, to restrain Israel had made the job its soldiers, sailors and airmen had to do much more difficult. As Israel had already demonstrated that morning, Amit's suggestion was nonsense. But the last thing he wanted was for the Americans to know how well Israel was doing. He requested political backing, money, weapons and for the Soviets to be kept out of the area.

During Amit's briefing the sirens went. When Harry McPherson ‘asked the intelligence chief whether we should go to a shelter, he looked at his watch and said, “It won't be necessary.”' The next day, when McPherson saw exhausted Israeli soldiers sleeping in the shade near the Gaza border, the Israeli colonel with him said they had earned their rest. ‘They've been driving down here since Sunday afternoon. This place looked like Detroit Sunday night' – twelve hours, as McPherson realised, before the Egyptian ‘attack'.

Governments without the USA's intelligence-gathering resources spent weeks trying to puzzle out what really happened. At the end of June a foreign military attaché still had to ask Brigadier General Hod, the commander of the air force, how they could have been so effective when they were responding to a sudden attack. Surely they needed at least six months to prepare such a crushing attack. Hod did not try too hard to keep the secret. He replied, ‘Sir, you are right, but not quite. We have been preparing for it for eighteen and a half years.'

Washington DC, 0430

Washington was waking up. By 0430 Walt Rostow, the National Security Advisor, was preparing to rouse the president. The US government heard first about the outbreak of war from news agency reports. One of the overnight staff in the Situation Room at the White House saw them, picked up a phone and started dialling. He woke Rostow just before 0250. Groggily, Rostow told him to call back when the reports were confirmed. Five minutes later the phone rang again with the confirmation. Rostow was in the White House by 0320. He called Secretary of State Dean Rusk who had already gone into the State Department. Rusk suggested they waited an hour or so until they had more facts before they woke the president. Now at 0435, Rostow had a scrawled page of notes in front of him. He was put through to Johnson's bedroom. He told the president what they knew. Johnson asked very few questions and made no comment. At the end he thanked Rostow, who suddenly thought it seemed very ordinary, no different to all their other conversations. Then there was some confusion about the time difference with the Middle East. Was Cairo attacked at 0900 or 0800 local? For a while, the president's advisers tried to work out what time it was in Cairo and Tel Aviv.

By the time Rostow spoke again to Johnson, at 0615 Washington time, hard military intelligence was coming in from intercepts picked up by the National Security Agency. The Egyptian military in Cairo was receiving information that ‘at least five' of its airfields in the Sinai and around the Suez canal were ‘unserviceable'. The CIA recalled that ‘Israel's war plans had put high priority on quick action against the Egyptian air force because of the threat to its own more vulnerable airfields and vital centres.'

Johnson, still in his bedroom, was being briefed on the phone by Rostow and his other top officials. Johnson ordered Rostow to bring in the elder statesmen of American foreign policy to offer their help. First of all McGeorge Bundy, who had been one of Kennedy's key advisers. Bundy took over Rostow's direct responsibility for coordinating Middle East policy. (Rostow was told to concentrate on Vietnam, though in practice he remained deeply involved with the new war. Later on, the White House press secretary denied speculation that Rostow was taken out of the front seat because he was Jewish.) Also drafted were Dean Acheson, Secretary of State to President Harry Truman, and Clark Clifford, a lawyer who had been deeply involved with US foreign policy since the start of the Cold War. Bundy was made executive secretary of a Special Committee of the NSC. Rusk was the chairman. The idea was to recreate the Executive Committee, or ‘ExCom', which handled the Cuban missile crisis in 1961. Just like the ExCom, they took their seats around the big table in the Situation Room, the crisis centre in the basement of the White House.

Cairo, 1030

A group of foreign correspondents hurried down to the TV centre, an impressive ultra-modern curved building, topped by a high-rise tower. It was just a few blocks down the Nile corniche from the Hilton hotel where they were staying. Crowds were mobbing it. ‘Well, this is it, war with Israel,' someone said to Ron Chester of Canada's CBC. They pushed their way inside. Trevor Armbrister of the
Saturday Evening Post
saw Kamal Bakr, Egypt's public relations chief, who was ‘pudgy [and] quietly unprofessional', pinning military communiqué No. 1 to a notice board. It read: ‘Israel began its aggression this morning by raiding Cairo and now the governorates in the UAR [Egypt]. The UAR military crafts face the planes.' Communiqué No. 2 at 1020 reported Radio Tel Aviv had announced an Egyptian raid on the city. Ten minutes later the people grouped round the teleprinter for the Middle East News Agency ticker read that twenty-three Israeli planes had been shot down; ‘pandemonium'.

‘Twenty-three Israeli planes,' someone yelled, ‘twenty-three Israeli planes shot down…' US diplomats reported ‘effervescence and clapping in the streets' as the news started to spread. The radio went back to playing patriotic songs ‘interspersed with calls for a return to Palestine and a rendezvous in Tel Aviv'. No one seemed to know where the planes had been shot down. Outside, the sky was clear and empty. Just before eleven o'clock there were puffs of white smoke, which they took to be anti-aircraft fire.

A stream of lies was pouring out of the high command. They were passed on to the world through Cairo Radio and through Kamal Bakr at the press centre who kept pinning up the latest communiqués. At 1110 Bakr told them it was forty-two Israeli planes down, not twenty-three. Egypt, he announced proudly, had not lost one. At the press centre the military communiqués ‘kept flowing in … each one couched in superlatives', with more whooping and cheering every time the latest went up on the notice board. Nothing suggested that the war was going badly for the Arabs. Eric Rouleau of
Le Monde
had plunged into the streets. ‘We witnessed extraordinary outbursts of joy. In spite of the air-raid alarms, in spite of anti-aircraft fire, everybody was out in the streets and the crowd … shouted: “Nasser, Nasser, we are with you. Nasser, Nasser, finish with Israel.” … Every time that the loudspeakers announced that an enemy aircraft had been shot down, people embraced, jumped for joy, applauded.' American cameramen trying to film the excited crowds were attacked. New peaks of emotion swept through the streets when an Israeli plane, hit by anti-aircraft fire, crashed into the city centre. Crowds gathered around it, chanting the name of Nasser. They believed he was humiliating the Israelis in the same way that he had humiliated the British and French in 1956.

The speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, Anwar El Sadat, was in high good humour. He had heard on the radio that Israel had attacked. ‘Well,' he thought as he shaved, ‘they'll be taught a lesson they won't forget.' He took his time selecting an appropriate suit and tie, then drove himself to GHQ. He had ‘unshakeable confidence' in an Egyptian victory. At the headquarters building he saw that the Soviet ambassador's car was there already, ‘so I thought that he had called to congratulate us. “What's the news?” I asked. Some officers said we had shot down forty aircraft so far. “Splendid,” I said.'

Mafrak Airbase, Jordan, 1150

The Jordanians gave up waiting for their unreliable allies. Sixteen RJAF Hawker Hunters took off on a mission to bomb Israeli bases including the one at Netanya, a town on the coast north of Tel Aviv. They came back half an hour later claiming they had destroyed four enemy planes on the ground, without loss. But they were the only aircraft they saw. The Israeli air force was still concentrating on the Egyptians. But the planners in Tel Aviv were about to switch their attention elsewhere. Hod gave the order to go to the next phase of Operation Focus, the attack on Syria and Jordan.

Damascus, 1200

In Damascus in the morning tension was high. Civil defence personnel were called to their posts after the news of the raids on Egypt came through. Ports and airports were closed. Students who turned up for their summer examinations were told they had been called off. They milled around in the streets, waiting for something to happen. They did not have to wait long. An hour or so later, Mirages started to bomb Damascus airport. Heavy anti-aircraft fire blasted back at them. The border between Syria and Israel was the least active front in the first four days of the war, but there were heavy artillery exchanges, instigated by Syria and answered by Israeli air strikes.

Israel's deception campaign continued. In the United States it was still very early in the morning. At 5 a.m. Gideon Rafael, Israel's ambassador to the UN, telephoned his American counterpart Arthur Goldberg to tell him that Egyptian forces had penetrated the Negev. Israeli foreign minister Eban told the US ambassador Walworth Barbour that Egyptian ground forces had started the fighting by shelling Israeli border villages. The Israelis were both lying for their country, as was Prime Minister Eshkol, who sent President Johnson a message about Egyptian aggression ‘culminating in this morning's engagements and the bombardment … in Israeli territory'.

Cairo GHQ, 1200

Sidqi Mahmoud and Amer had arrived back from Cairo International airport, where they had finally been able to land. As soon as he reached his desk, Sidqi was swamped by reports of devastating Israeli attacks. Within minutes he telephoned Nasser to tell him what was happening. The full extent of the disaster was becoming clearer with every damage report that came into GHQ. Nasser started to feel that the battle was lost, before it had even properly started.

Anwar El Sadat went down to the basement of GHQ. He found Field Marshal Amer standing in the middle of his office ‘looking around with wandering eyes. “Good morning,” I said, but he didn't seem to hear me. I said “Good morning” again, but it took him about a minute to return my greeting.' Sadat's good mood disappeared. Something, he realised, had gone wrong. Other officers told him that the air force had been completely destroyed on the ground. Nasser came out of another room. Amer started talking, blaming the Americans. Nasser answered: ‘I am not prepared to believe this, or to issue an official statement to the effect that the USA has attacked us, until you've produced at least one aircraft with a wing showing the US ensign.' Nasser left.