Six Days (10 page)

As Secretary of State Dean Rusk poured the drinks he warned Eban that the president would not be offering him a NATO-style guarantee. Eban wasn't surprised: ‘I did not get the impression that the US had ever decided to enter a new and complicated defence alliance between cocktails and the first course of a dinner party.' But over the dinner table, on the roof of the State Department on a balmy midsummer night, the Israelis had their own warnings for Rusk. Nasser had ‘declared war' when he blocked the straits. It was a time bomb and in Israel, the mood of the cabinet was ‘apocalyptic'. The choice was to ‘surrender or fight'.

Just after 1:30 p.m. the next day, President Johnson summoned his main diplomatic and military advisers. What was he going to tell Eban? He needed advice and wanted it fast. The Texan looked round the table. ‘Along about sundown I have to bell this cat. I need to know what I am going to say.' President Johnson was reassured that Israel was in no danger it could not handle. But Johnson was America's shrewdest politician, who dominated Capitol Hill before he became John F. Kennedy's vice-president. He knew he had to give Eban something to take home to the Israeli cabinet.

But deciding what took time. The Israelis had an anxious afternoon, waiting for the White House to call. Ephraim Evron, the number two at the Israeli Embassy, had known Johnson since he was a senator. He went to the White House to fix a time for Eban's appointment. In the Oval Office Johnson told him that he could not do anything without the approval of Congress, ‘otherwise, I'm just a six foot four friend Texan'. With the help of Britain and other maritime nations, the straits could be opened, but Israel must not try any ‘unilateral action that will cause her great damage'. Eban was still being stalked by news teams. To avoid them the plan was that the foreign minister and Ambassador Harman would go into the White House through the diplomats' entrance. But they turned up at the wrong gate, where the guard would not let them in. The Israeli foreign minister preserved his dignity as the guard phoned into the executive mansion that ‘some guy out here by the name of Eban says he is supposed to see the President'.

The Israelis were finally ushered into the Oval Office at 7:15 p.m. Both sides were keyed up. Johnson wanted to finesse his way between his genuine commitment to Israel and his desire to keep the United States out of another shooting war. Eban had to take something home for the impatient generals. He opened by saying that there had never been a moment like this in Israeli history. Nasser was trying to strangle Israel, which would fight and win rather than surrender. An Arab attack was coming soon. What was the United States going to do? Would it honour its commitment to keep the straits open? What was happening with the plan for an international maritime force to open the straits?

Johnson told him not to worry. Israel was not in imminent danger. If the Arabs attacked, the Israelis ‘would lick them'. You can tell the cabinet, the president said, that ‘we will pursue vigorously any and all possible measures to keep the strait open'. But Israel must not initiate hostilities. Johnson then spoke with what the official White House note-taker said was ‘emphasis and solemnity'. Israel would not be alone unless it decides to go it alone. He repeated the sentence to make sure they understood. Johnson and his aides hoped that the carefully composed formula would stop the Israelis from launching a pre-emptive strike. The president used all the skills he had acquired in a lifetime of political persuasion. He was pushing for Congressional support. ‘What I can do, I do,' he told them. He handed over some of his notes. Copy them if you like, he said.

Then it was Eban's turn to speak slowly and precisely. What was the US doing to take action in the straits? Nasser would think twice about stopping a ship if he saw it had a British or American flag. Looking at Johnson he asked, ‘I would not be wrong if I told the Prime Minister that your disposition is to make every possible effort to ensure that the Strait and the Gulf will remain open to free and innocent passage?' One word came from Johnson. ‘Yes.' And don't worry about an Egyptian attack, he said again. An attack from Egypt was not imminent. If it came, ‘you'll whip hell out of them'.

At dinner that evening in the executive mansion Johnson thought he had given the Israelis, if not exactly what they wanted, then at least enough to hold them back. He was exultant, crowing, ‘They came loaded for bear, but so was I! I let them talk for the first hour and then I finished it up in the last fifteen minutes. Secretary McNamara said he just wanted to throw his cap into the air, and George Christian [the White House Press Secretary] said it was the best meeting of the kind he had ever sat in on.'

Eban left immediately for home. On the way back he stopped off at the Waldorf Towers hotel for two hours, where he met the US ambassador to the UN, Arthur Goldberg, who deliberately tried to damp down what the president had said. Don't forget, he said, that Johnson said he needed the support of Congress before he did anything. That meant that Eban should assume that the presidential commitment was conditional – and Washington would tolerate no surprises.

Eban and his team arrived back in Tel Aviv late on the evening of Saturday 27 May. They were driven straight to the prime minister's office in Tel Aviv where the cabinet had started what turned into an all-night session. The army was ready to attack the following morning. Rabin, who was there too, warned Moshe Raviv, Eban's political assistant, that not going to war was going to be ‘very difficult'. Eban urged the ministers to respect the American request for more time to work on opening the straits. After a fierce debate, nine ministers voted for Eban's proposition. Nine voted for immediate war. Overnight, there was another message from President Johnson warning against pre-emptive action. The next morning, the 28th, the cabinet agreed to give the Americans another two weeks.

Frustration oozed out of Yigal Allon. Israel, he said reluctantly, was committed to playing the American game. But it would go to war if it found credible intelligence that Egypt was about to strike the Israeli air force. The American ambassador Walworth Barbour, a reclusive, very tall, immensely fat man with chronic emphysema, was especially close to General Yariv, the head of military intelligence. He reported that, ‘They feel they can finish Nasser off … they are prepared to wait a few weeks but are maintaining mobilisation at top level which cannot be done indefinitely without serious economic effects [on] Israel.' The fact that it was Eban who had caused the delay was particularly infuriating. His classical education, often orotund style and metropolitan ways played brilliantly in the West but had always got under the skin of more down-to-earth
sabras,
native-born Israelis, who had spent their early years milking cows and mounting guard rather than reading Homer. They thought he was just plain wrong. What was he doing wasting his time over promises the Americans may or may not keep in the Straits of Tiran when the real issue had become the Egyptian divisions in the Sinai? General Yariv was furious. As far as he and other generals were concerned, Eban had disobeyed his orders. Tiran was ‘not important'. What mattered was the big picture. Nasser was uniting the entire Arab world against Israel. Eban should have taken the cable that Rabin had rewritten more seriously. A rumour was started by Eban's enemies that he would be replaced by Golda Meir.

Nasser's bandwagon

The Egyptian capital was calmer than it had been. In the papers the government ran campaigns to give one day's wages to the army and to give blood at the newly opened donor centres around Cairo. There was no rush of volunteers. The minister of culture arranged for intellectuals to tour the provinces to make speeches and declaim patriotic verse to inspire the masses. For the foreigners who were left, Cairo was bleak. The American Embassy, desperate for something positive, was comforted that critical voices in the press and radio, which had ‘reached upper decibel range … now describe British as our accomplice in the plot so we no longer alone'.

For Nasser, 28 May was an excellent day. The world's press waited for him as he strode confidently into the floodlit, circular council chamber of the Presidential Palace. A British foreign correspondent, Sandy Gall of ITN, felt Nasser's charisma. ‘Physically he was an impressive man, tall for an Egyptian, well built, handsome and with a film star quality that turned heads and made him the centre of attention. But his most noticeable feature was his smile. It came on like an electric light, the shiny white teeth flashing on and off.' Among Arabs, his prestige had never been higher.

It was a confident, assured performance, broadcast live on radio in Egypt and, through Voice of the Arabs, across the Arab world. The crisis over UNEF and the Straits of Tiran, Nasser told them, were just ‘symptoms' of the constant threat to the Arab world posed by Israeli aggression against Palestine. What could be more natural than an Egyptian response? He threatened anyone who tried to ‘touch the rights of Egyptian sovereignty' with ‘unimaginable damage'. Nasser warmed to his theme. Israel had been deceived by its ‘sham victory' in 1956. Coexistence was not possible because Israel had robbed the Palestinians and expelled them from their country. Palestinian rights must be restored and Eshkol would get what was coming to him for threatening ‘to march on Damascus, occupy Syria and overthrow the Syrian Arab regime'. Winston Burdett of CBS News thought Nasser sounded like a ‘sleepwalker speaking in an exalted trance of fatalism'. But a British diplomat who was listening reported that Nasser was ‘riding high and working coolly and cleverly'.

American diplomats in Cairo listened with dismay, certain that a crisis was becoming a disaster. The US position in the Arab world, already weak, was about to be destroyed. Nasser, they believed, would not turn back, except perhaps if he was faced with the threat of clear and overwhelming force. Even then, he would turn a retreat in the face of American power into a major political victory. They accepted he did not want to fire the first shot. But he hoped a showdown with Israel would strengthen his position in the Arab world. They dismissed a theory put around by some Nasser-watchers in Washington, who detected hints that he would let oil pass through the straits to Israel, as long as it went quietly in neutral tankers.

After Nasser had finished, King Hussein's private secretary, Ziad Rifai, switched off the radio he kept on the desk of his office in Amman. What Nasser had said, and the way he said it, meant war was coming. The king, who had been listening in his quarters in the palace, felt the same. Hussein's first reaction to Nasser's blockade of Eilat was that it was ‘incomprehensible and extremely dangerous'. But he decided that his only chance was to try to repair relations with Nasser. New light has been thrown on Hussein's reasons for taking his decision by recently declassified CIA documents. The CIA had a special relationship with Hussein. For many years it channelled secret subsidies to the king. The CIA station chief in Amman, Jack O'Connel, became Hussein's close confidant. He reported that the king and his generals were more convinced than ever that the West Bank was Israel's ‘strategic target'. Jordan's generals were pressing very strongly for coordination of defensive plans with other Arab states. Failure to do it, they argued, meant that they would lose more soldiers and more territory. The CIA reported that ‘the army's mood was determined, their argument was irrefutable and the King faced serious morale and loyalty problems if he did not respond to it'.

Hussein warned Washington that its unilateral support of Israel was endangering its ‘traditional Arab friends', a reference to himself. He warned them that he might oppose the US to ‘survive the Arab wrath'. Even so, his friendship with the US might have made him ‘too vulnerable to survive'.

Hussein realised that even if Nasser's actions were a lousy way to prepare for a war, they had propelled him right back into the hearts and minds of Arabs everywhere, and nowhere more so than among Palestinians on the West Bank. For Hussein, it all came down to survival. He could feel the Arab political bandwagon that had started in Cairo rumbling threateningly towards him. If he did not jump on to it, he would be squashed. War was coming and he would not be able to stay out of it. He was just too close to the action.

An alliance with the viciously anti-Hashemite regime in Syria seemed out of the question. Jordan did not even have diplomatic relations with Damascus. The king withdrew his ambassador after a lorry filled with explosives blew up at Ramtha on the Jordanian side of the border with Syria on 21 May, killing twenty-one Jordanians. Syria accused the king's men of planting the bomb. Hussein's court became convinced that the radicals in Syria saw the king as the real enemy, not Israel. All that was left to him was a reconciliation with Nasser. Hussein's reading of Israel's intentions, and the pressure from his generals and the people on the streets, especially Palestinians, left him with no choice. If he stayed out, an ‘eruption' would cause his regime to collapse, which ‘would result in an Israeli occupation of probably the West Bank or even more than the West Bank'. If he fought, Egyptian air cover might delay Israel's advance into the West Bank long enough for the UN to intervene. In his official business he gave the impression that he had become ‘a lonely man'.

Just after dawn on the morning of Tuesday 30 May, King Hussein left for Cairo. He strode from his car to the plane, scribbling his signature on papers appointing his younger brother Prince Mohamed as regent while he was away. He told them to expect him back for lunch. Hussein was tense, excited and in a hurry. He was wearing a khaki combat uniform with field marshal's insignia, and a big American Magnum automatic handgun in a canvas holster on his left hip. The king found flying calmed him so he took the controls of the Jordanian Caravelle. He flew it south across the desert, over Petra, Wadi Rum and the Red Sea towards Cairo.