DECEPTION-ON-NILE, JULY 1972he seemed very uncertain. This conversation, like the one the day before, ended on an
extremely cordial note.”^24 If Nixon himself was incensed at the Soviet claim, he hid it
in a press conference a week later. Asked about the impact of the withdrawal, the
president fudged: “It might exacerbate the problem by trying to evaluate what hap-
pened between Sadat and the Soviet leaders.”^25 By 1981, Nixon was taking credit for
the achievement when “Soviet advisers were thrown out of Eg ypt in 1972.”^26
Kissinger thus came full circle from his declared goal to expel the Soviet military
formations from Eg ypt, while the individual advisers might stay—although this was
what he actually achieved. His political motivation now required that he advertise
the opposite: that he had reached no agreement for withdrawal of the Soviet troops,
much less granted the concessions at Israel’s expense that the Soviets had demanded
in return. But he was also eager to prove that his efforts to promote détente had
caused a Soviet setback as a by-product, which could only be done by establishing the
misnomer “expulsion of advisers” and depicting it as a bolt from the blue rather than
the outcome of extended negotiation. By Nixon’s next meeting with Brezhnev, on
14 June 1973, Kissinger was proudly advising the president: “the one area where
Soviet policy seems most confused and uncertain is the Middle East. The abrupt
dismissal of Soviet advisers from the UAR last summer may well have been the high-
water mark for the Soviet offensive. ... Their influence with Sadat has declined.”^27
In this, he had the willing cooperation of the Eg yptians and the Soviets, for their
own motives. Kissinger consistently perpetuated this line in subsequent publica-
tions—from his 1979 description of Sadat’s “bombshell” move as terminating “the
mission of the more than 15,000 Soviet military advisers and experts” to a sweeping
statement twenty years later: “In 1972 ... Sadat dismissed all his Soviet military advis-
ers and asked Soviet technicians to leave the country.”^28 How pervasive this version
became even in recent studies is illustrated by an authoritative overview of the Cold
War (“Sadat expelled some 15,000 Soviet advisers from Eg ypt”) and a history of the
Palestinian–Israeli conflict (“to the world’s surprise, he evicted the Soviet Union’s
15,000 military advisers.”)^29 Neither writer saw need to provide a reference.
One of the first analyses, by Walter Laqueur in 1974, in referring to the “exodus”
as “unexpected and startling,” relies mainly on Eg ypt’s “semiofficial version” and
Sadat’s public statements. Laqueur accepted the subsequent disinformation described
below whereby the “expulsion” was later reversed. But his evaluation is actually one
of the most accurate to date, in stating that the expulsion was partial, and concealed
the effectiveness of war preparations.^30 Other early studies, while accepting the claim
of a full expulsion, pointed out that “the rift did not last long ... and the Soviet with-
drawals had in fact paved the way for re-establishing military relations on a more
stable basis,” including supplies specifically aimed at enabling a war.^31 But few have
acknowledged that neither rift nor reconciliation ever happened; rather, the bulk of
genuine advisers in Eg ypt resumed their work soon after their mass recall to Cairo in
mid-July.^32