of the Yom Kippur War, flatly blamed Meir for not requesting the
king to be more specific and divulge when war was going to erupt.
He also criticized Meir for not informing the Agranat Commission
about the king’s warning.
However, recent studies maintain that the king did not know many
details about the impending war. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Hus-
sein had met secretly and regularly with Israeli leaders on issues
common to the two countries. He consistently stated that he had no
intention of taking any military initiative. He had met Meir and
Dayan on 9 May 1973, and then too warned of an Egyptian intention
to go to war. At the 25 September meeting, Hussein did indeed warn
of a Syrian attack on the Golan Heights, and the logical inference to
be drawn, Knizer later concluded, was that there would be a joint
Syrian-Egyptian attack. Professor Avi Shlaim of Oxford University
met with King Hussein about two years before the king’s death as
part of a research study on peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.
The king at that time denied that he had known a war was about to
erupt. Still, the information relayed to Meir did not absolve Zeira of
responsibility for the intelligence failure. Zeira received a detailed
account of the meeting and decided nonetheless to downplay it. Ap-
parently, the prevailing Conceptat that time—that Egypt was not
ready for war and Syria would not wage war without Egypt—was so
dominant that even if President Anwar Sadat himself had met Meir to
warn her that he was bent on war, she would probably not have be-
lieved him.KLINGBERG, AVRAHAM MARCUS (1920– ).Born in Poland, at
the beginning of World War II Klingberg evaded the Nazis and the war
by escaping to the Soviet Union. There he studied medicine. In 1948
he immigrated to Israel and served as a doctor in the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF); however, there were rumors that he was an officer of the
Soviet KGB. After leaving the IDF, he taught medicine for several
years at Tel Aviv University. At the same time, he steadily rose to the
summit of one of Israel’s most sensitive institutions: the top secret Bi-
ological Institute in Nes Tsiona (south of Tel Aviv), where Israel al-
legedly produced—and perhaps still produces—biological weapons.
From 1957 to 1975 he occupied the position of vice president of the
institute.150 • KLINGBERG, AVRAHAM MARCUS06-102 (03) H-P.qxd 3/24/06 7:24 AM Page 150