THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973Boris Sedov, a KGB political operative at the Soviet embassy in Washington working
under the cover of a Novosti correspondent, began to cultivate the professor with
frequent meetings.^4 Oleg Kalugin, Sedov’s superior at the rezidentura, asserts “we
never had any illusions about trying to recruit Kissinger; he was simply a source of
political intelligence.”^5 Still, the Soviets would be astonished by the sensitive informa-
tion that Kissinger volunteered.
Kissinger was invited to join the White House team two days after Nixon took
office, and accepted a week later.^6 By then, Sedov had operated what his boss would
call in retrospect a “back channel” with Kissinger for over a month. Dobrynin was
“not thrilled” with this activity so long as Nixon had no official status. Once the new
administration was installed, he protested the meetings with Kissinger, and Sedov
was “relegated to background”—but developed an alternative contact with National
Security Council aide Richard Allen. This as well as Sedov’s previous link with
Kissinger may explain the latter’s quite accurate comment, after only one meeting
with Dobrynin, that the ambassador’s reports “probably do carry weight in Moscow,
but his bosses also seem to run a check ... through the sizeable KGB establishment in
their embassy.”^7
On 30 December, Nixon’s yet-informal status did not prevent the Soviet leader-
ship from presenting him (as well as the outgoing administration) with a Middle East
settlement initiative. Although Israel rejected it within days, Soviet emissaries, includ-
ing a TASS correspondent at the UN, still tried to pitch the plan to Israeli diplo-
mats—presumably to minimize Jewish pressure on Nixon against it.^8 Simultaneously,
Moscow made sure, by such habitual means as an article by Primakov in Pravda, to
denounce and deny “rumors in the West” that the Soviet Union was about to reach a
settlement with Israel “behind the Arabs’ back.”^9
On the day of Nixon’s inauguration, after his address promised a change from
confrontation to negotiation, the Soviet leadership also presented him with a pro-
posal to discuss strategic arms limitation (SALT). Kissinger impressed on the presi-
dent his theory of linkage between this and other global issues. Nixon listed the
Middle East first when, a week later, he declared to the press that he was willing to
hold strategic arms talks “in a way and at a time that will promote ... progress on
outstanding political problems.”^10
Dobrynin—already a candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee and soon
to be promoted to full membership—rushed to Moscow to discuss this with the troika,
and returned by special plane. He received Kissinger for their first talk while in bed with
the flu. Dobrynin’s report of this meeting stresses two points that Kissinger omitted in
his. First, that the American suggested “to actively utilize a confidential channel”
between them, in order to sidestep the leak-prone State Department. Second, when
Dobrynin voiced Soviet suspicions that the new concept of linkage was “a political
game for pressuring the USSR in the hope ... of unilateral Soviet concessions,” Kissinger
“immediately began to justify himself ” and suggested Nixon meant that talks on the