1O
DR CHAZOV’S “VACATION IN EGYPT”
A. Superpower talks and Nasser’s “flu”
Through the summer of ’69, US–USSR discussions about “basic principles” for a
Middle East settlement dragged on, in an apparent effort by Moscow to temporize until
its regulars were in place. After meeting Kissinger on 11 June, Ambassador Dobrynin
reported that the Middle East was next on Kissinger’s agenda after Vietnam and
S A LT. But Kissinger said that Nixon thought a settlement could be “accomplished only
through an unpublicized exchange of opinion between the USSR and USA, who ...
need not be under the thumb of their clients ... it would be necessary for both sides (the
Arabs and Israel) to ‘swallow the bitter pill of certain compromises.’”
This was a clear jab at the talks that Dobrynin had been holding regularly with
Assistant Secretary of State Sisco. The Soviet ambassador, despite his earlier disparage-
ment of Kissinger’s character, now noted that they had developed a “fairly good per-
sonal rapport.” Since “Kissinger’s influence on ... Nixon’s foreign policy remains pre-
dominant,” Dobrynin considered “it would be advisable to develop and utilize the
Kissinger channel ... where publicity is undesirable, something that very often cannot
be achieved by working through the State Department.”^1 Still, Dobrynin continued to
meet almost weekly with Sisco. A blow-by-blow analysis of their wrangling over minu-
tiae of phrasing and procedure thus might offer a fascinating exercise in diplomatic
history, but would be relevant to developments on the ground mainly as a diversion.^2
In early September, as the groundwork for Soviet intervention was being laid, Nasser
suffered a heart attack and (as informants close to the Eg yptian president disclosed long
after his death) he “received medical care from the Soviets. ... Soviet doctors told Nasser
he had one year to live.”^3 At the time, it was reported that he postponed a trip to
Moscow that was originally scheduled for September on the pretext of a bad flu, which
actually disguised this heart attack.^4 Heikal retained this fiction in his story of a secret
visit to Moscow in January 1970: Nasser supposedly decided to go even though “he was
ill—an attack of the flu on top of all his other complaints.”^5 But the memoirs of Nasser’s
Soviet physician call into serious question not only his purported flu but whether the
president was in the USSR at any time during this period.