FOREWORDxx
ers were easily manipulated. Visiting foreign correspondents and even the few resi-
dent ones, who seldom spoke the local language, could be fed the desired information
through confidential leaks from “knowledgeable circles.” Back at the American or
British newspapers’ or networks’ home base, analysts and commentators were simi-
larly dependent on the officials and/or politicians that they had mutually cultivated,
or whose agenda they shared.
After reading hundreds of examples, their content and bias became almost comi-
cally predictable; but in the absence of other sources for early historiography, they
were treated as authentic reflections of what actually happened. Our own approach
differed from this not in discarding the contemporary media as a source—on the
contrary, following its coverage of events proved essential—but in constant reference
to the context, purpose and origin of the information. Reports are cited, when pos-
sible, from the original print or broadcast media, often as a means of tracking a story
in the daily news cycle or the hourly evolving “takes” of the news agencies, whose
impact has rarely been adequately appreciated.
B. The impact of early memoirs: Heikal and Kissinger
Most historians, and certainly the best of them, were well aware of at least some of
these pitfalls. But they were unavoidably susceptible to the inculcation of stretched
or utterly false notions that was made over the following fifteen to twenty years by the
handful of central figures who staked early claims with memoirs and other publica-
tions. This is hardly unique to the present subject and period: Churchill too, among
many more or less iconic figures, “wrote a widely read multivolume account of the
[second world] war to make sure that contemporaries and future generations would
see the conflict and his role in it the way he preferred.”^22 What stands out in the
present instance is the degree of pervasive influence that these writers enjoyed. Since
they were at or near the top leadership level, they gained wide attention and were
ascribed the authority of possessing “inside information,” which ensured their pre-
dominance in setting the factual record (what happened) in addition to its interpreta-
tion for causality (why it happened)—even though these actors obviously had the
strongest vested interest in enshrining their versions.
The following chapters will demonstrate how a handful of these writers, and par-
ticularly newspaper editor and politician Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and Henry
Kissinger, succeeded in establishing self-serving and highly misleading versions about
pivotal events in the Soviet intervention: the former as to when and how it began, the
latter as to when, how—and, indeed, whether—it ended.^23 It was no less than aston-
ishing to follow the track of footnotes from one scholarly or popular publication to
another, and to find how many of them originated mainly or exclusively from these
two sources. Their shared celebrity status and media skill helped; the front cover of
Heikal’s The Sphinx and the Commissar (1978) features an endorsement from