FOREWORDxxi
Kissinger, which contrasts with his own evaluation of Heikal at the time of the
described events: “I don’t even know who Heykal is. Of course, I know his title, but
I don’t know what he stands for.”^24
Kissinger’s and Heikal’s respective vantage points, however, are still inadequate to
explain why objections that were obvious even at the time did not call their narratives
into more question than they actually met. The extra ingredient was, metaphorically,
a perfect storm: a confluence of interests and constraints, on the personal as well as
national level, that discouraged any of the parties involved—both contemporane-
ously and retrospectively—from pointing out the misstatements and spelling out
what actually happened.
Readers will soon find that the following pages make extensive use of many subse-
quent memoirs by prominent political and diplomatic figures, as well as the very same
books by Kissinger and Heikal. In the Soviet case, first glasnost, then the demise of
the USSR, added a raft of former nomenklatura members to the already swollen ranks
of US, Israeli and Arab figures for whom
the genre of memoirs has become not a bad means for improving one’s own biography ...
if it is unknown and unremembered how much was left out of these autobiographical
memoirs, one might think that the world had never seen a better, more decent, more
honest man than the writer.^25This does not mean such literature is useless—only that it must be subjected to
the same adjustment for context and purpose as the contemporary open sources.
Except when verified by cross-checks against sources with clearly differing motiva-
tions, these VIP memoirs must be treated as what their writers sought to establish,
not necessarily what actually took place. Reminiscences of rank-and-file partici-
pants, whose use is one of our main innovations, called for other tools and tests that
will be discussed presently.
C. Archival documentation: worth the wait?
Historians who were rightly dissatisfied with the available sources often ended their
presentations with the caveat, and on the hopeful note, that better-founded conclu-
sions would have to await the opening of the relevant archives. Well, forty years or
more have passed since the events in question; developments in both the political
sphere and information accessibility have been no less than revolutionary, and the
result has been mainly to undermine confidence in official records as the ultimate
arbiters of factual truth.
First of all, the very notion that comprehensive—or even fairly representative—
archival documentation is ultimately bound to emerge has proved to be illusory.
When we mention our use of newly available sources from the former USSR, the
response is almost always: “Ah, you mean the Soviet archives that have been thrown