CEASEFIRE VIOLATION SEALS A STRATEGIC GAINBut CIA sources hold that after Italy, Greece and Spain caused further delay by
refusing to host the U-2s, Britain had to be “begged” for use of its base at Akrotiri,
Cyprus, and British pilots did conduct some of the twenty-nine flights.^13 The agree-
ment required intense negotiations with the Cypriot authorities too, and was
obtained on condition that the flights not be made public, a constraint that ham-
pered US exposure of the violations that the U-2s documented.^14
If, as the CIA claimed in retrospect, despite all obstacles the two planes were trans-
ferred within seventy-one hours, and arrived on 8 August, then the operation was
approved on the 4th or 5th. The NRO director proudly described them as “the only
true crisis use of the IDEALIST [U-2] for national intelligence collection in the last
four years.”^15 But when finally, “on August 9 we flew the first IDEALIST mission,” it
was too late. The first reports could determine only that since 28 July (evidently the date
of the latest previous US imagery) and as of 10 August, 23 Eg yptian SAM-2 and four
Soviet SAM-3 sites had been moved forward. US analysis suggested that this had been
done mainly in the run-up to the ceasefire, though possibly completed afterward.^16
Other versions hold that this data was useless anyway, because the various parties to the
conflict used differing sets of map coordinates.^17 Either way, for the first few days the
Americans could produce little if any proof that they had been double-crossed.
B. The Soviets laugh off US complaints
By then, the Israelis had remonstrated with Washington on the basis of their own
evidence, and US diplomacy followed up with a move that is so far known only from
the Soviet side. Vladimir Vinogradov, the deputy foreign minister “in charge of the
Middle East,” recorded in his memoir that “on a Sunday in the summer of 1970 ... I
was phoned from the ministry to inform me that the US chargé d’affaires was request-
ing an urgent meeting.” This could only be Sunday, 9 August, when Boris Klosson, a
Soviet-affairs expert and counselor at the embassy, was acting as chargé. By the 13th,
Ambassador Beam was already back from summer vacation.^18
Vinogradov prefaces this anecdote with a background note that is egregiously false
on several counts:
the Eg yptians had reached an agreement for a ceasefire on the canal, on condition that
Israel stopped its attacks on peaceful Eg yptian cities. But the United States craftily inserted
in the English-language document’s title one more little word to which the Eg yptians did
not ascribe any significance. It could now be interpreted ... as a “standstill ceasefire.”Dobrynin had, of course, already pledged that the Soviets as well as the Eg yptians
accepted a ceasefire-in-place. The full Rogers Plan as presented to the Knesset on
12 August included not merely “one little word” but a detailed section (3) requiring
both sides not to alter the military status quo within 50 kilometers of the canal.^19