SADAT PROVES HIS STABILITY AND LOYALTYning the Eg yptian game.”^40 The same conclusion—“the USSR is dictating Eg ypt’s
military and political moves”—was declared by the Israeli cabinet, in a meeting that
was somewhat too blithely described as “totally calm!”^41 The next day, Dayan
famously stated in the Knesset that it would be better to forgo peace than to gain it
by relinquishing all of Sinai, and on 11 March he rejected the opening of the canal in
a partial deal, which according to earlier reports he had advocated.^42 Heikal
responded by publishing the Israeli and Eg yptian order of battle, stressing that Sadat’s
strateg y was now based on the SAM shield across the canal.^43
As usual, there were also reassuring interpretations, holding that Sadat’s talks had
exposed differences with the Soviet leadership.^44 This reading leaned, among other
things, on reports that the Soviet crews of SAM-3 batteries on the canal had handed
them over to Eg yptians.^45 These in turn may have originated from observations of the
first Kavkaz personnel being rotated, at the end of their year’s tour of duty, with other
Soviet servicemen. The reports were later denied.^46 However, the first Eg yptian crews
were really completing their training period in the USSR, for which the Soviet units
had originally been intended as a stopgap. Sadat even boasted that Eg yptian com-
manders at all levels, including electronic warfare, had ended their courses in the
Soviet Union at a level “that surprised even their Soviet instructors.”^47
E. Embarrassments in Eg yptian cities, rearmament at the front
Akopov relates that Sadat “several times raised the issue of limiting the number of
Soviet military specialists,” and the Soviet leadership actually welcomed the sugges-
tion. Akopov’s boss, Ambassador V. Vinogradov, puts it only in 1972 that
the embassy concluded that it would be desirable for the Soviet side itself to propose to
Sadat a reduction of the number of Soviet military experts. ... It would be better, we
thought, if our military men would begin a gradual “exodus” at our own initiative, than to
have Sadat himself raise the question of their withdrawal.But after Sadat’s visit to Moscow in March 1971, Vinogradov (newly appointed a
candidate-member of the Central Committee) was summoned to a Politburo meet-
ing. Before it began, “Brezhnev told me that he was in full agreement with the
embassy’s well-reasoned and farsighted proposals” to initiate a withdrawal from
Eg ypt—that is, the ambassador submitted this suggestion not long after taking office.
The first speaker at the Politburo was Defense Minister Grechko, who threatened
that if the embassy’s proposals were accepted, he “would disavow any responsibility
for the state of the Eg yptian armed forces.” Grechko had been Brezhnev’s commander
in “the Great Patriotic War,” and was his political ally. His resistance must have been
awkward for the general secretary, who effectively ended discussion by referring the
matter to a committee. Vinogradov’s recommendation was in effect adopted. In ret-
rospect, he wrote: “the embassy had looked into a crystal ball.”