20. Trial Balloons from Both Sides
A. Sadat responds through Rogers to Kissinger’s “indiscretion”
With Rogers making the rounds, war fever was at least temporarily cooled. In Cairo
on 7 May—the day UPI again reported Soviet pilots flying Foxbats out of Eg ypt—he
received an offer that was clearly designed in response to Kissinger’s “indiscretion.”
Recordings of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations show that Rogers reported to the
president a promise by Sadat:
if we can work out an interim settlement ... all the Russian ground troops will be out of my
country at the end of six months. I will keep Russian pilots to train my pilots because that’s
the only way my pilots can learn how to fly. But in so far as the bulk of the Russians—the
ten or twelve thousand—they will all be out of Eg ypt.There was no mention of the new Soviet craft or personnel that had just been
introduced.^1
Rogers came to sound out Dayan on the defense minister’s reputed proposal for
an Israeli withdrawal. Dayan specified that in return for Eg yptian “nonbelligerency”
as a component of a “partial solution,” he would agree to pull back as far as the Sinai
passes—but with no further commitment. Prime Minister Meir and her other cabinet
colleagues rejected even that.^2 In two days of stormy talks with Meir trying to recon-
cile the disparate concepts of an interim settlement, Rogers apparently did not dis-
close Sadat’s offer of Soviet withdrawal. He only asked Meir (in vain) whether the
departure of Soviet forces might soften her position. She retorted that the Soviets
would not be moved by anything Israel did or didn’t do. Even when Meir asked about
the US response if Soviet forces crossed the canal after an Israeli pullback, Rogers
only declined any guarantee of US action—without suggesting that the Soviet forces
might no longer be there. The talks ended in acrimony, with a threat from Rogers that
the Nixon administration would distance itself from the peacemaking effort; the
threat was empty, as the secretary himself had in effect already been excluded.^3
Still, Nixon went through the motions of instructing Rogers to follow up on
Sadat’s offer. But in an extraordinary directive a week later, the president so much as