THE DEAL AT THE SUMMIT AND THE “EXPULSION” MYTHThe withdrawal of regular Soviet formations from Eg ypt was, then, a done deal by
the end of the Moscow summit. But its implementation was predicated on an interim
settlement—and, Kissinger’s memoir notwithstanding, the Soviets did call his bluff
on the “general principles” by carrying out their part of the deal—as they had resolved
to do anyway. There was no risk that an interim settlement would actually be reached:
Kissinger had clarified that Washington would not press Israel for it before the US
presidential election, and Primakov’s talks had precluded any other prospect of rec-
onciling the Israeli formula with Sadat’s or the Soviets’. So Moscow’s perennial prior-
ity of legitimacy for a military solution would be achieved, with the added attraction
of a faked “expulsion” to reduce Israeli preparedness. Moscow and Cairo each had
their own, overlapping though not identical, reasons to bring the withdrawal for-
ward, which would be the subject of discussion that now intensified between them.
“The Center [Moscow headquarters] was regularly informed about the planned
action against the military specialists,” writes the KGB’s Kirpichenko, who by 1972
had taken over as rezident (station chief ) in Cairo. When the “expulsion” was
announced “it baffled no one.”^8 Confidentially to the few Americans who were aware
of the agreement, the Soviets would present the withdrawal as a goodwill gesture
symbolizing the spirit of détente, while the Eg yptians could hold it up as a harbinger
of their disengagement from Moscow—and both could ask for American reciproca-
tion. Since Kissinger was not about to reveal his complicity, the Soviets and Eg yptians
could feign an irrevocable rift between them and mislead nearly all others—especially
the only party where no one was informed, the Israelis.
B. Detection and rejection of the “expulsion” ruse
It is at this point that, even at the time and especially after the Yom Kippur War,
several analysts—most notably, Uri Ra’anan—began to discern a concerted and suc-
cessful Soviet–Eg yptian deception effort. Some of these claims were advanced to
back up charges that Sadat’s postwar peace moves and his subsequent shift from the
Soviet bloc to the American camp were also deceptive. When the latter changes
turned out to be genuine, the analogous suspicions about the 1972 events were also
largely but gratuitously discarded and even ridiculed. By 1981, an Israeli expert on
the Soviet military, Amnon Sella, could write:
commentators too often describe the ups and downs in Soviet–Eg yptian relations as a feint
in the best tradition of Communist devious practice. The worse the relationship appears,
the craftier the feint. According to this sort of ratiocination, the expulsion of Soviet advis-
ers from Eg ypt was carried out in connivance with Moscow in order to prepare for war.Despite this derision, Sella actually listed a series of examples whereby all the “defi-
ciencies” caused by the Soviet withdrawal “taken together did not inflict any lasting
damage on the long-range plan for war.” He concluded that “distorted as such a