THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973me? Why didn’t he demand of me all kinds of concessions first?’ For in a curious
intelligence failure, Kissinger learned of the expulsion from news dispatches.”^17
Some who took Kissinger’s reaction at face value accounted for it by “a quid pro
quo known only to a few in the CIA,” whose “direct payments” Sadat “had been
apparently receiving ... since the late 1960s ... contacts known to only a very few in
Washington.” For this description, Kenneth Stein relied on several US officials
(including Quandt) who claimed to have been surprised, but only on a single
Washington Post report for Sadat’s purported recruitment by the CIA.^18
No further evidence of such collusion has emerged. If Sadat was in US pay, explain-
ing the Americans’ surprise at the launch of his cross-canal offensive would require an
even more elaborate conspiracy theory whereby Kissinger was the sole US party to
the plot (which has indeed been suggested, with no more evidence).^19 Rather, the
shoe appears to have been on the other foot: as late as March 1972, the CIA itself was
still leaning only on “the Middle East press” for predictions “that some or all Soviet
personnel will be expelled from Eg ypt.”^20 Aleksey Volovich, the interpreter for
Lt-Gen. Lev Gorelov, chief adviser at the Cairo Military District, entered in his diary
on 16 July 1972, just before the general gathered his staff to announce their repatria-
tion, that “rumors” were circulating whereby Kissinger himself, in a clandestine visit
to Cairo in April 1972, had offered Sadat $3 billion a year in aid in exchange for
expelling the Soviets.^21 When Sadat did break with Moscow after the Yom Kippur
War, Soviet sources took up this canard as fact, adding that Sadat may also have been
bribed personally.^22
The back-channel papers now do show that Kissinger’s surprise was feigned. He
could have been surprised only that the Soviets and Eg yptians had forced his hand
on the interim settlement ahead of the US election, by carrying out the part he had
most desired, before he produced Israeli compliance—which he was incapable of
delivering. Kissinger’s memoirs claim he went so far as to accuse Brezhnev of “amaz-
ing chutzpah” when, on 20 July, the general secretary wrote to Nixon that the Soviet
departure was “a down payment, as it were, on the offer to withdraw Soviet forces”
that Gromyko had made in September 1971.^23 However, Kissinger’s report on the
meeting in which Dobrynin handed him this letter reads quite differently. “We were
not aware of these events beforehand,” he told the Soviet ambassador:
We had not yet fully understood their significance. Nor did we know the extent of Soviet
withdrawal. In any event, I wanted Dobrynin to know that the President had issued the
strictest orders that there would be no U.S. initiatives toward Cairo and that we would not
try to gain unilateral advantages. On the contrary, we would proceed within the letter and
spirit of my conversations with Gromyko in Moscow ... Dobrynin said he appreciated this
and that now ... it was up to us to take some reciprocal action. I said we would study the
letter and no doubt there would be some formal response.None came. The next day, “Dobrynin ... asked a number of questions about what
approaches we had made to Eg ypt, and I assured him that we had not made any. But