THE ULTIMATE TEST OF ASHRAF MARWANowed and sidelined any other information, including evidence that obviously pointed
to a war.”^8
B. 4 October: dependents out, advisers in
All the above tends to obviate the ongoing debate whether Sadat specified the exact
date and hour of the attack to the Soviets on 3 or 4 October, and how this notice was
transmitted. However, the notion that the Soviets were first informed on either of
these days has become so firmly fixed, in even the most recent and reputable reference
works, that uprooting it seems next to impossible.^9
Low- and mid-level Soviet officials and officers may be entirely truthful in attesting
that they were first warned of the impending war less than two days in advance, that
is, on 4 October, after Sadat served notice on Ambassador Vinogradov the day before.
Sadat himself related retrospectively that he did give Vinogradov a general warning
on the 3rd, without stating the precise time.^10 Vinogradov—as he did in respect of
Nasser’s “secret visit in January 1970”—describes this in even vaguer terms: “Sadat
raised the possibility that Eg ypt might take retaliatory action against a big Israeli
provocation, and promised to inform the USSR when this came about.”^11
Vinogradov’s deputy, Akopov, did not clarify the issue much when he stated in a
retrospective interview that Sadat disclosed the exact date “two or three days before
the war started.”^12
According to Sadat, the precise zero hour was divulged to the Soviets by Syrian
President Assad on the 4th, as the two Arab leaders had prearranged. Assad’s biogra-
pher Seale also maintains that the Soviets were not told “officially” until 4 October,
though as already mentioned they were privy to the preparations.^13 In the best-known
Soviet “insider” account, Victor Israelyan maintained that the Soviet ambassador in
Damascus, Nuritdin Mukhitdinov, did meet Assad on the 4th—but received the
same general declaration as his counterpart in Cairo, and was finally told about the
zero hour only on the morning of the 6th.^14
But given what is now known about Mukhitdinov’s role in the council-of-war at
Alexandria in August, either these meetings or the accounts about their content seem
like a choreographed charade. Israelyan admits that he failed to find the crucial infor-
mation in any diplomatic dispatches from Cairo or Damascus; he concluded that the
Soviet leadership must have received it through “special channels,” and “its ‘special
connection’ in Cairo or Damascus remains undisclosed.” He stresses that this does
not allude to KGB representatives in either Arab capital reporting to Moscow with-
out informing the ambassadors.
This was aimed specifically against a claim by the KGB’s Cairo rezident
Kirpichenko that his agency had, on its own evidence, “predicted the outbreak of a
war in the first days of October.”^15 But at a conference in 1998, three years after
Israelyan’s book was published, Kirpichenko stood on his version that “we learned