On October 27, 1973, a German-born career foreign service officer, Omar Sirry, who served as Deputy Chief of Operations in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, was called by Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy. This was exactly three weeks after the outbreak of the October 1973 War, ten days after Israel launched a counter-attack against the Egyptian Army in Sinai and eventually surrounded the 15,000 man Egyptian Third Army, one week after American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated in Moscow with Soviet Chairman Brezhnev the contents of what came to be United Nations Security Council Resolution 338. That was just a day after the United States and the Soviet Union stepped back from possible military confrontation over the intervention of Soviet troops into the canal area.
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