Ambassador Joseph Sisco was an integral member of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s team that put together three military disengagement agreements after the October 1973 War. Sisco has high praise for Sadat’s wisdom and courage and insight in working with Kissinger to turn Egypt away from Moscow and into agreements with Israel.
In the 1970s, US State Department Ambassador Michael Sterner was privy to Sadat’s preference for step-by-step diplomacy PRIOR to the 1973 October War. He is critical of the Carter administration for being too satisfied with only a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli Agreement.
Tamir was a 35-year veteran of the Israeli army, attending all Egyptian-Israeli negotiations as a strategic planner. He stated that he thought the 1973 war could have been averted if Golda Meir had responded to Sadat’s pre-war overtures. He credits Henry Kissinger’s negotiating successes of the post-1973-war period as laying the basis for the successful 1978 and 1979 Egyptian-Israeli agreements.
With a keen memory to detail, Nicholas Veliotes engaged an array of American and Middle Eastern political leaders. This interview is laced with charming and enthusiastic candor as he served in American diplomatic positions from 1973 to 1986 in Tel Aviv, Washington, Amman and Cairo. He was present when sensitive U.S. policies were debated and operationalized. His assessments of Kissinger, Sadat, Meir, Nixon, King Hussein, Brzezinski, Carter, Vance and a whole panoply of Israeli officials bubble with content; the vignettes he shares about Nixon and Brzezinski are priceless. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Veliotes, along with Morris Draper, Hermann Eilts, American consuls general in Jerusalem and other U.S. officials failed in repeated attempts to secure PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s participation in the diplomatic process.
As the October 1973 war came to an end, Israeli and Egyptian leaders decided that respective generals from both sides should disentangle the war’s realities. Israel was keen to have her POWs returned, and Egypt did not want to see Israel clobber the Third Army, which Israel had surrounded in the second week of the war. General Yariv, who had been head of military intelligence in earlier years, recalls in detail his cordial meetings with the Egyptian chief of staff, General Mohamad al-Gamasy. Yariv’s recollections pair almost identically to the ones given by others who participated in the talks or were on the Kissinger negotiating team at the time. These negotiations came to be known as the Kilometer 101 talks; they were the first direct Israeli-Egyptian public negotiations since the late 1940s. The talks were collusively halted by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as agreed upon with Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat. What followed was the December 1973 Geneva Middle East peace conference. It was a public display and intentionally a truncated meeting with no substance discussed. Kissinger sidelined the U.S.S.R., though they were co-chairs of the conference, as the U.S. choreographed the postwar diplomacy extending over the next six years into the Carter administration. The Yariv-al-Gamasy negotiations became the basis for the January 1974 Israel-Egyptian Disengagement Agreement.
