Joel Rosenberg Blog: May 16, 2007

June, 1967. War clouds had been building for months. The Israelis found themselves increasingly surrounded by Soviet-backed forces of the Arab and Islamic world, all of whose leaders were vowing to “throw the Jews into the sea,” and the Israelis were considering a first strike. The element of surprise might be their only hope of survival, they figured. But President Lyndon Johnson had warned Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in no uncertain terms that such a move would be a serious mistake.

As historian Michael B. Oren noted in his highly praised book, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Johnson sent a secret message to Eskhol saying that “it is essential that Israel not take any preemptive military action and thereby make itself responsible for the initiation of hostilities. Preemptive action by Israel would make it impossible for the friends of Israel to stand at your side.” Oren noted that Johnson specifically “warned of the possibility of direct Soviet intervention.”

Marshal Andrei Antonovich Grechko, the Soviet deputy defense minister, had told his Egyptian counterparts in Cairo that the Kremlin had dispatched “destroyers and submarines to the waters near Egypt, some armed with missiles and secret weapons” to help wipe out the Zionists. One of Israel’s top experts on Soviet foreign policy told Israeli Defense Forces intelligence that “the USSR would muster all its influence and power to maintain its Middle East position” and when asked if the Soviets would intervene directly, replied, “of course.” Soviet Premier Kosygin, meanwhile, sent a cable to Prime Minister Eshkol warning that “if the Israeli Government insists on taking upon itself the responsibility for the outbreak of armed confrontation then it will pay the full price of such an action."

But at 8:44 a.m. on the morning of June 5, 1967, Eshkol sent an urgent message back to President Johnson informing him that it was too late. War had begun.

“After weeks in which our peril has grown day by day, we are now engaged in repelling the aggression which [Egyptian President] Nasser has been building up against us,” Eshkol wrote, explaining his rationale for the preemptive strike Israel had just launched. “Israel’s existence and integrity have been endangered. The provocative [Arab] troop concentrations in Sinai, now amounting to five infantry and two armored divisions; the placing of more than 900 tanks against our southern frontier; . . . the illegal blockade of the Straits of Tiran; . . . the imminent introduction of MiG-21 aircraft under Iraqi command [into the theater]; Nasser’s announcement of ‘total war against Israel’ and of his basic aim to annihilate Israel. . . . All of this amounts to an extraordinary catalogue of aggression, abhorred and condemned by world opinion and in your great country and amongst all peace-loving nations.”

Eshkol also noted that three Israeli towns had been bombed that morning by Arab forces, citing these as the last straws that led to war. He thanked Johnson for America’s support and expressed hope that “our small nation can count on the fealty and resolution of its greatest friend.” But he also had a request: that the U.S. “prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting and enlarging the conflict” at this, Israel’s greatest “hour of danger.”

“Eshkol knew and feared the Russians,” noted Michael Oren. “War with Syria [and Egypt] was risky enough; with the USSR, it would be suicidal.” But Eskhol calculated that without U.S. support, the Soviets would find themselves compelled to get involved directly. Moscow had, after all, “invested massively in the Middle East, about $2 billion in military aid alone—1,700 tanks, 2,400 artillery pieces, 500 jets, and 1,400 advisers—since 1956, some 43 percent of it to Egypt.” Sure enough, as the Israelis demolished the forces of the Arab coalition over the next three days and captured the Sinai, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, reunified the holy city of Jerusalem, and began an offensive against Damascus itself, Moscow saw itself staring into the face of a geopolitical disaster. Those were, after all, Soviet-trained soldiers being defeated. Those were Soviet-made arms being seized or destroyed. Those were billions of dollars in Soviet funding to their Arab client states being poured down the drain. And—it would later be learned by U.S. and Israeli intelligence—the Egyptian war plan itself (code-named, “Operation Conqueror”) had actually been written in 1966 by the Soviets. As a result, the Soviets feared their prestige was quickly unraveling.

U.S. intelligence was already picking up signs of this fear in the Kremlin. In the President’s Daily Brief on June 9, for example, the CIA informed President Johnson that “the Soviets are finding it hard to conceal their shock over the rapid Egyptian military collapse. A Soviet official [identity still classified] could not understand ‘how our intelligence could have been so wrong.’ He asked despairingly, ‘How could we have gotten into such a mess?’”

So the Kremlin decided to dramatically up the ante.

On June 10, at 8:48 a.m., Washington time, Soviet Premier Alexey Kosygin used the “Hotline” to call President Johnson in the White House Situation Room. His message was as blunt as it was unnerving: “A very crucial moment has now arrived,” he said, “which forces us, if [Israeli] military actions are not stopped in the next few hours, to adopt an independent decision. We are ready to do this. However, these actions may bring us into a clash which will lead to a grave catastrophe. . . . We propose that you demand from Israel that it unconditionally cease military action. . . . We purpose to warn Israel that if this is not fulfilled, necessary actions will be taken, including military.”

The Soviets quickly broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, and the Soviet-bloc governments of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria quickly followed.

CIA Director Richard Helms would later recall that the conversation in the Situation Room for the next several hours were in “the lowest voices he had ever heard in a meeting of that kind” and that “the atmosphere was tense” as the President and his most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisors contemplated the possibility of a direct Soviet strike at Israel.

Johnson, a devoted friend of Israel and an ardent anti-Communist, was not prepared to kowtow to Moscow or let Israel be destroyed. He immediately ordered the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean to turn around—it was then heading west towards the Strait of Gibraltar—and steam towards Israel as a show of solidarity and to warn the Soviets not to get directly involved.

He did the right thing, for according to Isabella Ginor, a Russian-born correspondent for the BBC World Service and other international news services, “new evidence now reveals that the Soviets were indeed poised to attack Israel. . . and had been preparing for such a mission all along.”

On June 10, 2000—the thirty-third anniversary of Kosygin’s ominous Hotline threat to Nixon—Ginor published an article in The Guardian (London) entitled, “How The Six Day War Almost Led to Armageddon: New Evidence of 1967 Soviet Plan to Invade Israel Shows How Close the World Came to Nuclear Conflict.” In December of that year she published a longer and more detailed article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs entitled, “The Russians Were Coming: The Soviet Military Threat in the 1967 Six-Day War.” In these and other articles, she quoted Soviet military officials who paint a fragmentary but still disturbing picture of the attack that was being prepared.

Ginor noted, that “in his recently published memoirs, Nikita S. Kruschev asserts that the USSR’s military command first encouraged high-ranking Egyptian and Syrian delegations, in a series of ‘hush-hush’ mutual visits, to go to war, then persuaded the Soviet political leadership to support these steps, in the full knowledge they were aimed at starting a war to destroy Israel.”

Soviet Acting Defense Minister Andrei A. Grechko and KGB Chairman Yuri V. Andropov, meanwhile, “were pressing for the immediate dispatch of Soviet forces to the Middle East.” Retired Soviet air force lieutenant Yuri V. Nastenko confirmed in 1998 that bomber and fighter jets, such as the MiG-21s that were under his command, were put on full operational alert on the evening of June 5, 1967 and that he was convinced this was in preparation for “real combat." Yuri N. Khripunkov was a former Soviet naval officer who was serving on one of thirty Soviet warships that had been moved from the Black Sea southward to the Mediterranean in June 1967. Khripunkov told Ginor that he and his colleagues were preparing to unleash a force of Soviet forces onto the Israeli mainland. His own platoon, he said, was “ordered to penetrate Haifa—Israel’s main commercial harbor and naval base.” Russian Professor Alexsandr K. Kislov, who was stationed in the Middle East in 1967, told Ginor that the strike force the Soviets had prepared for insertion into Israel included “desant [landing] ships with well-prepared marines.”

Some respected historians and diplomats have disputed the notion that the Soviets were planning to attack Israel in 1967. But while the evidence available from declassified documents and interviews with direct participants may not yet be conclusive, it is compelling. What’s more, Soviet Premier Kosygin’s threat of direct military intervention into the 1967 war with Israel alone stands as chilling evidence of Moscow’s historic and recent animus towards the Jewish State, and as a warning of things to come, especially as Moscow currently arms Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Sudan, Algeria and other enemies of Israel.


* NOTE: This article is adapted from Chapter 10 of Epicenter. Now, a new book by two Israeli historians, including one I interviewed for Epicenter, documents how the "Soviets engineered Six Day War" to destroy Israel's nuclear program. See Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez.

http://joelrosenberg.blogspot.com/
-----------

'Soviets engineered Six Day War'

In a new book that "totally contradicts everything that has been accepted to this day" about the Six Day War, two Israeli authors claim that the conflict was deliberately engineered by the Soviet Union to create the conditions in which Israel's nuclear program could be destroyed.

Having received information about Israel's progress towards nuclear arms, the Soviets aimed to draw Israel into a confrontation in which their counterstrike would include a joint Egyptian-Soviet bombing of the reactor at Dimona. They had also geared up for a naval landing on Israel's beaches.

"The conventional view is that the Soviet Union triggered the conflict via disinformation on Israeli troop movements, but that it didn't intend for a full-scale war to break out and that it then did its best to defuse the war in cooperation with the United States," Gideon Remez, who co-wrote Foxbats over Dimona, told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday. Essentially, the Soviet Union at the time was regarded as having evolved "a cautious and responsible foreign policy," the book elaborates. "But we propose a completely new outlook on all this," said Remez.

(Links)
Did Israel want the Six Day War?

American writer's account of a miracle victory

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the war, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, by Remez and Isabella Ginor, is to be published by Yale University Press early next month. The title refers to the Soviets' most advanced fighter plane, the MiG-25 Foxbat, which the authors say flew sorties over Dimona shortly before the Six Day War, both to help bolster the Soviet effort to encourage Israel to launch a war, and to ensure the nuclear target could be effectively destroyed once Israel, branded an aggressor for its preemption, came under joint Arab-Soviet counterattack.

Soviet nuclear-missile submarines were also said to have been poised off Israel's shore, ready to strike back in case Israel already had a nuclear device and sought to use it.

The Soviets' intended central intervention in the war was thwarted, however, by the overwhelming nature of the initial Israeli success, the authors write, as Israel's preemption, far from weakening its international legitimacy and exposing it to devastating counterattack, proved decisive in determining the conflict.

And because the Soviet Union's plan thus proved unworkable, the authors go on, its role in stoking the crisis, and its plans to subsequently remake the Middle East to its advantage, have remained overlooked, undervalued or simply unknown to historians assessing the war over the past 40 years.

Remez said the work was based on "some documentary evidence, in combination with testimonies of rank-and-file and high-ranking participants."

Among these are quotations from the commander of the Soviets' strategic-bomber pilots, Gen. Vasily Reshetnikov, indicating that he and his colleagues were given maps for a planned mission to target Dimona, and from Soviet Foreign Ministry official Oleg Grinevsky to the effect that the outcome of the war "saved Dimona from annihilation."

The book also quotes Soviet naval officer Yuri Khripunkov detailing the orders his ship's captain gave him on June 5, 1967, to raise a 30-strong "volunteer" detachment for a landing mission in Israel. "The mission for Khripunkov's platoon was to penetrate Haifa Port - the Israeli navy's main base and command headquarters," the book states. Khripunkov was told that "similar landing parties were being assembled on board 30-odd Soviet surface vessels in the Mediterranean, for a total of some 1,000 men."

June 5 ended without any such attack, of course, because the initial Israeli attack "had been much more potent than expected."

Nonetheless, according to the authors, some aspects of the Soviets' intended direct intervention were actually put in motion, to help Egypt as Israeli forces advanced into the Sinai, before the cease-fire ended hostilities.

Remez, a longtime prominent Israel Radio journalist, fought in the Six Day War as a paratrooper. Ginor was born in the Ukraine, came to Israel in 1967 and is a noted analyst of Soviet and post-Soviet affairs. The authors, who live in Jerusalem with their teenage sons, say they "fell into this role of historical revisionism" after chancing upon Khripunkov's account of the planned naval landing - which was repeatedly postponed, only to be activated and then aborted as the ship neared the Israeli shores on the last day of the war - in a Ukrainian newspaper.

The authors acknowledge a dearth of incontrovertible documentation that would back up central aspects of their thesis, but note that "it is entirely possible that few corresponding documents ever existed," as was the case when former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev "tried in vain to find the formal resolution to invade Afghanistan, which was adopted less than a decade before he took office."

They add that key documents may have been destroyed, and note that "the accounts of numerous Soviet participants refer to orders that were transmitted only orally down the chain of command."

Historian Michael Oren, author of the landmark Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, told the Post Tuesday night that he had not found "any documentary evidence to support" the book's central claims. He noted that he had visited the Soviet archives and that "not a lot has been declassified." Oren said he had found "several reasons why the Soviets helped precipitate the war, and this wasn't among them."

Critics cited on the book's jacket are more enthusiastic. Daniel Kurtzer, former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt, for instance, says the central thesis "appears unreal until one assesses the myriad sources and deep documentation that add up to a compelling argument."

Odd Arne Westad, director of the Cold War Studies Center at the London School of Economics, states that "by placing Israeli nuclear ambitions - and the Soviet reaction - as major links in the chain of events, the authors have produced a book that will stand out in the debate about the Cold War and the Middle East."

And former US under secretary of defense Dov Zackheim says the book proves "that the Six Day War marked a major Soviet political-military defeat comparable to the Cuban missile crisis."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid...ticle%2FPrinter