ABSTRACT
On 18 July 1972, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced his decision ‘to terminate, as of 17 July, the mission of the Soviet military advisers and experts, who came here in compliance with our request.’4
Sadat’s measure was immediately dubbed, and is still conventionally termed, the ‘expulsion of Soviet advisers’,5 frequently with the added modifier ‘surprise’. The number of Soviet ‘advisers’ who were ‘expelled’ is variously given as 10,000-20,000,6 and they are explicitly or implicitly described as ‘all’, or at least the bulk, of the Soviet advisers and/or military personnel in Egypt. The ‘expulsion’ is described by Western historiography as the first
step towards Egypt’s eventual rupture with its erstwhile Soviet patrons, and therefore (to quote one recent study), it ‘might have been the single greatest Third World success for the United States during the entire Cold War.’7 Its direct motive is usually held to be that ‘under the guise of de´tente, the United States had persuaded the Soviets to reduce their support for the Arabs’ – that is, to delay arms deliveries that had already been agreed and planned.8 Specifically, Moscow purportedly refused to
supply Egypt with the advanced offensive weaponry that first Gamal Abdel Nasser and then Sadat desired for a total onslaught on Israel, in order not only to reverse the latter’s occupation of Sinai and the rout it inflicted on Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War, but even to solve the Palestinian problem according to Arab demands. Israeli military historian Dani Asher recently traced Israel’s unprepa-
redness for the Yom Kippur War to its failure to appreciate the change in Sadat’s strategy that was dictated by this supposed Soviet refusal. The offensive was still planned as a total war, but for a limited objective: crossing the Suez Canal and establishing a strip of control to its east, after which the superpowers would stop the fighting and impose a political settlement, taking Egypt’s achievement into account and ensuring Sadat a moral victory. Asher puts the finalization of this change in October 1972 – barely three months after Sadat’s supposed break with the USSR.9 This is indeed, as detailed below, a date often given for a rapprochement between Cairo and Moscow. But why would Sadat undertake an open confrontation with Moscow
if so soon afterwards he in effect adopted the limitations it imposed? Conversely, why would the Soviets risk a rift if they were so soon prepared to concede its cause? It remains generally accepted that after 1967 the Soviet Union supported an operation to regain Sinai, as distinct from the total defeat or eradication of Israel. This was confirmed before the 1973 war by the USSR’s unprecedented commitment of integral military units to provide the vital anti-aircraft coverage east of the Canal; by its supply of the materiel for the crossing; by Soviet political backing for Egypt during the war itself, and even by limited intervention of Soviet forces in the fighting,10 as well as military resupply of Egypt during and after the war. Even some of the earliest writers who perpetuated the ‘expulsion’
theory noted that its purportedly main reason, the USSR’s denial of offensive weaponry, had no basis in fact. As Alvin Rubinstein termed it, ‘the biggest canard in all Western reporting on the affair was the prevailing uncritical acceptance . . . of Sadat’s claim’ to this effect. ‘Excluding nuclear weapons, of course, no other weapons in the Soviet arsenal were denied the Egyptians.’11 Kenneth Stein, writing 22 years later, also notes the ‘virtually uninterrupted military supply flow from Moscow,’ which ‘lends support to the notion that Brezhnev wanted to repatriate Soviet advisers and . . . sustain some leverage over Cairo.’12
Both this description and the variant whereby arms shipments were interrupted but resumed after a reconciliation by the fall of 1972 hardly confirm an irretrievable clash in July. In the most glaring discrepancy, most accounts that first speak of ‘the
expulsion of Soviet (or even all Soviet) advisers’ go on to mention that a major intelligence indication which Israel (and the United States) detected – but misinterpreted – ahead of the 1973 Arab offensive was the
mass evacuation of Soviet advisers and/or their dependents from Egypt (as well as Syria). Henry Kissinger, who (as this chapter argues) played a central role in creating the ‘expulsion of advisers’ concept, even holds that only the advisers’ dependents were evacuated in 1973 – that is, the advisers themselves were not only present in Egypt 18 months after their ‘expulsion’, but even remained there during the war.13 Soviet participants add that additional personnel were actually sent to Egypt before and during the war.14 Where this discrepancy is not ignored, it is glossed over by such glib explanations as that some advisers remained after all, or even that some returned – but this, in turn, again conflicts with the claim of an abrupt and decisive break with Moscow. The same inconsistency appears in accounts by former Soviet officials.
Pavel Akopov, the counselor at the Soviet Embassy in Cairo during both events, recounted in a 1997 interview that Sadat decided in July 1972 ‘about the withdrawal of Soviet military experts and specialists from Egypt’. But a few minutes later, Akopov related how ‘two or three days before the war’ in October 1973, the Egyptian president warned the Soviet embassy: ‘You have too many people and specialists here.’ Akopov, who directed the latter evacuation, told of 1,700 Soviets leaving by air alone, with others by sea ‘including submarines’.15 The interview provides no similar detail on the implementation of Sadat’s order in 1972, though Akopov elaborated on Sadat’s decision itself. One of the first analyses, by Walter Laqueur in 1974, relies – as do
most subsequent works – mainly on Egypt’s ‘semiofficial version’ and Sadat’s public statements. But it is actually one of the most accurate evaluations to date, in stating that the expulsion was partial, was later reversed, and concealed the effectiveness of war preparations – aspects that were omitted in subsequent descriptions.16 While Mohammed Hassanein Heikal’s accounts and/or Sadat’s memoirs (not to mention Kissinger’s) are universally quoted and often analysed in detail,17 the aforementioned indications to the contrary are ignored, and for the bulk of Western scholarship the ‘expulsion’ became so axiomatic as to require no attribution beyond listing the Heikal and Sadat accounts in the bibliography.18
