Posts
Dear Ambassador Bhadrakumar,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and forwarding the message from Graham Fuller that appeared in the Huffington Post Yo(http://www.huffingtonpost.
As
the events unfold with the Saudi and Egyptian engagement in Yemen, I
thought it might amuse you to read an account of my discussion with
President Nasser on "his" Yemen war. As Mark Twain may have said,
"history doesn't repeat but sometimes it rhymes." The rhymes, at least,
seem unmistakable.
In
the course of our first lengthy talk on Yemen, he (rather angrily)
replied to one of my comments, "you don't think I will win the war,do
you?"
"No, Mr. President," I replied, "I don't."
"Well, you would be surprised to know that I have acquired your secret analyses of guerrilla warfare."
"Oh,
Mr. President," I shook my head, "I know the people who wrote those
reports. They are rubbish. I would throw them away if i were you."
He
just looked at me, even more angrily, thinking I suppose, that having
pulled off an intelligence coup, I was trying to trick him by claiming
that it was really not a coup but a mistake.
Then
he said, "I know how to use helicopters, too." (Their use was then
being touted by our military as our great weapon against the Viet Minh.)
"And you lost one yesterday, didn't you?" I jibed.
"How did you find out about that?"
"Well,
Mr. President, we spend a lot of money on the CIA finding out about
such things and one way or another they usually do. That is what the
CIA is supposed to do They don't always succeed but sometimes they do."
"Well,"
he retorted, "you American's think you know all about everything, and
you don't even have any of your people in Sanaa and none up in the north
where the fighting is going on. You don't know anything about Yemen."
Then, without thinking of the implication, I suppose, he said, " You
should go see."
"Mr. President," I quickly said. "I regard that as an invitation." Impolitely, I then stood up.
He looked at me with narrow, angry eyes. He obviously had not meant what i had inferred.
"All
right, go see," he said. "I will give instructions that you can go
anywhere you want, talk to anyone you want, see everything.."
"But, of course, I can not even get there without your help," I said.
"You can have my plane."
Rather off-handedly and not warmly, we shook hands.
I
said goodbye and rushed back to our embassy and wrote an "eyes only"
message to President Kennedy. I did not want it scattered around our
government so I prevailed upon the CIA station chief to send it by his
rather more restricted route. It was encrypted and sent in three
batches. Before the second batch got sent, a reply came back: "go."
So
I went, and Nasser was as good as his word. I spent hours with his
military commander, Abdul Hakim Amr who gleefully unfolded the huge map
of showing the planned Egyptian sweep of the mountains to the east
(while Anwar Sadat, then rather on the fringes of the Egyptian
Establishment, angrily protested against Amr's indiscretion with a
foreigner. He never forgave me for being there). I went up to the
supposed battle zone,near Saada, went out to all the villages were the
war was, according to the CIA and British intelligence, being fought,
met with the new Yemeni Leader Sallal and all the new Yemeni leaders,
and then flew back to Cairo.
Disclosure
(as they like to say in the media): I was bribed. As a going away
present, I was given 500 pounds of Yemeni coffee. Nothing so welcome to
a traveler as 500 pounds of anything! But thanks to me, our Cairo
embassy was "in coffee" for years!
I
did not see the President on my return but sent him a message through
the Governor of Cairo, Salah Dessouki, that I hoped to go down to the
Saudi-Yemen frontier to meet with the guerrilla leaders, and somewhat
jokingly I said to my friend Salah, "I want to be very sure that
President Nasser knows exactly where i am going. And,Salah, please tell
the President not to do anything silly."
Salah burst out laughing and said, "Bill, I certainly will not say that to the President!"
So
I flew to Riyadh and, with the permission of then Crown Prince Faisal,
with whom I had a rather close relationship, I took the American
ambassador's airplane and flew down to Najran where I spent an evening
with a group of the guerrilla leaders.
As
we sat around a campfire, outside of Najran, we drank tea, ate a lamb
roast and then, in a fairly typical desert encounter, we had a poetry
duel. My pure luck, I happened to know the poem being recited and I
capped the verse of one of the men. in their terms, that was like a
passport for me. And we could then have a serious and frank discussion
on the war, the strengths and weaknesses of the royalist forces and
what might bring the war to a conclusion. Our talk went on almost all
night. Finally, just at first light, I had barely gotten to sleep when
the first of four Egyptian but Russian piloted TU 16 jet bombers arrived
overhead from Luxor. They dropped 15 200 kg bombs on the oasis and on
us. My pilot was just worried about his plane. The rest of us had
other worries! The biggest danger, in fact, was from the shrapnel
falling from the anti-aircraft cannon. They were totally ineffective
against the TU 16s as they could not reach them. (One of my aides, an
Air Force colonel informed me that the TU-16s were at about 23,000 feet
and the 90 mm canon would reach about 18,000 feet.) But a few people
around us were killed. Another of my aides, a Marine Colonel, presented
me with a wicked looking piece of one of the bombs. It had fallen or
been blown not far from the place I was lying.
On
our return flight to Riyadh, I wrote Nasser a 'thank you' note, saying
"Mr. President, I am most grateful for your kind hospitality in Egypt
and Yemen but I don't think you needed to entertain me in other
countries."
Our
ambassador, my good and old friend, John Badeau,was not amused. He
said, "Bill, just say thank you and, please, don't hurry back!"
it
was a few months later that I next saw President Nasser. We had a long
and very frank talk then about Yemen. I compared it to Vietnam which
I was already sure would be a disaster. I pointed to the huge cost to
us of Vietnam, how it disrupted all our domestic social goals and how it
poisoned Americans' trust in one another. I warned that in my opinion,
Yemen might do the same to Egypt, disrupting what Nasser was trying to
do to uplift his people and end their tragic poverty. In our talk, he
said, "I certainly didn't agree with you, Bill,but I knew you would tell
me the truth as you saw it." Somehow, the Israelis found out about
this and later the chief of Mrs. Meir's cabinet, Mordachai Gazit told
me, "We know that President Nasser trusts you."
As
I was leaving, he took me out to my car and even opened the car door
for me. His guards were as astonished as I was, Apparently, he had
never before done this. As we shook hands, he said, "Well, Bill, where
are you off to this time?"
"This time, Mr. President, I am not going to tell you!"
He burst out laughing as did I.
We
did not meet again but our frankness and respect later enabled me to
work out the 1970 ceasefire on Suez with him shortly before his death.
It
is hard to believe that history now seems to be repeating with Egypt
and Saudi Arabia again engaged in a counter-guerrilla war in Yemen!
It
was Egypt's Vietnam. Will the new Yemen war be Egypt's (and Saudi
Arabia's) Afghanistan? I think it is very likely. All of the signs
point in that direction. And, as I have laid out in numerous essays on
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia,Mali and Algeria, and in my little
book Violent Politics guerrilla wars are almost never "won" but
usually drain the supposedly dominant power of its wealth,moral position
and political unity.
The above, of course, is only the light side of a very serious series of events, but i thought it would amuse you.
With kind regards,
William R. Polk.
No comments:
Post a Comment