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i SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO
PUBLIC LIBRARY
.earn of the
AS Sunday Times
T.Y.K.W.
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“Excellently written and planned . . .
more telling than newsreels or a film.”
. . . Times Literary Supplement
By the internationally famous
Insight Team of the
London Sunday Times
The London Sunday Times Insight
Team combines first-rate investigative
journalism with lively writing and
opinion. In THE YOM KIPPUR WAR, they
provide the most complete and objec-
tive re-creation of 1973’s hard-fought
sixteen-day war between Israel and the
Arab states.
From the painstaking planning of
Anwar Sadat and his Chief of Staff
Saad Shazli to the chill reality of the
U.S. nuclear alert, the people and
events of the war and its aftermath
are clearly before us. We see Prime
Minister Golda Meir so distracted by
Austria’s closing of the transit camps
for Soviet emigres that the warnings
of impending Egyptian action are not
taken seriously until it is almost too
(continued on hack flap)
Author: Sunday Times* London Copy
Titles The Yom Kippur War
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THE YOM KIPPUR WAR
Other books by The Insight Team of the London Sunday Times
published in the United States:
WATERGATE
HOAX
DO YOU SINCERELY WANT TO BE RICH?
NORTHERN IRELAND: A REPORT ON THE CONFLICT
AN AMERICAN MELODRAMA
PHILBY
THE YOM KIPPUR
WAR by The Insight Team of
the London Sunday Times
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK, 1974
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Most of the photographs in this book are by Sunday Times photographe
Kelvin Brodie, Frank Herrmann, Bryan Wharton, and Sally Soames.
Additional photographs were provided by:
Romano Cagnoni: 12, 13, 23, 39
Leonard Freed: 24
Michel Astel, Bamahane: 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69
Micha Bar-Am, Magnum: 19, 30, 31
Associated Press: 3, 14, 21
Camera Press: 4, 8, 9, 15, 29
Rex Features and Sipapress, Paris: 16, 20, 40, 42, 58
UPI: 5, 6, 18
ISBN: 0-385-06738-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-2719
Copyright © 1974 by Times Newspapers Limited, London
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
First Edition in the United States of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book derives from the extensive coverage of the fourth
ArabTsraeli war in the London Sunday Times during October
1973. Research into the causes and conduct of the war continued,
however, for some time after the cease-fire. We have also taken
advantage of the lag between publication of the British and the
present American edition to incorporate considerable material
not earlier available and to correct several errors of fact or in-
terpretation in the previous work. The text has thus been ex-
tensively rewritten and greatly expanded. The efforts of other
inquirers and the pressures of politics in several countries, not
least the United States, make it inevitable that new facts and
assessments on aspects of the war will continue to emerge for
some years. But sufficient facts can already be pieced together,
it seems to us, to make it possible to outline with some precision
the main events of a remarkable conflict. That is what this book
tries to do.
A note on sources. We have rejected footnotes in the text as
being too cumbersome—one working draft to which we did
append sources ran up to twenty footnotes to a page. For the
most part, our sources are obvious from the context or may be
deduced from the nature of the material. Where we have obtained
information from private sources beyond the reach of a normal
inquirer, we have indicated this, unless to do so would point
to the identity of someone who specifically requested anonymity.
We should add that although we write before publication of the
report of the Israeli judicial inquiry into aspects of the war, we
have had access to some of its preliminary findings. As for
material already in the public domain: A great deal was published,
at the time and subsequently, about almost every aspect of the
Yom Kippur War. A disheartening amount was incorrect. We
VI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
have thought it outside our brief to examine the role and
effectiveness of the press in the conflict, though it is worthy of
considerable study. (A first stab can be found in the January
ssue
1974 ^ the Columbia Journalism Review.) Where our own
researches have led us to facts or conclusions different from those
published at the time—as they frequently did—we have, by and
large, thought it worthwhile neither to point out contemporary
errors nor to relate the process of inquiry through which we
decided in favor of one version against another.
Insight reporters in the Middle East were Peter Kellner in
Cairo and Philip Jacobson and Peter Pringle in Tel Aviv. The
Insight editor, John Barry, and two former Insight editors, Bruce
Page and Lewis Chester, combined to write and edit the book.
Research in London was by Parin Janmohamed and Marjorie
Wallace. The project was coordinated by Ron Hall.
We depended heavily on the skill and experience of Eric Mars-
den, the resident Sunday Times correspondent in Israel, and
many other Sunday Times reporters and correspondents made
valuable contributions, including: Stephen Aris (New York),
John Bonar (Amman), Henry Brandon (Washington), William
Dullforce (Cairo), Paul Eddy (Tel Aviv), David Holden (Lon-
don), Martin Meredith (Cairo and Beirut), Brian Moynahan
(Beirut and Damascus), Tony Rocca (Cairo), William Shawcross
(Washington), and Ed Stevens (Moscow).
The graphics and maps are by Peter Sullivan, Duncan Mil,
and John Grirnwade, under the art direction of Edwin Taylor.
The photographs are mostly by Kelvin Brodie, Bryan Wharton,
Frank Herrmann, Sally Soames, and Romano Cagnoni, who
worked often under dangerous conditions near the front lines.
Special arrangements were made with leading news organiza-
tions for particular aspects of the coverage: the BBC monitoring
service, Caversham (which provided texts of Middle East radio
broadcasts); AL Ahram, Cairo (whose then editor, the distin-
guished journalist Mohammed Heikal, conducted revealing
interviews with General Ismail and Henry Kissinger, and whose
writings 1969-73 provide essential clues to the real course of
Egyptian-Soviet relations); Ma’ariv, Tel Aviv (which first pub-
lished a vivid tape recording of the opening of the war, edited in
Hebrew by Aaron Dolav); Ha’aretz, Tel Aviv (whose authoritative
