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2 Twenty-Four Decisive Hours in My Life with Hafiz Ismail

On the morning of Saturday, October 6, 1973, a watershed day in the history of Egypt, I was out strolling with my lifelong friend, Ahmed Maher al-Sayed, in the garden of Abd al-Moneim Palace, a small villa in Heliopolis, in a mainly residential area close to what is now the presidential palace in al-Qubba. We noticed that a great many people were looking out of their windows intently, intrigued at the sudden appearance of a number of the Presidential Guard in the garden of the villa and all around it, plus a number of officials in civilian clothes. This activity was accompanied by the din of cleaning staff and maintenance workers repairing or replacing phone lines with newer ones offering better networks—networks able to ensure efficient communications with the palace to prepare it for its new occupant, the Egyptian national security advisor, and his staff. This personage was Mr. Mohamed Hafiz Ismail. At that time, he was mandated to assist President Sadat by managing the diplomatic and political side of the October 1973 strike.

We were discussing our preparations, what the military action we were planning might have in store, and simultaneous and concordant diplomatic and political maneuvers. That day, we were overcome by anticipation and not a little apprehension regarding what might or might not come to pass. For no matter how intently we examined the efforts made and the preparations in progress, the in-depth planning for everything—of which there was a great deal, and in which every element of the national security apparatus was taking part, including operatives working with Hafiz Ismail (a collection of the best young men from the Ministry of Defense, Egyptian Intelligence, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Foreign Ministry)—we were by no means certain that military action was indeed in the offing, and that our forces were indeed about to storm the Bar-Lev line. This would initiate a major military operation into which Egypt would pour all its efforts, an operation which might lead to great military and diplomatic success, or to ignominious defeat that would damage Egypt’s standing in a manner unparalleled in the twentieth century.

It was a great gamble, requiring the most ingenious and insightful preparation. It had been skillfully concealed, with the highest level of strategic deception. I say gamble because the truth of the matter is that despite the hundreds of thousands of troops that Egypt mobilized in preparation for this large-scale military action, Israel had military superiority over Egypt and Syria in the form of U.S.-supplied weaponry and aerial forces. However, the joint Egypt–Syria strategy would force Israel to fight on two fronts, one to the far north and the other on the Suez Canal. This was intended to push Israel to divide its forces and resources, and prevent its army from mustering the entirety of its forces to face either one, thus annulling Israel’s military superiority.

We saw Hafiz Ismail’s late-1960s model black Mercedes approaching the outer gates. He alighted from it, a tall, wiry figure with a sharp, serious face, and hurried to the door of the palace, quickly climbing the steps and disappearing inside. “Don’t you notice something, Ahmed?” Ahmed Maher asked me.

“What?” I said. “How grim he looked? Or do you mean the way he rushed in, ignoring two of his close assistants?” (I meant us, of course, walking in the garden—there was no way he did not notice we were there.)

“No,” said Ahmed. “I mean that he was smoking a cigarette, although it’s Ramadan and everyone is fasting! What could possibly be so serious as to make him break his fast in public like that?”

With that, we both went inside to start work in our brand-new offices. We had only moved into the palace the night before, on October 5, that is, and were still finding our way around the rooms, corridors, internal and external phone lines, and so on. Abdel Hadi Makhlouf, the office director for the national security advisor, was on his way to Hafiz Ismail’s office on the upper floor of the villa. He stayed inside for half an hour, then popped outside. “The Advisor wants to see you.” (We all called him the Advisor.) Bringing a small notebook, I hurried in with Ahmed Maher. Neither of us wanted to keep the great man waiting.

Even today, I still remember the sight of Hafiz Ismail in his shirtsleeves, his jacket discarded on a chair. He handed an envelope to Ahmed Maher. “Please deliver this to Dr. Ashraf Ghorbal, assistant to the national security advisor.” Ghorbal was in charge of media coverage and crisis management, with a special focus on the United States and other western powers, including Europe. “Dr. Ashraf is currently manning the media front at the Egyptian television headquarters in Maspero.” Under no circumstances, he said, was Ghorbal to open the envelope before 1330 hours on this historic day. “He is to give orders for Egyptian radio and television to broadcast its contents at that time.” He added that he would telephone Dr. Ghorbal to make sure that the sealed envelope had arrived safely. It was a little before 1030 hours. He went on, “In this envelope is a bulletin from the Egyptian armed forces to the effect that the Israeli air force launched an attack on Egyptian bases in the Red Sea and on the front, at 1330 hours today. Egyptian forces responded with military counterattacks all along the frontlines.”

“Are our operations scheduled to start at 1330 hours?” Ahmed Maher asked. “While the envelope’s being opened and broadcast?”

“Egypt will commence military operations,” responded the national security advisor, “at 1405 hours.”

“I don’t quite get it, sir,” said Ahmed Maher uneasily. “Wouldn’t that be alerting the enemy in Sinai to our movements over half an hour before the fact?”

After a moment’s thought, Hafiz Ismail nodded. “You have a point. Let’s make it after 1400 hours, no sooner than that.”

I exited Hafiz Ismail’s office full of apprehension. I feared for my country, for my friends in the military, and for our future. I genuinely dreaded a repeat of that black day in our modern history, the defeat and subsequent humiliation of June 5, 1967. To calm my nerves, I took to telling myself that our armed forces were well-prepared, that a strike like the one we had suffered in June could not be repeated, and that this time it was we who would take the enemy by surprise. We had trained hard, we had learned from our defeat, we had prepared our army well.

On my way out of the office, I met Abd al-Fattah Abdullah, a minister of state at that time. He was quartered in the palace with us, as assistant to President Sadat, who was living in al-Tahra Palace, another more beautiful and luxurious palace. I had no knowledge of his duties or why he was stationed there, but I found out in the days that followed that President Sadat wanted him to attend all the working sessions, conferences, and other meetings at al-Tahra during the upcoming military operations, as well as attend to related diplomatic and political tasks. On the second floor, I should explain, there were bedrooms, one of which was Hafiz Ismail’s, the other Abd al-Fattah Abdullah’s. That worthy greeted me with the sternness common to military men when some important event is drawing near. I had seen it often in my life with my father, Air Force General Ali Ahmed Aboul Gheit. Abdullah went on his way, saying to Chief of the Cabinet Abdel Hadi Makhlouf, who was standing in the hallway that overlooked all the second-floor rooms, “I’m off to al-Tahra Palace to see the President, Makhlouf.”

I was overcome with worry. We would not be able to defeat Israel’s long reach, I felt, despite all our superior preparations, despite the War of Attrition that had trained, tested, and honed our forces, and despite the wall of anti-aircraft missile launchers we had formed over the past three years. I had a sneaking suspicion that our move to this palace reflected a fear that our main offices—in Abdin Palace, in the center of downtown Cairo—might be attacked. However, the real source of my unease was that President Sadat had taken up residence in al-Tahra Palace, in Heliopolis, closer to the military command centers and bases of operations in the deserts that then surrounded Heliopolis and Nasr City. I would have liked to see him take up residence in more modest quarters. However, in the days that followed, I was to discover that the president had selected this location in order to conduct many high-level political and diplomatic meetings with presidents and ambassadors of various countries, whom he might need to meet during this period of armed clashes.

In the days that followed, I read a great many minutes of the meetings between President Sadat and world leaders, prominent among them ambassadors from Britain, Iran, France, and Russia. These were recorded in their entirety by Abd al-Fattah Abdullah, and Dr. Makhlouf would often ask me to supervise the transcription of the recordings and convey their contents to various official bodies. These minutes reflected the president’s confidence and belief in the military action that Egypt was taking, in that we possessed the element of surprise and thus would outstrip them before they had a chance to react.

“Has the Advisor told you what’s happening in a few hours?” Makhlouf asked. We replied in the affirmative, whereupon he said, “We need to get ready.” He called for a general meeting of the staff—Farouk Baraka, Ehab Wahba, Ahmed Maher, Ahmed Adel, myself, Maher Khalifa, Salah Sha‘rawi, Gamal Barakat, and others in an elite group of national security experts—to assign duties and shifts for the coming twenty-four hours, and to organize communications, agree on how reports would be presented, give instructions on the use of the telephones, and familiarize us with the codenames for the top men in government (prepared by another assistant to the national security advisor, the distinguished ambassador Osman Nouri). We waited, biting our nails.

Worry twisted my insides. I remember writing that down in my diary: it was important, I remember feeling at the time, to document this decisive moment in our history. I set down several paragraphs on the evening of October 5 as soon as we had moved to the palace. One of them read:

2145 hours: Clearly the organizational side is not very strong. We have been given no duties so far. Not optimistic. Afraid the enemy will find out about our preparations, esp. as many now know of our intentions to strike.

I wrote also:

We must start at once, or the enemy will abort us.

Tried to sleep. Failed. I must be very tense.

These were my diary entries, as I mentioned above, for October 5. In any case, we waited. Hours and minutes passed like eons. As soon as the clock struck 1400 hours, the first communiqué was broadcast, the one Hafiz Ismail had sent to Ashraf Ghorbal to be read out.

During the heavy hours of waiting, things began gradually to improve. We were able to make telephone calls now, a luxury not available to ordinary citizens at that time—the communications apparatus of the state was in a deplorable state pretty much throughout. Military operations commenced with the first airstrike, coordinated with artillery fire across the Suez Canal. My diary entries at the time were like this:

I can’t believe how fast they’re crossing, although they’re so many. The reports coming to us from the army say that the forces are at around 2,000 yards. In my estimation, they need to go in deeper or else the enemy will pose a threat to the bridgehead. The enemy will not respond until tomorrow, Sunday, or even Monday, October 8. Everyone’s starting to become hopeful, but I prefer to remain cautious. It’s the best thing to do with armed conflict.

I had my own reasons, and justifications, for this extreme unease. The news had come in from Syria on October 4 that the Russians were pulling their experts out of Damascus, quite visibly and publicly. The Russian ambassador to Cairo had had a meeting with Hafiz Ismail on October 4 at noon, in which he had asked him directly, on instructions from Moscow, whether Egypt and Syria planned to break the ceasefire with Israel. The question took Hafiz Ismail by surprise. “He took his time thinking before he answered,” said my colleague Farouk Baraka, whose job it was to record the meeting. After nearly half a minute of silence, he advised the Russian ambassador to take it up with President Sadat at their meeting the next day. In my estimation, Hafiz Ismail was trying to conceal the attack, and obfuscate the timing of the operation as much as possible for the Russians. This was why I feared our plans would be revealed, and fall prey to a preemptive strike from the Israelis.

However, the Russian ambassador, who was widely and deeply versed in Egyptian affairs and the measures Egypt was taking, made his report to Moscow and came back the next day, Friday, October 5, with a message from the Kremlin to President Sadat. The Arabic translation, I noticed, was surprisingly unidiomatic and badly written—odd, because we knew that a great many Russian diplomats spoke exceedingly fluent Arabic. In any event, the message consisted of a warning to Egypt of the consequences of any military operation against Israel. It spoke of how Egypt’s military was unequal to Israel’s, and predicted that Egypt might well be heading for a second crushing defeat if it went ahead and joined Syria in mounting an offensive against the Israel Defense Forces’ fortification on the Bar-Lev line. Such a defeat, the message predicted, would deal a blow to Egypt’s status that would be almost impossible to overcome.

For all these reasons, I was uneasy in the extreme. The writings of Israeli military experts that came out after the war will reveal, I have no doubt, that my fears were justified. Israeli intelligence reports dated October 5 and at dawn on October 6 state that Egypt and Syria were on the verge of a military strike, breaking the ceasefire; they recommended that Israel make a move at once to avoid sustaining heavy losses at Arab hands.

Israel finally made a decision to wait and see: if the forthcoming Arab strike did indeed take place, they would make the appropriate response at the time—the same fatal error, ironically, that President Nasser committed in June 1967, deciding to wait for Israel to strike first rather than initiate armed operations on the Egyptian side.

At the end of my shift, I returned to my home in Heliopolis, and went to bed at 2300 hours on Saturday, October 6, leaving another shift of colleagues working with Hafiz Ismail in the palace. Throughout the long hours from 1400 on October 6, Hafiz Ismail had been in constant contact with President Sadat to inform him of developments in the international political situation, especially the communications arriving from the United States, and the telephone conversations with Dr. Mohamed Hassan al-Zayyat, the foreign minister, then in New York. It was this worthy man who received the now-famous telephone call from Henry Kissinger at dawn on October 6. Having received intelligence that Egypt was mobilizing forces at the front, the U.S. president sought to reassure Egypt that Israel had no intention of conducting any strikes against our armed forces. Zayyat conveyed this message to Hafiz Ismail, possibly at the exact moment Egyptian military operations were starting across the Suez Canal. Ismail was calm, alert, and in control. His significant knowledge and experience were palpable. I must admit that, although I was relatively green, I had a great many conversations with him about the military experiences of various states and their statesmen in a number of wars, foremost among which was the Second World War, on which Ismail had written a good deal of riveting and enjoyable work in the 1950s, which I read before my tenure under him in the 1970s. He had a keen intelligence, a profound investment in his responsibilities, and a range of exceptionally astute context-based responses, influenced no doubt by his own reading on military history and the general strategies of states that had engaged in military conflict.

I woke extremely early on Sunday, October 7, and wasted no time getting to Ahmed Maher’s house in the work car. We hurried to the palace, and I immediately delved into the reports from the previous night and the dawn, prepared by the night shift team for the national security advisor. My main concern was the Israeli air force’s actions against our air bases and our forces on the front. I started with the previous night’s reports and the ones dated October 7, and immediately my fears began to be allayed. The Israeli air force attempted to bomb our main bases; our fighter aircraft had been waiting and fought them off. The Israelis lost the advantage and their control of Egyptian skies. I wrote in my diary:

Air force losses insignificant. Our air force extremely effective. Our MiG-21s defended our skies successfully.

The bridgeheads are still very narrow. Heads of infantry divisions rose to fame as the most important corps in the Egyptian army. Forever inscribed in the annals of history are the Nineteenth Infantry Division, commanded by Brigadier General Fouad Afifi, and the Seventh Division, commanded by Brigadier General Ahmed Badawi, both divisions of the Third Army, as well as the Sixteenth Division, commanded by Brigadier General Abd Rabb al-Nabi Hafiz, the Second Division, commanded by Brigadier General Hassan Sa‘da, and the Eighteenth Division, commanded by Brigadier General Fouad Aziz Ghali, infantry divisions of the Second Army. Each of these had an armored division in addition to their armor, that is, a total of around one hundred tanks for each frontline infantry division that crossed the Suez Canal on that glorious day.

The strip is 2.4 km deep. The Second Army is doing better than the Third Army. We have at least four hundred tanks east of the canal. The Third Army had to use the Second Army’s bridges to cross, as the earth barrier (Bar-Lev line) was denser and more tightly packed in the south than in the north, and resisted the power of the water cannons to dissolve the dust and rocks of the Bar-Lev line.

A telegram arrived from Dr. Zayyat detailing Kissinger’s call to him in New York demanding that Egyptian forces retreat to the west of the canal and saying that Egypt continuing military action may lead to negative consequences: the tide may turn against Egypt. In my estimation, what America cares about now is to provide Israel with an opportunity to launch a counterattack. My reading of military reports indicate this may come on Monday, October 8.

As soon as I had read the reports from the previous night and that morning, we started working industriously. The twenty-four hours since Hafiz Ismail had told us of the timing of the Egyptian attack felt like years.