260. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson1
Washington, September 24, 1968, 17:25
p.m.
Mr. President:
Abe Feinberg is just back from seeing Eshkol. His message is as follows:
- 1.
- The reason the Israelis took the UAR incidents to the Security Council was so as not to complicate your life while the Czech crisis was on.
- 2.
- The Israelis say that Nasser
has already made an arms deal with Moscow involving some:
- —150 MIGs;
- —450 tanks;
- —the training of 200 pilots in the USSR;
- —the sending of an additional 200 pilots to Egypt in mid-1969.
- 3.
- While Abe was here, I checked with our intelligence people and found:
- —we have no independent confirmation of the alleged Soviet-UAR deal;
- —the Israelis have reported the deal to us but not shared the source or quality of the intelligence.
- 4.
- In the light of the arms deal, Eshkol is worried about the Soviet proposal to confer
with us about a Middle Eastern settlement. I explained to Abe that there
was a good deal of nonsense in the Soviet proposal, but two points that
deserved serious consideration:
- —the Arabs signing a “multilateral document;”
- —the notion of a 4-power guarantee which might be the best security Israel could ever get if the Senate would buy it, since the Senate does not appear about to buy a bilateral security treaty with Israel.
- 5.
- Abe said he would advise the Israelis to share with us fully their intelligence on the Moscow-Cairo deal. He said he was relieved that we were not “buying” the whole Soviet document.
- 6.
- I was in the midst of talking about the importance of the Israeli’s clarifying their border position when I decided I ought to get this memo up to you.
W. W. Rostow
2