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An Embassy in Wartime: The Six Day War
By William N. Dale
*
Ambassador Dale, a member of our board and a frequent contributor, was Deputy Chief of Mission in Tel Aviv during the Six Day War in June, 1967. In this account he describes what took place then from the point of view of the officers of the American Embassy and their families. Much of the information is drawn from the diary of his late wife. –Ed.
An earnest reader can picture a war from the chronology of pertinent dates, from official accounts of the events that occurred, and from the stories of the participants or refugees that war creates. In this account, we shall attempt a different approach. We shall try to create an impression of the Six Day War that took place in June, 1967 between Israel and the Arab countries, led by Egypt, from the point of view of the officers of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv and their families. We shall trace what they actually did during this time of great tension and danger without dealing with matters of high policy which mostly occurred elsewhere. Let us attempt to catch the flavor of the conflict as we open this chest of history.
In the US Embassy in the late spring of 1967 it did not dawn on us that relations between Israel and Egypt were so disturbed that we could not pursue our normal course of living. Hence, the Dales showed up at Lod (Ben Gurion) airport near Tel Aviv in time to steal a ride on the U.S. government plane that regularly supplied American embassies in the Persian Gulf with American products. The pilot casually informed us that the plane had "dropped an engine" and he would have to postpone our departure a day or more. Since aviation lingo was beyond our field of knowledge, we thought how dangerous it must have been to drop an engine for those on the ground below as well as for the plane's crew.
By the time we learned that the engine repairs were complete {and not from dropping), the international picture had completely changed. On May 14 Gamil Abdul Nasser, president of Egypt, had ordered his troops into the Sinai and two days later had requested U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations, to withdraw the United Nations Emergency Force, the buffer between Egypt and Israel.
When I brought up the subject of our delayed trip to the Persian Gulf with my superior, Ambassador Walworth Barbour, he remarked mildly that if he were making the decision, he would cancel the trip as it seemed likely that war was about to break out. We had forgotten entirely about the trip by the time the senior officers of the embassy met at the embassy residence that evening to discuss what changes we should make in our operations in light of impending hostilities.
As it happened, The British Ambassador, Michael Haddow and his wife, Lolita, were planning to give a Hawaiian style party at the pool of the Hilton Hotel the next evening to celebrate their daughter, Gay's eighteenth birthday. In spite of the war cloud hanging over the diplomatic community, the Haddows went ahead with the party. The only trouble was that it coincided with Israel's general mobilization with frustrating results. Men and women all over the country were being ordered to join their military units. At the Hilton, a guest would order a drink from one waiter and another would bring it after a sizeable delay together with excuses from the first waiter that he had to leave to join his unit. Eventually, so many waiters left that the guests had to find their own way to the hotel bar. Still, it was a reasonably good party.
Mobilization continued the following day. The little corner store near us in Kfar Shmaryahu closed down due to a loss of clerks. The flower seller disappeared from the corner by the supermarket. Our consul general, Clifton English, reported that their maid, Benta, was disconsolate because six of her seven boy friends were no longer available.
On May 22, President Nasser announced closure of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an action which the Israelis had already warned would be a casus belli. The embassy officers reacted to the news by spending even more time in the office while the families began to think seriously about what an evacuation would really mean.
On May 23, President Johnson called the closure of the Strait illegal and potentially disastrous to the cause of peace. By this time most of the thousands of Americans in Israel were aware that war was a distinct possibility. Clifton English, reported that his office had finished sending out notices to U.S. citizens already registered at the Embassy advising them to go home while dealing with the crowds of citizens or people claiming to be citizens besieging his office in search of information and advice.
Diplomatic community wives were now busily discussing evacuation. Lolita Haddow had put her foot down. She would not leave. It was too much trouble to get packed. She had two dogs and an old cat to feed and, in her absence, who would take care of her husband. Ambassador Barbour was unmarried, and Jane Dale, the senior American wife, felt the same as Lolita.
On May 24, the UN Security Council met to discuss the crisis. In Embassy Tel Aviv the administrative officers had by now distributed two-way radios to all the senior officers. Ambassador Barbour a portly and formal individual, objected to the code name assigned him, "butterfly" and "bulldog" soon replaced it. His radio picked up and broadcast all the messages in the system which did nothing to improve his sleep.
The remaining Hilton Hotel employees came to the Embassy to protest to James Grant, in Tel Aviv on a temporary assignment, because he had placed flyers in the mail boxes of American tourists advising them to go wasn't good for business. The tourists, however, asked for extra copies of the flyers as souvenirs.
By this time the Embassy wives were discussing avidly where they hoped to be evacuated. The most persistent rumor was Rome. One wife said she didn't care so much where she was sent as long as the wives could be together. They got along so well, she remarked, that they should be allowed to stay together.
On May 25 Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, met with Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, in Washington to discuss Israeli options and American reactions and ideas for keeping the peace. The following day he met with the President. Meanwhile, Embassy officers reported on the mobilization and political developments in Israel. Registration of American citizens and efforts to persuade them to leave continued. More importantly, the Ambassador and I became involved in trying to resolve the discrepancies between the Israeli and U.S. versions of the talks Eban had held in Washington. The question was how definite President Johnson was in telling Mr. Eban that he opposed Israel's going to war.
The two-way radios went on irritating. Nobody enjoyed being awakened by a grating voice squawking,"Rabbit Foot, Rabbit Foot, this is Whirly Bird." A group of American opera singers were still in town, but claimed they were too nervous to sing. Now they are afraid their failure to perform would be a breach of contract.
On May 28 the President and Secretary of State sent letters to Prime Minister Eshkol urging patience and restraint. Eshkol then broadcast the Israeli cabinet's decision to allow more time for diplomacy to work. Yet, on June 1 he reorganized his cabinet giving the defense portfolio to Israel's famous general, Moshe Dayan. Many observers considered this appointment to be a sign that a final decision to go to war soon had been made.
The Embassy went on a 24 hour watch system. British embassy personnel dropped around to say goodbye before they left for their evacuation destinations. Ambassador Haddow and, of course, Lolita, did not leave. Some American civilian employees began to depart with the remark that they had not come to Israel to witness a war. The Embassy kept the American school open for the few remaining pupils.
The 2nd, 3rd and 4th of June were strangely quiet days. We knew that fateful decisions had been made and we could only wait for their impact. Diplomatic activity continued at a furious pace in Washington and New York about how to avoid war with such devices as sending an international fleet up the Red Sea, but it did not appear to have much effect in Tel Aviv.
On June 4, An Israeli neighbor, Jack Stein, who had now become our civil defense warden, stopped by the house to pick out the best room for an air raid shelter. He decided on the clothes closet underneath the stairs and we moved a chaise lounge and several containers with food and water into it.
The Italian ambassador went ahead with a long planned reception on June 4. Many members of the diplomatic corps expressed relief at doing something to which they were well accustomed and which critics maintained was about all diplomats did anyway. We went to bed with more hope than usual that war could be avoided.
About 6:30 on the morning of June 5th Ambassador Barbour called to say his cook, who was an Israeli and hence spoke Hebrew, had just told him that Israeli planes were engaged in a massive attack on the Egyptian air force. I called the Embassy right away and spoke to the watch officer. He was assigned to Tel Aviv as a Hebrew speaker, so I asked him what he had heard. He replied that he had heard nothing he could understand and added that his Hebrew wasn't up to par. I then called Shlomo Argov, my contact in the Foreign Office and asked him about the reports of an air attack. He told me the reports were true and fighting was now underway. He was sure the Egyptians had done something to provoke it, but he didn't know what. It turned out the Egyptians had done nothing more than they had already done to bring on the war.
When the sirens sounded in Tel Aviv we dutifully abandoned our crowded desks and packed into the air raid shelter. Evan Wilson, our consul general in Jerusalem, called in a mood of great anxiety to tell us the Jordanians were shelling parts of the city and a projectile had landed 150 feet from his office.
My wife, Jane, and our Dutch au pair girl, Els, spent the morning packing personal belongings without knowing where, if anywhere, we were going. Siren blasts frequently interrupted their labors, followed by trips to the closet under the stairs. Jane reported that she heard many "big soft bangs" from the east as well as the sirens. The local Israelis, by now mostly women, stood in clumps in the street exchanging information and rumors. They kept close track of Jane to see whether she was being evacuated in which case they would really have to worry.
The last evacuation of Embassy personnel occurred at the American school not far from our house in Kfar Shmaryahu. Under the able direction of our youngest officer, Teresita Currie, people packed in orderly fashion into nine cars and the little procession left for the airport. Only working personnel and older wives without children remained.
The evacuation plane was a DC-4 which happened to be undergoing repairs at an Israeli facility. The U.S. Air Force officer supervising the work had told us one wing had to be reattached and he would do his best to see that the job was finished in time to evacuate our personnel to Cyprus safely. Ambassador Tobias Belcher, a close friend, had agreed to receive our evacuees and help them with arrangements for travel to their next destinations. We were more than a little relieved to hear from Toby a few hours later that the plane had arrived with both wings securely attached.
The night of the 5th of June I arrived home about 9:30 p.m. in time to watch the fighting for Jerusalem from an upstairs window. Jane, an artist by nature, thought the glow of exploding shells and particularly the prolonged glow of star shells was a beautiful sight, while I was much more concerned with the safety of our Consulate General personnel.
General Uzi Narkiss, commander of Israeli forces in northern Israel, had taken some U.S. Defense Department officials and me on a trip around Israeli positions in his area including Jerusalem only a few weeks before so I had a good idea where the fighting was occurring. Instead of marveling at the beauty of exploding ordnance, I was anxious about the welfare of Evan Wilson and his staff. As fighting intensified, the staff repaired to the kitchen with pots and pans on their heads awaiting the shrapnel which, luckily, never came.
However, shrapnel did destroy the clothing of one consul who had been particularly careful always to dress well. As soon as possible after the war, he hurried to London to restore his wardrobe.
We heard reports that Iraqi planes had bombed Netanya, a nearby city that specialized in diamond cutting. We experienced some proof of this when we heard and felt a tremendous shock causing the house to shake and our hearts to pop up into our throats. It turned out to be the crash of an Iraqi bomber shot down by the Israelis.
During this period, Ambassador Barbour disappeared for large blocks of time. He told us he was going to the Israeli war room to follow events more closely. General Dayan remarked afterwards that he had not noticed the Ambassador there, but in any case his absence left me in charge of the Embassy. We converted the conference room into a war room with large maps showing the positions of the opposing forces and we relocated our message center there. Only war related messages came in or out and we kept carefully arranged files of them. We staffed the war room with commercial officers and others who's regular duties had evaporated.
Consular officers were still busy trying to keep track of American citizens in kibbutzim and other locations and had not left the country. They also handled an invasion by hundreds of Orthodox Jews. Since they were American citizens, they believed they had a right to be evacuated to the United States at government expense. They became so obstreperous that the Marines who guarded the Embassy had to make an appearance to quiet them down.
As fighting appeared to be slackening, the Ambassador surfaced long enough to receive Moshe Bitan, who was in charge of US affairs at the Foreign Office and Mr. Barbour's chief contact, at the Embassy residence. Moshe informed us that the Israelis could not accept the latest draft cease fire resolution circulating among U.N. Security Council members because they still had a little clean up job to do in the North. He emphasized that it was minor. We transmitted the gist of the conversation to New York and Washington immediately. Shortly thereafter, the Israelis launched a major attack up the Golan Heights. The trick succeeded in that it could have led the U.S. government to expect some activity along the Syrian border and hence be less prepared for a major attack. Ambassador Barbour was furious and accused Moshe Bitan of deliberately deceiving him. Moshe admitted that he had indeed deceived him, but added that the Arabs deceived Americans much more. Relations between the two men were never as close after that incident.
Keeping preparations for the attack on the Golan secret as long as possible may also have been a reason for the Israeli attack on the U.S. intelligence gathering ship, the Liberty, on June 8. Israeli claims to the contrary, the Embassy had no contact with the Israelis regarding the Liberty before their attack on the ship off the southern coast of Israel. When the Israelis told us of their attack, they took our Naval Attaché, Commander Ernest Castle, on a helicopter over the heavily damaged ship. He dropped a paper bag, weighted down with two oranges from his lunch on to the deck of the Liberty asking if he could help. He was speedily waved off.
Jane Dale had her special tasks. She took Mayor Tate of Philadelphia and a White House official, who had been stranded in Israel, shopping. Even though the Turkish and Dutch contingents of our domestic staff had gone, she entertained the remaining Embassy staff members almost every night in order to keep morale high. Jane also made a point of keeping up her exercises with her Israeli friends. During the blackout, we kept one candle burning on top of the bar. However, by June 9 the Israelis around us believed victory was theirs and they rejoiced in the streets, especially over the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem.
With acceptance of the last cease fire resolution the war ended. Life returned rapidly to its normal routine. Husbands spent their nights at home again and came home from work a little earlier. When news came that Richard Nixon would arrive on June 21, marking the resumption of visits by American politicians, we knew living had returned to its habitual course. However, the Middle East would never be the same again and America's involvement there would become vastly greater.
July 21, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Bill Dale served thirty years in the Foreign Service. His posts, aside from Washington, were Copenhagen, Ottawa, Paris, London, Ankara, Tel Aviv, and Bangui. He was the U. S. envoy in the Central African Republic, 1973-75. Back