I arrived in Cairo on Wednesday 7 January 1976 and dined that evening with President and Madame Sadat. I had first met him briefly in London only two months earlier. Before dinner we had a long talk. I found him a powerful and direct personality who had a strong grasp of the power relations of the Western world. Sadat still had to play a shrewd diplomatic game, balancing America and the Soviet Union. Having dramatically ejected Soviet advisers in 1972, he had received Soviet support during the 1973 war, but was now inclined once more to look to the United States. Just two months after my visit, Egypt formally abrogated its 1971 Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union.
In our conversations, he claimed to be reasonably satisfied with the state of the Egyptian economy: at this time there were still some expectations that the destruction of Beirut as a financial centre might indirectly benefit Cairo, and he was hoping for help from the Gulf states. But I thought it significant that the President lamented the amount of money which had gone into paying for war which might have been used for the peaceful development of Egypt. He told me that he was ‘very tired’, and I suspected this was said as much on behalf of Egypt as on his own account. He felt that he had a good relationship with President Ford, which perhaps intimated the way his mind was turning. Indeed, he gave the impression that Egypt would remain neutral unless forced into another war. There were also telltale signs in his conversation of Egypt’s well-known rivalry with Syria. He told me that that country was providing arms to both sides in the Lebanese civil war and added that the Syrian Ba’athist Party was hated throughout the Arab world. I formed the impression that Sadat was a formidable man, capable of great boldness, who was contemplating a major departure in his country’s foreign relations; I could not foresee, however, just how dramatic that change would be. Less than two years later he was to make his historic visit to Jerusalem, which led to Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt.
Sightseeing during my short stay in Egypt was a diplomatic necessity as well as a pleasure. But even this contained risks. Having climbed the great Cheops Pyramid, and still a little breathless, I came down to find a small group of cameramen, journalists and officials standing beside a camel. The camel driver’s name was Ibrahim and the camel was called ‘Jack Hulbert’, perhaps so named by an English Tommy after the popular long-jawed British comedian of the 1930s and forties. He was, it seems, a distinguished beast, and had been ridden on a previous visit by Alec Douglas-Home when Foreign Secretary. Everyone seemed to assume that I would follow suit. The possibilities flashed across my mind, not just getting on but staying on. I firmly declined. Ibrahim claimed to be most offended. If Jack Hulbert was good enough for Sir Alec, why not for Mrs Thatcher? I caught a gleam in the driver’s eye and suggested that paying double the fare for no camel ride might suit both of us. With a great show of reluctance he agreed. And so the newspaper photographs in Britain showed me being welcomed by President Sadat, rather than in some less dignified posture.
On Friday afternoon I flew to Damascus. President Assad had recently marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power by a judicious air-drop of gifts in Damascus and large pay rises for civil servants and the army. He was already a proven survivor in a country where previous heads of state had never served for more than two or three years. A member of the Alawite minority, presiding over a government containing people from a wide variety of religions, tribes and political affiliations, Assad had demonstrated a high level of political cunning to attain and hold power. His Ba’athist Party was itself an odd mixture of elements derived from both socialism and Islam, but founded in the 1940s under the slogan of ‘one Arab nation with an eternal mission’. Assad had developed to a fine art that particular mixture of radicalism, pragmatism and ruthlessness which success in the violent, turbulent world of Middle Eastern politics required. He was considered the most anti-Western leader in the region and was held responsible not just for many of the difficulties in the Arab-Israeli peace process but also for engineering the destruction of Lebanon. Western policy’s main error, which unfortunately continued for many years, was to underrate him and to exclude him from talks. But he made it easier to do this because of his subservience to the Soviet Union and his support for international terrorism.
Syria was a tightly controlled police state. Romanian-style eavesdropping was clearly the order of the day at the official Guest House in which we stayed. On our arrival, Gordon Reece and I went up to our rooms to wash and change. But Gordon found that he had no towels in the bathroom and so knocked on my door and asked to borrow one. I had barely gone to fetch it when a maid scurried up to hand him his own.
That evening our hosts would have found their guests’ private conversation more interesting. The Syrians had without warning invited me to a secret meeting with the PLO the following day. I was not going to agree to this. I would not meet them formally at all, still less in secret, because the PLO had refused to renounce terrorism. But I agreed, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to pay a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp and it was arranged that I would be taken to one on the outskirts of Damascus.
The following day began with a long, bumpy ride to Qunaitra, the last town on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. It had been demolished by the Israeli army when they withdrew in 1974. They were even alleged to have desecrated graves, and the whole town was now a showcase for the evils of Zionism. I was told that there was only one inhabitant now, an old lady who had refused to leave and had lived through the occupation. Predictably, I bumped into her on my way round.
We stopped at the Palestinian camp on our return journey to Damascus. ‘Camp’ turned out to be something of a misnomer. It was an enormous settlement with roads, tents, social halls, shops, hospitals and schools. I was shown one school, where the children were assembled in a large hall, being addressed by a woman teacher with great earnestness. I imagined that this was some kind of prayer assembly and asked my guide what the woman was saying. The answer came: ‘She is reminding these children that they are privileged to be at this school because at least one of their parents has been killed by a Jew.’ Now I understood why it was named the ‘School of the Martyrs’.
That evening after my return I had dinner with the President at his comfortable but modest house. He was obviously highly intelligent and knew precisely what he wanted. Though I was impressed, there was little meeting of minds. We talked about a draft Security Council Resolution which the Arab countries intended to put forward on the Palestinian question. It seemed to me that there was everything to be said for framing this responsibly so as not to attract the American veto. But of course I could not know quite what the Syrian President’s objectives in this matter really were: given Syria’s general stance of opposition to peace talks with Israel, he might well have been happier to have a strong pro-Palestinian Resolution vetoed than a weaker one passed. In any case, it was plain at that time that the Lebanese civil war was his real preoccupation, as he insisted again and again that Syria would never tolerate the partition of Lebanon. I was not surprised a few months later when Syrian troops intervened there in force. But I felt, oddly enough, that we had struck up some kind of relationship of mutual respect. He walked with me to the garden gate and jokingly asked whether I had been woken up early by the muezzin from the nearby mosque. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am up even before the Mullahs.’