President Carter, faced with stalemate and possible collapse of the Egyptian-Israeli treaty talks he has fostered, has directed Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to go to Cairo Sunday and to Jerusalem thereafter in an attempt to bring about the resumption of negotiations between the two countries.
The President made his decision last night, the State Department disclosed today, after Vance had consulted with both the Israeli and Egyptian governments and with the knowledge of the contents of the letters recently exchanged between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Premier Menachem Begin of Israel and the long series of talks over the past four days by Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, Vance and other officials with visiting Egyptian Prime Minister Mustapha Khalil.
An atmosphere of desperation to save the talks from foundering arose from Vance’s cancellation of his attendance of a meeting of the NATO ministers in Brussels this Thursday and Friday to prepare for his Middle East journey. Only yesterday afternoon, the State Department explicitly denied that Vance had any plans to visit the Middle East. Although dropping the Brussels meeting, the Secretary of State will fly to London Friday for a long heralded address before the Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs there Saturday.
He will fly to Cairo Saturday night where he will remain for an unspecified length of time and will then go to Jerusalem. He is expected to return to Washington by the middle of next week. There are no plans for Vance to visit any other Middle East country, according to George Sherman, the State Department official who has been spokesman for the trilateral conference that began at Blair House Oct. 12.
PROCEDURAL AND SUBSTANTIVE TALKS INDICATED
“The President has asked Secretary Vance to visit Egypt and Israel to explore ways of resuming their discussions with the objective of conducting the negotiations we have all been conducting on the basis of the frameworks agreed to at Camp David,” Sherman said. “The discussions obviously have both procedural and substantive sides,” he observed.
“The procedural side obviously is how, where and when to resume the negotiations. The substantive side — equally obviously — is to continue on the remaining issues in the negotiations that pertain both to the treaty between Egypt and Israel and the interrelationship to the two Camp David accords.”
Sherman’s remarks on the procedural and substantive matters and the announcement of Vance’s trip to the Middle East raised the question that Vance might be going there to prepare for another Camp David conference, as he did last August when he delivered Carter’s invitations to Sadat and Begin to meet at the Presidential retreat in September. When asked if would “rule out” the possibility of another summit conference, Sherman replied that he would not “rule it in.”
Asked if Begin’s letter to Sadat reportedly rejecting Egypt’s demands for treaty changes was “the key factor” behind the President’s dispatch of Vance to the Middle East, Sherman replied, “That is not true, that was absolutely not true.”
The importance Carter attaches to Vance’s trip was indicated by the fact that he will be accompanied by the Administration’s top diplomatic specialists on the Middle East — Ambassador Alfred L. Atherton, Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders, William Quandt, National Security Council expert on the Middle East and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, Michael Sterner.
‘TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT’ COMMENT DENIED
Meanwhile, reports that the U.S. was rebuking a reported comment that Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan had said that Egypt should “take it or leave it” in reference to the U.S. draft treaty proposed in late October is being angrily denied here by Israeli sources who said that was an interpretation of what Dayan had actually said. The Israeli sources said that Israel had accepted the U.S. draft treaty completely and that it was now up to Egypt to react to it.
In addition, reports distributed in important American media that “Israeli negotiators” accepted the “side letter” idea of a timetable for the West Bank-Gaza Strip elections were branded false by informed sources here. The Israeli negotiators agreed only, they said, to submit the idea, advanced by the U.S., to the Israeli Cabinet, which, they stressed, alone has the authority to accept or reject any proviso. The purpose in reporting that Israeli negotiators had “accepted” the “one element” set forth in the U.S. proposals was seen as merely aimed at discrediting and weakening the Israeli position in public opinion abroad.
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