The White House announced today that Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger will leave for the Middle East at midnight tomorrow in an effort to further the separation of Israeli and Egyptian forces along the Suez Canal and to add momentum to the disengagement talks now going on at Geneva. A spokesman for President Nixon said at San Clemente that Kissinger’s trip–his third to the Middle East since the end of the Yom Kippur War–is being made at the specific request of the Israeli government and at the invitation of the Egyptian government.
Kissinger will be accompanied by Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. representative at the Geneva talks; Undersecretary of State-designate Joseph J. Sisco, the Administration’s top Mideast expert; Alfred L. Atherton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State; Harold Saunders of the National Security Council Staff; and legal advisor Carlyle Maw. The Kissinger party is expected to visit Cairo first and then Jerusalem.
The White House spokesman said Nixon has informed the Soviet Union, U.S. allies in Europe and UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim of Kissinger’s trip. It was also learned today that Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy will visit Moscow this week-end. There was no immediate indication as to where Kissinger will go from Israel although the entire trip is expected to take less than a week.
State Department spokesman George Vest said that Kissinger has received “a number of ideas from Israel which form a prelude to concrete proposals.” This was understood to refer to the talks last week-end between the Secretary and Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and the Israeli Cabinet discussion with Dayan after his return to Israel. It was also understood that the Israeli ideas emerging from the Cabinet meeting were transmitted Monday to Kissinger by Ambassador Simcha Dinitz.
The third trip by Kissinger to meet with Israeli and Egyptian leaders indicates that he is himself the central figure in the “proximity talks” which the Nixon Administration fostered more than a year ago as a preliminary to discussions on an “interim agreement” that would lead to an Israeli pullback along the canal. The present developments do not have these names but the concepts are the same. (By Joseph Polakoff, JTA Washington Bureau Chief.)
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