Word: buildups
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After the long weeks of buildup, of insisting upon his innocence, of accusing Government officials of plotting his downfall, of vowing that he would fight to the end, the denouement of the Spiro Agnew debacle came with stunning swiftness. His hands trembling slightly and his Palm Springs tan bleached white with tension, Agnew walked into a Baltimore courtroom last week and admitted that he had falsified his income tax in 1967. When he emerged half an hour later, Agnew had been transformed from Vice President of the United States into a convicted felon...
...Harbor. Israel's intelligence agents alerted the government several days before the invasion that the Arabs planned to attack. Israel's aircraft were not caught on the ground nor were its front-line troops dozing. In the weeks before Yom Kippur, Israeli intelligence had carefully monitored the buildup of Egyptian and Syrian troops. Yet Israel's intelligence organization, which won world respect with its almost uncanny ability to uncover Arab plans over the years and whose officials boasted that "Israeli intelligence is the best in the world," obviously failed for weeks to evaluate properly the information that...
Military intelligence was aware that Egypt was increasing its troop strength along the canal, but it tended to accept Egyptian announcements that the buildup was a military maneuver. The Egyptians had held such maneuvers for the past ten years; there was no indication that this year was any different. Moreover, Cairo gave no hint of anything unusual. There were no air-raid drills, no stockpiling of materiel and no rhetoric aimed at preparing the Egyptian public for war. When Syria moved its troops ten miles forward from its secondary line to the 1967 Golan Heights cease-fire line...
American officials detected the Arab buildup in satellite spy photos and expressed some alarm, but Israel discounted the danger. Explained one U.S. intelligence expert: "The Israelis are right there, and they should know. This time they did not read the signals right." By last week an Israeli Foreign Ministry official privately admitted that, "what was coming out of Cairo was a smokescreen. What Sadat was trying to do was obvious-lull us into a security that was not there." But Israel also helped lull itself into a sense of false security. Since the devastating victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan...
Even if Israel had been more alarmed, however, its options were limited. During the week before Yom Kippur, at a cabinet meeting called to discuss the Arab buildup, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan urged that Israel begin mobilization. That would have been a first step toward Israel's launching a pre-emptive first strike against the Arabs. The U.S. government opposed such a move, as did Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir. They were wary of Dayan's aggressive plan because they concluded that such an attack would infuriate world opinion, leaving Israel open...