Carter-Sadat Camp David Strategy Told

Seven months before the start of the 1978 Mideast peace conference at Camp David, President Jimmy Carter reached a secret pact with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on a strategy intended to force concessions from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, according to a book to be published today by a former U.S. official.

William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council staff member, wrote that in February, 1978, Carter and Sadat agreed that after Egypt and Israel reached the expected deadlock, Carter would suggest a U.S. compromise that Sadat would immediately accept, thus putting great pressure on Begin to either go along or torpedo the talks.

“These moves might have led somewhere if both parties had been able to stick to the agreed strategy,” Quandt says in the book “Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics.” “But neither side was entirely convinced that this was the best approach. . . . The stratagem was probably a bit too Machiavellian and could have placed Sadat in an awkward position if Israel had failed to make comparable concessions.”

Nevertheless, Quandt, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said at a press conference Tuesday that Sadat “was surprised to discover that the deal was no longer on” at a crucial point at the Camp David conference in September, 1978. Sadat’s disillusionment may have been a primary cause for his now well-known threat to walk out of the talks.

Quandt said he believes that Sadat was sincere in his plans to abandon the conference but that Carter talked him out of it by threatening to withdraw all U.S. support for Egypt if the talks collapsed.

The Camp David talks ultimately yielded a framework agreement that led the next year to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, still the only such agreement between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors.

Need for Mediation

Quandt said that Arab-Israeli agreements apparently can be made only with U.S. mediation. He said President Reagan has been unwilling to invest his prestige, as Carter did, in bringing the Mideast parties together.

“Carter in one sense had it easy,” Quandt said. “He was dealing with leaders who were relatively strong and were willing to negotiate.”

By contrast, he said, neither Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres nor Jordanian King Hussein have sufficient political strength to reach a compromise with the other.

Nevertheless, Quandt said, a Jordan-Israel conference might have been convened last year if the Reagan Administration had applied sufficient leverage.

“I don’t think the present Administration thinks the Middle East warrants such high-level involvement,” he said. Lower ranking diplomats, he added, have had little success in serving as mediators because “Middle Easterners are spoiled--they expect the President to get involved.”

Quandt said the Camp David agreements have stood the test of time in terms of bilateral relations between Israel and Egypt, although they have failed to resolve the situation on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip.

“We knew (the West Bank provision) was a long shot,” Quandt said. “I never expected the Jordanians and the Palestinians to rally around it--although some others did.”