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290 TURBULENCE AND TERROR
with collecting this sensitive imagery, who travelled to
Washington once a week on an RAF Comet airliner, turned up
and found that 'The bag just was not there.'46
Political relations deteriorated further during August and
September. Although Edward Heath was urged to write to
Nixon on 17 August, it was not until 4 September that officials
managed to extract a crawling letter from him. 47 Heath
assured the President that there was 'certainly no question of
the relationship between your country and our one becoming
one of adversaries'. At the same time, he could not resist
lecturing Nixon about the complementary nature of Britain's
relationships with Europe and the United States. 48 Nixon's
response was notably brief and forma1. 49 Crispin Tickell, who
led a Foreign Office mission to Washington in September 1973,
discovered that many staffers on the US National Security
Council believed that Britain was now 'more European than
the Europeans'. They were complaining loudly that 'The British
are pursuing a consistently anti-American policy on a wide
variety of subjects.'5o
Some British officials argued that in 'the intelligence field'
the Americans were cutting off their nose to spite their face,
since any suspension of cooperation was 'not ... in their own
best interests'.51 Heath was determined to prove the point, and
opportunities for retaliation were not long in arriving. At midday
on Saturday, 6 October 1973, a coalition of Arab states inflicted
a remarkable surprise attack on Israel that had not been foreseen
by any of the world's major intelligence services. The Yom
Kippur War ranks alongside Pearl Harbor and Hitler's attack on
Russia in 1941 as one of the most extraordinary surprise attacks
of all time. Two weeks before, on 25 September, King Hussein
of Jordan had flown secretly to Israel to warn the Prime Minister,
Golda Meir, of what was coming. However, Israeli intelligence
did not believe that Egypt was capable of launching a surprise
attack because it lacked air superiority, and so, despite receiving
numerous other warnings, they closed their ears. On the
morning of 6 October, hours before Egyptian forces pounced,