Henry Kissinger and Anwar Sadat – Turbo-charged Shuttle Diplomacy.

Busy week in the world, the one ending on January 20, 1974.

Starting with The Middle East. Henry Kissinger pulled it off. The Israeli-Egyptian agreement to separate their troops along the Suez Canal is a brilliant achievement of personal diplomacy, although only the first step in the complex problem of ultimate peace in the Middle East. The agreement was achieved because both sides knew they needed it, and each had points it could afford to yield in the negotiations. Kissinger provided the essential ingredient to make the formula jell: great skill as a personal negotiator who by traveling from one camp to the other was able to get the two antagonistic sides into an agreement. For two or three years, back before the recent Yom Kippur War, the State Department was urging what it called “hotel room’ talks between Egypt and Israel.

Recognizing the traditional bitterness between the two countries, it sought to get their representatives into separate rooms of a hotel somewhere, then have an American or United Nations negotiator shuttle between them with an exchange of proposals until an agreement could be achieved. Kissinger’s series of flights between Egypt and Israel was “hotel room” diplomacy on a blown-up scale. Such is his ability to talk turkey to each side and to exploit shifting positions that he eventually achieved the compromise that both sides wanted.

And over to Capitol Hill and Watergate: The testimony of the experts about the 18-minute gap in a Watergate tape recording does not really come as a surprise. The experts stopped short of speculating on whether the erasure was deliberate or accidental, but reasonable persons are not likely to believe that anyone could accidentally re-record five to nine times on the same stretch of tape. The implication is clear that the erasure was done deliberately. The inference that the 18-minute gap contained compromising matter is irresistible, and Richard M. Nixon seems caught anew, and more tightly, in a new tangle of Watergate tapes.

Whether the tape erasure calls for criminal action is a matter for the court to determine. Ever since former White House staff member Alexander P. Butterfield disclosed to the Senate Watergate Committee that the White House was wired to record all the President’s conversations, the famous Watergate tapes seemed to hold the key to resolving this particular national tragedy. Mr. Nixon and members of his staff have been equivocal, by turns, in regard to the tapes, Mr. Nixon saying first that he had listened to them: and d that they were open to varying interpretations, and his staff insisting that they would exonerate the President of complicity in either the Watergate burglary or in its coverup. Mr. Nixon’s detractors felt certain the tapes would provide incontrovertible evidence of the President’s guilt.

And finally: CHINESE troops were put ashore on the Paracel Islands, east of the South Vietnamese Coast, after a naval battle in which South Vietnam lost an escort ship and had two destroyers damaged. The Saigon High Command claimed that a Chinese escort vessel had been sunk and that Chinese forces which had landed had been bombarded by the South Vietnamese Navy. Last night, Saigon instituted diplomatic moves to impress upon the world her claim to the and storm-buffeted islands. Chinese troops appeared to be in occupation of five of the largest islands Robert, Duncan, Drummond and Money. The size of the occupying Chinese force is unknown, but is likely to be several thousands. The Saigon Command said that Peking had 14 warships in the region, including four guided missile destroyers. South Vietnam’s Air Force has fighter aircraft based at Danang which are capable of reaching the islands, but military spokesmen said they had not yet been used.

And while The Middle East story continues to unfold, that’s just a sample of what went on, this week ending on January 20, 1974 as reported by CBS Radio’s World This Week.