ambassador. But not for the last time in negotiations with Syria, any real progress was blocked by an apparent combination of misunderstanding and miscommunication. The discussions were lively. Shihabi had served as Syria’s liaison officer with the UN force set up along the cease-fire line after the 1948 war. “Go check with the UN,” he said at our first meeting. “You'll see almost all the exchanges of fire in the late 1950s were provoked by Israel.” I didn’t respond directly, though I did note it was the Syrians who had tried to divert water from the Jordan River in the early fifties. “You did it first,” he retorted. So it continued. Only later did we learn that while Muallem had sent back a generally encouraging impression from our garden talks, and his conclusion that Israel was ready for substantive talks, he had neglected to convey our expectation that any early progress would occur in informal exchanges. The result was probably to raise General Shihabi’s expectations, which made him reluctant to show any real engagement. After a phone call with Rabin after our first day of talks, I became equally cautious. He agreed that we wanted to avoid a repeat of our experience with the Golan “deposit”. We did not want to put concessions on the record before we got an indication that the Syrians were genuinely ready for peace talks. Still, the fact that we’d established the precedent of a “chief-of-staff channel” was a step forward. My successor as ramatkal, Amnon Lipkin, would meet again with Shihabi in early 1995. * * * I was confident Amnon was inheriting an army stronger, better prepared and better equipped than at any time since the Six-Day War. We also had peace treaties not only with Egypt, but now Jordan, and none of the substantive issues with the Syrians seemed insurmountable. But the main security challenges were the unconventional ones. In the long term, a resurgent Iraq, and very likely Iran, might make strides towards getting nuclear weapons. There was ev