during the 10th of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in that year. The attack by the Egyptian and Syrian forces caught the United States by surprise. According to future CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he was briefing an American arms negotiator on the improbability of armed conflict in the region when he heard the news of the outbreak of war on the radio. On the other hand, the KGB learned about the attack in advance, probably from its intelligence sources in Egypt. Egypt's initial war objective was to use its military to seize a limited amount of Israeli-occupied Sinai on the east bank of the Suez Canal. This would provoke a crisis which would allow it to bring American and Soviet pressure to bear on Israel to negotiate the return of the rest of Sinai, and possibly other occupied territories, from a position of relative strength. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's publicly stated position was "to recover all Arab territory occupied by Israel following the 1967 war and to achieve a just, peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict". Similarly, Syria intended to seize back some or all of the Golan and to then negotiate its retention via great power pressure. Both Egypt and Syria expected that the use of the "oil weapon" would assist them in post-conflict negotiations, once their attacks had generated a reason for its use. Other than a flurry of Syrian missile attacks on Ramat David airbase and surrounding civilian settlements during the first days of the war, the fighting took place in Sinai and the Golan Heights, territories that had been occupied by Israel since their victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, and in the later stages, on the west side of the Suez canal in Egypt and in areas of the Golan beyond those held by Israel prior to the outbreak of war. Sinai Front The Egyptians had prepared for an assault across the canal and deployed five divisions totaling 100,000 soldiers, 1,350 tanks and 2,000 guns and heavy mortars for the onslaught. Facing them were 450 soldiers of the Jerusalem Brigade, spread out in 16 forts along the length of the canal. There were 290 Israeli tanks in all of Sinai, divided into three armored brigades, only one of which was deployed near the canal when hostilities commenced. Large bridgeheads were established on the east bank on October 6. Israeli armoured