WHAT TRIGGERED KAVKAZ? REFUTING HEIKAL’S VERSIONB. The sonic-boom incident, 17 June 1969
Back now to the chronological timeline. Igor’ Kubersky’s 2011 “novel” Egipet-69 typi-
fies the “fiction” genre of the Putin years. Kubersky was an interpreter for the chief
Soviet adviser to Eg ypt’s air defense array, headquartered in the elite Cairo suburb
Heliopolis, and his colleagues there have certified his account as factually accurate.^12
One morning, I awake to the sound of thunder shaking all the building as if the sky has
fallen onto our roof, and I reflexively run out to the balcony. I see them in the dim light—
two Israeli Mirages directly over the rooftops ... two afterburners, two orange flames.
Belatedly ... from the rooftop where anti-aircraft machineguns were manned around the
clock by Arab crews, came the dry rattle of a fire burst ... They had overslept ... But on this
memorable morning of 17 June 1969, this blast of breaking the sound barrier woke up all
of Cairo and President Nasser himself, over whose residence in Heliopolis the Mirages flew
mockingly, flaunting the total helplessness of Eg ypt’s air defense.During the morning, we discussed how easily we might have lost our workplace—it would
have been nothing for the Mirages to fire a couple of rockets into our headquarters. ...
Fortunately no one bombed Cairo, and apparently did not intend to—this was only a
gesture ... to humiliate us.^13The Israeli intent was so described in proud retrospect by one of the pilots, the leader
of one pair among the four Mirages that took off from Sharm el-Sheikh. Their primary
mission was photoreconnaissance, but “the secondary purpose” was “to show the
Eg yptian political echelon that it could not rely on its air force ... to let them know that
we were there and they couldn’t stop us. There could be no telling of tall tales about it
... and Cairo of summer ’69 was full of foreign reporters.” All four Mirages turned on
their afterburners in coordination upon signal from base, in order to break the sound
barrier.^14 This version was taken up by most Israeli and Western histories.^15 But the most
recent and authoritative chronicle of the IAF in the War of Attrition attributes the
sonic boom to an “operational mishap” in “a fairly routine” sortie. The result was,
according to this version, a classic case of unforeseen consequences. It broke several
weeks of relative lull in air activity, though the ground fighting along the canal contin-
ued to rage with Israeli fatalities approaching an average of one per day.
The latter version, based on the pilots’ debriefing immediately after the incident,
holds that after the foursome split up, pilot number two of the pair tasked to overfly
central Cairo lagged behind his leader, and turned on his afterburner to catch up. The
resulting boom
left a swathe of destruction as its rolling thunder passed through the streets of Cairo, wak-
ing the still-sleepy residents. Thousands of panes were shattered. The boom was heard
everywhere—including the Eg yptian President’s residence in Heliopolis and the air
defense HQ at Muqatem. ... The Eg yptian air defense command was bewildered.