The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967–1973. The USSR’s Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict

THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973

Phantoms, in order to conform with the narrative about the outset of Kavkaz “a few
days after Nasser’s December visit” that was then the authorized narrative in Moscow.
When confronted with the Israeli version, Yaremenko pointed out that inflated
claims of aircraft shot down (six Phantoms would have been about one-fourth of all
Israel had in December 1969) were reported by Soviet officers in the field:

It’s not impossible that they exaggerated. There was also a paradox: the rivalry between the

Eg yptians and our [men]. We shoot [a plane] down and the Eg yptians take credit for the

kill. So one plane gets shot down and two are recorded ... that was a game that did a bad

job for the statistics, because now it’s very hard to prove [the actual numbers].^59

Another reason for this disparity is probably that the Strela’s impact was frequently
less than fatal—but once the hit was sighted, or even if the flame of afterburner acti-
vation looked like a hit, the plane was reported as shot down. Soviet pilots would
have bailed out in such situations, but IAF airmen, acutely aware of their force’s
numerical inferiority, went to extraordinary lengths to save and land their craft even
when severely damaged. In the 19 August battle, for example, Tkachev lists three
Skyhawks downed, even though the missile operators actually saw only one plane hit
the ground. They reported that another “fell into the Suez Canal,” some 10 miles
away and therefore out of their sight, while the third was merely seen “turning back.”
These discrepancies would recur throughout Kavkaz and would apply to the main
SAM units too. Their commander, Aleksey Smirnov, mentions a promise from the
Air Defense Forces chief that the first divizyon commander to shoot down an Israeli
Phantom would be made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Glory was not the only motiva-
tion for inflated claims: a senior political officer, Viktor Logachev, attests that the
commander of any missile crew credited for a kill received a bounty of 200 Eg yptian
pounds, more than two months’ pay.^60 Smirnov’s own figures for Israeli planes shot
down by his missilemen also exceed Israel’s confirmed losses, and he admits that some
Soviet officers registered even wilder claims. “I don’t know where they took these
figures. Let them stay on their conscience.”^61 But accurate or not, the claim on behalf
of the SAM-7 was used effectively by the Soviets to promote the prowess of their
weaponry and by the Eg yptians to solicit further Soviet assistance: “The intensity of
Israeli raids decreased drastically. The world learned of the appearance of a shoulder-
fired, heat-seeking Soviet missile system.”^62
Was it Eg yptians or Soviets who actually fired the newfangled Strelas in these early
encounters? Since Tkachev mentions that “the [Eg yptian] personnel had not yet
completed the full training course,” at least Soviet instructors were undoubtedly still
present. Kubersky’s “fictionalized” genre allowed him to describe the Soviets’ role
more openly: “that some teams of our experts reached the canal, ready to ‘work’ on
the IAF, was a super-secret.”^63 Yaremenko, lecturing in 1998, already hinted almost as
broadly that the Soviet experts were directly involved: “the Eg yptians were trained ...