DR CHAZOV’S “VACATION IN EGYPT”as it swept for dozens of miles along Eg ypt’s Red Sea coast. A Soviet-supplied radar
station was among the targets that were overrun.
Kubersky’s “novel” relates how he encountered the Israeli column while traveling
to Cairo on leave from an Eg yptian SAM-2 battery at Hurghada, where he had been
transferred after the sonic-boom incident. He was the only soldier in a civilian bus,
and the driver quickly turned him in when the Israelis demanded, at the point of a
tank cannon, the surrender of any military personnel. But after an exchange with a
Russian-speaking member of the tank crew, he was allowed to proceed with the other
bus passengers—bearing a message to the Soviet command to “go home.” Continuing
north, he saw the remains of vehicles destroyed by the Israeli column, including the
flattened American car of the Eg yptian general in command of the sector.^19
If Kubersky’s account of his own escape is factual, he was lucky. In the car were
probably also the remains of a Soviet colonel, the Eg yptian general’s adviser, who was
unaccounted for after the raid.^20 So was the adviser to a SAM battery at Ras Zaafrana
that was attacked by IAF planes supporting the armored incursion before the tanks
overran it.^21 The latter was recently named in a regional Russian newspaper as Major
Pavel Karasev.^22 But Israeli accounts include no such incident as Kubersky describes,
and indicate that the tanks destroyed every moving target they encountered, civilian
as well as military.^23 In the absence of corroborating evidence, this part of his “novel”
must be considered as fictitious embroidery around the reports he read or heard
about the raid.
However, this was another case of Soviet casualties long before the “depth bomb-
ings.” The Arab media stressed, and neither Israeli nor US spokesmen denied, that
Israel’s newly received Phantoms had provided some of the operation’s air cover,
which would hardly have disposed Nasser to initiate any gesture toward
Washington.^24 The weak Eg yptian defense so enraged Nasser that it was reported to
have caused a relapse of his diabetes—actually the heart attack of 10 September.^25
Ahmed Ismail was indeed Soviet-trained and considered pro-Moscow, but he was
only the highest-ranking among a large group of officers who were cashiered after the
Israeli raid—all of whom were directly connected with the failure to repel it.
The Egyptian president’s real standing in Moscow was demonstrated when, soon
after Chazov’s return home, the doctor was awarded the Order of Lenin—officially
for “developing medical science and public health.” When he protested to Andropov,
“I didn’t earn it,” the KGB chief replied “what you did for Nasser, you did for our
country. You cannot imagine how great a political asset his health is today.”^26 In a
2010 interview, Chazov embellished the story by adding to Andropov’s “surprised”
answer: “you have to understand that ... your work in Eg ypt meant more than if we
had sent in two divisions.”^27