THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973division near Giza.^60 He relates that in two Israeli air raids on its command post, three
Soviet advisers and a senior interpreter were killed. Upon arrival, Goryachkin inher-
ited the hotel billet of a fallen colleague, and sleeping in the dead man’s bed troubled
him. “I had a recurring nightmare of myself crawling with a wounded leg under the
barbed-wire fence of an Israeli concentration camp, dragging some girl with me.”^61
Others were worse affected: V.P. Povelko, an adviser who shared a Cairo hotel with
Serkov, was “urgently sent back to the USSR due to a nervous-psychiatric break-
down.” But Serkov—who took time off to visit his wounded comrades in hospital—
relates that, nonetheless, he and the other advisers “continued to develop the training
plan for an infantry division attack ... across a water obstacle, which was drilled the
following week with the 4th Division.” He had already overstayed his tour of duty
despite his refusal (at the insistence of his wife) to extend it, and went home only on
19 February 1970.^62
G. Heikal’s admitted propaganda function
Let us now revisit Heikal’s account of Nasser’s supposed talks in Moscow. The Soviets
were well aware of the propagandist’s function, and took care not to contradict him
explicitly. Vladimir Shagal’, a GRU “Arabist” who spent thirty years from the early
1960s analyzing Middle Eastern affairs, relates that Heikal’s columns in Al-Ahram
were carefully parsed to monitor trends in the Eg yptian leadership and were inter-
preted as his master’s voice.
Remarkably, in his description of the alleged talks in January, Heikal himself
defines the role he was tasked to perform:
At one point Brezhnev ... came round and sat beside me. “Gospodin Heikal,” he said, “all
this is secret ... Of course one day the Americans and Israelis are bound to know, but before
that happens, we come to your domain. How can we present it to the world? I want you to
work out a scheme.” ... I said: “Mr Secretary, it is up to the statesmen to make the big
decisions. We can always find ways and means by which we can present their decisions to
the world.”^63One could hardly better phrase a caveat for the evaluation of vested-interest
sources.
The Russians, of course, were very capable of keeping their moves secret: if
Brezhnev indeed spoke to Heikal in late January 1970, the Soviet pilots and planes
were already operating in Eg ypt and the SAM division was being deployed—still
utterly unbeknownst to the Americans and the Israelis. So Heikal’s story looks more
like an excuse for a deliberate Eg yptian leak—or fabrication—about the visit, which
was effected within a few days.
As in other cases, NBC reporter Wilson Hall had to fly to Beirut in order to file
the story on 29 January, as censorship in Cairo at least made a show of suppressing