THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973Soviet expeditionary force was on its way to Eg ypt,” it did not spread outside Langley
for a quite a while yet.^28
D. The SAM-3 sealift
The “early February” date is apparently correct at least for the first SAM-3 shipment.
A British visitor was arrested in mid-February for “wandering too near a Soviet
SAM-3 missile site” near El Alamein; “these were among the first to be delivered.”^29
As the initial postings of Soviet personnel were for one-year periods, Smirnov’s
account of leaving Eg ypt with the first group of his subordinates when they were
rotated in mid-February 1971 appears to confirm the first arrivals a year earlier.^30
The main body of the Air Defense division left Nikolaev in the first days of March,
on board sixteen freighters whose captains were given sealed orders as to their desti-
nation. The civilian cover was identical to that used for the missile shipment to Cuba
in 1962. “Dates and places of embarkation were kept secret, even from family mem-
bers,” says the division’s deputy commander. “We sailed under the pretense of trans-
porting agricultural equipment. Everyone stayed below. ... Going through the straits
we declined Turkish pilots.”^31 According to the official military historian’s account,
the Turkish pilots were actually bribed to stay off. “There was an osoby otdel [field
security] officer supervising each captain ... there was a strict order to shoot anyone
who tried to jump overboard.”^32
Interpreters were again too scarce. Upon arriving in Eg ypt, operations officer
Anatoly Podalka was surprised to discover that his group of twenty-six had only two
interpreters. Instead, they were issued a four-page Russian–Arabic glossary, which
they called matyugal’nik (phrasebook of obscenities). On the other hand, he was
impressed by the young Eg yptian women who were pressed into service, along with
“freshly graduated schoolboys,” to prepare the SAM emplacements by manual labor
under whip-cracking overseers. The women, Podalka noted, were astonishingly obe-
dient and could even carry a sack of cement balanced on the head.^33
E. Kissinger blindsided
Fighting on the canal front continued unabated. On 10 March, Kissinger again dis-
cussed the Middle East with Dobrynin, who gave not the slightest inkling of a Soviet
military move (he would later deny to Kissinger that he knew about it). On the
contrary, the Soviet ambassador came with what his American interlocutor consid-
ered “significant concessions,” including a new offer for a ceasefire along the canal.
Such a ceasefire was exactly what the head of the US interests section in Eg ypt,
Donald Bergus, had recommended that Washington propose after the Israeli “depth”
raid on 28 January came uncomfortably close to the American School in Cairo. The
Washington columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak—on a still-unusual visit