THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973party conference that the troika had promised him full military as well as political
support. The detailed accounts of the Kremlin talks that were later published by
Heikal and Fawzy reported full agreement to intensify preparation for the ground
offensive, and meanwhile to accept the ninety-day ceasefire, which now had become
a US initiative—in order to exploit it for advancing the missile array. This would
indeed be carried out when the ceasefire ultimately came into effect on 7 August.
Nasser was promised new weapons, including a Soviet-manned SAM-6 mobile
array, which was positioned in August around the Aswan Dam, releasing Eg yptian
SAM-2 formations for stations closer to the front. Even sooner, three frigates armed
with the SAM-6’s naval version took up positions off Port Said to remedy the peren-
nial weakness of land-based anti-aircraft defense at the northern end of the canal and
to protect the Soviet naval base, whose vulnerability had been demonstrated three
weeks before the Moscow talks.^28 The long-delayed deal for supply of Luna missiles
was also finalized, to be discovered only when “several battalions” appeared on the
canal front in December.^29 They saw limited actual use on the Sinai front in the first
days of the Yom Kippur War, when Syrian forces—unlike the Eg yptians—were close
enough to fire multiple Lunas at targets inside Israel.^30
The Soviets reportedly balked at basing ten more Tu-16s in Eg ypt, of the C variant
armed with air-to-ground Kelt missiles. They suggested that this might motivate the
Americans to provide Israel with the newly developed Lance ground-to-ground mis-
siles. But the Soviets did agree to preposition the Tu-16 squadron’s missiles and other
equipment at bases in Upper Eg ypt, where the planes would be flown on six hours’
notice from the Eg yptians and operated under joint command.^31 Before long, the
Soviet-manned planes were stationed there too, and in greater numbers. Lt Evgeny
Lashenko, a radar engineer with the Northern Fleet at Severomorsk, relates that his
regiment of missile-bearing Tu-16s, in Eg yptian markings, was ordered to Upper
Eg ypt in 1971 and his tour of duty there was slightly over a year. When they arrived,
the field still had not been fully cleared from the Israeli bombing in 1967 and the
aircraft hulks were shunted aside from the runways to enable routine operation.^32
Lashenko’s detachment, whose mission included “teaching the Eg yptians the art of
war,” was the first in what became a continuing rotation.
Of more immediate significance was the Eg yptian version that credited Nasser
with selling the ceasefire-smokescreen idea to the reluctant Soviets—much as he had
supposedly persuaded them in January to intervene militarily in the first place. In
1989, based on a comparison of the published Eg yptian transcripts with the practical
outcome, Dan Schueftan concluded that it was actually the Soviets who pressed
Nasser to accept Rogers’s proposal, and either this was agreed tacitly or the transcripts
were doctored.^33 Three years later, Korn provided further indications that the Soviets
were already inclined toward the idea.^34 The Dobrynin–Kissinger reports have now
proved that the USSR actively promoted the proposal.