AN MIA MYSTERY AND SOVIET INTELLIGENCE METHODSWe then located Tolokonikov at his home in Zhukovsky near Moscow. A Second
World War veteran, he was the most experienced among the divizyon commanders in
Eg ypt, and was still embittered that instead of a decoration and reward for shooting
down Hetz’s Phantom, he was reprimanded for the casualties and damage that his
outfit sustained.^10 When asked about an Israeli pilot being captured alive,
Tolokonikov replied twice: “I do know something, but I don’t want to talk about it.
... I was not personally on scene, being too busy with my men,” but he said the divi-
zyon’s political officer, K.B. Chervinsky, did speak with the downed pilot, who was
“pulled away” from something—the plane?
How, then, to account for Hetz’s remains being interred in Israel? When informed
of the Russian version, Eini still insisted: “Hetz is dead and buried. That’s that.” This
was also the response of Hetz’s family members. Out of consideration for their wishes
and emotions, we are withholding the details that we have established about the
actual findings of the search party. We can, however, state with certainty that nothing
was found that could provide conclusive evidence of human origin or death, much
less definite identification by the methods available at the time (fingerprints or dental
records; DNA testing was still a thing of the future). Of Hetz’s plane, all that was
found amounted to parts of its landing gear and fragments of the canopy.
In November 2000, we submitted a detailed questionnaire to the IDF spokes-
man—who took over two months to concede that the identification was “circumstan-
tial.” Still, the spokesman’s response ruled out any prospect that Hetz had survived,
let alone been transferred to the USSR. But it contained several glaring contradic-
tions and ignored some central questions, to which—when we reiterated them—the
spokesman replied only: “we have nothing to add.”^11
Heavy pressure was exerted on the present authors and our media not to publicize
the new information from Russia, and strong criticism was leveled at us when we
went public with the new evidence on Israel’s Memorial Day in April 2001.^12 But
then-Prime Minister and former Maj.-Gen. Ariel Sharon, who as head of the
Southern Command in 1970 knew Hetz, surprisingly confirmed in response that the
ace’s body had never been found and his fate was still unknown.^13
Israeli discomfiture at the Russian disclosure was, however, minor compared with
that of the Russians themselves once its significance was clarified. The head of the
Military History Institute and the editor-in-chief of both publications that mentioned
Hetz’s deportation, Maj.-Gen. Vladimir Zolotarev, was also the Russian co-chairman
of the Joint Commission on POWs and MIAs (USRJC) that had been set up with the
United States in 1992. The US co-chairman of USRJC, Maj.-Gen. Roland Lajoie, and
the executive secretary of the US team, Norman Kass, took a keen interest in the Hetz
case: here was an unprecedented, unsolicited official Russian statement that a POW
from a regional arena of the Cold War had been transferred to the Soviet Union. At the
USRJC, the Russians had not confirmed so much as one of the multiple testimonies
compiled by the Americans about sightings of US servicemen in Soviet prison camps