SAM SUCCESSES AND A MIG DEBACLEOur daredevil group commander started to demand combat results. Just accomplishing
the mission that he had been assigned, preventing Israeli attacks, was no longer enough.
There was a demand to shoot down enemy planes. By this time we had already shot down
one Skyhawk, and our superiors liked this precedent. The atmosphere was burdened by the
successes of the missilemen, who by this time had exceeded ten kills. ... At noon on 21 July
our “young” squadron relocated to El-Mansura airbase, near the canal. That same evening,
the Israeli radio broadcast the entire list [of the pilots].^9But the Hebrew media, on the same day, still referred to “activation of Soviet pilots
over the canal” only as a potentiality.^10
Other veterans’ accounts also mention that they used to tune in to “Jerusalem” for
the Israeli accounts of their engagements.^11 The memoir of “radio-technical expert”
Boris Krokhin clarifies that the program the Soviets heard daily at 8 p.m. was broadcast
on a separate wavelength from Israel Radio’s domestic and foreign Russian services. It
evidently emanated from Masregah’s station in Sinai, which in the case mentioned by
Akimenkov might have picked up the pilots’ names from signal intercepts.
The program began with a Russian song as theme tune, followed by the sound of
whistling wind and a male announcer intoning “the wind blows from the sands of
Sinai ... a program for Soviet servicemen and their families on the other side of the
front.” Krokhin regretted not having risked the political officers’ wrath by recording
some of these programs, as he correctly reckoned they would be of historical value;
nothing about them has so far emerged in Israel. Along the canal, he was told, “special
television programs for future adversaries” could be picked up too. They featured,
together with the IDF’s weaponry, military troupes in Russian-style song and dance
routines that the Soviets accompanied with clapping and stomping, to the disap-
proval of their Eg yptian advisees.^12
Besides such psychological warfare, the Israelis’ advantage of having Russian speak-
ers with perfect accents—which even the Soviet schools’ excellent Hebrew training
could not match—was also used for operational deception. Misleading signals
beamed on the Soviet squadrons’ radio network, along with EW disruption of the
Soviets’ own transmissions, would be credited for drawing them into a fatal trap in
the war’s biggest dogfight on 30 Ju l y.^13
A week earlier, though, the Soviets still appeared to have the upper hand in match-
ups with Israeli pilots. Korn, then chief of the political section at the US embassy in
Tel Aviv, had until recently been the only source—from his own notes—for two
incidents, on 21 and 25 July, in which Soviet pilots pursued IAF planes up to the
canal line. In the second case, they even crossed into Sinai airspace and badly dam-
aged a Skyhawk with an air-to-air missile. “The Israelis told the Americans of these
encounters but kept them secret from their public.”^14 The second incident was dis-
closed by Aviation Week in January 1971, and recently confirmed by Danny Shalom
from Israeli sources.^15 IAF command was infuriated. The force’s website mentions