SAM SUCCESSES AND A MIG DEBACLEexercises and they set up a similar operation against us.” He had just missed a historic
air battle, which ended with four MiGs shot down for no Israeli losses (as in other
cases, one Israeli fighter was damaged but managed to land).
Israel imposed a blackout on the MiG pilots’ Soviet identity, which had been
learned from their radio communications. As an Israeli official said to a Soviet envoy
a year later, “we don’t want a flareup with your forces.”^22 IDF communiqués and the
first reports in the Israeli media either referred to Eg yptian planes or stated archly
that the pilots’ nationality was unknown, while pointedly mentioning the first reports
of the Skyhawk downed by Soviet airmen, which had just appeared in the foreign
press.^23 Two days later, Time reported that Soviet pilots had possibly died in the
battle—and Israeli papers gleefully quoted this as fact.^24 Since then, the IAF’s “trap
for the Russians” became a hallowed centerpiece of its heritage, recounted in minute
detail in Israeli literature.^25
Akimenkov’s account of the 30 July dogfight is one of notably and understandably
few among the dozens of memoirs by Soviet airmen. Not surprisingly, another excep-
tion appeared outside the former USSR and from a Soviet naval officer.^26 The official
Russian military history admits that Soviet pilots were shot down, and even adds the
tragic note that some of them were devoured by sharks in the Red Sea.^27 If true, this
must refer to additional, so far unknown incidents: on 30 July 1970, all the Soviet
planes were downed over land and the bodies of at least three of the pilots were
recovered.^28 One of them, Capt. Vladimir Zhuravlev, was recently described as buried
in Novosibirsk, near his native village. Typically for the veterans’ literature, this fact
was published in a local newspaper to protest that Zhuravlev was still not included
in a memorial list of the region’s casualties in foreign wars, although he had posthu-
mously been awarded an Eg yptian decoration.^29
Honoring the fallen Soviet pilots could hardly mask their Eg yptian colleagues’
Schadenfreude after being so often sneered at. Mustafa Hafez, who had commanded
an Su-7 squadron at Beni Suef before this airbase was handed over to the Soviets,
recalled his efforts to overcome the lack of full radar coverage of the Red Sea coast,
especially after the P-12 hijacking :
The biggest problem was the mountains between Beni Suef and the Red Sea. ... This meant
that the Israelis could come in low and hidden by the mountains before sending up another
flight to lure the Eg yptians into the air. Then the first unit would pounce on them from
below. This was why I told my controller never to send aircraft east of the mountains, but
to wait for the Israelis to come to us. A Russian unit took over at Beni Suef after I and my
squadron left, and very soon fell into the same Israeli ambush.”^30Israel’s triumph overshadowed its daunting losses, and enabled its government to
accept the ceasefire the next day (31 July) without excessive loss of face. Israeli spokes-
men and media alike claimed for years to have scored a total victory in the War of
Attrition against the combined forces of Eg ypt and the USSR, pointing to the latter’s