DECEPTION-ON-NILE, JULY 1972Actually, the supply continued not only of spares for existing models but of entire
and increasingly advanced aircraft, with the attendant instruction by Soviet advisers.
Andrey Yena, the deputy commander of a fighter regiment, was abruptly ordered to
Eg ypt in the first week of June, that is, after the Moscow summit and just before the
withdrawal of the Soviet MiG-21 squadrons. He was sent on a six-month komand-
irovka at the head of an eleven-man team, whose mission was to oversee the assembly
of Su-20 planes. This was the stripped-down export version of the swing-winged
Su-17 attack bomber, which besides Eg ypt and Syria was being supplied only to
Poland. The kits were already en route, and once they were put together Yena’s group
was to instruct Eg yptian pilots in their operation.
Yena submitted his work plan directly to EAF Commander Mubarak. He relates that
about six weeks into this program, after being told of Sadat’s “agreement” with
Vinogradov (which establishes the date of Yena’s dispatch), his entire group—except
the flight instructors—was notified that they were to go home. But within two more
weeks, the Eg yptians requested that the technical advisers remain too. Yena recounts
that while the Cairo media trumpeted the “expulsion,” the attitude of his Eg yptian
counterparts was only slightly more reserved than before, and his trainees politely side-
stepped the subject. His mission not only went on to its planned conclusion in
November but was even extended for another two months in order to assist in the
introduction of the fully equipped Su-17s, which then began to arrive; altogether,
Eg ypt acquired forty craft. By June 1973, the CIA was aware that this model was being
supplied, but stated that only seventeen planes had been delivered since the “expulsion,”
and did not judge that this answered Sadat’s demand for offensive air power.^52
Some of the Soviet squadrons’ MiG-21s were said to have been transferred to
Syria, and evidently this was the case with part of the advisers—including Yena’s
superior and Mubarak’s personal adviser, Gen. Vagin. The latter’s planned two-year
stint in Eg ypt was reduced to eleven months after “relations between the USSR and
Eg ypt cooled off and instructions came from Moscow to leave.” Following a short
break in Moscow, “toward the end of 1972” Vagin was attached to Mubarak’s Syrian
counterpart, Jalil Naji—a red-headed Chechen whose family had settled in Syria in
the 1920s. Naji evidently needed professional advice: Israeli experts considered him
more a politician than a soldier or pilot, whose incompetence impaired the capability
of his force.^53 Vagin won his confidence, which would gain the Soviet inside informa-
tion in the run-up to the 1973 war.^54
The Soviet presence also continued, or was soon resumed, with the Tu-16s in
Upper Eg ypt. According to Igor’ Trofimov, a radio-technician with the aviation arm
of the Baltic Fleet, in late 1972 or early 1973 two squadrons of its Badgers were actu-
ally flown on short notice to Asyut, where they were painted in Eg yptian markings;
he served there “till the summer of 1973.”^55 A history of these Tu-16s’ parent forma-
tion confirms the stationing of such missile-carrying bombers in October–November