RESCUING AND REARMING THE USSR’S ALLIES IN JUNE 1967massive airlift of military materiel to Moscow’s Arab allies—began as soon as the
dimensions of the latter’s defeat became apparent. On 20 June, addressing the first
Central Committee session after the war, Brezhnev stated that the Politburo resolved
“to provide the UAR [Eg ypt] and Syria assistance in renewing their armed forces”
only after the cessation of hostilities on 10 June. Even as regards Syria, where the
ceasefire had taken effect on that day, this date for the start of the resupply effort is
questionable; in respect of Eg ypt, which acceded to a ceasefire on 8 June, Cairo’s first
request to replenish its war losses was received and approved as early as the 5th—that
is, within hours of the Israeli strike. On the same day, Kosygin sought and received
permission to overfly Yugoslavia, and the first flights took off on the 7th.^10
This was as soon as the Eg yptian runways could be cleared and patched up. A
Soviet serviceman who made several round trips on the airlift relates that on the first,
at night, Cairo International Airport and the adjoining Cairo-West airbase were still
blacked out. On his second landing, in daylight, tow trucks were still moving some
forty wrecks of Eg yptian warplanes. There was a pause when Nasser declared his
resignation, but flights resumed once he retracted it.^11 Indeed, it was the sight of
Soviet transport planes over Cairo, pointed out by Soviet Ambassador Dmitry
Pozhidaev to Nasser, that caused the latter to call off demonstrations against the
Soviets’ perceived inaction. These protests were staged on 8 June and ended on the
9th, so that by then the airlift was in full swing.^12 By the 14th, Nasser told Pozhidaev
that his children, playing in their backyard, were counting Soviet planes landing every
ten minutes.^13
If indeed the Politburo formally approved the airlift only on the 10th, as Brezhnev
claimed, then (as would recur in subsequent cases) this resolution either rubber-
stamped an operational order that had been approved in a smaller, informal council
and was already being implemented; or it was one in a series of continuing adjust-
ments that were made as the Politburo’s marathon session went on throughout the
war; or it was simply a gesture to satisfy Arab demands and to reassure edg y Warsaw
Pact leaders who gathered in Moscow on 9 June. Andrey Kirilenko, a key Brezhnev
ally and Politburo member from 1965, is described in 1972 as “in charge” of a “com-
mittee for the Middle East” (apparently of the Central Committee Secretariat),
directly overseeing the General Staff in this area.^14 According to a 1969 CIA analysis,
Brezhnev himself as chairman of the Defense Council, “the supreme military–civilian
consultative body attached to the Politburo,” by then controlled “the Defense
Council as fully as the Secretariat.”^15 This was presumably the case by 1967. The
transition from planned intervention to damage control to redoubling the stakes was
almost seamless, rather than a single, deliberate turning point—which led to under-
estimates of its scope and significance by the adversaries. Israeli sources contended
even four months after the war that Eg yptian losses could not have been ascertained
so soon, and therefore discounted the airlift as mainly a morale-boosting exercise.^16