THE SOVIET NUCLEAR THREATunlike the MiG-25s’ previous stint in Eg ypt in 1971–2, the red stars were not
replaced with Eg yptian marks “as no one would believe it anyway.” Once reassembled,
the Foxbats carried out four “uniquely important” reconnaissance sorties by the war’s
end; the product was flown to Moscow within hours.
The flight dates are not specified in the main Russian account of this episode. In
the afternoon of 22 October, Ze’ira reported, in a briefing for Kissinger by IDF offi-
cers, that “he had just learned that two Foxbat photoreconnaissance planes are flying
in the canal zone ... flown by Russian pilots. That morning they overflew the Western
Desert and now they are flying over the canal.”^9 On 24 October, a report to the US
chief of naval operations listed, among other indications that Moscow was preparing
to follow up on the threat of intervention that Brezhnev made the same day: “Soviet
pilots flying (possibly) Foxbats in Eg ypt. (If Soviets were going to introduce troops,
they would want their own people doing reconnaissance in advance).”^10 The Soviets
were, indeed, releasing their observations to the Eg yptians only after vetting in
Moscow, and this applied to satellite images as well. Vafa Guluzade, then an inter-
preter at the Soviet embassy in Cairo, puts it around this time (“after the III Army
Corps was surrounded”) that
Sadat asked the USSR to give him aero-cosmic intelligence about the positions of Israeli
forces ... Moscow complied and sent to Eg ypt two GRU operatives at the rank of colonel,
who brought photos ... made from space. I was tasked to escort them to Sadat and to help
transfer [the data] from the photos onto the Eg yptians’ military maps.^11Unlike the satellites, the MiG-25s had another potential function. The aviation
writer Viktor Markovsky, based on participants’ accounts, claims that when dis-
patched to Eg ypt, the pilots of the 154th were instructed to prepare for both uses of
the RB version.^12 He states that the RB’s bombing function, which had been readied
but not used in 1971, was now close to implementation. GRU units began practical
training for “another insane plan” to “land” in Israel’s Negev desert (presumably by
helicopter or parachute; there were a series of attempted helicopter-borne raids by
Eg yptian commandos in Sinai during the opening phases of the war). The Soviet
commandos were to set up radio beacons to guide aircraft for an attack on the Israeli
nuclear complex at Dimona with burrowing missiles that would destroy the site’s
underground facilities.
Markovsky notes that the planes were designed, and the pilots thoroughly trained,
to launch standoff nuclear weapons from a range of 40 kilometers. Whereas at the
start of the war Israeli anti-aircraft defenses successfully intercepted some of the
“winged missiles” (i.e., Kelts) fired by Eg yptian Tu-16s, the Israelis still had nothing
that could cope with the MiG-25s’ altitude and speed or intercept their nuclear
weapons once launched. Markovsky even claims that “as the military situation
changed daily against the Arabs, an attack on Tel Aviv ... was seriously considered.”
He does not specify if the requisite nuclear weapons were actually delivered to Eg ypt,