RESCUING AND REARMING THE USSR’S ALLIES IN JUNE 1967Foreign Languages. In the first month of the airlift alone, Brezhnev listed 302 of
them as dispatched to the Middle East, mostly to Eg ypt.
The first group of these linguists had, before the war, been “sent to Crimea and was
on alert at airfields there.”^23 The rest were recruited so hastily that “we were in motley
civilian clothes and looked like partisans. Only later were civil-aviation uniforms
issued, as well as service passports. We made the first foreign flights with the kind of
papers that were used by Soviet forces in Socialist countries.” Fortuitously, some of
the interpreters had prior experience. As one of the recruited students, Vitaly
Sochnev, relates: “two years before enrolling in the institute I had served in a special-
forces unit as a mikrofonshchik [radio monitor] eavesdropping on radio communica-
tions of the USAF and NATO. I knew the terminolog y as a priest knows his liturg y.”
The others had to make do with a single briefing from “a lieutenant-colonel, who
dictated abbreviations and terms, some of them exotic ... advised how to answer
questions in flight, and listed the signal codes of air controllers in Italy, Greece and
Eg ypt ... which later was very useful.”^24
The necessity to overfly Yugoslavia (where controllers still spoke Russian); the
stopovers that the nominal head of state Nikolay Podgorny later made there on his
way to Eg ypt and back; and particularly the first exposure of the airlift in the
Yugoslav media, created the lasting impression that the Soviet transports landed
there for refueling.^25 The interpreters’ recollections were the first to clarify that the
airlift’s main staging point and refueling stop was actually the Soviets’ airbase at
Tököl, Hungary. From here, according to Sochnev, they took off for Eg ypt in for-
mations of twenty to twenty-five aircraft each. As Tököl is located on the southern
outskirts of Budapest, the delegates to the 11–12 July conference there were doubt-
less aware of this traffic’s extent, even though Brezhnev only told them that the
flights went “over Yugoslavia.”
Moscow had good reason to distrust the Yugoslavs’ confidentiality, and President
Josip Broz Tito had every interest in maximizing his passive and inexpensive contri-
bution to Nasser, his longtime partner in the leadership of the Non-Aligned
Movement. Barely a week after the airlift got underway, “informed but unofficial
Yugoslav sources and reliable Western diplomats ... confirmed a report that the Soviet
Union has flown approximately 100 MiG fighters to Eg ypt.”^26 This was even before
the Israeli ambassador in Rome learned from “informed sources in the Prime
Minister’s office” that Italian air traffic controllers reported overflights by forty-five
Soviet planes a day.^27
The crated MiGs had to be accompanied by crews of mechanics to put them
together, which—along with the onboard interpreters—partly accounts for the fif-
teen men on each transport (at least in the first rounds), while the craft’s normal
complement was five. Additional passengers were connected with other Soviet mate-
riel, which was being sent by sea. As witnessed by a Soviet correspondent in Cairo,
“the equipment from the USSR was no longer directed to training bases, but went