3
THE SOVIET PRESENCE IS FORMALIZED
AND EXPANDED
A. Lashchenko Hammers Out an Agreement
At the Budapest conference, Brezhnev announced that “at Nasser’s request,” on
10 July—that is, at the height of the Ras el-Ish clash—a delegation of senior Soviet
officers was dispatched to Eg ypt “to restore the fighting capacity of the Arab army so
that it will be able to repel imperialist attack.” As its leader—Petr Lashchenko—clari-
fied, it was also tasked with working out a formal agreement about the advisers’ status.
Besides Lashchenko, whom Brezhnev already described as “our chief adviser,” this
group included top officers from all the services, including the deputy commander of
the Soviet Air Defense Forces, Air Marshal Evgeny Savitsky, as well as marine and
tank commanders.^1
Seconded from his post as commander of the Ciscarpathian military district
(which title he retained), Lashchenko had earned a reputation as decisive and deter-
mined, not to say ruthless. He took part in the suppression of the uprising in East
Berlin in 1953, and in 1956 led the Special Army Corps in Hungary, where he drew
up and implemented the plan for putting down the revolt.^2 He had also honed his
political skill as a member of the Supreme Soviet and of the CPSU Control
Committee since 1966.^3 In Eg ypt, he soon earned, among the Soviet officers, the
sobriquet “our Montgomery”—another example of comparison with the Second
World War, with the canal front equated to El Alamein.^4
The agreement had yet to be negotiated, but Lashchenko was not disposed to
wasting time. In his only known memoir, he defined his team’s mission as “rapid
reconstruction of the [Eg yptian] armed forces and organization of a reliable defense
... to establish the dimensions of the defeat, and assist the Eg yptian command in
liquidating the consequences of aggression.” The CIA was, then, quite correct in
concluding, at the end of July, that the USSR would no longer support an Arab effort
to eliminate Israel entirely but would sponsor a limited offensive to regain the terri-
tories lost in the June war.^5 As Lashchenko’s longtime associate Maj.-Gen. Evgeny
Malashenko relates,