THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973who had been his top aide in Hungary and now was his first assistant chief of staff
in the Ciscarpathian district, to be his chief liaison to the Eg yptians. Lower in the
pecking order, G.V. Karpov, who headed the rocket and artillery units of a training
division in the Transcaucasian military district, was “summoned one summer day
and was offered to go the Middle East as a military adviser,” but both were put on
hold till October.^17
Signing the agreement, the culmination of Zakharov’s mission as continued by
Lashchenko, would appear to explain the marshal’s return to Cairo in October. But
a recently published Soviet document confirms Lashchenko’s own statement that it
was another member of the Soviet top brass who went there for this purpose. Meeting
Nasser late in the afternoon of 21 October, Vinogradov informed him “that tomor-
row a special plane was flying in a delegation headed by the First Deputy Defense
Minister of the USSR, General of the Army Sokolov, S[ergey] L[eonidovich], to sign
an agreement for dispatch of Soviet military advisers.” Sokolov, the commander of
the Leningrad military district, had been promoted in April to his sub-ministerial
post, creating the anomaly whereby in the government hierarchy he outranked
Zakharov—an ordinary deputy minister—while the marshal held the higher military
rank.^18 Nasser, who had (according to Vinogradov) broached the subject by again
expressing “supreme interest in the quickest arrival” of the advisers, “voiced his satis-
faction” at the news. He expressed hope “that financial questions would be no
obstacle ... I said that for us the main thing was not the financial aspect but for our
military advisers to be able to provide the maximum benefit.”^19
It was one thing for Nasser to tell Vinogradov in private that Eg ypt must emulate
the Soviets’ sacrifice in the Second World War in order to repel its own occupiers, and
to claim that he had just contemptuously dismissed a conciliatory feeler from US
Secretary of State Dean Rusk. It was quite another thing to acknowledge openly that
the Eg yptian military was to be even more thoroughly saturated with Soviet officers.
Sokolov was closer in political rank to Howeidy, with whom he signed the treaty, but
though his visit was mentioned in the Eg yptian press—in such innocuous contexts
as a tour of the Aswan Dam construction site—it received virtually no attention
abroad, and the agreement was never published.^20 Something of a smokescreen was
provided by the return of Zakharov: news of his arrival, “suddenly and unannounced,”
first emerged on 23 October.^21
The extraordinary presence of two top Soviet defense officials in Eg ypt demanded
some explanation. If Sokolov’s visit was preplanned to handle the formalities of a
treaty, Zakharov’s dispatch was widely interpreted as an improvised damage-control
effort. It was initially reported after four blasts that were heard around the world and
restored the Middle East to the front pages. These were the Soviet-made ship-to-ship
Styx missiles that were fired from Port Said and sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat.