THE SOVIET PRESENCE IS FORMALIZED AND EXPANDEDD. First Soviet–Israeli air encounters
Lashchenko singled out the air force advisers’ task of rebuilding the EAF from scratch as
particularly challenging. Most of the air advisers carried out his instructions with ostenta-
tious enthusiasm, risking—indeed, provoking—direct confrontation with the Israelis.
When Eg yptian pilots excused their poor performance by charging that their Soviet
planes were inferior to Israel’s French-made craft, “upon Lashchenko’s orders, senior Air
Force adviser Lt-Gen. S[ergey] Gorelov organized flights by our pilot-advisers who suc-
cessfully carried out some special sorties from forward airfields into Israeli territory.”^69
By late November 1967, Karpov—now already posted at a division headquarters—
witnessed such a flight from the ground:
Today, an Israeli attack plane flew over the division ... The EAF scrambled 12 fighters; they
reached the canal but only one [pilot] flew into the enemy hinterland in Sinai. He turned
out to be our senior adviser. The Eg yptian pilots still dared not fly over enemy territory,
and our pilot demonstrated there was nothing to fear.^70The Soviets “recommended that [the EAF] fly back and forth [across Israel], using
Syrian fields.” As Malashenko remarks, “they promised to work on it, but were in no
hurry to get into practical implementation for fear of IAF retaliation.”
If the Israelis were aware of the Soviet pilots’ overflights, they kept it very quiet.
The IAF acknowledged “numerous incursions over IDF forces in the canal sector and
inside Sinai by Eg yptian photoreconnaissance planes, which quickly returned to their
own territory.” Four intruders were shot down by Israeli guns east of the canal. In one
exceptionally deep penetration in August 1967, Israel claimed that one of two low-
flying Su-7s was downed by anti-aircraft fire over the former Eg yptian airbase at Bir
Gafgafa in central Sinai. It crashed on the runway; the dead pilot was unidentifiable,
but assumed to be Eg yptian.^71 The range from Israeli airbases made it impossible to
intercept brief incursions if IAF fighters were scrambled only upon the enemy’s
appearance, and the Mirage IIIs’ limited fuel capacity made it impractical to keep
them on constant patrol over Sinai. In response, Bir Gafgafa was rebuilt (as Refidim)
and a wing of Mirages was stationed there on constant alert from March 1968.^72 By
then, as Mossad chief Me’ir Amit described to White House staffers, the Soviet pres-
ence “had entered a new phase in which Soviet pilots are flying ‘for their own pur-
poses’—orientation to the terrain.” He put their number at seventy, one-fourth of the
EAF’s own pilot complement.^73
On 14 November 1967, Ambassador Vinogradov relayed to Nasser a proposal to
comply with the president’s repeated requests for air support by sending twelve naval
MiG-21s on a “friendly visit of 5–6 days”—that is, to display the fighters, in full Soviet
markings, over Eg yptian soil. Flying the MiGs in would require refueling stops in Iraq
and Syria, which Nasser agreed would pose no problem. But overflight permission
would be needed from Iran, since Turkey had denied such a request in June 1967: