“YELLOW ARAB HELMET, BLUE RUSSIAN EYES”of a connection between the two theaters. The artillery adviser quoted by Klimentov
predicted the artillery barrage a week before Soviet tanks moved toward Prague.
Western observers discerned coordination between “several politically and psycho-
logically significant activities of Soviet fleets,” including the Mediterranean squadron,
“before the invasion of Czechoslovakia.”^61 The destroyer crewman Kharchikov recalls
being sent again, “urgently” to the Mediterranean, with extended calls at Port Said
and Alexandria, in the second part of August ’68 (he noted that Port Said was now a
far cry from his first tour of duty there, devastated by shelling and with most of its
population gone).
Nasser, who returned to Eg ypt from the Georgian spa three days before the inva-
sion of Czechoslovakia, was informed about it within hours.^62 The Soviet chargé
d’affaires came to his villa near Alexandria on 21 August at 4 a.m., which means the
diplomat was either poised nearby in advance or left Cairo as soon as the Warsaw Pact
armies began the operation.^63 On 9 October, Lashchenko and his chief politruk
(political officer) visited the advisers of the II Army Corps. Karpov asked them a
characteristically provocative question, “‘what is our policy?’ He [Lashchenko]
stated: ‘the tension that we created here is justified. The entire world’s attention must
be drawn away from the events in Czechoslovakia. But the Eg yptian army is not yet
ready for decisive action.’” When Soviet military intervention in Eg ypt became overt
and direct, Israelis would frequently compare their situation with the Czechoslovaks’.
Such calculations may indeed have affected the precise timing of military moves, as
did the endless maneuvering and posturing about a political settlement in the Middle
East. But as already exemplified, at least on the Soviet side the shoe was more often on
the other foot. To the extent that the two were connected, it was the diplomatic con-
tacts that were strung out or accelerated to accommodate, obscure or legitimize the
military initiatives, which once set in motion took on dynamics of their own.
However, the invasion of Czechoslovakia was studied seriously in the IDF. Yo’el
Ben-Porat, the head of IDF sigint, held that the Soviets were the best in the world at
deception. They had fooled the West’s “good intelligence agencies” by launching the
invasion out of a supposed maneuver, and the same might happen in the Middle East.
At his behest, a committee was formed that formulated a directive whereby any major
Arab maneuver should be treated as a potential offensive. For reasons he could not
explain, this procedure was not observed in early October 1973.^64
F. The advisers counter new Israeli weapons
The relatively free rein that the advisers’ staff had in directing operations is illustrated
by Malashenko’s account of a typical incident:
Moscow would get on our nerves whenever an exchange of fire began. The military attaché,
Fursov, would report it immediately, without checking the data. Sometimes he would
report that Israeli amphibious tanks had appeared on the canal, floating on ordinary rub-