“YELLOW ARAB HELMET, BLUE RUSSIAN EYES”the USSR.^67 After Soviet MiG-21 units were deployed in Eg ypt, pilot “Oleg Tsoy inter-
cepted an enemy reconnaissance drone flying at low altitude. He attacked the tiny
machine and brought it down in the desert. The Eg yptians collected the wreckage and
found that the drone carried top-secret equipment whose information was recovered
almost undamaged” and presumably made available to the Soviets.^68 But experience
ultimately motivated the Soviets to trust their own personnel for such procurement,
sometimes from behind Israeli lines. The Russian military historian Col. Valery
Yaremenko states that “special units were established ... during the War of Attrition, in
1969–70, for the sole purpose of crossing the Canal and capturing any booty of equip-
ment, in order to load it quickly onto aircraft and send it to Moscow.”^69 However, the
only account that has emerged so far of Soviets actually crossing the canal before the
1973 war—a boast from a veteran in Kazakhstan that he took part in twenty such
forays with a “special operations” unit—remains unconfirmed.^70
Egyptian and Soviet statements indicate that the new Israeli rocket was a major
concern for them.^71 For the Israelis, the new weapon, codenamed Z e’ev (wolf ) was a
makeshift and yet-experimental attempt to offset their numerical inferiority in artil-
lery pieces. This “flying bomb” was inaccurately aimed from a primitive pipe-frame
launcher, and Israeli soldiers soon learned that it was prone to boomerang. Still, at
virtually point-blank range it could cause a good deal of damage to positions that
were hardened only against smaller shells. The intended effect of its blast was what
would be called, a half-century later, “shock and awe.” Even Israeli soldiers, from
whose outposts the Z e’ev was launched by specialists but who were not permitted to
handle the top-secret weapon themselves, judged by its impact across the canal that
it must deliver a half ton of high explosive.^72
Faced with this challenge, Karpov began working out a response. He calculated or
gathered from field observations that the rocket had a 90 kilogram payload, at the
expense of very short range—4 kilometers—which would put the launch sites within
easy reach of Eg yptian cannon.^73 The matter was presumably addressed by Chief of
Staff Riad, who accompanied Nasser to Moscow a few days after the weapon’s appear-
ance and had two days of “important talks” with Grechko. For years, Israel did not
officially confirm the Z e’ev’s existence, let alone its use—even after one such rocket
killed Riad himself on 9 March 1969.^74 In the summer of 1968, and even after UN
observers reported at least three rockets fired on 8 September, Eg ypt too did not
publicize their introduction.^75
The battle on 8 September showed that the Israelis could still use the rockets
despite the Eg yptians’ heavy shelling—and this may have been one reason for the
Soviets’ dissatisfaction with their clients’ performance. Maj.-Gen. Vladimir
Ryabukhin, the former logistics chief of the Volga military district, was since
December 1967 the adviser to his counterpart in the Eg yptian II Army Corps. He
registered that in the three hours of artillery fire, “our side used up 415 tons of ammu-
nition,” but considered that the Eg yptians’ estimate of the casualties on the Israeli side