THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973way mission. As Gromyko said in an arms-control discussion in September 1977,
the Phantom was “capable of reaching the territory of the Soviet Union and strike
[sic] targets thereon.”^29
It is hardly coincidental, then, that the earliest date given for the dispatch of inte-
gral Soviet formations to Eg ypt is “soon after” the finalization of the Phantom deal,
and in the air defense context: the Soviet response went beyond the supply of late-
model SAM-2s—the S-75 Dvina system—“in 1968.”^30 Egorin, the Novosti corre-
spondent in Eg ypt, likewise asserts that
about the end of 1968, the first Soviet units began arriving in Eg ypt together with the
advisers, initially for defense against attack from the air. Our military men now began to
be called askaryun Suviet (Soviet soldiers). At headquarters in Moscow the whole opera-
tion was called Kavkaz. ... Not one line appeared in the contemporary Soviet press about
this ... someone decided to send our boys into war, but without giving the fathers, mothers
or public any inkling of it.^31A recent, semi-official history of the Russian Air Force dates the formation of two
fighter squadrons, earmarked for Eg ypt as the 283rd Division, in the autumn of
1968—although the aircraft arrived there only a year later.^32 Simultaneously, Soviet
surveillance outfits (whose equipment the Soviets were reluctant to let the Eg yptians
handle, even if they had been qualified to operate it) were deployed in Eg ypt; they
“could monitor the conversations between pilots and air controllers throughout
Israel.”^33 “The Russians,” Egorin writes, “deployed as though the enemy was within
120km not of Cairo but of Moscow.”^34
This, in addition to the stalled Jarring mission, was the context when, on
24 November 1968, First Deputy Foreign Minister Semenov met Israel’s UN
Ambassador Yosef Teko’a—the first such contact since June 1967. Teko’a’s preliminary
report describes an ostensibly random encounter at a diplomatic reception. But he had
already requested and received urgent instructions from Jerusalem, which indicates a
prior Soviet approach.^35 Subsequent disclosures show that this was carefully planned by
the Soviets, after Moscow began to realize that “the more we alienated Israel, the closer
Israel got to the United States.” Semenov was specially dispatched to New York for the
purpose, as the UN representative Yakov Malik was considered too hardline (and anti-
Semitic) to effectively deliver what the few Soviet diplomats in the know described as a
conciliatory signal.^36 It was to be kept secret from the Arabs, even though an optimistic
message that “Russia doesn’t desire a new war but is interested in peace and stability”
had already been transmitted by Dobrynin a few days earlier through the notoriously
indiscreet Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann.^37
Media reports of the Semenov–Teko’a meeting evidently caused Arab remonstra-
tion, as resentful Soviet accusations of Israeli obduracy stressed the talk’s broken
secrecy rather than its substance. Semenov himself charged even more than two years
later that “he was interested in a dialogue with Israel, but the Israelis were not and