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FOREWORD
I. UN-REWRITING HISTORYA. The hottest front of the Cold War
It was clear that we were actually fighting against Russia.
Maj.-Gen. Yisra’el Tal, Hearing of the Agranat Commission, 2 January 1974^1This book’s title encapsulates its purpose: to describe how, between the Six-Day War of
June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, the USSR conducted a direct
military campaign against Israel along the latter’s front with Eg ypt, at varying levels of
intensity. What has conventionally been regarded as a conflict among regional actors,
with the superpowers’ backing for their respective clients, was actually a front of the
Cold War itself—indeed, the hottest. In 1969–70, when it was called a war—the “War
of Attrition”—this became the largest commitment of Soviet troops outside the
Warsaw Pact until Afghanistan: up to 20,000 men at a time, for a total of over 50,000.^2
This phase saw the climactic, and bloodiest, head-on clash between Soviet and Israeli
forces. In military terms, the Soviet servicemen then posted in Eg ypt largely accom-
plished their mission, while suffering considerable casualties.^3 They were instrumental
in creating the preconditions for a Soviet-supported Eg yptian offensive across the Suez
Canal to regain the Sinai Peninsula that Eg ypt lost in ’67.
But both before and after its acme in 1969–70, the Soviet role exceeded even the
greatly expanded capacity of “advisers” and “technicians,” and extended into combat
operations or direct support thereof. A continuum was thus created between the two
better-known wars that bracketed the period in question, and in which the USSR
planned—and partly implemented—direct interventions. Our previous book,
Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (2007), was
the first—at least in Western academic historiography—to reveal the USSR’s deliber-
ate instigation of the crisis in May 1967 and its plans to intervene in the war that the
crisis was intended to provoke. This disputed the bulk of existing literature, and has
therefore been termed “truly revisionist.”^4
The same applies all the more to our present findings, not least because previous
studies were much fewer. Commonly held perceptions of this period seldom
acknowledged high drama; the term “war of attrition” speaks for itself. It settled into