WHAT TRIGGERED KAVKAZ? REFUTING HEIKAL’S VERSIONshattering of his windowpanes.^51 The high priority that the Soviets ascribed to Eg ypt
in this project was noted a year later in a CIA report:
The new Strela antiaircraft rocket would not be sold to Warsaw Pact countries because
several years of production will be needed for the Soviets to meet their own needs ... [but
nonetheless] the Soviets are providing the Eg yptians with the Strela missile and training
them in its use. ... Soviet personnel are almost certainly involved in this program as advisers
or technicians. Initial training may have begun in mid-1969, enabling the Eg yptians to
carry out combat firings beginning in the fall.^52Multiple Russian sources, however, now clarify that the Strela was used in Eg ypt
even earlier. A highly detailed article by a specialist at the Russian General Staff ’s
Military Academy, Viktor Tkachev, describes an Israeli Skyhawk pilot who ejected
and was captured on 19 August after being hit by a Strela-2 in the missile’s “first
combat engagement.” This confirms the incident’s earlier and widely accepted iden-
tification by Jane’s as the new missile’s first known kill, attributed to “Eg yptian sol-
diers.” Tkachev adds that the Strela-2 detachment in question had been deployed as
early as 9 August to protect a SAM-2 divizyon.^53 Nepobedimy revealed in 2003 that
his development team was involved in the Strela’s Eg yptian debut: “We trained a
crew in Alexandria and they shot down six out of 10 American [sic] planes flying at a
low altitude. There was a report to Brezhnev and Grechko. The minister called me in
and said ‘I have good news for you’ ... So I was in heaven with my team.”^54
The Israelis admitted only one Skyhawk lost, and attributed it to “ground fire”;
when they first identified a Strela hit, on 15 October (as evidently reflected in the
CIA report), the weapon’s designation was still unknown. A circular from the IAF
Operations Branch warned only that a Super-Mystère had been struck by “a surface-
to-air missile of the US Redeye type.” All squadrons were instructed to raise attack
altitude to over 6,000 feet and to minimize their planes’ “heat signature.”^55 The
Soviets soon noticed this, as Kubersky wrote:
The IAF had used low altitudes and [now] it paid the price. The Arabs rejoiced—the
Israelis were in shock. But their intelligence did its job and soon the reason for these casual-
ties was discovered. For sure, they had agents within the top Arab officer corps, and IAF
planes went up to high altitude again [where they were vulnerable to SAM-2s].^56This, according to the doctrine that is still being taught at the Russian General
Staff ’s Military Academy, was precisely the purpose of deploying the Strela-2 as a
component of the SAM array.
Official Russian military historian Yaremenko gives an almost identical account of
the Strela’s first use, but puts it at the end of December.^57 This might refer to an
additional engagement, but Israel reported no aircraft of any model lost for all of
December.^58 It seems, then, that in his 1998 lecture the military historian postdated
the Strela’s deployment, and listed the six Israeli planes supposedly shot down as