WHAT TRIGGERED KAVKAZ? REFUTING HEIKAL’S VERSIONby test engineers from a military scientific institute who had been sent urgently to a
friendly country ... a unique precedent in Soviet military co-operation.”
More importantly, Tkachev’s description clarifies that the SAM-7s were not
merely an isolated stopgap, but the vanguard of an integrated array that in the Soviet
Air Defense Forces routinely shielded all SAM-2 and SAM-3 batteries and also
included mobile anti-aircraft cannon. Thus even if the first Soviet crews that brought
the shoulder-fired rockets only trained Eg yptians in their use, the Soviet SAM-3
division that was soon to deploy in Eg ypt certainly included Soviet-operated Strelas,
possibly manned by the same crews, and they must have accounted for at least part of
the kills claimed for these missiles until the ceasefire in August 1970. Being the most
easily portable part of the array, the shoulder-launched missiles could be sent urgently
in response to Eg yptian concerns after the boom over Cairo and Israel’s intensive
bombing in the canal zone. The heavier cannon would soon join them.
E. MiG-21 squadrons are marshaled for Eg ypt, August 1969
In previous Israeli and Western studies, the earliest date given for the Kremlin’s begin-
ning “to contemplate sending pilots to Eg ypt” was October 1969.^64 That too contra-
dicts Heikal’s claim, but a commander in the air contingent has clarified that this opera-
tion was not only decided upon but set in motion more than two months earlier.
The first Israeli Phantom pilots completed their crash course in the United States
ten days after the “flying artillery” was sent in.^65 On the morrow, the Soviet chargé
d’affaires in Washington delivered a protest against these attacks and “attempts to
take possession of Green Island,” while stressing that the Soviets “are for restraint” and
more “exchange of views.”^66 But the same day, 1 August 1969, Lt-Gen. (then Col.)
Yury Nastenko, the leader of a MiG-21 air reconnaissance wing, was summoned to a
full meeting of the “military council” at the headquarters of his Air Army Corps. The
commander, Lt-Gen. V.S. Loginov, asked him point-blank “what I would think about
an offer to command a group of volunteer pilots to provide internationalist aid for
the Eg yptian people in repulsing the Israeli aggression.” For Nastenko, “thus began
the operation code named Kavkaz.”
Nastenko had a personal score to settle: as a MiG-21 squadron leader in June 1967,
he and his men had sat out the Six-Day War in their cockpits at Yerevan-West, the
closest Soviet air base to the combat zone, waiting for an order that never came to
intervene in favor of the Arab side. Now, when “offered” a second go,
for twenty years I had been trained to answer in the positive. The next day ... we flew to a
meeting with Minister of Defense A.A. Grechko and Chief of Staff Zakharov. When one
of the unit commanders started declaiming the usual slogans about our being the strongest
and most capable and our victory being assured, Marshal Zakharov (who had seemed to
be dozing ) lifted his eyes and ... said: “I don’t know if you can beat this supostat [arch-