DR CHAZOV’S “VACATION IN EGYPT”27–8 December, on his way back from the finally convened Rabat conference.
Chazov confirms Heikal’s version that Nasser was rebuked by Brezhnev—and adds
that this reprimand was made at the physician’s behest: “Dr Chazov has learned that
you spent five hours standing up in a jeep, and followed this by making a speech
lasting an hour. This is absolutely contrary to his instructions and a grave danger to
your health.”^50
The persistent Russian version about a visit to Moscow in December by the
Eg yptian president in person may thus reflect rumors intentionally spread at the time
within the Soviet military in order to highlight the urgency of Nasser’s plea, which
was actually transmitted by his emissaries, and thus to justify the unprecedented
nature of the nascent intervention. In any event, the talks with Sadat’s delegation—or
Nasser’s, if he led it after all—could not have caused the initiation of Kavkaz but at
most speeded up its implementation.
The overwhelming evidence that integral Soviet formations began to arrive in
Eg ypt no later than October 1969 not only contradicts Heikal’s version that their
dispatch was approved only late in January 1970; it also casts in a rather pathetic light
the preliminary presentation of Rogers’s peace plan to both Eg ypt and the USSR on
28 October (it was publicly unveiled on 9 December 1969).
The earlier date for activation of Kavkaz is corroborated by testimonies from all
echelons of the SAM division, up to its commander, Col.-Gen. Aleksey Smirnov
(then a major-general), who dates Nasser’s visit in “early December.” The same month,
he was urgently summoned to meet his superior, Air Defense Commander Marshal
Pavel Batitsky. In Smirnov’s account, one of the first to emerge about the Soviet
involvement, Batitsky is said to have been told by Brezhnev two months earlier “Pavel
Fedorovich, the Arabs must be helped,” and to have responded “why not? We helped
them before, and will do so again.”^51 Then, as Smirnov relates, Batitsky asked him:
“‘What do you think—should Israel be punished for launching aggression against the
Arabs?’ Being a military man, I answered briefly ‘It should.’ ‘Are you ready to go?’ ‘I
am.’ And so I left for Eg ypt, to punish Israel.”^52
In later versions, Smirnov toned down the language and added detail. Batitsky
“advised me of top-secret information regarding preparations for Operation Kavkaz,
and ordered Col.-Gen. V.D. Sozinov to brief me on the particulars.” Secrecy was
tight: “Sozinov warned me that no one should know about this. I signed a document
without having time to properly consider what my subordinates and I would be
expected to carry out.”^53 In a 1998 interview for Al-Ahram, also giving the December
date, Smirnov stressed: “Our mission was, of course, undertaken on the orders of the
Soviet government and the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, in execution
of the agreement between us and the Eg yptian leadership.”^54 When he was briefed,
not only had the codename Kavkaz already been assigned, but the manpower too—
for the SAM-3 batteries as well as their Strela and Shilka outriders. Divizyon com-
mander Konstantin Popov dated his own attachment to the operation in November.^55