11
THE SOVIET REGULARS MOVE IN
A. Screening and training
“Selection was very meticulous, [by] health, combat morale and political characteris-
tics,” relates a political officer who was posted to Eg ypt. “Anyone who had relatives
overseas, who had two children, who had been married more than once, or who tended
to drink or ‘veer to the left’ [carouse and womanize] was disqualified.”^1 In this screen-
ing, “the ‘fifth rubric’ [ethnicity] played a role too, because for the war against Israel a
certain nationality was unsuitable.”^2 A former intelligence officer states this explicitly:
“Jews ... weren’t taken. The Arabs didn’t like them, and their special services saw to it
zealously. If anyone’s face looked ‘suspicious’ they demanded his exclusion.”^3
The process, then, was not overseen by the Soviets alone, and this was not the only
Eg yptian presence: K. Popov relates that when the missilemen went for training in
desert operations, at Ashuluk north of Astrakhan’, the first Eg yptian crews had
already arrived there too. “In the morning, the Soviet officers taught the Eg yptians ...
and in the afternoon, they would repair the equipment that the Eg yptians had dam-
aged.” In January, Popov recalled, the Soviet Air Defense top brass visited the training
ground, were shocked by the Eg yptians’ ineptitude, and made the final decision that
Soviet personnel had to be dispatched instead.^4 The designation of the Russian
deployment as temporary, until it could be replaced by Eg yptians, was taken seri-
ously—but it would take over two years to prepare.
V. Rakovsky, an An-12 flight engineer, describes how the destination of their trans-
port mission was kept secret, and the senior political officer of his unit even misled
them by recommending they read a book about Japan. “But another politrabotnik
[political officer] explained why ‘members of the Jewish nationality were not being
included in the crews.’ The obvious meaning was the Middle East.”^5 Jews were even
asked by others to help them evade the mission. A Jewish senior official at Radio
Vilnius at the time recalled that “colonels ... from units based in Lithuania who had
been ‘offered’ postings in Eg ypt but didn’t want to go came to Jewish civilian doctors
to consult how they could simulate some disease that would get them exempted from
the mission without being discharged from military service.”^6