THE SOVIET REGULARS MOVE INwho didn’t even have foxholes.” The Eg yptian officer in charge preferred to concen-
trate his main force around a dummy station, which the Soviets considered crude and
unlikely to fool anyone—but they were quartered there too. This, along with the
Eg yptian’s rejection of the Soviets’ proposal to hold a defense exercise on the night of
the raid, kept the advisers out of the line of fire.^19 Major Mikhail Antonov, the Soviet
adviser to the Eg yptian armored battalion charged with protecting the sector, arrived
on the scene too late, and found that the nearest tanks had been hidden uselessly in a
ravine. When he began to draw up plans for their more effective emplacement, the
Soviet higher brass who came to inspect the “disaster” scene advised him “not to work
too hard as they [the Eg yptians] are fighting here, not we.”^20
The Egyptian media did not mention the Ras Gharib caper for nearly a month,
and the Soviet media never did. But the US embassy in Moscow reported that an
official speaker had discussed it at an unspecified gathering—presumably of Party
activists—which was taken to indicate that foreign broadcasts about it had “been
received” and necessitated some response.^21 It remains an open question whether this
trauma was magnified, and the silence deepened, by capture of Soviet technicians at
the station itself. Given the P-12’s advanced technolog y (as Kulikov mentions, the
same model was in use in the USSR’s own air defense), it would be remarkable if there
were no Soviet personnel operating or overseeing the facility.^22 The Israelis confirmed
taking four Eg yptian technicians who had been trained in the Soviet Union. The
senior “radio-technical” adviser to the 5th Eg yptian Air Defense division based in
Cairo, K.M. Molodtsov, wrote in 2005 that the Israelis took two unidentified “mem-
bers of the combat crew.”^23 Antonov mentions only “the station’s crew” being cap-
tured, without specifying their nationality.
The senior interpreter Zardusht Alizadeh related how “we were relieved that our
people returned safely,” which might refer either to their release by the Israelis or to
their successful escape before the station’s capture. Before leaving Cairo, Kulikov and
the adviser he accompanied had been warned by a senior politrabotnik “don’t dare to
be taken prisoner by the Jews.”
D. Was there a Soviet ground-forces presence?
It was widely reported that Israel let US experts inspect the P-12 station, like other
captured Soviet hardware. The interpreters in Eg ypt heard that the Soviets had to
alter their identification codes worldwide as a result.^24 In Washington, Sedov relayed
a warning through a Jewish journalist that the radar hijacking was “a very grave mat-
ter. Henceforth we will make sure that valuable and up-to-date equipment will be
guarded by us, so that the Israelis will think twice.”^25 Guarding the Soviet-manned
SAM array against “possible Israeli paratroop raids like the radar station” was given
as the motive when, in April 1970, the Soviets were reported as having dispatched “an
estimated five battalions of troops” to Eg ypt.^26