THE SOVIET REGULARS MOVE INtheir launchers and not allowed to leave the sites.” He describes several incidents
similar to the one that Nastenko witnessed in Cairo:
one missile was launched without authorization. Thank goodness, it fell into the sea. Later,
the entire Fifth Eskadra and all the available divers searched for it. It turned out to be very
secret. But it was never found. Afterwards these missilemen fired a hand-held Strela at an
Il-28 of ours. They hit it successfully, one engine blew up and part of the wing came off, but
somehow it managed to land—it was, after all, flown by Soviet airmen.^33E. The Cherbourg fiasco
A diversion was created when on Christmas Eve five newly completed fast missile
boats—Israel’s ultimately successful response to the Eilat sinking—evaded the French
arms embargo by sneaking out of the shipyard in Cherbourg and heading for Haifa.
They were unarmed, and although reportedly escorted by two submarines once they
entered the Mediterranean, the boats were ostensibly vulnerable. While Israeli Navy
headquarters considered an Eg yptian “ambush” unlikely, and a Soviet one even more
so, the government in Jerusalem was edg y.
The mentions of this affair by Soviet veterans are uncharacteristically apologetic.
V.M. Pak, an interpreter at Eg yptian Navy headquarters in Alexandria, recalls that
the Soviets’ “preliminary calculations showed the Eg yptians still had enough time to
intercept [the boats]. Since they were unarmed, our advisers proposed to take them
as booty.” The Fifth Eskadra must have had a good idea of the boats’ whereabouts:
after passing Gibraltar, the Israelis sighted (and were presumably sighted by) several
Soviet ships, which they described as freighters. When on 28 December 1969 they
stopped to refuel from an Israeli car ferry that had been prepositioned south of Malta,
a Soviet intelligence trawler “bristling with antennas” came within 300 meters and
stayed there for hours, pointing a telephoto lens at the boats.
Was it monitoring a target for an armed naval force? The first opportunity, Pak
writes, “was spotted in the Gulf of Tunis, and a destroyer was sent there along with
several other craft masked as civilian. But before they could reach the projected inter-
ception point, salt water started leaking into the destroyer’s boiler and it had to return
to base for extended repairs.”
As a precaution, the Israeli flotilla split up to circumnavigate Crete, and the two
boats that sailed north of the island passed near if not through the eskadra’s
Antikythera anchorage; the Israelis reported “evading two unidentified ships.”^34 At
Pak’s headquarters, it was concluded on New Year’s Eve that
one more chance remained: to dispatch missile boats based in Port Said. I remember well
that this question was discussed at the Navy commander’s [office] in the first part of the
day, in an ambience of strict secrecy. ... But by that evening, I went to the market ... [and]
heard one butcher tell another that Eg yptian missile boats had been sent from Port Said
toward the Israeli ones.