The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967–1973. The USSR’s Military Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict

THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973

That night, Pak heard on the radio that the Israeli boats had entered Haifa; it was
later explained, he writes, that the Israelis were helped by strong back winds and got
home faster than expected.^35 The submarine adviser Kryshtob also recalls a joint
Soviet–Eg yptian effort on 31 December, and cites the weather to excuse its failure:

the Eg yptians and the Fifth Eskadra wanted to intercept them. ... But such a winter storm

broke out here that all the Arabs were scattered. Our Mediterranean eskadra came to their

assistance, but to no avail. The storm washed nine men overboard off the Arab ships. So

they caught nothing, neither the ... boats nor their crews [who would soon be tracking

Kryshtob’s own submarine].^36

Leonid Zakharov of the Soviet 90th Naval Aviation Reconnaissance Squadron
recorded that on the same day their Tu-16Rs were dispatched to locate the “hijacked”
boats east of Crete—exactly as a Daily Telegraph reporter was tipped off two days
earlier that the Soviet-manned Badgers at Cairo-West might do.^37 The Soviet airman
goes on wistfully: “it was no simple mission. Pairs of recce craft left all day at inter-
vals,” including his own in the late afternoon. “The crews were highly motivated but
had no luck. This was probably the only case in which the squadron did not accom-
plish its mission.”^38 The boats were, however, located and tracked even by media-
chartered light planes, not to mention French naval aircraft. It rather seems that by
the time Zakharov’s squadron was launched to search for the boats, it was too late to
block them: they arrived off Haifa early that day but were ordered to enter port after
dark, to minimize media coverage. It can only be speculated whether the Soviets were
really as feckless as the memoirists felt, or their leadership intentionally avoided a
high-profile incident that might disrupt the progress of Kavkaz.
Between 5 and 7 January 1970, that is, still before the first “depth bombing,”
Smirnov submitted his detailed air defense blueprint to Defense Minister Grechko.
Two days before Christmas, with Kavkaz already in full swing, Moscow had finally
stopped the diplomatic charade and rejected US Secretary of State Rogers’s peace
plan. Nasser publicly rebuffed it in a speech in Tripoli on 27 December, and again in
Khartoum on New Year’s Day. Vladimir Vinogradov, then a deputy foreign minister,
claims that “in the beginning of 1970” he was sent by the Politburo to discuss with
Nasser a possible end to the War of Attrition, apparently in the context of the Rogers
Plan’s “second version.” However, he recalls that one of Nasser’s arguments for Soviet
troops to man the anti-aircraft defense was “that the Eg yptian forces are not ready yet
for big offensive operations ... Israeli [air] raids are becoming more and more destruc-
tive ... in order to prepare the Army there is a need for reliable air defense.”^39

F. Diplomatic stalling and a pretense of outrage

It was only after the rejection of the Rogers Plan that Assistant Secretary of State Sisco
finally warned Congress he had serious doubt about Russia’s “willingness to play an