15
AN MIA MYSTERY AND SOVIET
INTELLIGENCE METHODS
The battle of 18 July 1970 has gone down in the history and “combat heritage” of
both the opposing forces. The Soviet Air Defense Corps, which analyzed and charted
all the engagements of that summer, memorialized this one in particular detail both
for its signal achievement and due to the Soviets’ own heavy losses. The corps’
museum displays, along with fragments of an Israeli F-4, a heroic painting of the
battle (which, perhaps to assist younger or uninitiated viewers in locating the scene,
fancifully adds the pyramids in the near background).^1 So the episode was not
brought back from total oblivion when a postscript to this event appeared suddenly
thirty years later, and opened a Pandora’s box of unresolved missing in action (MIA)
cases in the Cold War context.
Flying in high—at 18,000 feet—like “ducks in a shooting gallery,” Hetz’s Phantom
was quickly disabled by a missile launched from his designated target, a SAM-3 divizyon
near Ismailia. One of the other three pilots in the leading Israeli formation saw the F-4
“emit a trail of white smoke, turn left—eastward—and reduce altitude. Hetz’s plane
vanished from my sight. ... There was not a word from him over the radio.”^2 After he
failed to return, the IDF put out word that “pilots who operated in the same sector
reported seeing both crewmen parachuting.”^3 This version might have come from the
second formation of F-4s, led by future IAF Commander Avihu Bin-Nun, which struck
the same SAM battery successfully one minute after Hetz’s attempt. Bin-Nun’s own
plane was also badly damaged by a missile, but he managed to crash-land at Refidim.
The Eg yptians and Soviets, as usual, scored this too as a kill, this time with some justi-
fication: Bin-Nun’s F-4 was stricken from the IAF roster for over a year.^4
The Israelis’ two-parachute version, however, was most likely a fiction aimed at put-
ting pressure on Eg ypt to disclose the fate of Hetz and his WSO (weapons system
officer) Menachem Eini. The Eg yptians had uncharacteristically delayed any announce-
ment of the engagement. The next day, the two-parachute claim disappeared, after
Eg ypt stated that Eini had been captured, and that the Phantom had exploded in air
after he bailed out. In Israel, it was assumed that the plane did hit the ground—but that
either way Hetz had perished, and he was declared dead, resting place unknown.^5