19
RETURN OF THE FOXBATS
Any suggestion that the Soviets frowned on Sadat’s renunciation of the ceasefire is
dispelled by the Soviet move, immediately after his talks in Moscow, to introduce a
long-term presence in Eg ypt of the MiG-25, whose prime function was to prepare his
promised cross-canal offensive. Precisely as Moscow and Cairo prepared to offer the
United States a withdrawal of Soviet pilots from Eg ypt, several of their finest were
dispatched there as the 63rd Air Group.^1
As in previous instances such as the Fifth Eskadra and Operation Kavkaz headquar-
ters, the high-profile gesture of creating a new formation followed the practical assembly
of its components. Bezhevets, who had begun preparations in June 1970, was sum-
moned from a furlough in February 1971 and told to get ready to lead a “special team
for overseas deployment” in a “warm country.” His associates all understood this was
Eg ypt.^2 The handful of selected airmen included civilians (from the Mikoyan design
bureau and the Ministry of Aviation Industry) and military officers. The latter were
drawn from reconnaissance squadrons of the Moscow Military District—to which the
63rd was subordinated, with its home base at Shatalovo, near Smolensk.
While Bezhevets remained in charge of the pilots, overall command of the new
group was entrusted to Air Force Maj.-Gen. (and Hero of the Soviet Union) Georg y
Baevsky, the Moscow district’s deputy commander for combat preparedness. He had
been inducting new models including the MiG-25—in which his own first flight is
dated on 18 May 1967, the day after the first Foxbat overflight of Dimona. Baevsky’s
command, including ground crews, electronic equipment operators, auxiliary personnel
and a base-security rota (company), numbered a total of 450 men—and four planes.
Most of the MiG-25s already flying were of the original interceptor version, four
exemplars of which had been displayed in July 1967. But from the outset, the
Eg yptians requested the model for reconnaissance use (as over Israel in May 1967)
rather than for air superiority.^3 Of the two variants that would ultimately be sent to
Eg ypt, the reconnaissance version was at an earlier stage of development than the
interceptor. But its relative importance became more pronounced when the last flying
prototype of the American B-70 Valkyrie, the mach-3 high-altitude bomber that the
MiG-25 was originally designed to intercept, was retired in February 1969.