THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973standstill-violating SAMs “once and for all, to show them we are not putting up with
it”—but he was overruled again.^13 On the morrow of the Stratocruiser incident, the
Shrikes were put to their first test—and failed. Again, Shazly took credit:
We had devised electronic means of countering [the] Shrike and were quite keen to test
them. On September 18 Israel did as we had expected. The aircraft launched their missiles
from six miles east of the canal. Shrike only has a range of ten miles. The missiles fell hope-
lessly short.But as early as January 1971, Al-Ahram had credited the Soviets for promising
“state-of-the-art electronic equipment” to counter the newly supplied US missiles.^14
General Gareev, the Soviet advisers’ chief of staff, took pride for decades in foresee-
ing the Shrike’s appearance and devising “a dialectic approach to the practical prob-
lem.” After analyzing the missile’s performance in Vietnam—data hardly available to
the Eg yptians—“and the initial combat actions along the canal,” he “simply packed
the area with radars and turned them all on,” which confused the missiles’ homing
systems. Gareev claimed that of seventy-two Shrikes launched that day, only one
struck a Soviet-made radar.^15 “Lt Aleksey Smirnov,” a “radio-technical” expert who
was on a routine maintenance visit to a radar installation at Abu Suweir, witnessed
this hit and reported only minor damage, mainly to the P-35 station’s concrete ped-
estal. His group spent hours collecting Shrike fragments for study.^16 Primakov told
his Israeli interlocutors that there had been only one fatality and one injury among
the “Arabs,” and commended the Eg yptians for not striking back.^17 Al-Ahram even
claimed that one Shrike hit an Israeli position.^18
Although the Eg yptians gave no more credit to the Soviet advisers for countering
the Shrikes than for downing the Stratocruiser, their announcements were more
truthful than the Israelis’ about both incidents. The IDF insisted on describing the
plane as a cargo-laden transport, even after Eg yptian statements identified it correctly
and noted that its advanced equipment made it the IAF’s most costly craft—at $4
million, twice the price of a Phantom.^19 There remained little security justification to
hide this from the Israeli public. Frequent censorship and occasional falsification
were intended to protect American support and Israeli morale, but ultimately con-
tributed to Israeli complacency.
A week after the Shrikes’ failure, Bar-Lev “acknowledged indirectly” that these
missiles had been used, by confirming for the first time that Israel had them while
declining comment on the specific incident. Israeli statements only refrained from
the usual claim of accurate hits.^20 A later history of the IAF admits that the damage
was “inconsequential” but gave what appears to be a more realistic figure of twelve
Shrikes fired. The writer, a former IAF officer, deplores the force’s failure to address
the missile’s weakness. The Shrike remained the basis for IAF strateg y in the Yom
Kippur War, and only after it again fell short of expectations did development begin
of an ultimately successful improved model.^21