24. Withdrawn Regulars Conceal “Banished” Advisers
A. The numbers add up—or not
Late on 19 July 1972, a TASS report mentioned only that “a certain number of Soviet
military personnel” would return “shortly” to the USSR after completing their “tem-
porary assignment to teach Eg yptian forces” how to “master Soviet equipment”—
thus maintaining the image of “advisers.”^1 To this day, no official Soviet or Russian
figure has been given for the number and breakdown of servicemen who left Eg ypt
in the summer of 1972. The closest thing was provided by Dobrynin: “about 17,000.”^2
A former KGB officer in Eg ypt states that “in half a month about 20,000 of our
advisers left.”^3 Another Russian account puts the number as high as 21,000.^4 An
article in the Russian armed forces newspaper puts the number of evacuees at 15,000.^5
The official Russian military history oddly quotes only Western publications and
Sadat’s memoirs, which “average out” at the same.^6
Although even the smallest of these figures was much higher than the greatest
estimate of Soviet advisers to Eg yptian formations, a consensus formed in Western
and Israeli intelligence that it was these advisers who were expelled. Within two days
of Sadat’s speech, Israeli intelligence had concluded that Soviet advisers were “being
withdrawn from GHQ down to unit level” but not “at this stage ... the Soviet strate-
gic units nor ‘experts’ attached to air defense units.”^7 This was evidently the idea that
the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Rabin, had when, a week later, he estimated
that “while some advisors remain in headquarters, advisors are gone from units in
field. ... [The] bulk of the advisory personnel (4–6,000) have left or will leave Eg ypt.”
The State Department rather pathetically passed this on to Kissinger.
Rabin did suggest that “Soviet forces tied into Eg ypt’s air defense (10–12,000)
have been asked to leave. Rabin was not sure if this applied to all or most of the air
defense personnel.”^8 US Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, on the other hand, con-
cluded “that the Eg yptian order ousting Soviet military personnel was limited to
advisers, and did not apply to the Soviet military forces stationed in Eg ypt, who were