2
HOLDING THE LINE ON THE SUEZ CANAL
A. Podgorny’s visit obscures military moves
On 21 June 1967, a Soviet flight that did refuel in Yugoslavia brought Podgorny to
Cairo, after overnight talks with Tito. The brief for his mission in Eg ypt had, then,
been determined before the plenum was convened, and as Brezhnev confirmed, he
departed before the session concluded. The version propagated by Mohamed
Hassanein Heikal in his memoirs, and reiterated as late as 1990, described the Soviet
head of state’s “heavy-handed efforts to get Nasser to agree to give the USSR naval
and airbases in Eg ypt,” against the principles of the Non-Aligned Movement. This
supposedly left Nasser with “a bad taste in his mouth” from the “disastrous” visit.^1
This was the politically correct version in Eg ypt at the time of Heikal’s writing,
after the Soviet–Eg yptian alignment had deteriorated. Contemporary Soviet docu-
ments paint a different picture: Nasser recognized that Eg ypt’s “armed forces in their
present state cannot guarantee the defense of the country.” In particular, its “aerial
forces and other air defense means were incapable of it.”^2
In June 1967, only a small part of Eg ypt’s SAM-2 (surface-to-air missile) array had
been deployed in Sinai. At least one battery was captured intact (the first to fall into
Western hands); it had apparently scored the single kill attributed to Eg yptian mis-
siles during the war.^3 Elsewhere, although the Eg yptian batteries expended a large
number of missiles, they proved completely ineffectual (unlike anti-aircraft cannon).^4
In Western analyses, and apparently in the USSR too, this was blamed on incompe-
tent operation or on the poor quality of locally assembled missiles, though the main
reason was probably the system’s ineffectiveness against the IAF’s low-flying tactics,
as well as disruption by electronic countermeasures.^5
To remedy this, Nasser “as a supremely urgent request ... brought up the question
of direct Soviet participation in the restoration, reorganization and reequipment of
the UAR’s [Eg ypt’s] air defense array.” In return, he offered not only Soviet use of all
his country’s ports but also an overt political realignment:
He posed to us the question of new forms for the mutual relations ... including the military
sphere; a formal withdrawal from the nonaligned policy, because in effect—he said—the