No Mission Is Impossible (14 page)

              
“I lifted the container and saw that it weighed four-point-one tons—one-point-two more than the permitted load. The instant I lifted off, a row of warning lights came on. I said,
‘The hydraulic system has gone out on me.' Typically in such a situation, you land and turn everything off immediately.

              
“I decided that I'd keep going. I told the copilot, Tron, a top expert in the aircraft's mechanics, ‘Let's shorten the flight path.' I reached the Red Sea and ordered the aircraft mechanic to look out the window to see whether a fire had broken out in the engines. I landed on the other side of the gulf. The moment that Ze'evik Matas unloaded the second container on our side, they immediately sent him to take my container, which had shaken so hard during the passage. I received a medal, but believe me, I've been in much more dangerous operations.”

In 1970 the Soviets heavily increase their involvement in the Middle East conflict, to the point where it may degenerate into an armed confrontation with the United States.

O
n April 18, 1970, at the height of the war of attrition, two Israeli Phantom pilots, Eitan Ben Eliyahu and Rami Harpaz, were on their way back from a photo-reconnaissance mission over Egypt. The war of attrition had broken out a short time after the Six Day War. Initially, the fighting had focused mostly on the area around the Suez Canal, but it spread incrementally, and the IAF had been carrying out audacious sorties deep in Egyptian territory.

That morning, as Ben Eliyahu and Harpaz flew toward Israel, several Egyptian MiG-21s appeared at high altitude. There was nothing special about this encounter, but this time, listening devices belonging to the IDF's 515th Intelligence Service Unit (later Unit 8200) recorded strange voices speaking an unfamiliar language. The person who understood the language was a young man named David, who was serving at the Umm Hashiba base, in Sinai. He immediately called his commander, Major Tuvia Feinman, and excitedly reported, “We've recorded transmissions between Soviet fighter pilots.”

Feinman responded with a colorful curse. He knew that Russian
technicians, trainers and advisers—not pilots—were working in Egypt, and he surmised that the soldier and his friends had recorded a conversation between them.

“No, Tuvia,” David responded. “This is something else.”

Feinman immediately sent a Bell helicopter to Umm Hashiba, which returned with the recording reels containing the conversations. Feinman, who knew Russian fluently, listened to the tapes and rushed to the head of military intelligence, General Aharon Yariv. At 8.00
P.M
., Yariv held a crash meeting with Minister Golda Meir, and that night she passed along the recordings to U.S. president Richard Nixon.

The recordings were definitive proof: not only were the Soviets supplying weapons to the Egyptians, they were secretly sending military troops and fighter squadrons. The planes were adorned with the logos of the Egyptian Air Force, but they were being flown by Soviet pilots!

This marked a dangerous turn of events. Israel didn't want to get entangled in a conflict with a superior power. The Soviet Union had been the main weapons supplier to Egypt and Syria (and later to Iraq) from the mid-fifties onward, and again after the Egyptian Army was defeated by the IDF in 1967. Moscow responded to the Egyptian president's request by sending military experts, advisors, air controllers and pilots. These facts had been kept secret until Israel's discovery.

Thirty-four Israeli soldiers of Russian background reported the Soviet presence. They were serving in the top-secret Masrega (“Knitting Needle”) unit, commanded by Major Feinman. In addition to training in intelligence, the soldiers had received a refresher course in Russian. They had formed a special subculture for themselves, with Russian underground songs and Pushkin poems, vodka drinking and stories in Russian, and were nicknamed the “Grechkos,” after the Soviet defense minister. As the reports of Soviet involvement in Egypt grew, they were dispatched to the 515th, in Sinai. Bit by bit, they gained mastery of the military terms used by the Russians; however, until April 18, they had only recorded conversations between technical crews. Suddenly, that day, the voices emerging from their radio devices belonged to Soviet pilots.

This raised the latent conflict between Israel and the Soviet Union to
a dangerous level. Israel tried not to escalate it. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan instructed the head of the air force, Motti Hod, to halt the attacks deep in Egypt. The United States also advised caution; after all, they said, Israel wouldn't want a confrontation with a superpower. But the Soviets's self-confidence only grew; they moved their missile batteries to the shores of the Suez Canal, and their planes pursued Israeli jets on photo-reconnaissance and bombing missions, trying to engage them in combat. On one occasion, they even hit the tail of a Skyhawk with an air-to-air missile; the pilot managed to land at the Refidim airbase, in Sinai.

Meir and Dayan still hesitated. But on July 25, when Israeli Skyhawks attacked Egyptian positions on the Suez Canal, Soviet MiGs appeared in the sky and chased them into Sinai. “Superpower or not,” Meir grumbled to herself, and ordered that Israel strike back at the Russians, as they deserved.

Hod decided to devise an operation against the Russians: an aerial ambush of the sort his pilots had pulled off more than once in the region. David Porat, who had designed ambushes in the past, was chosen to put together something special.

But how does one lay an ambush in the clear blue sky?

Hod established an elite team of the air force's best pilots and on July 30, 1970, ordered it to spring the trap. The area chosen as the site of battle was a third of the way between Cairo and the city of Suez, close to the Katameya airbase, where the Russian squadrons kept their planes. Israel's opening shot in the operation—code-named Rimon 20—was the takeoff of four Phantoms guided by Ben Eliyahu from the Ramat David airbase. The planes crossed the Gulf of Suez and started attacking the Egyptian positions next to Adabiya. The Phantoms mimicked Skyhawks fighter jets with bombing capacities but inferior to the Soviet MiGs. The Phantoms kept flying in an “Indian circle” over their targets—imitating American Indians circling cowboys on horseback—with one pilot at a time diving toward his objective, dropping his bombs and returning to the formation. This was a classic Skyhawk tactic. At their radar stations, the Egyptians and the Russians saw four dots circling above Adabiya, and it seemed clear to the ground controllers that they were Skyhawks.

Simultaneously, a dot of light appeared on their screens, passing from north to south at an altitude of twenty thousand feet. The controllers identified the dot as a lone Mirage jet, apparently on a reconnaissance mission. The Israelis were misleading them here as well. The “lone” dot was in fact comprised of four Mirages, which were flying in a tightly compact formation that was made to look like a single plane. The Mirage pilots even reported via radio on the progress of a reconnaissance mission. Together, they were the bait—what appeared to be an unarmed reconnaissance plane and four antiquated Skyhawks. The commander of the Russian squadrons fell for it and decided to unleash his pilots on the easy prey.

The Russians didn't know that an additional quartet of Mirages had taken off from Ramat David and was flying at low altitude in Sinai, below the mountain ridges, so that their radar stations wouldn't see them. Meanwhile, four more Mirages, engines thundering, were ready on the runways of the Bir Gifgafa airfield, in Sinai. As Ehud Yonay wrote in his book
No Margin for Error: The Making of the Israeli Air Force
, Porat succeeded, through this trickery, in “hiding four Mirages and four Phantoms in the blue summer sky, and another eight Mirages not far away.”

The Russians dispatched four quartets of MiGs from the Beni Sueif and Kom Osheim airfields. The first, lead by Captain Kamenev, flew northward, in the direction of the “solo” reconnaissance Mirage, in order to confront it on its journey. The second, led by the squadron commander, Captain Nikolai Yurchenko, was meant to close in on the Mirage with a forceps maneuver from the south. A third quartet, under the command of Captain Saranin, had been directed to strike it from the west. Another formation of four MiGs turned toward the “Skyhawks”; four more MiGs took off a few minutes later. At the air force Pit, Hod pressed a button on his stopwatch and ordered his pilots to attack.

The Soviets were stunned. The “lone” Mirage suddenly became four, which dropped their detachable fuel tanks and turned toward the MiGs. The four Skyhawks suddenly climbed skyward and revealed themselves to be state-of-the-art Phantoms swooping down on the Soviets from on high. Then the four Mirages that had been flying below the Sinai
mountaintops burst out, with the quartet that had been waiting on the runways at Bir Gifgafa following in their wake. The voices of the Soviet ground controllers suddenly went silent, as the electronic wizards of the Israeli Air Force blocked their radio channels. The Soviet pilots, accustomed to a constant flow of instructions from their ground controllers, were left disoriented, at a loss for what to do.

An ambush in the clear blue sky.
(AF Journal)

The Mirage pilot Asher Snir brought down the first MiG. Its pilot ejected, and the canopy of his parachute fanned out amid the aerial battlefield, where thirty-six planes were clashing. Avihu Bin-Nun and Aviem Sella also shot down two planes, and Avraham Salmon and Iftach Spector brought down two more.

The Russian pilots weren't used to wild aerial battles in which their customary formations came apart, and there was no ground controller to guide them. Initially, their voices on the radio stayed calm, but as the battle went on, they sounded increasingly frightened, and some shouted, “Abort!” The Russian ground controllers also lost their cool,
trying to contact their pilots and calling them by their names. A number of the pilots broke away and escaped toward their bases; others also tried to get away from the Israelis, however, the Israeli planes pursued them. Two and a half minutes into the battle, Hod glanced at his stopwatch and ordered a halt. The Israeli ground controller's voice emerged from the radio, instructing, “Everyone, cut off contact. Disconnect at once and get out of there!”

The skies indeed cleared at once, and the Israeli jets turned toward their bases. They left behind five burning MiGs in the Egyptian desert; three of the Soviet pilots had managed to parachute, and two were killed.

Moscow was in shock. The next day, Marshal Pavel Stepanovich Kutakhov, the Soviet Air Force commander, arrived in Egypt to ascertain the reasons for his pilots' failure. While grim inquiries were held in Egypt, modest parties were held on airbases in Israel. Air force commanders didn't forget the Grechkos and sent them bottles of champagne. The celebrations' secret participants, of all people, were the Egyptian Air Force pilots, who had been the butt of numerous insults from the Soviet pilots; the Russians had mocked their inability to take on the Israeli Air Force. This was, for the humiliated Egyptians, a moment of sweet revenge on their Soviet allies.

Within days, the news was leaked to the foreign press, and the story of Operation Rimon 20 exploded in dramatic headlines around the world.

   
GENERAL AMIR ESHEL, COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE AIR FORCE

          
“Bringing down the Soviet jets calls to mind one of the events of the War of Independence, when the first members of the air force took down five British planes that had infiltrated southern Israel. There are those who tell us that the Israeli Air Force is good, but only against other air forces in the region, which aren't at its level. And suddenly we're battling a superpower—a rival from an entirely different league—and we can handle it. And you achieve a result that is exceptional both in absolute terms and against the backdrop of that time. During that same
period, the Americans were fighting the Vietnam War and in other conflicts, and weren't managing to achieve results like these. Meanwhile, here we are, in one battle—boom!

              
“Cynics will say, ‘You ambushed mediocre pilots.' That isn't true. The Russians flying in Egypt knew what they were doing. They weren't suckers and knew that failure was forbidden. But our action brought out the Israeli air force's professional ability, acuity and determination.

              
“The state of Israel puts the best of its resources into the air force. We're able to get to places that no one else can—and to get the job done there. An air force plane knows how to attack in Tehran and to do so in Gaza, and it's in the hands of excellent people.

              
“Operation Rimon brought together our best attributes, talents and abilities—and is a sort of milestone, a sort of beacon.”