THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume IX, Issue # 198, October 24, 2007
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE SOVIET MILITARY ROLE IN THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT:
RESEARCH UPDATE I -- THE FULL STORY
By Isabella Ginor & Gideon Remez
HISTORY OF THE THIRD WORLD WAR: INVOLVEMENT OF THE LATE U.S.S.R. IN THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT
DURING THE COLD WAR ERA -- SOVIET EXPLOITATION OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN CONFLICT TO ADVANTAGE IN THE
GLOBAL WAR WAGED BY THE SOVIET UNION & ITS ALLIES AGAINST THE NON-COMMUNIST WORLD -- RECENT RESEARCH
FINDINGS
(Editor's Note: In May, 2007, Yale University Press published a book by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez,
Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War. [See: Bryan Schwartzman, "The U.S.S.R.
as the Culprit in the Six-Day War: A Report on the Briefing of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez," The Progressive
Conservative, U.S.A., Volume IX, Issue # 116, June 20, 2007.] The following update statement by the authors of the
book relates new developments that have occurred since Foxbats over Rimona went to press, developments
such as Russian Air Force official confirmation of one of the authors' major findings -- that, in 1967, a MiG-25 was flown
over Israel by a Soviet military pilot. The update also describes recent fingings in other phases of the authors' research
project on the Soviet Union's military role in the Arab-Israeli conflict as an arena of the Third World War, i.e., the
socalled "Cold War.")
NEW RESEARCH
Our new study challenges the so-called "expulsion of Soviet advisers" from Egypt in July, 1972.
Since the emergence of new evidence from the former Soviet Union
occurs for the most part randomly and haphazardly, we have had to research several periods of the USSR's Middle
Eastern involvement in parallel. The period that follows in chronological order after the Six-Day War -- the War of
Attrition, which saw the largest deployment of integral Soviet military formations outside the Warsaw Pact until
Afghanistan -- was already the subject of a study that we published in Cold War History in 2002.
Both the 30-year rule, where it applies, and the approaching 35th anniversary of the Soviet intervention's ostensible end
in July, 1972, brought about the exposure of new material about President Anwar al-Sadat's supposed "expulsion of
Soviet advisers" from Egypt. We presented a paper challenging this hitherto conventional concept at a conference held
by the London School of Economics' Cold War Studies Centre in May, 2006 .
Our research established that this was not a unilateral Egyptian move, but rather a withdrawal coordinated in lengthy
negotiations among Cairo, Moscow and Washington, and that the Soviet servicemen who left Egypt were not advisers.
They were mainly the personnel of the integral Soviet military formations, some 20,000 strong, that had been stationed in
Egypt since the War of Attrition in 1969-1970. The genuine Soviet advisers – officers attached individually to Egyptian
units -- mostly remained, and continued to prepare the offensive across the Suez Canal that Sadat launched in October
1973.
The conference proceedings are now forthcoming in book form, and the presentation of our paper, Origins of a
Misnomer, is accessible online on the Historians' News Network (HNN).
British document exposes the late Ashraf Marwan's role as an Egyptian disinformation agent in the "expulsion"
affair.
One of the British documents that we located in London's Public Records
Office, after it was declassified in 2002, took on particular topical significance on June 27, 2007, when the Egyptian
businessman Ashraf Marwan mysteriously fell to his death off a balcony in London. This rekindled the debate whether
Marwan had acted, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, as a genuine Israeli spy within the Egyptian regime, or as an
Egyptian double agent deployed to mislead the Israelis.
This British document strongly supports the hypothesis whereby Marwan was assigned by the Egyptian authorities to
spread disinformation among Egypt's adversaries. Rather than a double agent, he might be better described as a triple
agent or more, as, more than a year before the 1973 war, he was "clandestinely" disinforming the British, as well as the
Israelis.
The document is a secret "flash" cable from a British military attache in Cairo, Alan Urwick, dated July 22, 1972 -- that is,
four days after Sadat announced what became fixated in Western and Israeli perceptions as "the expulsion of Soviet
advisers." Urwick quoted Marwan – while requesting that the source "should be fully protected" -- as asserting "in strict
personal confidence" that "all the Soviet advisers had left Egypt" by the time of their conversation.
Marwan's message was evidently ascribed high credibility, due to his position as "the Secretary for Information Affairs to
President Sadat. " It thus formed a very effective part of a concerted Egyptian and Soviet effort to create the false
impression that the advisers, rather than the Soviet units, were being expelled because of Moscow's refusal to support
Sadat's war aims. This, in turn, cemented the "concept" in the Israeli military leadership that Egypt was incapable of going
to war, which had such disastrous results for Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973.
It would appear then, regardless of Marwan's services or disservices for the Mossad on the very eve of the 1973 offensive,
that, even earlier, he earned his posthumous glorification in Cairo as an Egyptian hero. See the aforementioned presentation
of Origins of a Misnomer and our letter to the New York Times, July 20, 2007.
FOLLOW-UP ON FOXBATS OVER DIMONA
Russian Air Force officially confirms MiG-25 flown by Soviet pilot over Israel in 1967.
Since Foxbats over Dimona went to press, and even more after its
publication, important new evidence has emerged that bears out our book's thesis about the USSR's instigation of, and plan
to intervene in, the Six-Day War. The most dramatic instance was what amounts to official confirmation of the book's Exhibit
A and the source of its title -- our exposure that it was Soviet pilots in the yet-experimental and top secret aircraft later known
as the MiG-25 "Foxbat" who flew the highly provocative sorties over Israel's nuclear facility in May, 1967.
This appears in an article by the chief spokesman of the Russian Air Force, Colonel Aleksandr V. Drobyshevsky , posted on
the official website of the Russian Defense Ministry. As in several cases that we cite in the book, this extraordinary
disclosure of a hitherto secret operation apparently was included inadvertently in a statement that was published in a
completely different context -- the anniverary of the test pilots' school from which the pilot graduated.
It states (in translation): "In 1967, the military valor and high combat training of Colonel Bezhevets, A.S. (now a Hero of the
Soviet Union, an honorary test pilot of the USSR, [and] retired Air Force major general), were demonstrated while carrying out
[a] combat operation in Egypt, [and] enabled [him] to perform unique reconnaissance flights over the territory of Israel in a
MiG-25RB aircraft." (This designation of the plane is of course retrospective, as the prototypes then used were still known by
various other code names.)
Drobyshevsky's statement officially corroborates the personal testimony of Bezhevets's senior colleague, Lt. Gen. Aleksandr I.
Vybornov, who told of such missions on several occasions quoted in our book, including one in the United States (at the
"Gathering of Eagles ," Maxwell Air Force Base, 1999.)
Publication of Foxbats Over Dimona spurs more accounts by Soviet veterans about preparations for intervention
against Israel in 1967.
The first, pre-publication report about Foxbats in The Jerusalem
Post was widely reproduced, in frequently inaccurate translations, throughout the Russian media and Internet, arousing
intensive discussion. Several respected news organizations, notably Komsomolskaya Pravda, contacted some of the
veterans who were among the main sources for the book, and they reiterated their accounts. These included General Vasily
Reshetnikov, the commander of the strategic bombers that were assigned targets in Israel, particularly "those protected by
Hawk missiles" -- that is (as we know), the Dimona nuclear complex -- and Captain Nikolai Khripunkov, the naval officer who
was tasked to lead a landing force in Haifa Port.
Bezhevets, on the other hand, denied his Foxbat flights -- which indicates that Drobyshevsky's statement relied not on the
pilot's testimony, but rather on the Air Force's own documentation. Likewise, a retired admiral denied the presence of nuclear
submarines in the Mediterranean Sea in 1967 -- which has, however, been been asserted in an official Russian military history,
as well as in the memoirs of several submarine captains and crewmen.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda writer, Colonel Viktor Baranets, a noted military correspondent and former General Staff
officer, concluded (in part):
"... the time has apparently come to set the record straight. So far,
the facts have often been replaced by inventions. No one can
dispute the obvious: the USSR 'orchestrated' that war. ... What
matters is ... that the USSR was prepared for an invasion of Israel.
The confessions of our own officers prove this."
Debate develops over archival evidence vs. other sources.
In the first Jerusalem Post report about Foxbats, Michael Oren (author
of Six Days of War) was quoted as disparaging our thesis on the grounds that "he had not found 'any documentary
evidence to support' the book's central claims," while admitting "that he had visited the Soviet archives and that 'not a lot has
been declassified.' " In a generally positive review in The New Republic, Benny Morris commended Foxbats for
"proximity to the truth," but characterized our evidence as "flimsy." He agreed that the most pertinent Soviet archives are still
closed, and suggested that the historical record could be definitively corrected only at "the moment the Russian archives
open the relevant files."
Coming after an essay in The New York Times on the status of Russian archives, we consider this to be the welcome
start of an important debate on the character of evidence for historical research. In a letter to The New Republic, we
pointed to Drobyshevsky's aforementioned statement as "about as close to an official document as one can hope for under
the prevailing circumstances." The statement "illustrates the point we emphasized, that full and direct documentation of the
Soviet plan in 1967 is still being suppressed, to the extent that it ever existed and was not destroyed."
"We do not share Morris's expectation that such material will
soon, or ever, be systematically released from former Soviet
archives, nor his willingness to await such release in order to
set the record straight. Indeed, our experience even with U.S.
and Israeli archival sources for the period encountered only
somewhat less selective declassification.
"Criticism of our findings merely on the grounds that no basis
for them has yet been exposed in Soviet archives is, therefore,
not merely fallacious. It is also disturbingly dangerous, because
it implicitly admits the Orwellian nightmare whereby the absence,
prostitution, or suppression of archival evidence can and should
be allowed to excise entire chapters from history. The alternative,
to which we have tried to contribute, is to cross-check and piece
together, cautiously and painstakingly, the myriad and often
random references now available from other sources, in order to
assemble a picture that evolves gradually toward the actual facts
as they occurred. Our approach is discussed at greater length in
the first chapter of Foxbats."
Foreign Affairs acclaims Foxbats.
The authoritative journal, Foreign Affairs, has named Foxbats
Over Dimona as one of five "outstanding new books." In the journal's issue for September-October, 2007, Professor
Sir Lawrence D. Freedman of King's College, London, summed up his review: "Using every snippet of relevant
information from an extraordinary range of sources, ... Ginor and Remez have succeeded to the point where the onus is
now on others to show why they are wrong." The full review follows.
"The revisionist label is too often used to describe a reinterpretation
of past events from an unorthodox political perspective. Here is a
book that is truly revisionist, challenging what we thought we knew
about the origins and conduct of the Six-Day War, Israel's crushing
victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria 40 years ago. The exact role
played by the Soviet Union has always been murky. The authors
work their way through the murk, meticulously using every snippet
of relevant information from an extraordinary range of sources, most
effectively Soviet military personnel who can recall what they were
up to in 1967. Where there are gaps, they make a careful case for
conjecture and inference. They demonstrate how anxiety about
Israel's imminent nuclear capability and an unwarranted confidence
in Arab military strength led Moscow to develop a plot to provoke
the Israelis into striking first before being overwhelmed by a
devastating riposte, in which Soviet forces would participate. The
plan never recovered from the quality of Israel's first strike, although
bits of it were implemented as Israel appeared to be marching on
Damascus. By its nature, this is an impossible case to prove, but
Ginor and Remez have succeeded to the point where the onus is now
on others to show why they are wrong."
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Communism, Soviet Imperialiam, & the Cold War:
Case History of Military, Political, & Psychological Warfare
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
A Ukrainian-born Israeli, Isabella Ginor is a Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, where she has founded a research project on U.S.S.R. military involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Gideon
Remez has received numerous awards for journalism and was a leading newscaster for Kol Israel radio for 36 years.
Return to Top of Page
Go to the WEBSITE INDEX
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Public Issues & Political Controversies
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
Most Recent Articles
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Volume IX, 2007
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Subject Matter Highlights
Return to POLITICAL EDUCATION Homepage
CONTACT & ACCESS INFORMATION
This is not a commercial website. The sole purpose of the website is to share with interested persons information regarding civics,
civic and social education, political science, government, politics, law, constitutional law and history, public policy, and political
philosophy and history, as well as current and recent political developments, public issues, and political controversies.
POLITICAL EDUCATION, CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS
POLITICS, SOCIETY, & THE SOVEREIGN STATE
Website of Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr.
Government, Politics, Public Policy, Legal Issues, Constitutional Law, Government & the Economy, Cultural Values, Foreign Affairs,
International Relations, Military Defense & National Security, Geopolitics, Terrorism & Homeland Security, American National Interests,
Political Systems & Processes, Political Institutions, Political Ideologies, & Political Philosophy
INDEX FOR THE ENTIRE WEBSITE
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic,
Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues
Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity