Say, remember that Soviet Mig-21 fighter pilot who landed in Israel and defected to the west? The one responsible for America getting the information we needed about the Soviet Mig-21?
It was an Israeli Mossad operation, not a spontaneous defection, as he told the press back in the day.
For the West, this was a dream come true. The Mig-21 was considered the number one fighter plane during the Cold War, and the United States had no clue as to how it was built, what its weaknesses were and what weapons should be developed against it.
Captain Munir Redfa, the Iraqi fighter pilot who flew the jet to Israel, said that he decided to defect to the West because of the remorse and guilt he felt over attacking Kurdish villages with napalm bombs.
But Redfa’s defection was not spontaneous, but rather the result of a comprehensive and bold Mossad-initiated operation, which was named “The Blue Bird – Operation Diamond,” and which ended a 20-year long US embargo on Israel.
[…] According to the film, the idea to try and obtain a Mig-21 was first raised in 1965, when then IAF commander Ezer Weizman asked Meir Amit, who was head of the Mossad at the time, “Get me a Mig-21.” Rehavia Vardi, who passed away last year, was appointed to command the operation.
[…] After a month in Israel, the Mig-21 was transferred to the American Air Force for testing and intelligence analysis. Thanks to this Israeli “gift,” Israel was finally able to replace its French Vautour and Mirage jets with the excellent US-made Phantoms.
And they all lived happily every after. Well, no, they didn’t. There are some in the U.S. intelligence community who are actively anti-Israel (if not actively anti-Semitic), who don’t realize that America’s partnership with Israel is still yielding immense advantages (U.S. troops have been trained by the IDF in house-to-house urban combat, such as they have to face in Iraq).
They made a movie out of it. I’d love to see the film. I wonder if it will make it to the U.S.
Meryl,
America has received a lot of technological support from the inventive Israelis over the years, from strategic to medical to agricultural, but it seems that it is not in the interests of some to make this widely known.
The billions that have acrued to American companies which have made things that much better for the average American have not been acknowledged while Israel has been cast as a beggar for American largesse.
The History Channel’s show Dogfights had an episode on the Middle East, where they told this story, from the point of view of Israeli fighter pilots who had to escort that MiG from Jordan to an Israeli air base.
It was also made into a bad (or boring) movie “Steal the Sky” starring Mariel Hemingway as the blonde spy.