Customer Reviews

Foxbats Over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War

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3 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The basic premise of the book is very interesting. That having been said I found the book difficult to read for the following reasons--
1. It seems to be a set of articles strung together in chronological order as a book. That in itself is not bad; however, there is no real cohesion or flow from one chapter/article to the next.
2. The book is set in an academic readership lever and not directed to the general public which makes it difficult for a person not immersed in the material to really comprehend. Good readability requires that a book be "dumbed down" for lay readers;
3. Because the book is a connection of articles--rather than a book of its own right, a most important chapter is missing between chapter 13 and 14--what happened on June 5 and the 6-day war(i.e., the wiping out of the UAR airforce, etc.) and how did that force the change in Soviet policy. We have to rely on our own memories of 1967 instead of having it put there to put the whole book in context. Again, this is probably a result of the book being on a higher academic level and a string of articles in which the reader is "presumed" to know everything;
4. On a more picky level, I find that endnotes which are common in academic matters should be replaced with footnotes. Footnotes do not detract from the book and would help the lay person immensely.
In addition, I find the font/set-up makes reading difficult.
5. All that criticism having been said, I find the book very interesting but difficult to slog through.

This book, exhaustively researched over many years by the authors, carefully elucidates the heretofor unknown but seminal role of the Soviet Union in the genesis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

In brief, the author's hypothesis is that the USSR, by a campaign of incitement and disinformation (such as informing Syria of the non-existant massing of Israeli troops on the Northern Frontier) fomented an incidiary situation with the deliberate attempt to start an Arab-Israeli war. Why? The USSR was constitutionally opposed to the possession of nuclear weapons by the Israelis. US and Soviet intelligence services estimated that completion of a deliverable nuclear device by Israel was immenent. Soviet overflights of the Dimona reactor (using the MiG-25 "Foxbat") were part of a coordinated plan for a combined sea (amphibious), air and land campaign integrating Soviet armed forces with those of it's Arab allies to demolish the reactor and ultimately to destroy the Israeli State.

While Soviet involvement was never a secret, the conventional line is that the USSR exercised a "restraining" role vis-a-vis it's Arab allies (the short-lived "United Arab Republic" and, to a lesser extent, Jordan). The authors of this book convincingly demonstrate that the Soviets took a diametrically opposite approach: instigating the conflict, promising military, logistical and diplomatic support and encouraging aggression.

As is well known, the proximate causes of the conflict were the removal of the United Nations Observer force from the Sinai, closure of the Strait leading to Eilat (violating UN "freedom of the sea" resolutions and international law) and, not incidentally, a massive influx of Soviet arms and advisors. This and other aspects have been dealt with by many other authors (beginning with the Churchills and, more recently, by Michael Oren in "Six Days of War"). This book concentrates on the Soviet role and, as a result, assumes some background knowledge of the conflict.

Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of the book is the explanation of the Israeli attack on the US "spy ship" the "Liberty". This action was attributed by the authors to confusion by Israeli radar monitoring: by their explanation, Israeli equipment detected a rapidly moving (~28 knots) ship which they assumed to be a Soviet war vessel. This ship was in relatively close proximity to the "Liberty". As the entire US Sixth Fleet had, in response to Soviet and Arab allegations of US participation in military actions with the Israelis, withdrawn by hundreds of miles from the vicinity with the sole exception of the "Liberty", the potential for a mistake was high. Some conspiracy theorists allege that the ship was deliberately attacked by the Israelis to thwart US interference in further military actions: the authors show that there were National Security Agency linguists abord, but they were all experts in Russian and Arabic; none spoke Hebrew. Given this finding, the conspiracy angle becomes less enticing. The attack appears to have occurred for this reason and (albeit hard for some to accept) a stupid blunder by the Israelis and by the Americans, as well.

The book was difficult to read: it is written as a factual exposition and has none of the novelistic style that entices a casual reader. There are exhaustive references and a mountain of minute detail, all of which support the author's premises, but do little to ease the burden of the reader.

In summary, this is a fine journalistic work and provides a firm basis for further research. Ultimate clarification will depend upon release of still-classified documents from US and Russian archives. Some elements may never be confirmed, as the USSR Politburo often cloaked important decisions in propaganda and sometimes did not record them at all. Nonetheless, the book is convincing and worth attention from any student of the Middle East and it's apparently incessant wars.

FOXBATS OVER DIMONA: THE SOVIETS' NUCLEAR GAMBLE IN THE SIX-DAY WAR is an excellent book which provides a lot of new information from Soviet Bloc archives and personnel about the Six-Day War in the Middle East. Authors Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez mine a lot of difficult, complicated archival material and supplement it with interviews of surviving participants to provide a Cold War context for a crucial regional war.

In so doing they are forced to step outside their skins and try to see the Six-Day War from the Soviet perspective. Previous accounts tend to ignore the Cold War context and interpret the Soviet role as a mirror of the US role. In other words, both sides tried to contain the conflict and make sure that a larger, nuclear war didn't break out. That makes sense in the West, because that's what Western militaries tried to do, especially the US which was increasingly bogged down in Vietnam.

Ginor and Remez, however, describe Soviet plans to intervene actively in a war they promoted. The authors also place the Isreali development of nuclear weapons at the center of Soviet plans. I hadn't ever heard of the MiG 25 being used in the Middle East until the early 1970s and yet they document a number of "Foxbat" (the NATO code word for the MiG 25) missions over Dimona before the Six-Day War started.

It looks like the Soviets planned to neutralize Dimona and help their Arab allies wipe Israel off the map. Israel wasn't a US ally in 1967. This operation involved landings and TU-95 strategic bombers. Given the Soviet operations in Hungary and especially Czechoslovakia (which came as a complete surprize to US intelligence), the authors may have a point.

The Soviet Union may have been much more involved than was previously thought. Indeed, the authors mention that more Soviet ships were in the Eastern Med than I ever suspected and that they seemed more involved in the LIBERTY incident than was previously suspected. Israeli radar contacts with what they thought was the LIBERTY, for example, showed it proceeding at a twice its maximum speed indicating clearly that it was a destroyer or similar war ship instead of a converted transport. There were Soviet destroyers in that area. Did the Israelis lock onto one of them by mistake?

There are other gems in this book such as the fact that the USS PUEBLO was the LIBERTY's "sister ship" and that less than a year later, "a Soviet naval vessel did open fire ...[on the PUEBLO] killing one crewman and injuring three others, to assist in its capture by North Korea." [p. 180].

If you're interested in military history, Israel, the USSR, the UAR, Soviet strategy, the USS LIBERTY, Dimona, or the Six-Day War, you'll enjoy FOXBATS OVER DIMONA. It brings new insights into that important period of history and places it all within the context of the Cold War.

I liked the book and gave it five stars.

This is bound to be a controversial book, but its careful documentation indicates that it should be taken seriously. The authors contend that the Soviet Union, far from taking a conservative role in the Six Day War, helped to plan and trigger it, up to the point of committing Soviet nuclear forces against Israel. The Egyptian blockade of the Strait of Tiran, according to this view, was planned to provoke Israel into a preemptive strike that, because of American reluctance to support a first strike, would have precluded the US from defending Israel against a combined Arab-Soviet attack. Only the overwhelming success of the Israeli attack thwarted the plan. The book's careful documentation makes it somewhat dry reading, but it is valuable not only for understanding the role played by the Soviets in the Middle East during the Cold War, but that they were not a conservative power but an aggressive one throughtout the Cold War period. Some aspects of the book are provocative and call for further research and documentation, however, such as a claim that the Soviets committed major forces to support Arab operations during the 1973 war and the war of attrition that preceded it, and that a Soviet ship participated in the North Korean attack on the USS Pueblo in 1968. If sustained, these charges would indicate that the Cold War was significantly hotter than most people now appear to believe.

This is an excellently researched book which poses some interesing new hypotheses concerning the Six Day War. It's not as readable as Oren's Six Day War, but worth the time if you want more background on the war and Soviet involvement in it.

The major idea of this book is that the Six- Day War did not break out as many believe simply as part of an Arab plan to destroy Israel. It did not break out as many others believe because of mistakes made by both Egyptians and Israelis in reading the intentions of their enemies. Rather the idea here is that there was a Soviet- Egyptian plan to induce Israel to make a first strike- and that this in turn would be countered by a joint Soviet- Arab counter-attack, which most importantly would destroy the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona. The book claims that the astounding and surprising success of the Israeli airforce in destroying the airforces of the Arabs on the ground obviated the plan.
The authors provide much source material for their well- written story. Whether their thesis is correct or not is however not at all finally clear. The Soviets in general in their foreign operations had a very cautious and conservative side. Something about this plan does not sound like them.
Nonetheless this is a welcome read to the growing literature on the Six- Day War. I would only complement this book with Michael Oren's book on the Six- Day War which has a very different conception of the Soviet role.

Excellent, timely comments based on a misterious, unfamiliar yet best informed and directly involved source, the Soviet, temporarily open archives. historical.
As Head of Israeli Air Force Planning and Operational Requirements during the years preceding the "Six Day War", this book widened my scope, be it post-factum.

The authors focus on the USSR's instigation of and preplanning for the Six Day war. The book takes on new relevance given recent testamentary confirmation by a Soviet MiG 25 (Foxbat) combat pilot. They claim the USSR not only planned and instigated the war through Arab proxies, but committed their best technology at that time, the experimental Mach 2 MiG 25 jet and issued preprepared instructions for landings and retaliation on Israel after the war began. The main Soviet objective was to neutralise Israel's nuclear program (allegedly weaponised just before the war) and to weaken US regional hegemony.
Their direct sources vary widely varying and are well referenced. Most damningly of all they include a 2003 Soviet official anthology which multiply and apparently inadvertently corroborates the thesis.

The book is short, though tightly reasoned and reads easily.
Personally I suspect the Soviet-Egyptian relationship was stormier than they depict. Amer's proposal of the preemptive 'Dawn' attacks must have been a profound irritant to the Politburo if the thesis is true. Nasser's closure of the Tiran straits (though not the withdrawal of UNEF) also would have undermined Soviet plans to avoid a multilateral 'regatta' like initiative, and smacks of Nasser's own impulsiveness, borne from the success of Suez.

Nevertheless the thesis is impressive and persuasively made.
Given the resurgence of Russian and nuclear interest in the Middle East, it serves as an important and instructive antecedent.

This book makes a very strong assertion: that the USSR almost became actively engaged in the Six Day War, to the point where the Soviets intended to land troops on Israeli soil.

The authors have collected a good deal of information which supports this theory. However, the presentation of the material makes it hard to follow at times. Nevertheless, an important book if you are interested in the 1967 conflict.

This book is written by two people whom claim that the 1967 Six Day war of aggression by Israel wasn't Israeli leader's fault. But that it occurred due to a grand Soviet plot. And that we haven't known the truth since because there's been a cover-up for half a century. That these two people claim to have 'exposed'.

This sort of nonsense is familiar. And confined to the American audience; for the usual paranoid reasons ;)