On 30 July 1970, four Israeli Mirages flew a routine photo-reconnaissance profile over the Gulf of Suez. They climbed to 35,000 feet, made the standard radio calls, and flew in a formation so tight that Soviet radar operators read four aircraft as two.

They were not unarmed reconnaissance aircraft. Every one of them was carrying Sidewinders, and twelve more Israeli fighters were waiting.

Eleven minutes later, Soviet MiG-21s scrambled. What followed lasted less than three minutes, and Israel’s air force commander timed it with a stopwatch.

The Soviets Were Not Supposed to Be There

By the summer of 1970 the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal had stopped being a purely Arab-Israeli affair. Nasser had gone to Moscow in January and come back with something extraordinary: Soviet air defence of Egyptian airspace, flown by Soviet crews. The operation was codenamed Kavkaz — Caucasus.

From March, the Soviet Union deployed the 18th Special Anti-Aircraft Rocket Division with SA-2 and SA-3 batteries, and fighter aviation to go with it. Soviet aircraft and vehicles wore Egyptian markings. Soviet personnel wore Egyptian-style desert uniforms. Officially, none of them existed.

The Israelis knew. Soviet units had brought their own Russian-speaking ground controllers, and Israeli signals intelligence — Unit 848, with Russian-speaking operators — was reading the traffic.

Then, on 25 July, Soviet-flown MiG-21s intercepted Israeli A-4 Skyhawks and chased them east into Israeli-held Sinai. One Skyhawk was hit by an Atoll missile and force-landed at Rephidim. It was the first time a Soviet air-to-air missile had been fired east of the canal.

That same day, Hod took the case to the cabinet. Golda Meir approved it.

The Trap

The plan had three moving parts and one deception.

The bait was four Mirage IIICs of 119 Squadron, led by Lt Col Amos Amir, flying in an exaggeratedly tight formation so that Soviet radar would resolve them as the usual two-ship unarmed reconnaissance pair. Each carried two AIM-9D Sidewinders. They came in low across the Gulf of Suez near Hurghada, climbed to 35,000 feet, and tracked north toward Suez City making standard reconnaissance calls.

The diversion was four F-4E Phantoms of 69 Squadron hitting the Egyptian radar site at Sokhna — flying a Skyhawk attack profile, so the day would look like an ordinary one on the canal front.

The trap was four more Mirages of 117 Squadron loitering at low level over Sinai beneath radar cover, with four of 101 Squadron sitting alert at Rephidim.

It took the Soviets about eleven minutes to bite. Then somewhere between twenty and twenty-four MiG-21s came up from Kawm Ushim, Beni Suef and al-Qatamiyah.

“Texas” was the Israeli aircrew’s nickname for the airspace south and west of Suez City. That is where the fight happened.

And the plan immediately half-failed. Amir turned his bait flight too tightly — a 270-degree climbing turn — so instead of dragging the MiGs westward he ended up head-on with them. The Phantoms could not make the planned rear-quarter Sparrow attack. Everyone fell straight into a close-in dogfight, which is the one thing a carefully engineered ambush is meant to avoid.

It did not matter. The Israeli pilots involved had sixty-seven aerial victories between them. The Soviet pilots had none.

The Operations Room’s reconstruction of the engagement, which is the clearest account of the geometry available anywhere.

Three Minutes

Avraham Salmon fired first and killed Nikolai Yurchenko. Asher Snir killed Yevgeny Yakovlev. Aviem Sella and Reuven Reshef, in a Phantom, downed Georgy Syrkin, who ejected and lived. Avihu Ben-Nun and Shaul Levi killed Yevgeny Kamenev with a Sparrow fired at very low level and near sonic speed — a shot that is not supposed to work in those conditions.

The fifth kill was shared between Iftach Spector and Salmon, and it is the one that matters for the arithmetic. Vladimir Zhuravlev’s MiG flew away apparently under control. Only later did it emerge that it had crashed, killing him.

Aviem Sella’s assessment of his opponent has been quoted ever since.

One Soviet pilot did get a shot away. An Atoll detonated in the exhaust of Asher Snir’s Mirage, shredding the nozzle and tail. Snir disengaged and landed at Rephidim. The Israelis credited the shot to Capt Vladimir Ivlev; a Russian loss database credits Yurchenko, who by the Israeli account was already dead. It is not settled.

The Parachute

The detail everyone remembers is not a kill. It is a canopy.

A man in a full parachute at 30,000 feet over a desert does not come down quickly. He descended through the entire battle. Israeli pilots began using him as a navigation reference in their radio calls — four kilometres west of the chute, heading north, seventeen thousand.

He did not survive the descent. Sources disagree about whose victim he was: Sella attaches the story to Snir’s kill, Yakovlev; the fullest published account attaches it to Salmon’s first kill, Yurchenko. Both agree on the altitude and on the canopy opening immediately.

Four, Then Five

Israel announced four aircraft downed that day, described them as Egyptian, and said nothing about who had been flying them. That was not spin. The fifth kill genuinely was not claimed, because two Israeli pilots had watched Zhuravlev’s MiG fly away.

Within days the foreign press had identified the dead as Soviet. In late October Golda Meir confirmed it publicly — still citing four.

The number became five in August 1972, when the editor of Egypt’s Al-Ahram disclosed that five Soviet aircraft had been lost that day. Sadat reportedly confirmed it during his 1977 visit to Israel. The Soviet Union never acknowledged the engagement at all, and a Russian loss database still lists only four, omitting Kamenev entirely.

What It Actually Achieved

Moscow said nothing. The commander of the Soviet Air Force flew to Egypt the next day, officially for a holiday in Luxor. Another MiG-21 regiment and a squadron of Su-15s followed. Israeli pilots were forbidden to discuss the battle or to paint Soviet kill markings on their aircraft.

Four days later the Soviets ran their own ambush: dummy SAM sites drew Israeli Phantoms onto concealed live SA-3 batteries. One Phantom was shot down — its pilot severely wounded, his navigator captured and dead in captivity — and a second badly damaged.

The ceasefire came on 7 August 1970.

The comfortable story is that Rimon 20 forced it. The historians Gideon Remez and Isabella Ginor argue the opposite: that Soviet SAMs had already made Israeli Phantom losses unsustainable, and that the 30 July victory simply let Israel accept an American truce without losing face. Within minutes of the ceasefire taking effect at midnight, Soviet-Egyptian convoys moved the missile array up to the west bank of the canal — the precise outcome Israel had fought the whole war to prevent, and a precondition for the Egyptian crossing in 1973.

There is one footnote that nobody disputes. The Egyptians, whose pilots the Soviets had openly mocked, thought the whole thing was hilarious. Nasser reportedly had to issue an order forbidding Egyptian personnel from laughing at their Soviet instructors.

Sources: Marshall Michel, Aviation History (March 2022); ynetnews; The National Interest; History Guild; Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, The Soviet-Israeli War 1967-1973; skywar.ru; contemporary UPI and AP reporting.