On the morning of 16 August 1966, an Iraqi Air Force captain named Munir Redfa strapped into his MiG-21F-13 for what his squadron believed was a routine long-range training sortie. He had full fuel tanks — a privilege he had rarely been granted — and a secret that would have put him in front of a firing squad. Roughly 900 kilometres away, Israeli radar crews were waiting for a single blip to appear out of the east.

What happened over the next hour became one of the most celebrated intelligence coups of the Cold War: Operation Diamond, the Mossad mission that delivered the Soviet Union’s most advanced fighter into Western hands — not in pieces, not in photographs, but flying, fuelled and intact.

The Loneliest Pilot in Iraq

Munir Redfa was, on paper, exactly the man Baghdad should have trusted. Born into a prosperous family in 1934, he was a skilled aviator who had risen to deputy squadron commander flying the newest fighter in the Arab world. But Redfa was an Assyrian Christian in an air force run by others — and he felt it every day.

He was repeatedly passed over for promotion. He was, by most accounts, restricted to flying with small fuel tanks — a quiet insurance policy against exactly the thing he would eventually do. And he was ordered to fly attack missions against Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, a duty that reportedly disgusted him.

The Mossad had been hunting for a MiG-21 since 1963, when spymaster Meir Amit made the fighter a top intelligence priority. Two earlier recruitment attempts in Egypt and Iraq had failed — the Egyptian attempt ending in betrayal and the hanging of Mossad agents. Then, in 1964, a tip from an Iraqi Jewish contact pointed to a bitter, brilliant pilot in the 11th Squadron.

A Courtship Measured in Years

The approach was patient, personal and extraordinarily risky. A female Mossad operative posing as an American befriended Redfa and, over months, drew out his frustrations. In July 1966 he travelled to Europe, and from there — in one of the operation’s boldest strokes — he was secretly flown to Israel itself.

There, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, Major General Mordechai “Motti” Hod, personally briefed the Iraqi pilot on the route he would fly. The deal reportedly included around one million dollars (some accounts cite a lower figure), Israeli citizenship and a guarantee that his family would be smuggled out first. His wife and two children left on a “holiday” to Paris; other relatives were walked across the Iranian border with Kurdish help.

Redfa’s reply, as recorded in the same account, was six words long: “I will bring you the plane.”

How the Mossad stole a MiG-21 — the full story of Operation Diamond.

Fifty Minutes That Changed Air Combat

On the morning of 16 August 1966, Redfa took off with full tanks on an authorised navigation exercise — and simply kept going. He climbed to around 30,000 feet, crossed Jordanian airspace and pressed on toward Israel as ground controllers barked at him to turn back.

Two Mirage III fighters rose to meet the incoming MiG. Redfa lowered his landing gear — the universal signal of peaceful intent — and followed them down to Hatzor Air Base. By most accounts he landed with almost nothing left in his tanks. The Soviet Union’s crown jewel was sitting on an Israeli runway, engine ticking as it cooled.

What Israel Did With Its Diamond

The jet was renumbered “007” — a wink at the espionage that delivered it — and handed to legendary test pilot Danny Shapira, who flew it within weeks. Mock dogfights against the Mirage III stripped away the MiG-21’s mystique: superb at high altitude, easy to fly, but underpowered and short-legged elsewhere. Every Israeli fighter pilot soon knew exactly where the Fulcrum of its day could be beaten.

The dividends came fast. On 7 April 1967, Israeli Mirages shot down six Syrian MiG-21s in a single day without loss. Two months later, the air force that had studied its enemy’s best fighter from the inside destroyed the Arab air forces on the ground in Operation Focus — the opening blow of the Six-Day War.

In January 1968 the MiG crossed the Atlantic. At the secret Groom Lake test site in Nevada — better known as Area 51 — American pilots flew it under the codename HAVE DOUGHNUT, giving the US its first hands-on look at the fighter it was meeting over Vietnam. The evaluation, and Israel’s willingness to share its prize, helped smooth the landmark sale of F-4 Phantoms to Israel later that year.

The Man Who Paid the Price

For Redfa, the diamond had sharp edges. Sentenced to death in absentia in Iraq, he lived out his life under a new identity, reportedly moving his family abroad in later years. He died of a heart attack in the late 1990s. His story reached Hollywood in 1988 as the HBO film Steal the Sky.

The jet wearing 007 stands today at the Israeli Air Force Museum at Hatzerim — and the type Redfa risked everything to deliver still flies. If you want to feel what nearly 60 years of pilots have felt behind that iconic intake cone, you can: flying the MiG-21 with MiGFlug remains one of aviation’s great experiences.

Danny Shapira, the first Western-world test pilot to master the stolen MiG, told his side of the story on camera decades later — worth every minute:

Sources: Jewish Virtual Library; Black & Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars (1991); Eisenberg, Dan & Landau, The Mossad: Inside Stories (1978); The Aviationist; National Security Archive (George Washington University); The War Zone; Wikipedia