The Russians Were Coming: The Soviet Military Threat in the 1967 Six-Day War
By Isabella Ginor
Editor's Summary: New evidence reveals that during the 1967 Six-Day War the Soviet Union set in motion military operations to assist Egypt and especially Syria, first in seeking to overcome Israel and then in response to Israel’s pre-emptive attack. These potential steps included a naval landing, airborne reinforcement and air support for ground operations. Action was aborted at the last minute due, among other factors, to a firm US response and dissension among Soviet leaders in Moscow.
8:48 a.m. on June 10, 1967 was “a time of great concern and utmost gravity” in the White House Situation Room, according to U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Llewellyn Thompson, one of the presidential advisors present there. (1) A message had just been received over the Moscow-Washington hotline from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin threatening a Soviet military action that might lead to nuclear confrontation.(2) Newly received evidence now shows the threat was not an empty one: the Soviets had prepared a naval landing, with air support, on Israel's shores.
New evidence summarized in this article indicates that the Soviet intervention was not only planned but actually set in motion before being aborted. Soviet officials interviewed insist that such operations were meant only to deter Israel from overwhelming Egypt and, especially, Syria, as well as to stop the United States from intervening on Israel’s side. In order to achieve this outcome, however, the projected action had to be made known to these adversaries, and this was carefully avoided by the Soviets. Yet details of the operation were kept in total secrecy, have been denied to this day, and remained generally unknown to Israeli and American intelligence.
Thus, unless the Soviets grossly overestimated the other side’s intelligence capability, this indicates that the operation was to be implemented, not just threatened. Moreover, preparations for this operation began well before the Soviets even accused Israel of offensive designs, the supposed reason for the intervention.
Well before 1967, Israel had been targeted by the KGB's Foreign Intelligence (First) Directorate as a theater of operations during a larger East-West conflict. Preparations had been made there for parachuting at least diversionnye razvedyvatelnye gruppy (DRGs--sabotage-intelligence groups) to destroy Israeli targets. During 1964-66, according to documents supplied by the defecting KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, Israel was one of the countries where caches of arms and radio equipment were prepositioned for such operations. Mitrokhin claims some of these were boobytrapped and may be in place to this day.(3) The direct involvement of Soviet personnel on Israeli soil, at least on a small scale, had thus already been considered and approved.
The Soviet Union played a central role in escalating Middle East tensions to the brink of war in 1967, and evidence is accumulating that it actually instigated the conflict. In his recently published memoirs, Nikita S. Khrushchev asserts that the USSR's military command first encouraged high-ranking Egyptian and Syrian delegations, in a series of “hush-hush” mutual visits, to go to war, then persuaded the Soviet political leadership to support these steps, in the full knowledge they were aimed at starting a war to destroy Israel.(4)
The conventional Western chronology of this crisis starts on May 13, 1967 when Egypt made the false charge, based on information provided by the USSR, that Israel was massing forces on its border with Syria in preparation for an attack. But even as the crisis unfolded, on May 26, a U.S. diplomat remarked to a Soviet interlocutor: “It almost seemed as though the Soviet Union had been aware in advance of the coming Near Eastern crisis, since [Communist Party Secretary Leonid I.] Brezhnev had first called for withdrawal of the Sixth Fleet [from the Mediterranean] on April 24.”(5)
