On May 25 1967, Mossad Director Meir Amit met the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, John Hadden. Many years later, the late Gen. Amit gave us the startling transcript. Despite Amit’s warning that a major Soviet move into the Middle East was in the offing, the American was adamant: Israel must not pre-empt a Soviet-instigated and armed Egyptian onslaught. Hadden then added a threat: “If you attack, the United States will land forces on Egypt’s side, in order to defend it.”
Recently declassified US documents confirmed that such an American contingency plan was dusted off in mid-May 1967. But no forces had been allocated, nor operational orders issued, by the time Israel did strike first on June 5. So no GI Joes found themselves fighting against Israeli soldiers, alongside the Soviet landing forces that were poised aboard some 30 ships of the USSR’s Mediterranean Eskadra, or the Soviet paratroops who spent the war on the runways of forward airbases.
Needless to say, Moscow would never have contemplated defending Israel, had the Arabs struck first, which the Soviets urged them not to do, but rather to provoke an Israeli first strike that would legitimize USSR support for the victims of aggression. This planned Soviet intervention was obviated only by the unexpectedly devastating effect of Israel’s opening air strike and the resulting rout of Arab ground forces, not by any US counteraction. Indeed, when Egypt falsely accused the United States (and Britain) of taking part in the air offensive, the US Sixth Fleet was ordered away from the combat zone, and Washington declared itself “neutral in thought and deed.”
Discovering the abortive Soviet intervention in Russian veterans’ memoirs illustrated the risk historians take if they project the superpower alignment of later periods onto pre-’67 years. It was a lot more asymmetric then; Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War did push the Americans farther into a corner, but by default after Egypt broke off relations. The USSR did the same toward Israel.
