by Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Raphael Ofek
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israel made a unique and particularly valuable contribution by shedding fresh light on Moscow’s nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles threatening the US.
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 751, February 26, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel
and the United States have a long history of close intelligence
cooperation. Apart from the regular provision of useful strategic and
political intelligence, Israel’s wars against the Soviet-armed and
trained Arab armies afforded invaluable insights into Soviet military
doctrine and weapons systems. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Israel
made a unique and particularly valuable contribution by shedding fresh
light on Moscow’s nuclear-equipped intercontinental ballistic missiles
threatening the US.
The intelligence cooperation between Washington
and Jerusalem is one of the cornerstones of the strategic alliance
between the two states. Given the extensive US military aid to Israel
along with Washington’s and the American public’s backing of Israel in
the international arena, it has been widely argued that the alliance
unilaterally favors Israel. In reality, however, the partnership has
been bidirectional. From the global standpoint, Israel has provided a
bulwark that protects US and Western interests in the Middle East and
has taken the brunt of Islam’s Manichean confrontation with Western
civilization.
To be sure, Israeli-American intelligence
cooperation has encountered some bumps along the road. Thus, for
example, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin did not inform the Reagan
administration of Israel’s plans to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor
in 1981, even though the two intelligence communities had signed a
memorandum on this issue about a year earlier; Washington responded by
chilling intelligence cooperation with Jerusalem for a short while.
Conversely, the US, along with Britain, kept Israel in the dark about
secret contacts with Muammar Qaddafi in 2003, which led to the
dismantling of Libya’s mass-destruction weapons program. Likewise, in
May 2017 Trump reportedly shared with Russian foreign minister Lavrov
sensitive obtained by Israel about ISIS’ terrorist plans.
These mishaps notwithstanding, Washington and
Jerusalem have maintained a strong intelligence relationship since the
1950s. The foundation for this relationship was laid in 1956, when the
Mossad obtained the text of a secret speech by the then Soviet leader,
Nikita Khrushchev, at the Communist Party Congress, in which he
lambasted the tyrannical practices of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin.
After the speech was published in the New York Times, the shock over
Stalin’s crimes helped delegitimize the Soviet regime among the Western
public.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Middle East served
as a combat testing ground for Soviet military doctrine and advanced
weaponry, with the experience amassed by Israel in its wars against the
Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi armies – trained by Soviet advisers and
equipped with Soviet weapons – providing the US military with
operational lessons; information about new Israeli technologies to
neutralize the Soviet weaponry; and direct access to Soviet weapons
systems captured by Israel. Within this framework,
- In 1966, an Iraqi pilot defected to Israel in a MiG-21 fighting aircraft.
- After the June 1967 War, Israel transferred to the US a SA-2 surface-to-air-missile battery seized by the IDF.
- In August 1968, two Syrian MiG-17s landed by mistake in a Galilee landing site.
- In December 1969, during the Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition, Israeli paratroopers raided an Egyptian radar station in Ras Gharib near the western shore of the Gulf of Suez, bringing back an advanced radar of the P-12 model.
- According to Professor Yuval Neeman, who, during the October 1973 War attended meetings of the cabinet and the IDF General Staff, Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon’s division seized (on October 18) a complete Egyptian SA-6 surface-to-air-missile battery.
- Similarly, during the 1967 and 1973 wars the IDF seized over a thousand Egyptian and Syrian T-54 and T-55 tanks. A large number of T-62 tanks, some of them intact, were captured on the Syrian front during the 1973 war.
- In his book Red Flag over the Mediterranean (2017), Pesach Malovany noted that during the 1982 Lebanon War Israel reportedly obtained unknown information concerning the Russian T-72 tank.
- Finally, in October 1989 a Syrian MiG-23 defected to Israel.
An especially valuable Israeli contribution,
however, involved a mysterious intelligence episode related to an issue
of existential significance for the US: the Soviet nuclear threat to the
American homeland, and, indeed, to the survival of the Western world as
a whole. The gravity of this threat was starkly demonstrated during the
Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when Moscow deployed nuclear
missiles in Cuba about 240 kilometers from the Florida coast. Viewing
the move as casus belli, US President John Kennedy imposed a naval
blockade on Cuba, leading Khrushchev to back down and to withdraw the missiles in return for the withdrawal of US nuclear missiles from Turkey.
At the time of this crisis, the Soviets had
already gone far in developing nuclear-equipped intercontinental
ballistic missiles. The first operational nuclear missile was the
dual-stage R-16, which, along with its more advanced model the R-16U,
formed the backbone of the Soviet strategic missile force, with a total
of 186 launchers, from 1961 to 1976. In the initial years, the launchers
and missiles were deployed on the ground and hidden in forests, but by
the mid-1960s they had already been placed in underground siloes.
According to the available information, they were initially dispersed
among nine sites across the Soviet Union: Nizhny Tagil, in the Ural
Mountains; Yoshkar-Ola, about 640 kilometers northeast of Moscow;
Bershet about 1,250 kilometers east of Moscow; Yurya, about 800
kilometers northeast of Moscow; Shadrinsk, about 1,650 kilometers east
of Moscow; Itatka, in southwestern Siberia; Novosibirsk, in southwestern
Siberia; and Krasnoyarsk, in the heart of Siberia. The dimensions of
the missile were impressive: a height of over 30 meters and a diameter
of about 3 meters. It had a flight range of 10,500-13,000 kilometers
depending on the weight of the warhead. The missiles were equipped with
three- to six-megaton thermonuclear warheads capable of destroying large
cities like New York or Chicago.
During the Cold War, US intelligence had
difficulty collecting information from behind the Iron Curtain, instead
concentrating on technical means of collection, especially aerial
photography: first by U-2 planes, then by satellites. Thus, particularly
in domains of a clearly technological nature such as the Soviet nuclear
threat, it was easy to err through over- or underestimation.
Yet, the thick cloak of secrecy surrounding the
Soviet Union was its Achilles Heel. It was the need to ensure secrecy
in all areas of life that caused an “information explosion” by requiring
to maintain huge databases in an endless quantity of cardboard files
crammed with documents; and the more they multiplied the more difficult
access to them became. Most likely, the personal files of not a few
members of the Soviet defense establishment with a high security
classification were lost over the years, and at some point after their
retirement their security classification disappeared. Indeed, they
became free agents, but there were still some difficulties in locating
them and gaining access to them. Against this backdrop, the Israeli
intelligence community succeeded, in the latter half of the 1970s and
the early 1980s, to provide its American counterpart with highly
valuable, original information on the Soviet strategic missile array as
it existed at the end of the 1960s.
Based on the information that Israel provided, one
could construct a detailed and quite accurate picture of the structure
and dispersal of at least some of the Soviet army’s strategic missile
brigades. The information also included details about the testing
grounds for these missiles: they were launched from a field in Baikonur
in Kazakhstan, or from the Plesetsk field in the Arkhangelsk region
about 800 kilometers north of Moscow. The missiles were aimed at the
Kora testing ground in the northern Kamchatka peninsula—more than 8,000
kilometers east of Baikonur and about 5,500 kilometers east of Plesetsk.
At the same time, it appears that the main importance of the
information was technical; it contained detailed technical data on the
R-16 intercontinental missile and its operation. The data also included
highly original information on the thermonuclear warheads of this
missile.
Some of the intelligence information could be
verified with aerial photographs. But it also included details, as well
as rumors, that were verified only later. For example, it included a
rumor about the fatal disaster that occurred in Baikonur field on
October 24, 1960, in which Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the first commander
of the Soviet strategic missile force, was killed along with about a
hundred members of his staff. The occasion was the first test launch of
an R-16 missile to mark the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. A
short time after the incident, the Soviet authorities reported that
Marshal Nedelin had been killed in a plane crash. Soon thereafter,
however, the Italian news agency gave a brief report on the disaster.
Nevertheless, the incident with its full details remained a secret in
Russia. It was only in 1989, almost 30 years later, that the Russian
weekly Ogonek revealed the circumstances of the tragic death of Nedelin
and his crew. The accident occurred when a short circuit in the engine
of the missile’s prototype caused an explosion as it was being
positioned and fueled on the launching pad. Khrushchev had kept
goading Nedelin to carry out the test. Thus, when the problem that
prevented the launching of the missile was discovered, the marshal
rushed to the launching pad to learn what had happened with his
entourage in tow, and then the explosion transpired. The planner of the
missile, Mikhail Yangel, was saved by being in a bunker far from the
launching pad to smoke a cigarette. After the disaster, Khrushchev summoned Yangel and asked, in anger laced with cynicism, “How did you remain alive?” Khrushchev
also appointed Leonid Brezhnev, who would succeed him as Soviet leader,
to head the commission that investigated the disaster. Ironically,
Brezhnev decided against any retribution, declaring that “The guilty
ones have already met their punishment!”
Another reported rumor concerned the “Kyshtym
disaster” (Kyshtym was the city close to the site of the explosion).
This was a radiological-contamination accident that occurred on
September 29, 1957, at the Soviet Mayak facility for recycling
irradiated nuclear fuel and extracting plutonium for nuclear weapons,
which operated in the “closed city” of Chelyabinsk-40 on the eastern
slopes of the southern Ural Mountains. The disaster ensued when the
cooling system of one of the tanks, which contained 70 to 80 tons of
liquid nuclear waste at a high radioactivity level, malfunctioned and
was not immediately repaired. The nuclear waste in the tanks evaporated,
and the high temperature caused a chemical explosion with the power of
70 to 100 tons of TNT. The cloud of radioactive fallout spread for about
300 kilometers, and over the next several years, thousands of people
died as a result.
Another anecdote that was reported and already
known in the West concerned the Tsar Bomba — “king of the bombs” —
explosion of a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb, the largest explosion yield
ever. The bomb was dropped on October 30, 1961, by a Tu-16 bomber over
the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean — on Khrushchev’s
orders with the aim of defying America: “We’ll show you!” The fireball
that emerged from the explosion was eight kilometers in diameter, and
when the blast wave reached Arkhangelsk, about 2,000 kilometers
southwest of the explosion site, it caused ships in the harbor to crash
into each other.
The CIA expressed its gratitude to the Israeli
intelligence community, noting that the received information was
“unique” and had enabled the agency to adjust its intelligence
overestimation on the issue in question. According to a senior CIA
official, the information obtained from Israel indicated that the Soviet
strategic missile technology was of inferior quality than the CIA had
believed. The official said the US intelligence community had feared,
because of the information gaps it faced, that by the 1970s the Soviets
had already developed a technological capability to equip their
intercontinental missiles with MIRV (Multiple Independently Targetable
Reentry Vehicle) warheads. This technology enables the missile, when
reaching the target, to strike a number of objectives simultaneously.
Furthermore, if a MIRV warhead includes decoy devices in addition to
nuclear bombs, it is more immune to interception. Thus, the Israeli
information made a particularly important contribution to the US
defensive capability against a Soviet nuclear strike.
History, however, tends to repeats itself to a
certain extent. The current nuclear threat to the US comes from North
Korea, and, as in the 1970s and 1980s, the US intelligence community has
difficulty collecting and assessing intelligence. But, unlike the
Soviet leadership during the Cold War, which acted in a rational and
calculating manner, Kim Jong-Un’s main hallmark is his unpredictability.
Lt. Col. (ret.) Dr. Raphael Ofek Former senior analyst in IDF military intelligence and the Prime
Minister’s Office. Specializes in WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)
proliferation in the Middle East and North Korea. (Ph.D. Ben-Gurion
University). Email: rhofek@gmail.com
He can be reached at rhofek@gmail.com
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family.
Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Raphael Ofek
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-intelligence-cold-war/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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