The Iraqi pilot who stole a MiG-21 for the Mossad

            During the height of the Cold War, two countries, the U.S. and Russia, were the world’s superpowers. Countries around the world aligned themselves with either one of them and received financial and military aid from the mother country. One of the biggest exports was fighter aircraft and in the 1960s the Russian built MiG-21 was delivered to many communist friendly countries.

            The one catch was that the Russians would have their own advisers and security details on each aircraft delivered. Most countries despised this and the west (U.S., Britain and France etc.) devised schemes to steal the blueprints or even a jet itself. Many attempts ended in failure and in some cases, the spies were executed. The Israeli Mossad, who had been part of the undercover plans from the beginning, decided to try a novel idea. Convince a pilot to defect to Israel. An Iraqi pilot had been identified as a possible target. His name was Captain Munir Redfa.

            The story begins with an Iraqi Jew whose name was Joseph (his last name is unknown). Most Jews had left Iraq by the 1960s, but Joseph, who lived with a Maronite Christian family, stayed. One day he began to explore his roots, discovered the Jews and Israel and decided that his ultimate job was to help the Israelis in any way possible. There are many non-Muslim and non- Arabs living in the Middle East and the Israelis have made it a point to reach out to these minorities for intelligence. Maronite Christians for the most part were not given high-ranking jobs in the military, and Redfa, a 32 year old with a young family, was only one of a few Christian pilots in the air force. His family fled from Turkey (they were Assyrians) to Iraq before he was born. He was upset with the pressures and unfair treatment that he was receiving from the Iraqi high brass. He told Joseph that he would like to leave the country and Joseph in turn contacted the Israeli Embassy in Tehran (Iran was an ally until 1979) and told them that he would be able to put them in contact with a pilot in the Iraqi Air Force.

            Most of the supervisors in the Mossad dismissed the thought of pulling off the mission as too dangerous and unrealistic. However, the commander of the Mossad, Meir Amit, realized the potential of Joseph and assigned their top agent Joseph Shamash to the case. Shamash convinced him to fly to Italy to meet Zeev Liron. Liron met him as a fellow pilot and was the first to tell him that the Israelis wanted him to defect. When he heard this, he almost fainted and said, “My MiG? To Israel? Are you guys out of your minds?”

            An American woman, who was their top agent in Bagdad, was also assigned to draw out Redfa and his family and slowly convince him to defect to Israel. His squadron had been tasked with bombing the defenseless Kurds and he told her that he “found himself in violent disagreement with the current war being waged by his government against the minority Kurdish tribesmen in northern Iraq.” According to some reports he told her that he even had a secret admiration for the Israelis who fighting so many with so few. She convinced him to fly to Israel on a trip where he would meet people who could help him his problems.

            In Israel, he finally realized that the Israelis were serious in getting his MiG-21, but he agreed to go through with it because they were offering $1 million, Israeli citizenship and to recue his entire family from Iraq and bring them to Israel. He met with the commander of the Israeli Air Force, Mordecai Hod, who laid out the entire escape plan and all of the possible dangers that could possibly arise, including if the Iraqis discovered the plane missing and sent other fighters to shoot it down. He was also shown where he would land his MiG and other key points for the excursion. They went through the plan until Redfa knew it by heart and before departing, he told Hod that he would bring him the plane.

            There was only one person left to convince. The night before the escape Munir’s immediate family was in a Mossad safe house in France (they were told that they were going on vacation). Betty Redfa, Munir’s wife, had not been told of the plan and when Liron met her, she threatened to expose the plan to the Iraqi authorities. Eventually, Munir was able to calm her down and she was put on a flight to Tel Aviv.

            Redfa picked the date for his escape on August 16, 1966. He told his ground crew to fill up the fuel tanks. Normally he would have needed Russian approval to do so, but the crew was also annoyed with the communists and they happily obeyed their commander’s orders. After taking off he veered off course and the air traffic controllers tried frantically to reach him over the radio. They kept on calling for his plane to turn around. Redfa simply shut off the radio. As he got closer to Israel, the IAF (Israeli Air Force) picked his plane up on radar and sent Mirages to escort him to the Tel Nof air base in the Negev. After landing safely, the Israelis immediately started inspecting the plane.

            Newspapers worldwide carried the sensational story of the MiG pilot who defected to Israel. The Russians were furious, because the defection seriously diminished their credibility and prestige. Now the west would have the key to defeat the Russians in air battles and called upon Israel to return the plane. The Israelis ignored the request.

            The Israeli foreign office started to field many phone calls from western nations wanting to inspect the aircraft. However, so as not to infuriate the Russians even more, the IAF kept the plane for several months before loaning it to the Americans. The plane was sent to the Nevada Desert, where US Air Force pilots learned its secrets so that they could prepare to fight it over the battlefields in Vietnam.

            The Iraqis were even more embarrassed than the Russians because Redfa had been a star pilot- not a mental case they would have liked imagine. After the defection, no Christians were allowed to join the air force until the American invasion in 2003.  

            The secrets to fighting the MiG-21 in an aerial dogfight became essential for the IAF in the coming year. During a dogfight with Syrian MiGs in April 1967, the Israelis shot down six with no loss of their own. Less than a year after the defection, the secrets to fighting the plane were used during the Six Day War and thanks were handed to Redfa and his MiG.

            Joseph, the Iraqi Jew who had arranged the meeting between the Mossad and Redfa, chose to remain in Iraq, and because it took the Russians years to piece the whole story together, never discovered his part of the plan. The rest of the Redfa family was secretly transported from Iraq and moved to Israel. Munir died in 1998, leaving behind a story of how the Mossad stole the latest and best fighter aircraft in the Russian military during the height of the Cold War. 

The man who stole Khrushchev's speech

            On February 25, 1956, Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev gave a four-hour speech to the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party. Before the speech, he kicked out all reporters and foreign diplomats for security reasons. Western countries were more than curious to find out what he said during that secret speech. They knew that he denounced many of Joseph Stalin’s actions as barbarism. The West knew that if they could get the contents of the speech, they could let the world know the truth about communism. At that point in time, many people, including high-ranking Americans, tried to rationalize communism saying it was humanistic. They needed the speech badly, but the problem was that it remained a top-secret document, so the CIA put out a huge reward for a copy.

            The one security lapse in the Russian plan was that they had delivered copies of the speech to Eastern Bloc countries. Poland’s communist party leader, Edward Ochab, had his copy on the desk of his secretary, Lucia Baranowski, who was waiting to the end of the day to file the speech. Lucia’s boyfriend, Victor Grayevsky, came into to visit her, but she was too busy to leave. As he was about to leave he saw the red-bound speech marked with top-secret on her desk. He asked her if he could borrow it for an hour. She said fine and to be sure to return it at the end of the day.

            Before continuing, it is important to know about Victor Grayevsky’s background. He was born Victor Spielman in Krakow in 1925 and because he was journalist for the communist party he changed his name to Grayevsky so that he wouldn’t arouse suspicion because he was Jewish. His family had moved to Israel in 1949 and in 1955, he went there to visit his sick father. He was planning to move to Israel as soon as his visa was approved. Even though he had no formal spy training, he had Zionist sympathies and would do anything to help his future country.

            On the way back to his apartment, Grayevsky read the document and was shocked to read about all the atrocities that Stalin carried out. On the way back to return it, he stopped at the Israeli embassy to see his friend Yaakov Barmor, who was also a member of the Shin-Bet. Grayevsky later said that Barmor “ went pale, he went red, he went black, because he knew better than I what it was…that everyone throughout the world was looking for this speech.” Barmor asked to borrow it and within an hour and a half had copied the speech and Grayevsky was sent back to Lucia’s office.

            Barmor immediately flew to Vienna, Austria and handed the speech to Amos Manor who was the head of Shin-Bet. Manor than flew to Israel and showed it to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion who told Manor to give it to Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. Within a few weeks, the speech was “leaked” to the New York Times and the world finally learned of the horrors done by the early communists.

            Grayevsky moved to Jerusalem in early 1957 and had a low paying job in the foreign ministry when the KGB recruited him to spy on Israel. After all, he was a communist living in enemy territory and was employed by the host government, so he seemed the perfect spy. He gave them sensitive information and other secrets and was even awarded a medal for his heroism to the motherland.

            He was so good that the Russians never suspected that they were being duped. In reality, Grayevsky was a double agent (a spy for one country but has allegiances to another) and as soon as the KGB recruited him, he went to the Shin-Bet and they gave him falsified information to pass on to the Russians.

            One of his major successes while working for Shin-Bet was when he passed on a copy of a meeting between Russian generals and Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. Many of his meetings with his KGB handler (the middle agent who would get the information from the spy and pass it on to the higher authorities) took place on the lawn of the Russian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. There were many spies posing as priests and with Grayevsky’s information, Shin-Bet raided the church and arrested many KGB spies.

            The KGB handlers would sometimes give him money for his and Grayevsky would immediately turn it over to Shin-Bet. He said, “I was very proud and happy that KGB money was funding the Shin-Bet.” As for the medal that he was awarded, they told him that it was waiting for him in Moscow. Needless to say, he never picked it up.

            After 14 years working as a double agent, Grayevsky stopped working for Shin-Bet in 1971 to work full-time in radio broadcasting. Retiring in 2000, he wrote down his memoirs in a book but because he was unheard of (no one had reported that he was the one who had stolen Khrushchev’s speech) it went unpublished. He had assumed that many copies of the speech were sent to the CIA and Shin-Bet and only after he retired was he told of the impact his copy and it was the only one that they had received.  It was only after his death in 2007 at the age of 82 did some newspapers pick up the incredible story of how the Jewish journalist from Poland stole Khrushchev’s speech.