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.