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Middle East Review of International Affairs
The Cold War's Longest Cover-Up: How and Why the USSR Instigated the 1967 War
by Isabella Ginor
*
Abstract
The Soviet warning to Egypt about supposed Israeli troop concentrations on the Syrian border in May 1967 has long been considered a blunder that precipitated a war which the USSR neither desired nor expected. New evidence from Soviet and other Warsaw Pact documents, as well as memoirs of contemporary actors, contradicts this accepted theory. The author demonstrates that this warning was deliberate disinformation, part of a plan approved at the highest level of Soviet leadership to elicit Egyptian action that would provoke an Israeli strike. Soviet military intervention against the "aggressor" was intended to follow and was prepared well in advance.
Full PDF Document, 26 pages, 142 kb
Note *: Isabella Ginor, a Fellow of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, thanks the Institute for a research grant on the Soviet military involvement in the Arab- Israeli conflict, which facilitated the research for and writing of this paper. She thanks Dr. Stefan Meining of Munich for granting access to Stasi documents he uncovered; Brook Lapping Productions for permission to quote from material relating to "The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs," a six part television documentary made by Brian Lapping Associates, 1998; and the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London for granting of access to, and permission to quote, interview transcripts from this material (henceforth referred to as "transcripts;" spelling and grammar reflect the text of the original English translation). She is also the author of "The Russians Were Coming: The Soviet Military Threat in the 1967 Six-Day War" which appeared in the December 2000 issue of MERIA. Back