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Soviet Support for Egypt's Intervention in Yemen, 1962–1963

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Soviet Support for Egypt's Intervention in Yemen, 1962–1963 FerrisSoviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention in Yemen, 1962–1963 Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention in Yemen,1962–1963 ✣ Jesse Ferris - The Air Bridge to San‘a’. In October 1962, as Soviet troops hurried to complete the secret deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, a second drama was unfolding far away in the rugged boondocks of the Eastern Hemisphere. As if to underline that this bold move in the Caribbean was the rule rather than an exception, Nikita Khrushchev had authorized the dispatch of Soviet planes and pilots to the Middle East to help Egypt project force onto the distant battleªeld of Yemen. Gamal Abdel Nasser, still smarting from Syria’s secession from the United Arab Republic a year earlier, was determined to restore Egypt’s prestige and re- capture the initiative in the rancorous struggle for power and legitimacy that characterized inter-Arab politics from 1955 through 1967. His principal ad- versary in that struggle was King Saud of Saudi Arabia, who led the group of conservative Arab leaders opposed to Nasser’s aggrandizement and was ru- mored to have bankrolled the secessionists in Damascus. When, on 26 Sep- tember 1962, a group of self-styled “free ofªcers” toppled the neighboring Imamate of Yemen and proclaimed the establishment of a republic, Nasser perceived a golden opportunity to strike back at his opponents and revive Egypt’s ailing claim to leadership of the nationalist cause. As republican forces frantically tried to stave off collapse of their ºedgling regime at the hands of royalist tribes backed by Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s new president, Colonel ‘Abdullah al-Sallal, turned to the Egyptians for help. Unable to transport the requisite forces with sufªcient dispatch, the Egyptians in turn appealed to the Soviet Union for assistance. As world attention remained riveted on Cuba, thousands of Egyptian soldiers poured into the Arabian Peninsula. Night after night the air bridge continued. Huge Antonov-12 transport planes, painted with the red, white, Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall 2008, pp. 5–36 © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.4.5 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ferris and black of the Egyptian air force but piloted by Soviet aircrews, rolled off the tarmac at Cairo’s al-Maöah airbase laden with everything from MiG ªghters and men to mail and mousetraps. After a brief pitstop at Aswan, the planes continued on their nocturnal journey southward over the Red Sea in darkness and radio silence. Turning inland just before daybreak north of the port city of al-Hudaydah, the aircraft descended at the crack of dawn onto a rough airstrip perched precariously on the mountainous outskirts of Xan‘a’, 7,200 feet above sea level. Within weeks the Antonovs would be joined by Tupolev-16 long-range bombers manned by mixed Soviet-Egyptian crews. Out of their base in Cairo West, they ºew bombing missions over royalist tar- gets in northern Yemen and, on occasion, across the border into Saudi terri- tory.1 1. The story of this little-known episode in Soviet-Egyptian military relations is told in part in the fol- lowing sources: “Polozhenie v Iemenskoi Arabskoi Respublike i Iemeno-OARovskie otnosheniya (spravka),” Memorandum from V. Kornev, deputy director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Near East Department, 13 March 1964, in Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), Mos- cow, Fond (F.) 5, Opis’ (Op.) 30, Delo (D.) 451, Listy (Ll.) 39–40; Lev Bausin, Spetsluzhby mira na Blizhnem Vostoke (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2001), pp. 128–130; Aleksandr Fursenko et al., eds., Prezidium TSK KPSS 1954–1964, 3 vols., Vol. 1: Chernovye protokol’nye zapisi zasedanii, stenogrammy, postanovleniya, rev. ed. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), p. 596; Nikita Khrushchev, N. S. Khrushchev: Vospominaniya—vremya, lyudi, vlast’ (Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999), Vol. 3, p. 446; Sergei Pavlenko, “Bez grifa ‘Sekretno’: Spetszadanie za predelami rodiny,” Krasnaya zvezda, 19 November 1994; Andrei Pochtarev, “Pod chuzhym ºagom,” Krasnaya zvezda, 16 August 2003; I. Shishchenko, ed., Smoliane-Internatsionalisty: Sbornik vospominanii voinov-internatsionalistov Smolenshchiny (Smol- ensk: Smyadyn’, 2000), p. 172; V. Zolotarev, ed., Rossiya (SSSR) v’ lokal’nykh voinakh i voennykh konºiktakh vtoroi poloviny XX veka (Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2000), p. 180; Mahmud‘Adil Ahmad, Dhikrayat harb al-yaman, 1962–1967 (Cairo: Matba‘t al-Ikhwah, 1992), pp. 508–509; WajihAbu Dhikri, al-Zuhur tudfan fi al-yaman (Cairo: Dar al-Watan al-‘Arabi, 1977), pp. 11, 26, 31–32; Mu- hammad Fawzi, Harb al-thalath sanawat 1967/1970: Mudhakkirat al-fariq awwal Muhammad Fawzi, wazir al-harbiyyah al-asbaq (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi, 1984–1986), pp. 23–24; Xalah al-Din al-Hadidi, Shahid ‘alaharb al-yaman (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1984), pp. 48–49, 55–56; Mohrez Mahmoud el-Hussini, Soviet-Egyptian Relations, 1945–85 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), pp. 120–121; ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Khalil, Hurubmixr al-mu‘axirah fi awraqqa’id maydani: 1939–45, 1948–49, 1956, 1962–67, 1967, 1968–70, 1973 (Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi, 1990), pp. 58– 9; Xalah Naxr, Mudhakkirat Xalah Naxr, Vol. 2 (Cairo: Dar al-Khayyal, 1999), p. 373; Oleg Peresypkin, al-Yaman wa al-yamaniyyunfi dhikrayat diblumasi rusi (Beirut: Dar wa Maktabat al-Hilal, 2005), pp. 173–175; al-Quwwat al-Musallahah, No. 417, 16 July 1964, p. 9; “Egyptian Air Force: Record of a Conversation with a Wing Commander of the Indian Air Force,” Memorandum from M. S. Weir (Cairo) to P. H. Laurence, VG 1226/1, 20 November 1962, in The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK), Foreign Ofªce (FO) 371/165401; Cairo to Secretary of State, Airgram No. A- 288, “Joint Weeka No. 40,” 9 October 1962, p. 4, in National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group (RG) 59, Central Decimal Files (CDF) 1960–1963, Box 2073, 786b.00/10- 962; Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935–1990 (London: Wil- liam Heinemann, 1995), p. 250; Muhammad Haykal, The Sphinx and the Commissar: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Inºuence in the Middle East (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 118; Dana Adams Schmidt, Yemen: The Unknown War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), pp. 168–169; and “The Aerial Actions in Yemen,” in United Arab Republic, Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, Division of Instruction, Branch of Educational Institutions, The Operational Military Lessons from Yemen, undated top-secret document captured in Sinai in June 1967, Hebrew trans. (hereinafter cited as OMLY), in ShM/586.140, Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Gelilot, Israel. 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.4.5 by guest on 27 September 2021 Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention in Yemen,1962–1963 Thus began the little-known story of Egypt’s ªve-year intervention in the Yemeni Civil War, an adventure that proved more costly in lives, treasure, and squandered inºuence than any of Egypt’s wars with Israel—with the possible exception of 1967. The campaign not only crippled the Egyptian economy and left a permanent scar on society; it also destroyed Nasser’s neutralist for- eign policy by pushing Egypt onto a path of confrontation with the United States and dependence on the Soviet Union. Although not the total catastro- phe painted by some of the regime’s more sensationalist critics—contempo- raries often compared it to Vietnam—the protracted involvement in a fratri- cidal conºict on the Arabian Peninsula played a central role in Egypt’s decline from preeminence in the Arab world and in the subsequent rise of Saudi power. A set of challenges familiar to students of counterinsurgency combined to rob the Egyptians of the chance for an easy victory: the unforeseen need to adapt to the exigencies of guerrilla warfare presented grave tactical difªcul- ties, and the impossibility of eliminating foreign sanctuaries across the border in U.S.-protected Saudi territory induced strategic paralysis. Above all, the fractiousness of tribal politics undermined the very idea of a centralized re- public, which the Egyptians were committed to uphold. From a few hundred commandos at the beginning of October 1962, the Egyptian expeditionary force grew to roughly 70,000 men by the summer of 1965. Their presence in Yemen threatened both Saudi Arabia and the British position at Aden, pro- ducing a near-immediate Saudi-British rapprochement after decades of conºict. The clash between Egypt and two key American allies on the penin- sula strained U.S.-Egyptian relations to the breaking point. The ensuing sus- pension of U.S. aid to Egypt exacerbated the burden placed by wartime ex- penditure on the economy, which was already strained by the radical socialization drive of the 1960s, and drove Egypt more deeply into the Soviet sphere. As shortages proliferated and casualties mounted, popular discontent soared to a level unknown since the revolution of 1952. All the while, the Egyptian army continued to stagnate in Yemen and became increasingly rest- less and decreasingly prepared for large-scale conventional war. Egypt, in short, was already deep in the throes of political, military, and economic crisis when Israel delivered the coup de grâce to Nasser’s hegemonic ambitions in 1967. Thus the fateful decision to send Egyptian troops into Yemen, the infa- mous “graveyard of the Turks,” carried profound unintended consequences. This article explores the origins, characteristics, and motivations of Soviet as- sistance, without which that decision would not have been possible. 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.4.5 by guest on 27 September 2021 Ferris The Nature of Soviet Relations with Egypt and Yemen On the face of it, the extent of Soviet participation seems bafºing.
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