[1], he:מוניר רדפא Redfa died sometime around 1998 of a heart attack. [1] Redfa's defection was the subject of the movie Steal the Sky (1988). The third pilot, Munir Redfa was reportedly offered a cash reward and Israeli citizenship. Redfa… Like many other Assyrians, his family fled to Iraq as part of the Christian migration from southeast Turkey and the northwestern mountains of Iran following the Assyrian Genocide. The tipoff came from a Mossad contact in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Later, he joined the Iraqi opposition. How the top-secret unit came to be is so outlandish that it sounds like fiction, but as this first-hand account details, it was anything but. Once in Israeli airspace, he was met by a pair of Israeli Air Force Mirage IIICJ fighters, which escorted him into Hatzor. Remarkably, the MiG-21F-13 was also pressed into action by the Israelis in the 1967 conflict, at a time when the Israeli Air Force needed every serviceable aircraft it could lay its hands on. Redfa was an ethnic Assyrian and a Christian. When touching down in Israel, the jet still wore its Iraqi Air Force markings and carried the Arabic serial number “534” on its nose. The death of the actor Sean Connery at the age of 90 this weekend saw accolades from across the worlds of cinema, celebrity, politics, and more. Taking this evidence alone, the covert acquisition of the Fishbed — under an operation known to Mossad by the codename Diamond and to the Israeli Air Force as Blue Bird — was a success. Knowledge obtained from analysis of the aircraft was instrumental to the successes achieved by the Israeli Air Force in its future encounters with Arab MiG-21s. The reality was much more complex and left a bloody trail of destruction in its wake. It’s not exactly clear why Connery was in Israel, although the visit seems to have occurred in November 1967, after the Six-Day War fought in June between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Thomas and two others were executed in December 1962. This clandestine program was a forerunner to Constant Peg, during which a variety of captured and acquired Soviet-made fighter jets were operated under extreme secrecy from Nevada’s Tonopah Test Range Airport in the late 1970s and 1980s. The MiG-21 fighter was evaluated by the Israeli Air Force and was later loaned to the United States for testing and intelligence analysis, as part of "Have Doughnut". He and his family shortly thereafter moved to another western country. The surplus two-seat F-15s will become key components in Israel's long-range air combat arsenal. Career In what is considered as one of the Mossad"s most successful operations, Redfa"s entire extended family was smuggled safely out of Iraq to Israel. Redfa died of a heart attack around 1998. At some point the Fishbed received outsized Syrian Arab Air Force markings, apparently to increase the level of realism for the dissimilar air combat training sessions staged for Israeli Air Force pilots. According to Iraqi Air Force accounts, this pilot was assassinated after making excessive financial demands in exchange for his defection. If true, this seems like an extraordinary risk to have taken, should the Iraqi authorities have found out once he returned to his country. One of these contacts quickly broke down, however, leading to an Iraqi Air Force captain reportedly being shot dead in a Baghdad apartment by a local Mossad informant, in July 1965. According to Steve Davies’ account in Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs, Israel agreed to the transfer only on the condition that the United States would sell it F-4 Phantom II fighter jets in return. The most well-known part of the story begins with the Iraqi Air Force MiG-21F-13 Fishbed — among the very first production versions of this iconic Soviet-made jet — landing at Hatzor Air Base in central Israel, on August 16, 1966.

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