Steve DaviesTed
Thanks for the mature, balanced and enlightening response.
I hope that it gives some of the nay sayers here some points of reference when referring to the book.
Cheers
Steve
Steve DaviesWell….
Mr. Davies,Your book and the guys who was in that business and the guys who maintained the MiG-23 in WP are much more interesting for me than this meaningless conversation.
Thanks, Robert.
Please do let me know if you have any feedback, as I would be interested in hearing the views of someone who was sat on the other side of the fence.
Also, if you get the chance, I would be very interested in seeing or hearing about some of the intel reports you mentioned that the WP had on US equipment and operations.
Cheers
Steve
Steve DaviesBeen reading / re-reading since Steve Davies informed me there were some “less than favorable” comments from people who werent there (TTR). I was there from Day 1. We were tasked with maintaining the Fleet of MiGs to provide exposure and “Buck Fever”prevention to U.S. pilots / aircrews. We did not evaluate the MX proceedures,nor did we operate as a WP Unit would. That was not our purpose. We copied no one and didnt try to be anything out of the ordinary. It kinda’ boils down to”whats the best way to kill a MiG? Lets get some, fly them and figure it out.Keep in mind PLEASE that MX guys are NOT FIGHTER PILOTS and by the same token, Fighter Pilots are NOT MX GUYS. Rarely could the two species agree 100% on the good vs bad points of a given piece of equipment. As for MX, of all the assets, the 21 was my favorite. relatively simple, dependable, didnt take much time to turn and had no really bad features. IMO, the 23 was not that great and had some issues. I wouldnt call it a piece of crap,but it was close.If some out there are offended, too bad.
Don
Good to hear someone who was actually there clarify the role and nature of the unit.
From the pilot side, I know that Ted Drake is going to chime in soon, too.
Cheers
Steve
Steve DaviesAbsolutely Not !
It is very hard and slow business for me, because my language barrier.
I appreciate that.
Have you ever “tested” your pilots with straight questions about this topic ?
Please try to check the knowledge of some USAFE guys from the 70s about WP, technical details of the MiG-21bis, Su-17. It will hard, because they have many infos from later years, but if you can find fair guys with fresh memories – better with exercise-books with dates at the infos;) -you can have some interesting discussions.
This is a valid question.
Can you recommend some good questions to ask?
Steve DaviesI see somebody wrote a report about a Su-20 wreck in September 1975, who do not know the engine itself…in my reading it is frivolous.
It was a metallurgical study, and the report you are reading is the second of two *interim* versions.
The exact designation of the motor, which was no doubt properly identified later, is not important for the purposes of educating scientists and engineers (the principle audience for this data).
Again, you are judging something without even considering the context in which it was written, and nor are you recognising that it is just a part of a series of documents written along a continuum that started in April 1974.
I think if you start to read something scientific and you realized same on the first page, you will bounce it out through the window without hesitation.
Really? So, the engineers at GE, Vought, NA and Rockwell should have put a 128 page metallurgical study in the bin because an interim report didn’t have the exact model and block of motor identified? Wow.
Steve DaviesIt will very interesting for you to read same reports from Soviet sources from the same period.
I am all ears. Where are they?
Steve DaviesObviously the US had no contact with any people on the other side who were in touch with the Su-20 in 1975 September.
Sorry Gents – for me it fits again very well in the picture of the limited intell-sources of the West.
Sainz
That is a massive statement, and I fear that it is ill-founded.
This report was written by the Foreign Technology Division, and as such represents only a fraction of the analysis on this particular type of a/c.
It is known (as per my book) and acknowledged that different intelligence agencies did not share information, even when instructed to do so.
More to the point, reports like these deliberately left out significant details that exceeded the security classification of the source, even to the point of allowing misleading or erroneous information to remain: the classified Flogger briefing that the Air Force continued to give to the TAF, despite knowing it was not correct having executed HAVE PAD, is a classic example. This report is classified only SECRET and is therefore intended to be read by a general audience. It is not a SAP or SCI report that would require codename access.
In summary, you are making a very significant statement about the intelligence capabilities of an entire nation without fully recognising – or at least, acknowledging – that the report cannot and should not be taken in isolation.
Anyway, draw your own conclusion……
I don’t think that there are many valid conclusions that you can draw. See the points made above.
This document is talking more colourful than anybody else – there were NO any such Fitter-related intell-tours (what the Constant Peg pilots described) pre-September 1975, or if were, those were absolutely fruitless !
We don’t know that.
This is one report written by a compartmentalised team that would not have been privy to a wealth of other collected data.
It is standard in intel circles to compartmentalise activities such as those you speak of – for example, many of the Red Eagles had *no idea* what their colleagues were doing when they dissappeared off for weeks at a time; when they came back, they would still be no wiser. Tony Mahoney told me that until he read my book, he had no clue whatsover. likewise, the MiG exploitations that preceded Constant Peg were heavily compartmentalised, as were those technical exploitations that went on concurrently with Constant Peg.
The truth is that you and I do not know what the CIA, DIA and any other ‘black’ intelligence agencies were doing, or what they knew. Just because they didn’t tell the Air Force, or didn’t share information, doesn’t mean they didn’t know it – see the MiG-21 Rolodex story in my book as an example.
Steve DaviesCountermeasures: “martinez” answered partly, more details in my coming book;)
That’s a book I greatly look forward to.
Steve DaviesIn the late 70s Egypt sold two Fitter C to Germany for testing.
http://www.flugzeugbilder.de/show.php?id=822938
Yes, I am still working on the US side to that particular story.
Steve DaviesIn this case the wreck of the Su-20 was most probably an Egyptian Fitter:
” several Egyptian Su-20s were shot down over the (Israeli-occupied) Deversoir area, in closing stages of the 1973 War.” – Tom Cooper
That makes sense.
But for eternal doubters – like me – as you wrote:
“Obviously, there are numerous ways they could have come by this material,”
:diablo:
Steve Daviesexactly…:)
I asked, because I heard from different sources – WP pilots from diff countries – this info arrived to the Soviets through the Czechoslovak intell-lines earlier, than from anywhere else.
Rumour or not – I do not know….
What did you hear/learn about it? And how did you counter it?
Steve DaviesI find that extremely hard to believe. Any crash site in WP countries was completely sealed within hours, just like on the other side of the curtain. Anything useful was immediately removed…
Are you sure that you pilots didn’t just want to add some James Bond mentality to their everyday job? Sounds like a script for a 4th class action movie starring Michael Dudikoff.
Flex
I honestly don’t know what the exact details of these trips were, but I do have declassified FME reports that show the US acquired crashed MiG components. I don’t think that it is unreasonable to think that they dispatched teams to help make this possible, and the impression I get is that these were sometimes covert in nature (i.e. Visas were not applied for).
I attach, by way of example, a scan of one page of the HAVE FOAM report. It discusses, in the first paragraph, that the project was concerned with the exploitation of material from “crashed Su-20 Fitter C”. Obviously, there are numerous ways they could have come by this material, but I am inclined to believe what I am being told, and don’t really subscribe to the idea of them adding a little enigma to their stories a la James Bond 🙂
Steve Davies“Semi-offtopic”, few pics from my archive, I hope you will enjoy:
http://www.scramble.nl/forum/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=48711&hilit=soviet
sainz = RobertS;)p.s.; Sorry, I have very basic English.
Nice shots.
Thanks for sharing!
Steve DaviesHmmm…sounds interesting.
They had operational Soviet planes, and they sent his best pilots to comb wrecks for spares, from behind the “Wall”…So…in “my range”, I can not imagine that “wreck-check” for spares….
But who knows…maybe was an other “WP-light-country” with soft rules…;)
I can only tell you what two pilots and a handful of maintainers have told me off the record.
These men, specially selected from an already elite group, were told to keep their passports on them at all times, and would make hastily-arranged trips to crash sites. In fact, it wasn’t only these men that did it, it was also members of the intel communities.
Maybe…
They went to the local embassy to do those “interviews”…not too risky, travelling as diplomats.
That’s also how I had imagined that it worked.
Maybe…
From my viewpoint it is an urban-legend only from the Constant Peg pilots, that you can not check(I can not check too).
Just comment….
This is true; I cannot check it.
I can tell you that I believe it to be true. Based on hearing about some of the activities of FTD analysts, on having had a number of FME reports declassified, and on some of the stories I have been told by intel officers who worked in FME, I think it has credence.
Maybe…
I know dozens of WP pilots, who were trained in the Sovietunion(late 70s early 80s) and later went to AF Academys to the US and to NATO.
They met with endless questions(from classmates and intel-guys) about the Cold-War era.Also I was there at many DACT, when NATO fighters arrived to fly against the MiG-29, “guest-flys” in MiG-21UM -23UM….the same questions from them….
And the same surprised faces everywhere;)
I am sure that this is true. What was your job?
… much more likely paid locals or low level agents but i’m not in the spy game so I wouldn’t know. Perhaps Steve could clarify for us.
I don’t think that they hung around. I was given the impression that it was a quick in and out affair. Sadly, I can’t say more than that because I just don’t know 🙁
Steve DaviesDid the ‘Red Eagles’ question themselves in the hindsight about the deeper sense by generating adversary training by such unsuited items?
At the time, I don’t think that they really did: they accepted the drastically increased risk to life and limb until they were closed down in March 1988. They were prepared to accept the risks because the pay-off was so exceptionally valuable.
In hindsight, I think that quite a few of them recognise today that they really were lucky not to have suffered more losses as they ‘felt their way in the dark’.
I hope that the book is transparent enough for most reasonable readers to recognise that these men didn’t always get it right and were not perfect. For example, they knew about cracks in the Flogger’s wing through box and they knew how the Soviets had fixed this, but they didn’t have the capacity to fix it themselves. While they worked all of this out, their Floggers sat grounded for more than six months.
I have asked a couple of Red Eagles to come and read the thread and post their responses. I have no idea if they will, but I hope so. Should they do so, you’ll be able to get an answer to this question direct from the source.
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