THE PYRAMID SCHEME, PART 1: HOW TO STEAL A MiG

True Spies, Episode 138, The Pyramid Scheme, Part 1: How to Steal a MiG

Welcome to True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino and this is True Spies from SPYSCAPE Studios. The Pyramid Scheme, Part 1: The Three-Stage Plan.

STEVE DAVIES: It flew through the dead of night, arriving in Cairo, and made all the usual communications that you would expect with air traffic control. But at some point, as it approached Cairo, turned off its navigation lights, stopped talking to air traffic control, and then flew at a low level down the Nile to a secret air base. 

NARRATOR: Egypt, the late 1970s. In the dark, black stillness of a September evening a covert operation is underway. An unidentified aircraft is flying low over Egyptian airspace. The only clue to its presence is the distinct, shrill noise of the engines. A trained ear would recognize it instantly. The crew radios air traffic control one last time before bringing the aircraft around to a southerly trajectory and increasing power once more. Now, the only thing standing between success and failure is the thin screen of darkness.

PAULA: The ambassador had, I believe, six bodyguards with him at all times. And my father, who never carried a handgun, decided that he probably ought to and the CIA believed he should. So he carried a pistol for six months until the threat was over. 

NARRATOR: An American spy finds himself far from home trying to close a risky deal with a cagey partner. The Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, has been re-evaluating the country's global affiliations - particularly, its long-standing arms deal with Moscow. The Russians have a new weapon in their arsenal - the MiG-23 fighter jet - and the US knows almost nothing about it. The CIA is eager to fill this gap in its intelligence and has devised a mission that falls on the shoulders of one man.

STEVE DAVIES: It's important that they get hold of the MiG-23 because the MiG-23 is seen as the greatest threat to America's new series of fighters. So they are developing the F-15, the F-16, the F-14, and the F-18 will arrive during the ‘70s as well. All of these things are built predicated on assessments that they're making about Russian capability.

NARRATOR: But if the plan is to succeed, it’s going to require strong nerves, charm, diplomacy, and perfect timing. Egypt might be more open to flirting with the West, but divorcing the Russians won’t be easy.

STEVE DAVIES: They were friends with Russia. They had acquired a whole swathe of different bits of capability from surface-to-air missiles through to MiG jet fighters and then medium-sized bombers. But that relationship has turned sour. 

NARRATOR: This is Steve Davies, an author, and former aerospace and military aviation journalist. He’ll be one half of our story-telling duo on this adventure. And our True Spy? He’s an old hand in the Middle East, and he’s eager to serve. He’s seen action before but this time it'll be different, delicate, and dangerous all at the same time. His name is Jim Fees and he was a decorated CIA operative. Jim is no longer with us. He died in 2017. But, as our second guide to this story, we’ve enlisted someone who knew him and the mission intimately. She’s asked not to be named here, so we’ll call her Paula. She’s Jim Fees’ daughter.

PAULA: Only daughter and only child. He called me eagle-eyed. I noticed everything. I see everything. He was eagle-eyed. I mean, that was part of his training as well. But I think I somehow inherited that from him.

NARRATOR: On paper, this mission is a routine asset extraction. In civilian language that just means he needs to move something valuable out of one country and back to the US for intelligence purposes. That something valuable is the coveted MiG-23, a Russian fighter jet at the cutting edge of military aviation tech. But obtaining a jet in Egypt will not be easy. The country is still recovering from its defeat in the Yom Kippur War with Israel a few years earlier - a heavy loss that has only reinforced political tensions in the region. If Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is to restore his Army’s strength, a new alliance with the US might just be the ticket. But he’s understandably cautious about entering into a partnership with the Americans so soon after they’ve contributed to Egypt’s defeat by backing the Israelis. Sadad is shrewd though. He knows that his fleet of MiG-23s is of interest to the CIA. But he’s also acutely aware that his bargaining chip has a time limit. After all, if the Americans don’t get one from him, there’s a chance they might go elsewhere.

STEVE DAVIES: We're at a time in the mid to late 1970s when the Cold War is at its height. The US Air Force and the US military, in general, have a very expensive and well-developed foreign military acquisition program whereby they are going around the world. They're going to bazaars. They're going to crash sites. They're going to any locale where they think they can get access to Soviet-made or Russian-created military technology to bring it home and then to exploit it. 

NARRATOR: The problem is that the MiG-23 has eluded the US Military thus far. Clearly, the Americans can’t just buy one from the Russians, which is why the CIA hopes Egypt might be open to negotiations. If the US Air Force can secure one, it might find a vulnerability in this mysterious aircraft and that could swing the needle in their favor should the Cold War ever heat up. But Egypt and Russia have been sweethearts since long before America came on the scene and it’s hard to break up when you’re so tied up.

STEVE DAVIES: Russia provides very good financial incentives. So they loan money. They allow delayed repayments. They have a very, very small interest rate and the repayments can be made over many, many years. And, without that, you are going to struggle. A country like Egypt is going to struggle to be able to buy the equipment that it wants and the quantities that it wants. 

NARRATOR: To understand why Egypt has bound itself to Russia, we have to look back to the first half of the 20th century. The Kingdom of Egypt gained independence from the British in 1922. Then, in 1952, the Egyptian Revolution kick-started a wave of political change throughout the Arab World. Monarchs were out. Presidents were in. President Sadat came to power in 1970 after his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, died of a heart attack. Sadat was keen to break away from many of his predecessor’s economic and political principles, including Egypt’s strategic partnership with Moscow. He’s ready to make his own special relationships. Meanwhile, the US is going through its own political upheaval. Public faith in government is still reeling from the Nixon Watergate scandal and his replacement, Vice President Gerald Ford, just lost the election to Jimmy Carter. Both at home and on the global stage, America is feeling bruised. Recession and the ongoing conflict in Vietnam has further dampened the appetite for war as the country struggles to deal with the worst economy since the Great Depression. In short, America needs to flex its global muscle. 

STEVE DAVIES: The might and the prowess and the technological advantage that America thought that it had, I think was notched down a peg or two during the Vietnam conflict. So they discovered that the Russians had the ability to be fairly innovative and to develop capabilities that they didn't think they would have. So they're coming off of the back of that experience and they're probably a little insecure.

NARRATOR: This is where Jim Fees comes in.

STEVE DAVIES: Jim has been set the task of going to Egypt and acquiring a MiG-23, which is one of the most modern and arguably most enigmatic of the Russian jet fighters in terms of American military knowledge about it being pretty much nonexistent there. 

NARRATOR: Despite being drafted for the military, Jim’s path to the Middle East didn’t begin in active service or through years of climbing the ranks. Instead, it started at the dinner table of a family home on the outskirts of Augusta, Georgia.

PAULA: He was going to university and then he was drafted. So he spent two years in the Army. Then, when he was in the Army and Camp Gordon in Georgia, he met a lovely lady whom he dated. And it turned out that this lady's sister was a CIA recruiter. He didn't know that at the time. I think he was even engaged to the girl. And so he spent a lot of time with the family at their house and the sister got to know him. And before he left back to university, she suggested that he might want to apply for a job with the CIA.

NARRATOR: As you may have guessed, the relationship with his then-fiancee didn’t work out but the career advice did. Jim applied to the CIA and the interview went well but they told him he should finish his studies, so that’s what he did. He finished university but the minute he could, he marched right back up to the CIA recruiting center. Jim’s enthusiasm and education paid off and before long, he’s dodging real bullets in the Middle East. In the early ‘60s, he was posted to Yemen.

PAULA: That's really, probably, the most crazy posting he had. He was the only CIA officer in the country. It was during a civil war. He was basically on his own and being shot at, and nearly kidnapped, and all sorts. That was a really, really dramatic tour, but that's when he received his first medal and was very quickly recognized as being very good at what he did.

NARRATOR: There’s a paradox in the CIA. If you manage to come out of a dangerous placement alive, you’re often rewarded with even more perilous assignments. It might not sound like much of an incentive but for true spies like Jim, it’s what he signed up for. And his successful tours in Yemen and other locations in the Near East made him the perfect candidate to work with the Egyptians. Jim was just glad that there wasn’t an active conflict going on. For once, he’s not going to be shot at.

PAULA: I think I was very aware, very young, of danger. And that we had to be careful that we didn't talk to strangers, that we had guards and that kind of thing. So it was more that element, I think, than any sort of subterfuge. Also my father in Cairo, my father was very absent because he worked all the time.

NARRATOR: Jim’s treading a super-fine line here, and one that is being constantly redrawn. After two decades, much of the Cold War is being fought behind closed doors. There’s a secret race going on between Russia and the US to enlist as many countries as possible onto their respective military supply chains. A war that’s being fought over the negotiating table mostly.

STEVE DAVIES: It's almost as though the world is a playground for the United States and Russia. And they're going into the playground and trying to bribe the other children in the playground with their sweets and with their toys and, if not, bully them by taking their lunch money and beating them up. 

NARRATOR: The two superpowers - with a mixture of threats and backhanders - are trying to persuade Egypt to come over to their side. They’re lining up alliances for a moment in the future when they’ll really be needed. The Russians were particularly shrewd with their offerings. They’re seducing enemies of the US with attractive military packages. This leaves the Americans with two options: Compete for the same government spending dollars or find the weakness in Soviet hardware and exploit it.

STEVE DAVIES: It's difficult to feel sorry for any nation that supplies its military hardware to another nation because that's the nature of relationships. They ebb and flow. They go one way and then they go the other. 

NARRATOR: The Russians knew they were taking a risk in the Middle East. Sentiment toward the Americans was changing, which made the potential for their hardware falling into enemy hands increasingly realistic. But they calculated that by selling slightly inferior versions of their MiGs to these third countries, they’d still maintain some advantage, should one be seized. Which brings us back to Anwar Sadat’s defeat in the Yom Kippur War a few years earlier in 1973. 

STEVE DAVIES: One of the reasons that they were comprehensively beaten during Yom Kippur was because the Israelis had the F-4 Phantom II, which was the premier fighter that was available to Israel at the time, and it was one of America's premier fighters. 

NARRATOR: Israel was under attack from Syria from the north and Egypt to the south. It should have been overwhelmed but its victory shone a light on the secret global arms race happening in the shadows. President Sadat had just seen what US fighter planes were capable of firsthand. He realized that no amount of generous repayment plans matters if you’re fighting a foe with superior technology. US Secretary of State Henry Kissenger spotted an opportunity. 

PAULA: Kissinger wanted him there - not to recruit agents but to essentially facilitate the relationship between the United States and Egypt. And to make them friendlier with the US versus the Soviet Union who had been their previous supporters.

NARRATOR: Kissinger knew Jim Fees had been stationed in Jordan. He also knew the country was being ravaged by civil war. It was such a high-risk environment his wife and daughter had been evacuated, leaving Jim there alone and likely very open to being posted somewhere else - somewhere like Egypt.

STEVE DAVIES: It does appear that this wasn't just happenstance that Jim didn't just go to Egypt as station chief and work from the ground up, let's say, to develop the relationship. It does look like the United States at a political level was talking to Egypt and there was agreement that the relationship needed to be developed and could be beneficial for both parties. 

NARRATOR: Jim was brought on to seduce Egypt and bring her over to the American side. He quickly accepted and took up his new position as chief of station in Cairo, bringing his wife and five-year-old daughter, Paula, with him.

PAULA: I didn't think that much of it at the time until my mother announced that I had to have something like 24 vaccinations before going. And so, she bribed me with my favorite foods for a few weeks while I got all of the different vaccinations. 

NARRATOR: Jim knew full well that going to Cairo meant more secrets, more cover stories, and the stresses that come with living a double life. What Paula saw on the outside was far from the full story but there are always tells - tells that an eagle-eyed five-year-old might even pick up on.

PAULA: I think I knew instinctively, at least in Egypt, it was quite obvious that he was important because we had a very big house for a small family. We had guards outside the gates. I had, well, we had a driver who carried a gun. And so it was, I suppose, pretty obvious to me that he was important. Let's put it that way. 

NARRATOR: Important he may have been, but Jim knew that the key to achieving anything, especially overseas in politically sensitive locations, is a strong network. Kissinger, back in the US, may have opened the door to some of Egypt’s high-ranking politicians, but Jim knew that that wouldn’t be enough. If he was going to secure a MiG-23, he was going to need to get closer - much closer - to the people that mattered. Fortunately, this is the 1970s. You may have thought that Connery’s Martini-swilling Bond was using a bit of creative license, but it turns out even diplomats in Egypt aren’t adverse to a cocktail with a Maraschino cherry floating in it.

PAULA: My mother had a binder that I found years ago now, and we laughed about it because these were expenses, if you will, that they could claim but it was a list of babysitters for me because they had parties to attend to and it was literally every day, every night. And my father used to tell stories about how much he hated the Ramadan period because they would be invited to the breaking of the fast, the dinners, but they'd be invited to two or three a night and so they would literally go from one dinner to the next. Or to the next dinner and come back at 3 am, 4 am. Plus a lot of American dignitaries would come out - the senators, the congressmen or whomever - and they regularly come out on visits and so my parents would have to host dinners or cocktail parties for them. So yes, that element of martinis and cocktail parties was very accurate.

NARRATOR: Jim was working as hard as he could - and yes, working the room is still working - to get the ear of someone with the direct authority to give him what he wanted. Fortunately, Jim’s ambition, it turned out, was only matched by his charm and wit. No one could tell a story like Jim could and it earned him some important friends - much sooner than his bosses imagined.

PAULA: He was welcomed into the inner circle quite easily. I think they were cautious, certainly at the beginning. But he had a very good relationship with Sadat, the president, with Mubarak, the vice president.

NARRATOR: Sadat and Mubarak knew they held the keys to Egypt’s trove of Russian fighter jets. They had warmed to Jim and were starting to trust him. But Sadat would need a little more than a well-mixed Old Fashioned to be convinced to hand over a MiG. Sadat had been eager to wind down Egypt’s strategic partnership with Russia but he wasn’t going to simply roll over for the Americans. Jim knew all this so he wouldn’t just come out and ask for one. Would he?

STEVE DAVIES: He does ask and I think he's asking because you'd be stupid not to. And you need to test the water. You need to see what the response is like. You need to understand what the objections are. Is it a conversation? Is it not a conversation? 

NARRATOR: The answer? A firm but polite ‘no’.

PAULA: And so he dropped it. And I think he realized that it was better to grow and nurture the relationships he had.

NARRATOR: Jim was about to receive another, much more pressing piece of news. President Sadat’s foreign policy wasn’t going down well with a certain problem neighbor. Colonel Muammar Gadhafi was frustrated by Egypt and Syria’s bungled efforts during the Yom Kippur War with Israel. Sadat had rejected Gadhafi’s offer to cooperate against the Israelis. Worse, he was considering a peace treaty, which only further enraged the Libyan leader. During the 1970s, hostages were becoming an increasingly common bargaining tool among some of America’s enemies in the region so any American official camping out in Gadhafi’s neck of the woods was a potential target.

PAULA: My father was told that the CIA station in Tripoli, Libya had come across very detailed information that showed that Gadhafi wanted to kill either our ambassador there in Cairo, Hermann Eilts, or the chief of station, Fees. And they provided the names of the assassins and a lot of detail. So it was considered a valid threat. And so the CIA, as I understand it, has its own cohort of bodyguards if you will. And so, two came out to Cairo, one for my father and one for me, because they were concerned that he might be difficult to get to and that they might decide to kidnap me instead.

NARRATOR: Jim was no stranger to serious heat. He’d been a high-profile American in the Middle East for long enough to know it comes with consequences but this new threat couldn’t have come at a worse time. He was about to implement a new plan to secure access to a MiG-23. The last thing he wanted was to put his family in danger, even if that’s what it took to secure the asset.

PAULA: My father, who never carried a handgun, decided that he probably ought to and the CIA believed he should. 

NARRATOR: Here’s what Jim wrote in his journal at the time about the need to carry a weapon. “After some renewed practice at the Egyptian Presidential Guard shooting range, I carried a 9mm, 16-shot Browning automatic with me 24/7 for six months while worrying about the safety of my wife and my young daughter who was in the French elementary school in Cairo.”

PAULA: He carried a pistol in his back for six months. The ambassador had, I believe six bodyguards with him at all times.

NARRATOR: Later, he wrote another journal entry explaining how it was resolved: “Finally, the Egyptians wanted this threat to end lest it turns into a gunfight at the O.K. Corral where a lot of innocent people could be killed in Cairo. President Carter, new in office, was told about it and he sent a letter to Gadhafi - hand carried by the Libyan ambassador to the UN - with our basic intel about the plot, including the names and photos of the assassins. The letter said if such a plot were executed the US would be at war with Libya. Of course, in his response, Gadhafi rejected the whole matter as nonsense. And that was the end of it, thanks to good intelligence and the president’s actions.”

NARRATOR: Nothing sharpens the mind like a credible murder plot but, death threat or not, Jim knew he had no time to lose and embarked on a charm offensive. This time though, he didn’t risk asking Mubarak and Sadat for a MiG-23 directly. Instead, he had a plan: Start small. He made a request for something fairly trivial. After all, who could say no to that? According to Jim’s own journal entries, as read by Paula, Egypt’s top military general could. 

PAULA: “The senior Egyptian Air Force general I was directed to by Mubarak to meet on this project balked at giving me the MiG-23 documents at my first meeting. After making notes of my request for the MiG 21 manual, he abruptly slammed his notebook closed when I used the word MiG-23. He said he had no authority to discuss that with me. So I apologized politely and said I must have made a mistake, and dropped the subject, and went back to the MiG 21 documents. Then, I left the general and went straight back to the embassy to call Mubarak to advise him of the general's reaction. Mubarak said, “Don't leave your office.” Sure enough, the Egyptian general called back 30 minutes later, almost begging me to please come at 9 am the next morning to get all the documents I requested. I found out the military chief of staff had not agreed with giving up the 23’s secrets but Mubarak had ordered the general to do it. Keep in mind, Mubarak used to be the CO of the Air Force - commanding officer.”

NARRATOR: After toning down his approach, Jim finally had something to show for his efforts. Technical manuals contain crucial data that the CIA can use to better understand the MiG-23’s capabilities. It might not be a physical jet, but in terms of the Americans’ understanding of the MiG-23, it’s a huge step forward. Jim brings the manuals back to his office and he places a call.

PAULA: So he took those. The CIA headquarters sent a number of people out to Cairo station for them to photocopy the two manuals, which I gather were thousands of pages each. So that would have taken a long time in the '70s.

NARRATOR: Of course, this is a time long before digital archiving or other scanning technology. Photocopiers existed but were far too primitive for something this important. Instead, the CIA agents from HQ arrived with cameras and started the laborious task of photographing the encyclopedic documents. Remember, until now, the CIA knew very little about this aircraft. They think it’s slow but maneuverable and are instructing US Air Force pilots to respond to it accordingly. But the wrong intel can be incredibly costly, not just for pilots in battle but for the military as a whole.

STEVE DAVIES: If they think an airplane is faster than it is, then they'll work harder to develop missiles that can take it out that have a capability against higher speed targets. Well, if it's not necessary to do that, then they want to take those research and development dollars and spend them somewhere else.

NARRATOR: While the 1,000-page technical manuals were being meticulously copied, Jim had to keep the momentum going. His next ‘ask’ was quite a bit bigger. He asked the Egyptians if a US pilot could fly a MiG-23 under supervision, of course, but they wanted as much time with American hands on the controls as possible. Manuals and written data were nice to have, but Jim knew it wasn’t enough. Until they had the real thing back on American soil so they could see what it was really made of, the US Air Force couldn't know what it was up against. Jim knew the Egyptians would get twitchy when he asked, after all, they had an agreement with the Russians that expressly forbade them from sharing their hardware with other nations, least of all the Americans.

STEVE DAVIES: Yeah. He ratchets up the level of expectation. So the next thing he asks for is access to the MiGs, to go and have a look at them. And for an American pilot to come along, jump in the backseat of one of them, and fly and see whether or not that experience is informative.

NARRATOR: To Jim’s surprise, his plan to start small appears to have worked. After handing over technical documents, his request for a test flight suddenly doesn’t seem like so much of a leap. He quickly puts a call in to his superiors in the US and a pilot is dispatched from an undisclosed location. The US Air Force has pilots specifically trained in flying enemy assets. It’s a secretive job that requires a high level of discretion. So, who actually arrived in Cairo remains unknown, officially. But Steve thinks it could have been Major General Richard Vernon Secord.

STEVE DAVIES: The American pilots, when they turn up to other countries - even though they know how to fly MiGs because they've flown them in secret in the US - they have to pretend that they don't know how to fly MiGs. So there's a little bit of a game here. And so Secord would have turned up in Egypt, probably pretending that he didn't really understand any Cyrillic. He couldn't read any of the instrumentation. He didn't know about some of the idiosyncrasies in terms of, for example, they don't have nose-wheel steering. You have to push a pedal and apply a brake lever in order to brake on one side. And that's how you still steer the aircraft. Now, that's a skill that takes quite a bit of practice. And so, he would have had to have pretended that he didn't know anything about those things in order to preserve the biggest secret, which is that the United States by that point was very well developed in its exploitation of other MiG fighters.

NARRATOR: Just not the MiG-23, the crown jewel of the collection. With his best poker face, the American pilot climbs into the back seat and nods along as the Egyptian pilot tells him not to worry, that he’ll handle take-off and landing for him. He looks around, mentally taking notes and running his flight checklist. He watches the dials as they take off and observes how it handles. Once in the air, the pilot probes his Egyptian counterpart with key performance questions - What speed can it reach? How high can it go? - before taking the controls himself and putting it through its paces. After landing, Jim files his report and shares the findings with his colleagues in the US - and those findings are not what they were expecting.

STEVE DAVIES: He discovered that the airplane didn't turn very well at all. It wasn't a turning fighter. It was a fighter that was great at accelerating and great at going very, very fast. And so those were the two major revelations that he would have landed with. And they were sent, I think, by a priority signal back to the US to let them know that they were completely wrong about what they thought of the airplane and that they needed to update the tactical Air Force as, in those days, men who are flying frontline fighters whose job would have been to go out and tackle that airplane in combat if war kicked off. 

NARRATOR: Diplomatically and politically, this test flight was a major win. But in intelligence terms, it’s a disaster. Everything they thought they knew about the MiG-23 was wrong. Rather than buying Jim some time to secure a physical MiG-23, the urgency just increased. The CIA’s initial intel was so far off, they had to consider: What other secrets does the jet hide? What other dangers lurk within? Jim decides to step up the pressure. He needs to remind his Egyptian hosts that it’s in their best interests to cooperate. He brings out all his best moves.

STEVE DAVIES: I think when you've got somebody whispering in your ear saying to you, “You had a hard time at the hands of the Israelis flying the F-4. We'll sell you F-4s. We'll make sure that if there's another Yom Kippur War, then there's parity, at least in terms of equipment, if not in terms of tactics and training and doctrine.” I think when somebody is whispering that in your ear, it's very easy to probably turn around and say, “Okay, we've got a load of MiG-23 sitting on the ramp and you can have one.” 

NARRATOR: All Jim could do now was ask and wait. It was the call Jim had been waiting for. Later he would write this following in his journal:

PAULA: “After several weeks, I received a positive reply from Mubarak and I advised headquarters to arrange with the USAF for a clandestine pickup of the MiG. My first three years in Cairo, they told me it was impossible, but I never gave up.”

NARRATOR: Now, the operation he’d been thinking might never happen, was going full steam ahead, leaving no time for celebration. Jim needed to assemble his best men for the job. This would be the ultimate test of his nerves and the final test of his relationship with the Egyptians. Jim has his goal in sight, but smuggling a fighter jet out from under the Russian’s noses, even with Egyptian assistance, won’t be easy. Even less now he knows that he, and his family, have become potential targets for Libyan hit jobs. But as we’ll soon find out, there are other challenges ahead.

‍PAULA: He had a tendency to go very quiet and still, I think, so he probably would have been internally excited and a little bit anxious but he probably then would have just been very quiet - kind of, waiting for the sound of the plane coming in.

NARRATOR: That’s next time on True Spies. I’m Sophia Di Martino. Join us next week for the final episode of The Pyramid Scheme.