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At this point in the mid-1960s, an interesting event occurred. The Israeli Mossad sent an American female agent to Iraq where she cultivated a romance with Munir Redfa, an Iraqi jet fighter pilot who had been trained both in the United States and the Soviet Union. The pilot, a Christian Arab, was married and had two children. The agent lured him to Paris. When they arrived, the eager prospective lover was told, "This is not about sex. If you would like a handsome sum of money and your family out of Iraq, take this ticket and false passport and fly to Tel Aviv. Otherwise, you may fly back to Iraq."
The Iraqi pilot made the trip to Tel Aviv and ultimately his family left Iraq. Then, on a lovely clear day, he flew an Iraqi Air Force MiG-21 to Israel, where the family was reunited and he got his handsome amount of dollars.
In 1966, the MiG-21 was the Soviet first line jet fighter and no Western country had been able to get near one.
While the official U.S.-Israeli relationship had been first indifferent from 1948 until 1956, and then cold from 1956 into the 1960s, one slender strand of cooperation had remained intact. During World War II, Palestinian Jews had cooperated with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the fight against Nazi Germany. Following WWII, the OSS became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The U.S. Chief of Counter Intelligence, James Jesus Angelton, developed, maintained, and nurtured a symbiotic relationship between the CIA and those Palestinian Jews who evolved into the Israeli Mossad.
The Israelis assigned Colonel Danny Shapira to study the MiG-21 and after a short time, they turned it over to the United States Central Intelligence Agency. (Danny Shapira trained a U.S. Air Force F-111 Test Pilot, Lt. Joe Jordan to fly it and the MiG-21 was sent to the United States where it spent a lot of time in an Aggressor Squadron at a U.S. Air Force Base in Nevada.)
Needless to say, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force were delighted with access to the Soviet's first line fighter and the chill of the Eisenhower/Dulles years began to thaw.
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