The Daring Defection of The Secret Soviet Super Fighter
The West Thought the MiG-25 Was a Deadly, Agile Superfighter. What They Learned
Was Surprising.
1430 Hrs. Local, September 6, 1976. Sea of
Japan near Hakodate Airport, Hokkaido Prefecture.
Jet fuel burned faster than he calculated
as he pressed lower under the overcast, down to the gray black waves only
150-feet above the Sea of Japan. He hauled the heavy control stick left, then
corrected back right in a skidding bank around a fishing vessel that came out
of the misty nowhere in the low afternoon cloud cover. White vapor spiraled
long “S”s from his angular wingtips in the violent turn nearly touching the
wave tops.
That was the second fishing boat he had to
bank hard to miss at nearly wave-top level. Rain squalls started. The huge
Tumansky R-15 jet engines gulped more gas by the minute. This plane was not
made to fly low and subsonic. It was built to fly supersonic in the high
altitude hunt for the now-extinct American B-70 Mach 3 super-bomber that was
never put into service.
He had to find the Japanese Self-Defense
Force F-4 Phantoms that were no doubt in the air to intercept him. If they
didn’t shoot him down first, they would lead him to Chitose Air Base where he
may be able to land safely. If his fuel held out. But the Japanese Phantoms
were nowhere to be found.
So, he hauled the stick back into his lap
and the big, boxy Foxbat clawed through the clouds in its last, angry climb
before succumbing to a fuel-starved death.
Eventually, he found an airport. Hokodate
Airport. A 6,000 foot runway. Not long enough for his MiG-25 though. He’d make
it work. On final approach to Hokodate he nearly collided head-on with a 727
airliner. It was better than ditching where he’d lose his biggest bargaining
chip. His top secret airplane. He managed a rough landing, running off the end
of the runway, climbing out of jet, and firing his pistol in the air when
curious Japanese began snapping photos of the incident from a roadway.
It was, as I recall, the biggest thing
that had ever happened in my life. I was 15 years old then.
We raced to the hobby shop on our bicycles
to consult with the older men who owned the store. What would this mean? Was it
real? Would there be a model of the MiG-25 released soon? We poured over the
grainy newspaper photos, the best we had ever seen, again and again. We could
not believe it, but it was real. The most exotic, highest flying, fastest, most
secretive fighter plane on earth had just fallen into American hands. We got
our first look at the mysterious MiG-25 Foxbat.
What happened in the aftermath of his defection 42
years ago influenced aircraft design, dispelled myths about the Soviet Union,
angered one nation and offered relief to another while leaving a third in an
awkward diplomatic bind. It was one more minor tear in the tapestry of the Iron
Curtain as it slowly unraveled around the edges, like a loose thread that
continues to pull out longer and longer.
“What did they think and [what do we]
think now? Traitor! Military pilots consider it a huge disgrace for the Air
Force of the USSR and Russia.” That is what the administrator of the most
active social media fan page for the Russian Aerospace Forces told TheAviationist.com
when we asked them what Russians think of Viktor Belenko today. While the Iron
Curtain has come down, the hardened attitudes about Belenko betraying the state
remain. The Russians still hate Viktor Belenko for stealing their most prized
combat aircraft at the time.
In the U.S., “secret” units have been
operating Russian MiGs and Sukhois quietly over the American west for years.
But Belenko’s defection in 1976 with a Foxbat, the NATO codename for the MiG-25
(the Russians don’t call it that), was an intelligence coup that not only
provided technical data and benchmark insights for decades to come, it also
provided a core-sample of Communist life in the Soviet Union.
According to Belenko, things were bad in
the Soviet Union. In the 1980 chronicle of Belenko’s defection, “MiG Pilot: The
Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko”, author John Baron wrote of rampant
alcoholism within the ranks of the Soviet air force. Living facilities at bases
in the eastern Soviet Union were poor since some of the bases the MiG-25
operated from had not yet been upgraded to accommodate the larger ground crews
needed to maintain the aircraft. Food quality for enlisted maintenance crews
was so bad the men refused to eat. While food for officer/pilots like Belenko
was much better, when Belenko reached the United States after his defection he
mistakenly ate a can of cat food and later remarked that, “It was delicious.
Better than canned food in the Soviet Union today!”
But Belenko entered a netherworld when he
defected from Russia. While U.S. President Gerald Ford granted Belenko asylum
in the U.S. and the Central Intelligence Agency gave him a stipend and built a
life for him as a pilot and consultant in the U.S., neither side could fully
trust the turncoat. When Belenko arrived in Japan he was given the book by
Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovitch”. Despite his oath of military service to the Soviet Union, Belenko
feared and was repulsed by the deep social injustice of Communist Soviet Russia.
He had seen people inside the Soviet Union suffering like Denisovitch from
poverty, hunger and oppression. Belenko wanted out. And so, he stole his
Foxbat, flew it to Japan and never looked back.
In a footnote to Belenko’s defection with
the MiG-25P Foxbat, I did get my scale model airplane kit shortly thereafter.
The Japanese hobby brand Hasegawa had sent photographers to Hokodate Airport to
photograph the MiG-25 before it was concealed, examined by the U.S. and Japan,
and shipped back to the Soviet Union in pieces. Within months of the MiG-25
landing in Japan, Hasegawa released a 1/72nd scale plastic model kit of the
MiG-25 complete with decals for Viktor Belenko’s aircraft. It sold for $10 U.S.
Viktor Belenko continues to live in the United States
according to most sources. He was photographed in a bar in 2000 where he was
recognized, photographed and spoke openly to people about his experience defecting
from the former Soviet Union. In 1995, he had returned to Russia after the fall
of the Soviet Union and safely returned to the U.S. afterward. Belenko told an
interviewer he had enjoyed going on fishing trips in the U.S. with test pilot
and fighter ace General Chuck Yeager.
There have been other famous defections by
military pilots, including some fictional ones such as the failed defection
with a Soviet Tu-95 “Bear” heavy bomber. Author Tom Clancy rose to prominence
on his breakout fictional novel “The Hunt for Red October” about a Russian
captain defecting with a Soviet nuclear powered missile submarine. One of his
fictional characters in the book even refers to the Belenko defection saying,
“This isn’t some pilot defecting with a MiG!”. But fictional accounts aside,
now that the Iron Curtain has long since come down it is unlikely we will ever
see a defection from any country like Viktor Belenko’s.
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