MiG Pilot Read online

  MiG Pilot

  John Barron

  I was so blown away by this book I had to meet Viktor in person and now count him as a personal friend. The book is factual in every respect and is difficult to put down once started. John Barron is an excellent author and did a first class job of writing Viktor’s story. In addition to an exciting escape story it reveals why the Soviet Union had to collapse of its own ineptitude, deceit, and corruption. It details humorous incidents such as army pilots’ mess-hall riots due to bad food.

  MiG Pilot is also a biography of an exceptional man whose intelligence saw through a lifetime of brainwashing. The story is humorous in places and engrossing from beginning to end. It starts right out with Viktor’s desperate and harrowing escape flight to freedom in his top-secret MiG-25 Foxbat, then in subsequent chapters details the life events that led to his courageous decision to “go for broke” and make his live-or-die dash to freedom. It illustrates how America probably could have given the Soviets all of its top secrets and they would have found a way to screw up making use of them.

  Viktor is not only a first class pilot, he is also a true hero.

  Don’t lend this book to anyone and expect to get it back.

  John Barron

  MIG PILOT

  The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

  CHAPTER I

  Into the Unknown

  As he had done every day except Sunday during the past four weeks, Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko awakened himself early to watch what the dawn might reveal. The first light was promising, and upon seeing the fiery, blinding sun rise, he knew: almost certainly this would be the day. Above the vast forests of pine, cedar, birch, and poplar stretching along the Pacific shores of the Soviet Far East, the sky was azure and cloudless. The magnificent weather meant that barring mistakes, malfunctions, or some other vagary, in all likelihood he would fly as scheduled. Probably he finally could attempt the supreme mission which rain, fuel shortages, or bureaucratic caprice repeatedly had forestalled. If the weather held, his chances of reaching the objective would be as good as he ever could expect.

  Belenko estimated it all should be over within the next six hours. At age twenty-nine, he would be either dead or reborn into a new world. He felt tension in the muscles of the arms, legs, and stomach, but the stress derived more from the complexity of the mental tasks ahead than from fear of dying. During his training as a MiG (Named for its designers, Mikoyan and Gurevich) pilot he had lived on the edge of death so long and seen sudden, violent death so often that he had given up contemplating it. He had come to regard it simply as an unfathomable phenomenon to be avoided as long as possible, but not at any price. Neither did he dwell on the infinite uncertainties and unknowns that awaited him should he succeed and survive. He had assessed them as best he could before making his decision, and there was no profit in considering them further now. The awareness that he was looking for the last time at his pretty wife and three-year-old son, both sleeping within his reach near the window, evoked no emotion either. She had adamantly demanded a divorce and had announced her intent to take their child back to her parents in Magadan, some 1,250 miles away. The many failed attempts at reconciliation had sapped all emotion from the marriage, and there was nothing more to say. He was tempted to pick up and hold his son. No! Don’t! He might cry. You wouldn’t ordinarily pick him up at this hour. Don’t do one thing that you wouldn’t ordinarily do.

  Belenko put on his shirt, trousers, and boots quickly, trying not to awaken his family or the family occupying the other room of the apartment. From between the pages of a tattered Russian-English dictionary he removed a slip of paper on which he had written a three-sentence message succinctly explaining his mission. Preparation of the message the month before and its retention ever since had been dangerous. Yet it was necessary that he deliver a written message instantly if all went well, so he folded the paper into a tight square and buried it in his pocket.

  In the small yard outside the frame apartment house reserved for officers, he exercised for fifteen minutes, doing push-ups on soggy ground and chinning himself from the limb of a tree. Then he commenced jogging through the muddy streets of Chuguyevka, a village situated in the taiga 120 miles northeast of Vladivostok, toward the bus stop about a mile away. Running and jumping puddles, Belenko looked like a prototype of the New Communist Man the Party spoke endlessly of creating. He stood just over five feet eight inches and had an athletic physique, with broad, slightly sloping shoulders powerfully developed by years of boxing, arm wrestling, and calisthenics. A Soviet television program once pictured him — yellow hair, fair complexion, and large blue eyes widely set in a handsome, boyish face — as the very model of a young pilot. Women, particularly older women, were beguiled by his smile, which they found simultaneously shy and rakish.

  At about seven that morning, September 6, 1976, Belenko arrived in a decrepit bus, built before World War II, at the headquarters compound of the 513th Fighter Regiment of the Soviet Air Defense Command. Outside the smallest of the red-and-white-brick buildings he hesitated. No, you have to eat. You would be missed. Besides, you will need the strength. Go on!

  In the officers’ mess, fresh white cloths covered the tables, each set for four pilots, and still-life paintings of fruit and vegetables adorned the walls. The waitresses, girls in the late teens or early twenties, all employed because they were pretty, enhanced the ambience. A physician was tasting the breakfast of goulash, rice, fruit compote, white bread, buttermilk, and tea to make sure it was fit for fliers. After he approved the food, everyone sat down in white plastic chairs and began.

  Because Belenko was acting deputy commander of the 3rd Squadron, he customarily dined with the squadron commander, Yevgeny Petrovich Pankovsky. More often than not, by breakfast time Pankovsky’s day had already started unhappily. The regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Ivanovich Shevsov, rose early to survey the wreckage visited upon his domain during the night, and by six-thirty he had the squadron commanders before him to berate and degrade them for the most recent transgressions of their underlings.

  Shevsov was a sorely troubled officer. This was his first command, and the difficulties besetting the regiment would have taxed the capacities of the wisest and most experienced leader. He did not quite know how to cope, but he tried mightily, shouting, threatening, and often ridiculing officers in front of one another and the men. Other pilots dubbed him the Monster, but to Belenko he looked more like a toothless boxer dog: short, husky, with receding red hair, a protruding jaw, and a face that seemed in perpetual motion, as if he were chewing or growling.

  Belenko greeted his squadron commander as always. “Good morning, Yevgeny Petrovich.”

  “You think it’s a good morning? Do you know that already I got reamed? Did you know that our soldiers refused to eat breakfast this morning? They threw their food at the cooks, and one of them hit a cook.”

  “Would you eat that food from their mess hall?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t eat that food either. I think if we would take a pig from a good kolkhoz and put that pig in the mess hall, that pig would faint.”

  “Well, I agree. But what can I do about it?”

  At eight the regiment assembled on the asphalt parade ground before the staff headquarters buildings. Pilots stood at attention in the first rank; flight engineers, their assistants, and the enlisted men in succeeding ranks behind.

  “Comrade Soldiers, Sergeants, and Officers!” Shevsov shouted. “Today we fly. Our mission is a vital mission, for we will fire rockets. The results of this important mission will depend on everybody, from soldiers to officers, working together. In spite of all our troubles here, we each must do our best today.

  “We must remember that the Americans are not
sleeping. We must remember that the Chinese are only a day’s march away. We must remember that aircraft, fuel, and rockets are expensive and that our government which supplies them is not a milk cow. We cannot afford soon to repeat this mission, so we must do it properly today.

  “Now, next weekend we will give the Party a Communist Weekend. Everybody will work, officers and soldiers; everybody. Each squadron must gather sod and plant it over the aircraft bunkers so that from the sky they will appear to the Americans to be no more than green, grassy fields.

  “I have one other announcement, a very serious announcement. Do you know that our regiment has a great lover? Do you know whom he loves? Not his faithful wife who waits far away, anxious to join him here as soon as quarters are ready; no, he loves a whore in the village, a common whore.” While the officers winced and the enlisted men snickered, Shevsov read aloud a telegram from the wife of a flight engineer, beseeching him to compel her husband to cease a dalliance of which she suspected him. “Here we have a big example of degenerate capitalist morality. Let this be a warning to all. Henceforth in our regiment we will abide by and tolerate only communist morality.

  “All squadron commanders report to my office. For today that is all. Dismissed.”

  In the locker room Belenko changed into the dark-blue cotton flight suit issued him nineteen months before. It would be five more months before he was due to receive another, and he had tried to keep this one serviceable by neatly sewing patches on the knees and elbows. A duty officer unlocked the safe and handed him an automatic pistol and two clips of seven rounds each, for which he signed a receipt.

  Sometime back a pilot had parachuted from a disabled plane into a remote wilderness, where he eventually died of privation and hunger. Hunters who came upon the skeleton many months later found a diary in which the pilot recorded his suffering and complained about the lack of any equipment that might have enabled him to survive in the wilderness. The last entry read, “Thank you, Party, for taking such good care of Soviet pilots.” Soon combat pilots were issued pistols, and their aircraft equipped with survival kits containing food, water, medicine, fishing gear, flares, matches, a mirror, and shark repellent. Newly armed, a pilot came home, found his wife in bed with a friend, and killed them both. Thereupon, in the interest of domestic tranquillity, the Party ordered the pistols recalled and kept locked up until just before flights.

  During the next couple of hours briefing officers meticulously reviewed the flight plans. Planes from the squadron designated to fire missiles were to fly almost due eastward over the sea, where Navy ships would launch the target drones at which they would shoot. Belenko’s squadron would proceed to other exercise areas, practice intercept approaches, and then, relying solely on instruments, return to the base, and land. Because of the fine weather, many MiG-23s from adjacent bases probably would be in the air and perhaps also firing. Thus, it would be dangerous for any pilot to stray out of the zone to which Ground Control directed him.

  Belenko sat motionless, maintaining a pose of respectful attentiveness while he contemplated his personal flight plan. His mind raced far away, computing times, distance, speed, fuel consumption, courses, points of probable intercept, evasive maneuvers, deceptions, and all exigencies he could imagine.

  The fliers returned at eleven for a second breakfast of sausage, boiled eggs, white bread, butter, tea, and a chunk of chocolate, all again first tasted by a physician. Then a military truck hauled them over a bumpy, unpaved road to the Sakharovka Air Base two miles from squadron headquarters. Belenko presented himself in the hangar dispensary to the regimental physician for physical examination. The doctor protected the pilots as much as he could. They were forbidden to drink five days prior to flying; but everyone drank some, and many drank heavily. He ignored minor traces of alcohol, and if he judged the condition of a pilot hazardous in consequence of imbibing, he disqualified him for the day on other grounds — nasal congestion, slight ear infection, temperature; something that would soon pass.

  He took Belenko’s temperature, pulse, and blood pressure, then examined his eyes, ears, and throat.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Excellent.”

  “What kind of flight do you have today?”

  “Routine exercise.”

  The physician stopped talking and studied him carefully — skeptically, Belenko thought.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant, have you drunk any alcohol in the past twenty-four hours?”

  “No, not in the last five days,” Belenko answered truthfully.

  “Do you think you are ready to fly your mission?”

  “I am certain.”

  “Well, your blood pressure is somewhat high. Nothing to be alarmed about, but for you, rather high. Is something troubling you?”

  “Not at all.” Anticipating that the body might betray his tensions, Belenko had readied an explanation. “Comrade Doctor, if I don’t exercise, I feel like lumpy potatoes, and I’ve been cooped up for almost a week. This morning, when I saw the sun, I went out and ran like a deer, more than six kilometers. I’m probably still a little winded.”

  The doctor nodded. “That could account for it. Good luck on your flight, Comrade Lieutenant.”

  Belenko joined other pilots, who, pending the latest report from the meteorological officer, were standing around the hangar, joking about the forthcoming Communist Weekend. It was preposterous to cover the bunkers with sod. Obviously the Americans long ago had located and targeted the airfield. How could anyone think they would believe it suddenly was not there anymore? Someone said, “Besides, I heard that the cameras in their satellites can photograph a soldier’s boots from three hundred kilometers up.”

  The conversation ceased, and the pilots edged off in different directions at the sight of Vladimir Stepanovich Volodin, the young KGB lieutenant assigned to the regiment. “Good morning, Viktor Ivanovich, how are you?”

  “Very well.”

  “And Ludmilla and Dmitri. How are they?”

  “They are well also.”

  “What’s new? What do you hear?”

  “Well, the men rebelled again this morning, refused to eat breakfast.”

  “Yes, I heard. What do you think the problem is?”

  Answer him just as you regularly would.

  “Vladimir Stepanovich, you know what the problem is as well as I do. Everybody knows.”

  “I still would like to talk to you. Stop by this afternoon after your flight. Let’s talk.”

  There was nothing at all unusual about this. The KGB officer naturally slinked around, asking, “What’s new? What do you hear?” Yet for a moment Belenko worried. Why did he come to me just now? Why did he ask me that? Well, so what? The bastard won’t be seeing me this afternoon, that’s for sure.

  The meterological officers reported that to the east, where Belenko’s squadron would fly, the skies were fair and should remain so throughout the afternoon. However, to the southeast, where his actual objective lay, some cloud formations were gathering. A front might be moving in from Japan, but it was nothing to worry about this afternoon.

  No! The forecast was clear everywhere. Idiots! How thick is it? Think of a reason to ask him. No, don’t. There is no reason. Careful. Show no concern. You’ll just have to take the chance.

  From the supply room Belenko drew his flight helmet, oxygen mask, and gloves. “Comrade Lieutenant, you forgot your life preserver,” a sergeant called. Don’t take it. Fool them.

  “Thanks. I won’t be over water today.”

  Striding from the hangar, he saw the aircraft — twenty MiG-25s — poised wing to wing on the runway some 200 yards away. Weighing twenty-two tons, with twin tail fins, cantilevered tail planes, thick, short, swept-back wings, two enormous engines, and a long rocketlike nose ending with a radar needle, the MiG-25 reminded Belenko of a great steel bird of prey, dark gray and angry. Few weapons in the Soviet arsenal were more closely guarded from foreign observation, and even among themselves the Russians in
official terminology simply referred to the MiG-25 as Product No. 84. A stripped-down model in 1967 set a world record by achieving a speed of 1,852 miles an hour, and another in 1973 eclipsed altitude records by soaring to 118,898 feet. Aging American F-4 Phantoms, though equipped with excellent missiles and flown by skilled pilots, had been unable to intercept or shoot down MiG-25s which occasionally streaked over the Mediterranean and the Middle East, taking photographs. No Westerner ever had been close to a MiG-25, and much about it was unknown. Nevertheless, the MiG-25 in the autumn of 1976 was the one plane most feared in the West. In 1973, U.S. Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans, a scientist with impressive aeronautical credentials, had characterized it as “probably the best interceptor in production in the world today.” While Defense Secretary, James R. Schlesinger had warned that the MiG-25 was so formidable that its widespread development and deployment would force fundamental changes in Western strategy and weaponry. More than 400 of the interceptors had already been deployed. They embodied the most advanced aeronautical technology and, in a sense, the national pride of the Soviet Union. The comparatively few young men chosen, trained, and entrusted to fly them represented an acknowledged and honored elite in the Soviet armed forces.

  Swarms of men were making the planes ready. Tracks filled each with fourteen tons of jet fuel and half a ton of coolant alcohol and pumped oxygen into life-support systems. From smaller trucks bearing electronic test equipment, technicians checked the missiles, fire control, and electronic systems. Others stepped under and around the planes, physically inspecting the exterior surfaces and controls.

  Belenko climbed a fourteen-foot metal ladder, followed by his flight engineer, who helped him settle into the green cockpit, green because Soviet researchers believed it the most soothing color. The cushioned seat was the most comfortable in which he ever had sat. The various dials, gauges, buttons, and levers were well arranged and easily accessible. Conspicuous among them was a red button labeled “Danger.” Pilots were instructed that should they be forced down or have to eject themselves from the aircraft outside the Soviet Union, they must press the button before leaving the cockpit. Supposedly it activated a timing device which a few minutes later would detonate explosives to destroy the most secret components of the plane. Some fliers wondered, however, whether a press of the button might not instantly blow up the entire aircraft, pilot included. He also dared not touch the radar switch because the impulses from the MiG-25 radar were so powerful they could kill a rabbit at a thousand meters. Hence, it was a crime to activate the radar on the ground.