Operation Diamond: Recruiting a Pilot to Steal an Aircraft

Israel wanted a MiG-21. It was the Soviet Union's front-line fighter, it equipped every Arab air force in the region, and no Western service had one to examine.

Mossad's approach, after several failed attempts in other countries, was to find a pilot rather than an aircraft.

Munir Redfa was an Iraqi Air Force captain, a Maronite Christian in a majority-Muslim service, competent and passed over. He had been assigned to fly missions against Kurdish villages in the north, which he objected to. He was not promoted to command. He was, by the accounts of the operation, a man with a set of grievances that were real and that he had not resolved.

The recruitment did not begin with an offer. It began with a woman — a Mossad officer operating under cover — who met him socially in Baghdad, befriended him over a period, and eventually raised the subject of his situation and invited him to Europe.

Three elements make the case worth studying as a recruitment rather than as a bribe.

Grievance amplification. Nothing was invented. Redfa's exclusion, his religious minority status, and his objection to the missions he was flying were all real, and what the recruiters did was make them salient and connect them to an interpretation: he was not one of them and never would be. Social identity theory predicts that a person whose in-group membership is insecure is the most available to a competing identification.

Removing the hostage. The obstacle to any defection of this kind is not the defector's risk but his family's. Loss aversion has a specific structure here: the gains from defection accrue to the pilot and the losses fall on people he loves, which is a trade almost nobody accepts. Mossad extracted Redfa's wife, children and extended family in a separate operation before the flight. The barrier was not overcome; it was removed.

And incremental commitment. A meeting became a trip to Europe, which became a trip to Israel to see the country and be shown what was being offered, which became a series of technical discussions about range and routing, which became an agreement. Each step was small relative to the last, which is chapter 3's ladder applied to treason.

On 16 August 1966 Redfa took off on a training flight, turned west, and landed at Hatzor. The aircraft was flown by Israeli and later American pilots, and the exploitation of it shaped air combat doctrine for a decade.