Military 'Traitor' Who Stole A Secret Soviet Aircraft Now Heralded As A Hero

In fact by the mid-1970s the Cold War was not as fractious as it had been in earlier decades. But there was still a fear among the NATO allies that the Communist nations led by Russia might have stolen a technological march on the West.

In an astonishing turn of events, in 1976 the Americans came into possession of one of Russia’s most advanced military aircraft: this was regarded as a great intelligence coup for the U.S.

NATO nations on the other hand had a fairly freewheeling capitalist system and its democratic elections were hotly contested by different parties. Yet despite those differences you don’t have to go too far back into history to find members of the two opposing blocs working in concert.

In 1944 the Soviets turned the tide against the Germans, who had invaded Russia in 

1941. They then began to sweep across Eastern Europe until they reached the German capital, Berlin, in 1945. That signaled the end of WWII.

Just a year after the conflict had ended, the dividing lines between the Communist world and the Western democracies had been set in stone. In 1946 Churchill made his famous speech in which he said, “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent”.

Although it’s known as the Cold War, the conflict between the Communist World and the democracies often became extremely hot. In the 1950s there was the Korean War: North and South Korea fought each other, respectively backed by Russia and China on one hand, and America and her allies on the other. 

According to the U.S. Office of the Historian website, “The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.”

Those conflicts were overt, but behind the scenes paranoia and espionage on both sides of the Cold War were rife. There was the 1960 incident when the Soviets shot down a U.S. U-2 spy plane as it flew over Russia.

But American embarrassment about this incident was rather tempered by a discovery announced soon after the spy plane affair. In 1946 the Soviets had made an accurate replica of the Great Seal of the United States and gifted it to the Americans.

In the war of competing military technologies, both sides strove to gain an advantage, and there was a real fear in America that the Russians had pulled ahead in the 1970s. And by 1976 there were some who believed that the Soviets had finally gained technological superiority over NATO.

The plane in question was the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25. Dubbed the “Foxbat” by NATO, it had also been spotted in 1971 by the Israelis. They’d observed it flying at the extraordinary speed of Mach 3.2 — in other words, over three times the speed of sound. The mystery plane had also climbed to a staggering altitude of 63,000 feet. 

Later in 1971 the Israeli Air Force spotted this mysterious plane again. This time they were prepared for this unknown intruder; in fact there were intruders, since two of the Foxbats were flying together. The Israelis had specially prepared some of their American Phantom F-4 fighter jets for this eventuality.

When the Foxbats were spotted, the Israeli planes scrambled. Reaching a speed of Mach 1.4, they flew to an altitude of 44,000 feet and launched their missiles towards the unknown planes, but the Foxbats flew off at speed.

The BBC report continues, “The Pentagon put two and two together, and came up with a Cold-War crisis.” Military chiefs now worried that these fighter planes — surely of Soviet origin — had the capability to best any aircraft in the arsenal of the U.S. Air Force.

The challenge that the Soviet engineers had faced at the Mikoyan-Gurevich aircraft company had been to design and build a plane capable of flying at three times the speed of sound. To achieve that goal, they’d have to create an engine with a hugely powerful output of thrust.

Even though they’d solved the problem of powering the aircraft that would become known as the Foxbat, the engineers faced another difficulty. When a plane flew at such extreme speeds, air friction created very high temperatures.

But using steel instead of titanium brought its own problems. At 64 feet long the MiG-25 is large for a plane intended for a role as a fighter and reconnaissance craft. The plane had to be welded together by hand, a massive job, and it was exceptionally heavy.

The combat version of the MiG-25 was capable of reaching Mach 2.5, and it navigated towards targets by using ground radar. Once it was 50 miles from a target, the plane would switch to its onboard radar. Then the Foxbat’s massive 20-foot missiles could be launched.

It was the lighter reconnaissance version of the MiG-25 that the Israelis had spotted in 1971. But at that time neither the Israelis nor the U.S. militaries had any clear idea of the capabilities of this mysterious Soviet jet. And, in the context of the Cold War, that made them extremely anxious.

It was in September 1976 that an unidentified aircraft appeared above the Japanese city of Hakodate, which is on the island of Hokkaido. The large plane had a distinctive metallic sheen and two engines. It sported the red-star decals of the Soviets. 

The landing was described in John Barron’s 1980 biography MiG Pilot, The Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko. The pilot “touched the runway at 220 knots. As he deployed the drag chute and repeatedly slammed down the brake pedal, the MiG bucked, bridled, and vibrated as if it were going to come apart. Tires burning, it screeched and skidded down the runway, slowing but not stopping.”

Once the Japanese had a chance to inspect the plane, there was no doubt about it. With its distinctive twin tail fins, this was a MiG-25. But who on Earth had flown it to the Japanese island? In fact the pilot was a Russian citizen and member of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, Flight Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko.

As the BBC pointed out, “It is no normal defection. Belenko has not wandered into an embassy, or jumped ship while visiting a foreign port.” The Soviet airman had chosen a much more dramatic way to desert his native country.

As Time magazine reported in 1976, “According to euphoric Pentagon spokesmen, an examination of the plane and interrogation of the pilot would yield vital secrets about Soviet air-weapons technology.”

According to the BBC, “Viktor Belenko had been a model Soviet citizen”. So something must have gone wrong, although there’s little evidence in his background and upbringing to suggest what that was.

In a 2023 article The New York Times described Belenko as “the flower of Communist youth.” It added that he had “worked himself up through the career and party ranks to become a member of the country’s elite Air Defense Forces.”

The New York Times said, “Along the way he became disillusioned with the Soviet system. He had been promised material rewards for his hard work; instead, despite his elite status, he felt he was being treated like an expendable cog in a creaking war machine.”

In a 1996 interview with Full Context magazine Belenko himself said, “Soviet propaganda at that time portrayed [the U.S.] as a spoiled-rotten society which had fallen apart. But I had questions in my mind.”

When Belenko was assigned to pilot the top-secret MiG-25, he must have realized that flying this aircraft might just provide the very opportunity he needed. It seems that the pilot spent many months planning just how he would make his escape from the clutches of his Communist masters.

As Belenko and his comrades were flying on a training mission, their planes did not carry missiles. But they were fueled up to the brim. And that was a key factor for Belenko’s planned bid for freedom, since the heavy Foxbat, with its thirsty double jet engines, had a fairly limited range, even with full tanks.

Belenko had not been flying alone — he was in the sky with other MiG-25s. So his first task was to evade his fellows as they flew in formation. Without warning Belenko broke away and jetted off across the Sea of Japan.

In fact, Belenko’s MiG was noticed by the Japanese, and fighters were scrambled to apprehend him. But he escaped their attentions by flying into heavy cloud cover. Now his pressing problem was finding somewhere to land his gift to the West and to begin the new life that he hoped awaited him.

But as the indicator on his fuel gauge nudged zero, it became increasingly essential to find somewhere to land, and quickly. In the nick of time Belenko spotted the commercial airport at Hakodate. He made the unceremonious and somewhat panicky landing there that we described earlier.

But in the end it seems that the analysts of this “intelligence bonanza” were less than impressed by this top-secret Soviet aircraft. A 1976 article in Time magazine said that, “The much-touted superplane brought to the West by Soviet Air Force [sic] First Lieutenant Viktor Belenko is, in many respects, a clinker.”

In the end what seems to have been of most interest was what Belenko was able to tell the American authorities about the state of the Soviet military. As The New York Times wrote, “American officials had long believed that Soviet military personnel were chiseled supermen.”

Some of the tales Belenko told about Russian air force personnel verged on the farcical. For example, he told his debriefers that there had been great difficulty in preventing the MiG-25 windshields from icing up when they were in flight.

For his part, Belenko was astonished by the affluence of America in comparison to life in Communist Russia. The New York Times related that on one occasion he’d bought a can of cat food by mistake and eaten it.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians were furious that their trusted pilot had not only defected, but taken with him one of their prized aircraft, whose secrets they’d guarded so closely. The Japanese and Americans hung onto the plane for 67 days before crating it up and returning it to its rightful owners.

In the months after Belenko arrived in Japan he was an international celebrity. But once the intense interest in the story had died down, Belenko elected to live a quiet life. A Congressional act gave him American citizenship and he changed his name to Schmidt, making a new life in the Midwest.