Turn for turn, waypoint for waypoint, it is him.

Two Dissult Mirage 3 fighters scramble from a nearby Israeli base.

They climb hard, engines screaming, turn east, and accelerate toward the incoming aircraft.

Their orders are specific.

Escort the contact to Hador.

Do not engage unless hostile.

This is not an enemy.

This is the most important delivery in Israeli Air Force history.

and on a specific Israeli radio frequency, one that Reda has been told to monitor, one that he has memorized alongside the escape route and the runway approach.

A song begins to play.

Arabic.

A woman’s voice singing two simple words.

Maruptine.

Maruptine.

Welcome.

Welcome.

After 900 km of silence and fear, after turning off every connection to the life he is leaving, after flying through the airspace of three countries that would have killed him if they understood what was happening, he hears the one sound that means he is going to live.

The mirages appear, one on each wing, [music] Israeli markings.

The most beautiful sight Munir Redf has ever seen from a cockpit.

and he has spent his career looking at the world from above.

He lowers his landing gear, the universal signal between military pilots.

Not a threat.

Coming in peacefully, they guide him south toward Hatsor, the runway he walked under the name Moshe Misrai, the strip of concrete he visualized so many times during sleepless Baghdad nights that it feels more familiar than the base he has just left forever.

He lands.

The MiG 21 rolls to a stop on Israeli concrete, still wearing its Iraqi Air Force markings.

Serial number 534 still visible on the nose.

Ground crews sprint toward the aircraft.

Armed soldiers ring the taxi way.

And inside the cockpit, a man who was an Iraqi squadron commander 90 minutes ago sits with his hands on the controls, breathing hard, alive.

At a press conference, Redf will later say one sentence that becomes famous across the aviation world.

I landed the plane on the last drop of fuel.

Hours earlier, Betty and the children had arrived from Paris, exhausted, terrified, [music] still processing the ambush in that safe house.

Now her husband is climbing out of a Soviet fighter jet surrounded by Israeli officers, treating him like the most important man in the country.

At that moment, he is.

The Israeli Air Force gives the captured jet a new number 07.

It’s not a random choice.

They choose it because the way this aircraft was acquired, seduction, [music] espionage, betrayal, a jet flying across enemy lines feels like it was lifted straight from a James Bond movie.

Within weeks, [music] Israeli test pilot Danny Shapi takes the MIG up.

Over the next 12 months, [music] Israeli pilots fly it for more than a 100 hours.

Simulated dog fights against mirages, every altitude, [music] every angle of attack.

And what they discover changes everything.

[music] The MiG 21 is fast, agile, and deadly at high altitude.

But the pilot sitting inside it has a massive [music] blind spot directly behind him.

He literally cannot see what’s chasing him.

The engine takes 14 [music] seconds from idle to full power.

Below 15,000 ft, the aircraft starts fighting against its own pilot, and the afterburner gives away the pilot’s position with visible puffs of unburned fuel.

[music] These weaknesses are invisible to anyone who hasn’t flown the jet.

Now Israel knows them all.

Somewhere [music] under a different name in a different country, Reda hears the news.

The jet he has stolen is winning a war he will never be part of.

April 7, 1967, less than 8 months after Redfuza’s defection, Israeli Mirage fighters engaged Syrian MiG 21s in aerial combat over the Golan Heights.

The Israeli pilots know exactly how [music] the MiG turns.

They know its blind spots.

They know where it’s weak.

The result, six Syrian MiGs destroyed, zero Israeli losses.

Six to zero.

The pilots who were supposed to die didn’t because of one stolen jet.

2 months later, the 6-day war erupts.

Israel achieves total air superiority over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

Partly because its pilots have trained against the actual aircraft their enemies fly.

The 007 MEG itself is armed with Israeli Shafir missiles and placed on quick reaction alert at Hutzor during the war.

It’s never scrambled, but it stands ready.

The story doesn’t end here.

It crosses the Atlantic to the most secret air base on Earth.

January 1968, Israeli technicians disassemble the MiG 21 and crate it into secure containers.

The crates are loaded onto a military transport and flown to Groom Lake, Nevada, Area 51.

The evaluation program is codeenamed have donut.

The jet receives a new American designation YF110.

Over 40 days, American pilots fly the stolen MiG 102 times.

77 hours of simulated combat against nearly every fighter in the American arsenal.

The findings are transformative before have donut.

MiG 21s in Vietnam are achieving devastating kill ratios against American pilots.

After the evaluation’s findings are applied to combat tactics and training, American kill ratios improve dramatically.

There’s an irony buried in this success.

The have donut results are so highly classified that the Navy cannot share them with its own combat pilots fighting in Vietnam.

American aviators are dying in engagements that could be won if only the tactical knowledge locked inside classified files at Area 51 could reach them.

This problem, the gap between secret intelligence and the pilots who need it, becomes one of the catalysts for creating the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School.

You know it by its Hollywood name.

Top Gun.

The Air Force creates its own equivalent, Red Flag.

When Israel agrees to loan the MiG to the United States, the deal comes with a condition.

[music] America will sell Israel F4 Phantom fighter jets.

For nearly 20 years, the United States has refused to provide advanced military aircraft to Israel.

[music] This single stolen jet breaks that embargo.

The F4 Phantoms will become the backbone of Israel’s air force for the next generation.

>> [music] >> One stolen plane doesn’t just win a battle.

It changes the balance of power in the Middle East.

November 1967.

A man walks across the tarmac at an Israeli Air Force base.

He’s tall, famous, Scottish.

He has played a character who seduces enemies, steals secrets, and operates under the number 0007.

His name is Shan Connory.

Connory is visiting Israel and the IIAF brings him to see their most prized intelligence trophy, the stolen MiG 21 with 007 painted on its side.

He poses for a photograph alongside IIAF commander Major General Motihad.

Two men, one jet, one number.

The photograph sits in military archives for decades until Connory’s death on October 31, 2020 when the Israeli Air Force posts it on social media in tribute.

The irony is this.

The real James Bond’s story was never fiction.

It was already written years before that photograph was taken.

Not by a man with a gun, by a woman named Lisa Brat, who walked into a pilot’s life and gave him a choice that was never really a choice.

But the man who made it possible didn’t get a legend.

He got a quiet eraser.

Red received his million dollars and his citizenship.

[music] But the new life was harder than any briefing in a Greek bar had promised.

He sat in Israeli cafes where the waiter spoke a language he didn’t understand, reading news about a war his stolen jet had helped win in a country his wife had never agreed to live in.

And there was Betty.

She had been ambushed in Paris, lied to by her husband, dragged to a country she never chose with [music] children too young to understand why their mother couldn’t stop crying.

Whatever trust had existed before Lisa brought, before Greece, before that night with a passport and a phrase about silver and lead, it had been damaged in ways a million dollars couldn’t fix.

[music] After a few years, the family left Israel.

New [music] names, new documents, new country.

Where they went has never been confirmed.

According to one account, they ran a petrol station.

a mundane anonymous life for a man who had once flown at twice the speed [music] of sound.

One consequence lasted decades.

After the defection, Iraqi Christians were banned from serving in the Air Force.

Every Christian officer, every Christian recruit, every Christian family that had dreamed of a son in a cockpit shut out.

The order held for nearly four decades until the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 dissolved the institution that issued [music] it.

Munir Redf died of a heart attack around 1998.

[music] 64 years old, far from Baghdad, far from Israel, under a name his parents never gave him.

whether he found peace, whether Betty forgave him for the silence that nearly destroyed everything in Paris, whether he ever lay awake wondering if the choice was really his or if it had been engineered from the first evening Lisa Brat sat down across from him in Baghdad.

None of it has entered the public record.

What has survived is this.

According to former MSAD agent Aarham, Reda’s son and daughter are still alive.

They live under assumed identities.

They have never publicly used the name REFA.

The MiG21 sits today in the Israeli Air Force Museum at Hatsarim near Beeva.

Repainted over the years, but still carrying the number it was given the day it arrived.

007.

Tourists photograph it.

Children lean over barriers to get closer.

Retired pilots, men who flew in the wars that this jet helped win, stop and stare at it longer than anything else in the museum.

It is the only aircraft in that museum that was stolen by a love story.

And the whole thing started with a 60-year-old Jewish merchant who heard through his girlfriend that a friend of hers was married to a pilot who couldn’t sleep at night.

The oldest weapon in the world is not [music] a bullet or a bomb.

It’s a promise of love, of money, of freedom, or of death.

And the woman who made it all possible has never been found.

Operation Diamond lasted 3 years.

It cost at least four human lives, millions of dollars, and a seduction engineered in Tel Aviv.

It gave Israel air superiority in the Six-Day War.

It gave America intelligence that reshaped Vietnam.

It helped create Top Gun.

60 years later, one question still divides everyone who studies this case.

Was Munir Reda a hero who chose freedom or a man who was handed a passport with his name already inside and told to pick between silver and lead? What do you think? Tell me in the comments.

And if this story surprised you, subscribe because next time a MSAD agent checks into a five-star hotel in Dubai and 27 cameras are watching.

Somewhere in the world, Redfu’s son and daughter are alive today.

They carry different names.

They tell a different story about where they came from, but they know.

They’ve always known.

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