Throughout the early 1970s, the Soviet MiG-25 streaked through the nightmares of America’s military and intelligence communities. If the Cold War were to ever turn hot, they feared, this seemingly unstoppable fighter, code-named Foxbat, appeared poised to sweep the skies of Western aircraft.

The first hints of the existence of this Soviet superplane had begun to materialize almost a decade earlier, when a Russian prototype jet, designated Ye-155, set a world record with an impressive speed run of 2,319 kilometers per hour (1,441 mph) in early 1965. In the years that followed, the West nervously watched as updated versions of the Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau’s quick-climbing, high-flying, ultrafast jet continued to shatter records. Observers knew that the Ye-155 would soon be more than an experimental testbed.

Eventually, in the summer of 1967, the U.S. military obtained clear pictures of the mystery aircraft. At a flying exhibition near Moscow, an American delegation clicked away with their cameras as three Ye-155s zoomed past the rapt crowd. The rolls of film the delegation shot that day were immediately dispatched across the Atlantic; just hours later, they landed in the waiting hands of Foreign Technology Division officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

It was up to James W. Doyle, who’d been an aircraft performance analyst with the U.S. Air Force, to assign a new NATO code name. “Foxbat was used for the plane that I perceived as having the most mystical capabilities,” he noted.

The streamlined Foxbat fighter had oversized intakes that fed a pair of massive afterburner-equipped turbojets. The Foxbat’s twin exhausts had a diameter of nearly 60 inches. Above them was a pair of angular vertical tails.

Beyond the substantial engines, the wings were also a point of interest among the Air Force evaluators. They were big—661 square feet, as it turned out. More wing area helps an aircraft distribute weight, typically making it defter in the skies. From that observation, speculation quickly grew that the Foxbat was more than just fast; it was remarkably maneuverable too.

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A MiG-25 flying in 1987.

The fact that the Foxbat bore an uncanny resemblance to American fighter aircraft proposals fueled the unease. One primary requirement of the new fighter dubbed F-15 was exceptional maneuverability to dominate in a dogfight. Because the Foxbat’s layout appeared so similar to the cutting-edge F-15 hopefuls, many designers and evaluators presumed that the Soviets’ new MiG was built to perform in a comparable fashion.

The specter of the Foxbat forced the Air Force to make the F-15 faster and more maneuverable. The U.S. government, too, was spooked by the threat of the Soviets fielding an unparalleled jet fighter. When McDonnell Douglas won the F-15 competition in 1969, Congress had little choice but to shell out $1.1 billion for aircraft development, including the first 20 F-15 fighter jets, to stay competitive. (The fact that no F-15 has ever lost an air-to-air scrap to an enemy aircraft is in part due to America’s panic over the Foxbat.)

As the U.S. Air Force was selecting the F-15 in 1969, the MiG-25 Foxbat went into full production and began to fly in the Soviet Air Forces. Almost two years later, the Soviets deployed four MiG-25 reconnaissance planes to Egypt, where they conducted high-speed dashes over Israeli territory. The Israeli Air Force’s McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs scrambled to intercept numerous times, but the Foxbats flew at such stunning altitudes and impossible speeds that they easily outran the Israeli defenders. On one occasion, Israeli radar tracked a MiG-25 over the Sinai Peninsula at 80,000 feet traveling at an astounding Mach 3.2 (2,436 mph). For years, the MiG-25 Foxbat remained the most feared fighter in the Soviet arsenal. Then a Russian pilot stole one.


On September 6, 1976, a flight of Soviet Air Forces MiG-25s took off from Chuguyevka Air Base in southeast Russia, about 300 miles west of Japan, for a training mission. The planes were unarmed, each carrying a full load of fuel and nothing more. Among the pilots flying that day was 29-year-old Flight Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko.

Disillusioned with Soviet society, at odds with his superiors, and facing divorce, Belenko had decided to defect with his seven-month-old MiG-25P interceptor.

Early in the training exercise, Belenko violently dove his Foxbat toward the ground, leveling off at just 100 feet. During the plunge, he broadcasted an emergency signal to persuade those around him that he was in serious trouble. Then he switched off his radio to give the impression that he had crashed. Flying below radar, Belenko pushed his throttles forward and raced east across the Sea of Japan.

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Courtesy CIA
Belenko’s Military Identity Document
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Courtesy CIA
Belenko’s Knee Pad Notebook with Flight Data

Earlier that day, he had memorized a rough heading toward a big military air base on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands. As Belenko’s warplane approached, he climbed to 20,000 feet and lit up local warning radars. A pair of Japanese Self Defense Force F-4EJs scrambled to intercept the intruder, but they were too late to provide an escort. With his fuel levels critically low, Belenko spotted a civil airport near the city of Hakodate and lined up for landing, narrowly missing a Boeing 727 passenger plane that was taking off.

The MiG was going too fast for Hakodate’s short runway. Even with his drogue parachute deployed, Belenko used up the entire 6,500-plus-foot distance and continued another 800 feet into the grass, shredding one of the MiG’s tires and nearly plowing into an airport instrument landing system.

In the frantic hours after the landing, Western intelligence organizations were astounded by their good fortune. A pristine example of the Soviets’ most feared aircraft had fallen into their laps. Asylum would protect Belenko, but the Foxbat was still the property of the U.S.S.R.; Japanese and American specialists had to work fast to learn everything they could about the aircraft before political pressure forced Japan to return the MiG. The fighter was quickly stripped apart, its various systems placed on work stands for examination, testing, and photographs.

Belenko was questioned and the aircraft was examined up close for weeks. Gradually the real story of the Foxbat began to emerge: As it turned out, the MiG-25 was not the deft and versatile fighter that had distressed NATO for more than a decade.

The Foxbat was an interceptor through and through, but it was built for only one job: to climb, catch, and kill an American bomber force that never materialized. In the mid-1950s, U.S. Air Force officials pushed for a deep-penetration aircraft that could carry nuclear bombs at a velocity and height that would make them virtually untouchable by any contemporary fighter in the Soviet Air Forces. North American Aviation’s XB-70 Valkyrie, a six-engine high-altitude speed machine, seemed destined for full-scale production as the Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau began work on their answer to the Americans’ new threat.

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Associated Press
Officials examine Belenko’s MiG at Hakodate airport in Japan, September 7, 1976.

Congress killed funding for the XB-70 by the early 1960s and only two experimental testbeds were ever built. However, work continued on the plane that would become the Foxbat out of the fear that the United States might change its mind or develop similar projects.

The Soviet Air Forces needed a sophisticated aircraft to counter their high-tech foe, but they didn’t have the luxury of America’s advanced resources and funding. So the cash-strapped Soviets decided to repurpose massive engines designed for an abandoned high-altitude cruise missile project. And though plans for the Tumansky R-15 turbojets primarily called for titanium construction, the Soviets ran into technical problems machining and shaping the extremely hard metal. They settled on steel components, with silver-plated steel in high-temperature areas. When Belenko was questioned about the Foxbat that clocked at Mach 3.2 over Egypt, he told his CIA interrogators that the MiG-25’s engines were heated to the point of almost complete destruction during the run. Ground crews later removed the wrecked R-15 engines from the aircraft and replaced them.

The Tumansky engines gobbled fuel, particularly at low altitudes. When asked about the combat radius of his aircraft, Belenko shocked the intelligence men by saying, “At best, 300 kilometers [186 miles].” When the Americans didn’t completely believe him, he offered up his escape flight as a typical example. He’d flown less than 500 miles to Japan, mostly at low altitude, and the MiG had only 52.5 gallons left in its tanks—about 30 seconds of flight time.

Similar metallurgy issues plagued Mikoyan and Gurevich when it came to airframe construction. The Foxbat’s high-top speed, generating air friction temperatures up to 900℉, warranted construction primarily of lightweight, heat-resistant titanium. But the Soviets were forced to make most of the Foxbat from heavier stainless steel. They reserved the expensive and troublesome titanium only for areas exposed to the most extreme heat; that amounted to about 9 percent of the airframe.

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A XB-70 Valkyrie

Once U.S. engineers had a MiG-25 to carefully scrutinize and a Soviet pilot to interrogate, it quickly became apparent that the aircraft’s sizable wings were not for maneuverability at all. Instead, the Foxbat’s monstrous wings were intended to help haul the plane’s oversized engines, more than 15 tons of fuel, and its weighty steel airframe into the skies for a rapid climb and a fleetingly brief attack.

The MiG-25 could achieve its initial job of killing speedy high-flying bombers—but just barely. The prototype XB-70 Valkyrie could attain Mach 3.1. With its engines redlined, a MiG-25 could reach Mach 3.2. The Valkyrie had a service ceiling of 77,350 feet. The MiG-25 could climb to 78,740 feet while hauling two heavy R-40 long-range air-to-air missiles to run down the fast-moving intruder. The margins for a successful attack were razor-thin.

The truth of the Foxbat was that in order for it to attain great speed and altitude, Mikoyan and Gurevich had sacrificed nearly everything else, including range and maneuverability. The MiG-25 was never a dogfighter.

The Foxbat was amazingly primitive when compared to Western warplanes of the era. It was built without the benefit of large quantities of advanced materials and sophisticated technologies. But even with limitations, the Soviets were clever creators; the MiG’s construction was filled with surprises. Evaluators from the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division originally scoffed at the exposed rivet heads dotting the MiG’s skin, judging the Soviet’s production methods hopelessly crude. But years later they came to realize that the rivets protruded only in areas where they wouldn’t cause parasitic drag. The MiG designers thus added strength to the airframe with no speed-sapping penalty in performance. Evaluators also marveled at how the MiG’s stainless-steel airframe was welded by hand, eliminating the need for expensive and complex machines.

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A MiG-25PU Foxbat taking off at the 1999 MAKS Airshow near Moscow.

Perhaps the most stunning discovery was the fact that most of the MiG-25’s avionics were based on vacuum tubes—not solid state electronics. This was considered woefully outdated for a top-of-the-line military jet in the 1970s, but the vintage system had its advantages. The vacuum tubes were more temperature-tolerant than modern avionics were, which allowed the MiG to fly without weighty environmental controls in the avionics bay. Plus, the tubes allowed for quick and easy maintenance at Russia’s primitive airfields, and the antiquated system would better withstand the circuit-frying power of an electromagnetic pulse created by a nuclear blast.

And thanks to those vintage vacuum tubes, the MiG’s radar system was able to generate an immensely powerful pulse. Belenko called it jam-proof. In essence, the extraordinarily potent radar had the ability to “burn through” any jamming signals thrown out by its quarry.

After more than two months of dissection while the Soviets fumed, the analysis came to an end. Stuffed into 30 crates, the picked-over parts of what had once been the West’s most feared aerial foe was loaded onto a Russian freighter at Japan’s port city of Hitachi for its trip home.

The Japanese later sent the Soviet Union a $40,000 bill for damage to their airfield and return shipping charges for the aircraft. Russia retaliated with an invoice for $10 million for “unfriendly handling.” Both debts remain unpaid.