“From all the various intelligence sources and methods that we had for gathering electronic and other information, the U.S. “Simply by looking at the size and the shape of it, it was clear that the Soviets were developing a counterpart to our F-16 and F/A-18,” says Benjamin Lambeth, author of the 1999 book Russia’s Air Power in Crisis and, in the late 1970s, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. intelligence community first learned of the new Soviet aircraft from satellite photos in November 1977, about the time of the jet’s first flight. When it first showed up, in 1977, the MiG-29, like its very distant ancestor, the MiG-15, was a startling revelation: The Soviets were catching up with U.S. The acquisition also gave Western analysts, some of them working inside the grim edifice of this national intelligence center, a chance to study the fighter that they had been viewing from afar for 20 years. “I wonder how happy would the White House be and Pentagon if Mexico, for example, would even try to sell its UH-60L Blackhawk helicopters to the Russian Federation?” “Any military establishment of any country would be upset if its opponent would receive an opportunity to evaluate and test its most modern weapons,” says Moscow-based aviation historian Sergey Isaev. The loose confederation that replaced the Soviet Union was not in a position to stop the buy, and it became one more ignominy in the Soviet collapse. government purchased from the former Soviet state of Moldova in 1997, a deal that kept the jets from being sold to Iran. In a way, it is a war prize, taken in the winning of the cold war. The aircraft gives the impression of a war prize displayed like a head on a stake. Its tires, lifted off the ground by stands, are split and shredded. The MiG-29 Fulcrum outside the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has a hornet’s nest growing in its nose.