Israel agreed to do. Later Redfa traveled to Israel to see the airfield he was going to use to land the plane. He also met with the commander of Israeli Air Force, Major General Mordechai "Mottie" Hod. They discussed the dangerous flight and its path. Numerous Mossad agents were sent to Iraq to assist the transfer of Redfa's wife Betty, their two children aged three and five, his parents and a number of other family members out of the country. Betty and their two children went to Paris for what she thought was a summer vacation. Redfa, who promised to prepare her for what was going to happen, told her nothing. When Betty was contacted by a Mossad agent, who had her new Israeli passport, she initially became very upset and threatened to contact the Iraqi embassy, before she calmed down. The other family members were taken to the Iranian border, where Kurdish guerillas helped them to cross into Iran, from where they were taken to Israel. The opportunity to defect came about on August 16, 1966. While Redfa was flying over northern Jordan, his plane was tracked by radar. The Jordanians contacted Syria but were reassured that the plane belonged to the Syrian air force and was on a training mission. When Redfa's plane reached Israel, he was met by two Israeli Air Force Dassault Mirage IIIs, which escorted him to a landing at Hatzor. Later at a press conference, Redfa said that he had landed the plane on "the last drop of fuel". Aftermath Soon after his defection, Redfa's MiG was renumbered 007, reflecting the manner in which it had arrived. Within a few weeks the aircraft took off again with Israeli test pilot Danny Shapira at the controls, on the first of many test flights. The jet's strengths and weaknesses were analyzed and it was flown against IAF fighters, eventually training Israeli pilots to deal with the aircraft. In May 1967 director of CIA Richard Helms said that Israel had proven that it had made good use of the aircraft, when on April 7, 1967, during aerial battles over the Golan Heights, the Israeli Air Force brought down 6 Syrian MiG-21s without losing any of its Dassault Mirage IIIs. In January 1968, Israel loaned the MiG to the United States, which evaluated the jet under the HAVE DOUGHNUT program. The transfer helped pave the way for the