By Tom Cooper
That the Soviet-made R-3S air-to-air missile — better known in the West by its NATO-designation AA-2 Atoll — is a copy of the AIM-9B Sidewinder, originally developed and manufactured in the USA, is relatively well-known.
How it came to be … isn’t so well-known. It involved the mail.
The story began back in summer of 1958. The communist People’s Republic of China was preparing to invade the U.S.-backed Republic of China, a.k.a. Taiwan.
In the course of related operations, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force received the order to establish air superiority over several islands close to mainland China still held by Taiwan’s Nationalists, specifically Quemoy and Matsu.
When the People’s Liberation Army began shelling Quemoy and Matsu, in August 1958, the United States helped re-equip several squadrons of the Republic of China Air Force with North American F-86F Saber fighter jets.
An R-3S as seen installed on the underwing hardpoint of a MiG-21F-13. Photo by Sean O’Connor
When the PLAAF took the skies, the Nationalist scrambled their own interceptors. Fierce clashes resulted.
Although outnumbered, the Taiwanese pilots achieved a positive kill-to-loss ratio. However, they found no solution for reaching the PLAAF’s MiG-15s when these operated at their maximum ceiling, several thousand feet higher than that of the Sabers.
Correspondingly, the Pentagon decided to equip some of the ROCAF’s F-86 with its then brand-new and still super-secret weapon, the infrared-homing air to-air missile with the designation AIM-9B Sidewinder.
The Americans took 40 Sidewinders and 40 launching rails directly from U.S. Marine Corps stocks and sent them – together with a party of five experienced technicians from Marine Fighter Squadron 323 – to Hsinchu air base in Taiwan.
https://warisboring.com/the-kgb-shipped-a-sidewinder-missile-by-mail-to-moscow/
