Quick Facts
Biography
Munir Redfa (Arabic: منير ردفا, born Munir Habib Jamil Rufa (Arabic: منير حبيب جميل روفا) (1934 – c. 1998) was an Iraqi fighter pilot who defected in 1966 by flying a MiG-21 of the Iraqi Air Force to Israel. In what is considered as one of the Mossad's most successful operations, Redfa's entire extended family was smuggled safely out of Iraq to Israel. The MiG-21 fighter was evaluated by the Israeli Air Force and was later loaned to the United States for testing and intelligence analysis. Knowledge obtained from analysis of the aircraft was instrumental to the successes achieved by the Israeli Air Force in its future encounters with Arab MiG-21s. Redfa's defection was the subject of the movie Steal the Sky (1988).
Redfa was an Assyrian Christian.
Redfa died of a heart attack around 1998.