<i> Glasnost </i> Takes Controls of a MIG : Foreign Relations: A RAND Corp. expert, at Moscow’s invitation, becomes the first American to fly the Soviet jet.

Not so long ago, it would have seemed the stuff of a spy thriller. Here was Benjamin S. Lambeth, a Cold Warrior by profession, climbing into the cockpit of the erstwhile Evil Empire’s most sophisticated jet fighter.

The 46-year-old Lambeth--ex-CIA, Harvard Ph.D. and veteran RAND Corp. expert on Soviet military affairs--would be the first American to fly the MIG-29, a ride the folks at the Pentagon want to hear all about.

But that’s glasnost for you. Lambeth was the Soviets’ special guest on his Dec. 15 flight out of the Kubinka Air Base east of Moscow. His experience, he says, was “a minor footnote--but still a milestone in the Soviet-American relationship.”

“This was much more important as a political event than as a technical event,” Lambeth said, now back in RAND’s Santa Monica headquarters and preparing a briefing for the Defense Department. “The fact that it happened is more important than anything technical I learned.”

Willis Hawkins, a consultant to Lockheed Corp., said the significance of Lambeth’s flight is “reasonably large” in showing Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s willingness to open military secrets.

The MIG-29, a Mach-2.3 interceptor, is a major advance in Soviet technology. It is roughly comparable to the Americans’ front-line F-15 and F-16 fighters, authorities say, although still a generation behind the most-advanced U.S. fighters.

Fluent in Russian, Lambeth has made a career translating and analyzing the Soviet press and military papers, first with the CIA in early 1970s and for 15 years with RAND’s National Defense Resarch Institute, an agency sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is director of RAND’s International Security and Defense Policy Program.

His duties at the think tank have helped Lambeth, a civilian pilot, gain training and more than 400 hours flying a wide variety of American and foreign warplanes. Lambeth described his jet fighter experience as “a mile wide and about a half-inch deep.”

The Playa del Rey resident believes the Soviets let him fly the MIG-29 in part because the U.S. military is not ready to return the favor. The Soviets have proposed a reciprocal program to allow pilots from each country to fly the other’s warplanes, but the U.S. military has thus far declined.

The Soviets’ motives in letting Lambeth fly also reflect their desire to market the MIG-29 to nations beyond such allied states as Cuba and Syria. A Soviet leadership that once viewed MIGs as instruments of political leverage now “see them as sources of hard currency,” Lambeth said. Finland, for example, is now debating whether to buy Soviet- or American-made warplanes.

“It remains to be seen how successful that strategy will be . . . The fact they’re marketing the airplane internationally doesn’t mean there’s a market for it,” Lambeth added.

But in another sense, the flight happened simply because Lambeth asked.

While attending the Farnborough Air Show in London in September, 1988, Lambeth met Soviet test pilot Valery Menitskii of the Mikoyan Design Bureau, developer of the MIG series. “Almost in passing, I said I’d love to be the first American analyst to fly the MIG-29,” Lambeth recalled.

To his surprise, Menitskii said that it might be possible because of extraordinary changes under Gorbachev. “We decided to extend hands across the chasm and see what came of it.”

Lambeth and Menitskii met again at an air show in Vancouver in August and a November aviation symposium at the University of Michigan. Menitskii and other members of the Mikoyan Design Team accepted Lambeth’s invitation to visit RAND last November. (Lambeth also took his guests to Venice’s Ocean Front Walk. They were amused, Lambeth said, by the scenery.)

Lambeth got his chance to fly during a five-day trip to Moscow with two other Russian-speaking RAND Soviet experts, John Hines and Eugene Rumer. The trip was devoted primarily to researching evolving U.S.-Soviet relations, arms control and European security.

The Russian winter seemed to conspire against Lambeth’s flight plans. Blowing snow and restricted visibility almost forced cancellation of the flight. “It was a day the birds would be walking,” Lambeth said.

Late in the afternoon, Lambeth was finally able to take the MIG up. Taking turns at the controls with Menitskii in a two-seat trainer model, the MIG performed a series of maneuvers that included loops, stall turns, maximum-rate rolls and zero-gravity rolls. There was no attempt, however, to explore the outer reaches of the “performance envelope,” Lambeth said.

Lambeth said he was impressed by the MIG’s handling, agility and stability at slow speeds--that it felt very much like an American F-15 or F-18, and a long step ahead of the French-made Mirage 2000.

Lambeth said he came away convinced that combat between the MIG-29 and the American front-line fighters would ultimately be decided by essentially by the skill of the pilots, not by a technological advantage.

Lambeth, Hines and Rumer were given a close look at a future generation MIG undergoing stress testing, escorted inside a supersonic wind tunnel and shown major subsections of a Soviet space shuttle.

A self-decribed “conservative” in his views of U.S.-Soviet relations, Lambeth said the experience has helped make him more “neutral” in his regard of the Soviet threat.

But just because the Cold War may be over, there’s plenty of work for Sovietologists--more now than ever, Lambeth said.

In the Brezhnev era, he explained, the Soviets were predictable. Not so any more.

“It’s difficult to take the long view,” Lambeth said, “when the challenge is just to understand the short run.”