Russia's Involvement With Terrorism

[Ryan Ruck]

How Russia Arms Terror - Where Hezbollah Gets Its Most Effective Weapons Against Israel

Mother Russia is also turning out to be the mother of all arms sellers.

The former Cold War superpower, where crusading journalists and anti-corruption bankers are regularly bumped off gangland style and the rule of law has become a joke, has just been designated the leading exporter of arms in 2005 to developing countries by a report issued by the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the US Congress. According to the report, China, India and Iran are Russia’s best customers for its booming arms industry which took in $1.6 billion more than 2004 to reach $7 billion in sales to developing nations. American arms sales occupied third spot behind second-place France.

But it is Russia’s supplying of weapons to rogue countries like Iran and Venezuela that is causing friction with America. Sadly, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose outward democratic façade hides the heart of the former Cold War KGB official that he once was, sees nothing wrong with arming nations that have made no secret of their intent to use them against their neighbors and to destabilize their regions. Russian arms have also been used against American forces and allies, making one wonder with friends like Russia, who needs enemies?

Last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon is the most recent example of Moscow’s double-dealing. During that conflict, Israel complained to Russia that Hezbollah was armed with Russian-made anti-tank missiles. This weapon turned out to be one of that terrorist organization’s most effective weapons. According to one report, it was responsible for the deaths of 50 of the 118 Israeli soldiers who died in the 34-day war.

Israel did not accuse Russia of arming Hezbollah directly, but of having given the missiles to Iran, Hezbollah’s supplier. Ehsan Ahari, a defense consultant, confirmed the effectiveness of this weapon when he wrote: “…Russia’s RPG-29s made a name for themselves for making a high kill ratio of Israel’s heavily armored Merkava tanks.” These rockets, the Virginia-based consultant wrote, came to Hezbollah through Syria. America has designated both Syria and Iran state sponsors of terrorism and prohibits arms sales to them. Which obviously would not hinder Russia, since the former communist power itself also has a long history of state-sponsored terrorism behind it

A larger type of Russian anti-tank weapon also destroyed a couple of American tanks in Desert Storm II. However, a complaint to the Kremlin, it was reported, immediately stopped all further supply of this missile to the Iraqi battlefield.

Russian perfidy regarding arms for Iran does not stop with the RPGs. According to Ahari, Russia has also agreed to sell the Iranians 29 SA-15 Gauntlet surface-to-air defense systems and to upgrade its Russian combat aircraft and T-72 main battle tanks. These are weapons America will face if its military should take action to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Already in 2002, a report of the Defense Intelligence Agency stated Iran could temporarily close the Persian Gulf to shipping because of Russian anti-ship missile sales, forcing a halt to the all-important oil shipments.

Last year, Israel asked Russia not to go through with a deal to sell advanced, shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to Syria, claiming a deal had been signed between the two countries. Israel rightly feared, as last summer’s war showed, that such weapons could find their way into the hands of Islamist terrorist groups. At the same time, the United States threatened sanctions against Russia if it went through with plans to sell Syria an updated version of a Scud missile that could hit anywhere in Israel. In both cases, Russia denied that any deal was in the works. Such denials, however, would carry some weight if Russia showed it had ever considered all the possible end uses of these weapons by its two shady customers.

In typical unconscionable fashion, Russia also shipped arms in 2004 to Sudan, which was involved in a program of genocide in Darfur that the United Nations termed the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Russia sent Sudan 12 MIG warplanes five months ahead of schedule right when the UN Security Council was beginning to discuss a resolution against this African country for assisting in the ethnic cleansing. According to statements taken by Amnesty International officials, refugees claim Russian military planes had already been used to bomb the unfortunate Darfur civilian population. It is feared these new planes will also be used against these civilians. At the time of the shipment, Amnesty International and other human rights groups were also trying to get an outright arms embargo against Sudan. Which would not bother Putin’s Kremlin, since it is in the habit of closing down such human rights organizations in Russia.

While earning hard currency is a major reason for arms sales to undesirable states that also include China and North Korea, the Russian leaders’ Cold War mentality of opposing or harming American interests wherever possible also guides their dysfunctional sales policy. But Russia’s irresponsible actions may, in the end, backfire, as her anti-Western customers may eventually turn her own weapons against her interests. But as it now stands regarding the proliferation of Russian arms around the world, Mother Russia should immediately be declared an unfit parent.

[Ryan Ruck]

Russia Maintains Contacts With Hamas, Hezbollah

Russia continues to maintain contacts with both Hamas and Hezbollah as clashes between the Palestinians and Israelis continue and tensions in Lebanon persist, a senior diplomat said Thursday.

Russia, one of the Quartet countries mediating the Middle East conflict, has consistently taken a softer line than Western powers on the Islamic group Hamas, which leads the Palestinian government, and Lebanon-based Islamic militant group Hezbollah, both of which are considered terrorist organizations by Israel and most Western countries.

The Russian diplomat said, "I can say that we have never interrupted our contacts with representatives of the movements, which were elected [legitimately], be it in the Palestinian National Authority or in Lebanon."

Hamas, which won elections in January, has been implicated in missile attacks against Israel. Hezbollah was involved in a bloody conflict with Israel this summer which led to Israeli air strikes that killed over a thousand Lebanese and displaced a quarter of the country's population. Hezbollah is now one of the two main political parties representing the Shiites in Lebanon's parliament.

Russia was the first nation to accept the legitimacy of Hamas and invited a delegation from the group to Moscow after its election victory. But negotiations between the four mediators in the Middle East conflict - the UN, EU, U.S. and Russia - have stalled as Hamas is refusing to accept Israel's right to exist.

The Russian diplomat said Russia called for forming a sovereign Palestinian state and involving it in international processes as a way to resolve the Middle East crisis.

"The formation of a Palestinian state, which would have all the rights pursuant to a sovereign nation and assume a full set of corresponding obligations, would eventually resolve the Middle East problem," the diplomat said.

Israel and the United States, originally firmly opposed to negotiations with the Hamas government, have recently conceded the possibility of contacts, after Hamas said it would form a coalition government with the Fatah party of PNA President Mahmoud Abbas.

However, relations have been undermined by rocket attacks between Israel and PNA. Palestinian militants were locked in a five-month offensive with Israel, resulting in hundreds of Palestinian deaths, before a tentative ceasefire in mid-November.

The Russian diplomat also said no resolution could be expected without progress in negotiations between Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon, but added that talks should be based on the Road Map plan, which the Quartet of mediators proposed in 2002.

"Russia believes that the tenets of the document are still valid," he said, adding that the timeframe now needed to be adjusted.

In mid-November, the Quartet met in the Russian Embassy in Cairo to resume Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, in their first meeting since Hamas came to power.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for Quartet to be broadened to include the Israelis and the PNA leadership.

"Russia considers an expedited gathering of the Quartet of international mediators to be an urgent task," he said. "We are convinced that the leading countries of the region, as well as Palestinians and Israelis, should be invited [to the meeting] to make it productive."

[Ryan Ruck]

A very long but also a very informative read!

International Terrorism: The Communist Connection Revisited

Archives show Islamist terrorism linkages to Soviet Cold War intelligence

By J. Michael Waller
Posted: Saturday, June 1, 2002

PAPERS & STUDIES
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Publication Date: June 1, 2002

Seeing the unseen links

Twenty-five years ago, Stefan Possony posited the then-radical thesis that the Soviet Union was behind much of the world’s growing terrorist problem, and that otherwise independent terrorist organizations operated in international networks. Possony’s book, International Terrorism: The Communist Connection, published in 1978,[1] blazed a trail that other scholars, journalists, investigators, and intelligence officers would follow.


Polite company would seldom entertain such an idea of global, Soviet-sponsored terrorist networks, at least in the days of détente and Jimmy Carter and America’s post-Vietnam malaise. The CIA called Possony’s notion nonsense. Nobody in the prestige press of foreign policy establishment, it seemed, was willing or able to take the idea seriously.


But a few others, like Claire Sterling with the strong financial backing of Reader’s Digest,[2] did, and that combined research fired the imagination of President Ronald Reagan’s incoming national security team in 1980 and 1981.


The new CIA Director, William J. Casey, ordered a thorough review of intelligence collection and analysis to test the outside writers’ validity – and to test the competence of the U.S. intelligence community in the face of international terrorism.[3] The CIA failed the test.


Casey’s contentious intelligence review, which underwent fierce bureaucratic resistance and denounced in press leaks as “politicization of intelligence,” found that Possony was correct.


Here is what Possony found, using what he called “structured analysis” of open-source information:

There is virtually no terrorist operation or guerrilla movement anywhere in the world today, whether communist, semi-communist, or non-communist, from the Irish Republican Army to the Palestine Liberation Organization to our own Weather Underground, with which communists of one sort or another have not been involved. This includes non-communist operations and movements, for communist parties and governments always stand ready to exploit disorder in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere, however and by whomever it is fomented.

In hindsight, his point is obvious. Even so, caution ruled his analysis:

Because Moscow, Peking, Havana and other communist centers are linked to so many terrorist and guerrilla groups and organizations, and because so many of the groups look to those centers not simply for support and assistance but also for ideological inspiration, the groups often seem to be connected with one another. They are certainly cooperating with one another more and more, as if they constituted a Terrorist International, controlled and directed by some central authority. This study does not make that claim because the facts do not warrant that conclusion.


But it does recognize – and will show – that a significant degree of coordination of terrorist activities does exist, and that it is mainly communists who are doing the coordinating.


Put differently, if communist governments and political groupings, of one ideological emphasis or another, were to cease terrorist activity and assistance, the present wave of international terrorism would be quashed. Terrorism, of course, predates the communist movement, and even today not every terrorist is communist, especially in Ireland and the Middle East, but present day international terrorism is principally attributable to communists, either directly or indirectly. [4]

Linkages of communist and Arab/Islamist terrorism

Three times in the above passage, Possony cited links – relationships that facilitated operations without necessarily placing them under centralized control - to non-communist Palestinian or Middle Eastern terrorist organizations.


In do doing, he described the early stages of an international terrorist network in which the Soviet Union and other communist governments and movements facilitated the rise of non-communist terrorist organizations and networks in the Middle East and the Muslim world: Links are connections, not organizational operations of a subsidiary nature like a front or cover.


By their nature links are circumstantial. Links are not found by unearthing a secret communiqué or master plan, but by close attention to travel; exchange of personnel, money, arms, and materiel; propaganda, solidarity pronouncements, friendly acts and the provision of legal help to those who are arrested. Links are the stuff of informal working relationships that are usually more cost effective, and always less risky, than formalized ties.[5]


This prompts questions after the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States: To what degree do 21^st century Islamist terrorist networks owe their origins in the communist terrorist networks built and armed by the Soviet Union?


Had there been no USSR, would there be an Axis of Evil today?


Before discussing the Soviet incubation of Arab and Islamist terrorist organizations, let us first study how subsequent scholarship and journalism has contradicted or validated Possony’s central thesis, which is that communist countries, led by the Soviet Union and its proxies like Cuba, had their hand in terrorism throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.


First, nothing about the thesis should have been as startling as it was at the time. Soviet support for revolutionary movements that deliberately employed terrorism as a part of their politico-military strategy was a tradition dating to the Bolsheviks, whose leader, Lenin, wrote approvingly about using terrorism in principle as a tool of seizing power in the course of waging revolutions that would take over the world.[6] Moscow was a major, open backer of “national liberation movements” in 1960s Africa and Asia. But many of these movements, mainly fighting Western-backed governments and regimes, were not “terrorist” per se.


In his thesis, Possony defined terrorism as “the use of murder and violence against noncombatants, for the purpose of intimidating enemies, paralyzing their authorities and institutions, and spreading chaos within target societies.”[7]


Many if not most of the “national liberation movements” practiced terrorism under Possony’s definition, but they were organized more as irregular paramilitary forces than as purely terrorist units.


Western observers (and indeed, the Soviets themselves in internal discussions and documents that came to light after 1991) drew distinctions between Soviet support for guerrilla movements and for terrorists, subjective distinctions to be sure, but for our purposes a useful guideline for discussion.


United States law, which the federal government has employed for analytical purposes since 1983, draws the distinction thus: The term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. The term ‘international terrorism’ means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country. The term ‘terrorist group’ means any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.[8]

The witnesses and the documents speak


The evidence compiled since 1978 from intelligence services, defectors, scholars, journalists, and ultimately from the archives of the former Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Soviet Union and elsewhere, effectively closes the door on the debate about whether or not the USSR and its proxies armed and built the international terrorist networks of the 1960s through ‘80s.


Academic conferences brought together some of the West’s top scholars and practitioners to explore the subject, bringing with them defectors, eyewitnesses, and documents. Scholarly books, congressional hearings, and some investigative journalism produced incontrovertible evidence.[9]


Among other things, the researchers and writers pieced together the patterns showing that while Soviet-line Communist Parties generally did not engage in terrorism as organizations (albeit with some very important exceptions, especially in Latin America), extremist groups outside the Soviet formal party political control system did. Moscow seized on these groups, many of which it could not control outright but could influence by providing weapons, training, and other assistance, as surrogates with which to attack the global interests of its main enemy, the United States.


Often the Soviets used their more radical satellite regimes and client states as surrogates and cutouts, providing a thin but necessary coat of deniability. Sometimes those satellite regimes and client states – Cuba and East Germany, in particular - actually pressured Moscow on their own to provide serious support to terrorist causes.


Initially, the Soviets backed “wars of national liberation” against European colonies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Later they would extend campaigns to strategic targets that would serve as stepping stones for Soviet global power projection: states that flanked or occupied Western maritime chokepoints, territories rich in strategic minerals, or locations for aircraft forward-basing and refueling.[10]


After the Soviet collapse of 1991, the Communist Party archives yielded ever more primary source documentation proving Possony yet again. Take the Possony’s statement, written in 1977, in the introduction to his book: “The Middle East should be expected to experience new incidents of communist-supported terrorism, executed mainly by extremist PLO elements led by people like Wadih Haddad.”[11]


Others have since eclipsed Haddad, but he was a major terrorist figure of his day. Documents from the Kremlin archives which came to light after the 1991 Soviet coup provide insights into Haddad’s relationship with Moscow and into the quality of Possony’s own open-source analysis.


A top secret memorandum from KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov to CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, dated 23 April 1974, illustrates the relationship, showing also that at least some terrorist groups acted as free agents which the Soviets attempted to capture as franchises. Though the KGB chief cited the Soviet leadership’s “aversion in principle to terrorism,” he did not let the principle get in the way of Soviet statecraft. The Andropov memorandum reads,


Since 1968, the Committee for State Security [KGB] has maintained clandestine contact with Waddih Haddad, Politburo member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and chief of the PFLP’s foreign operations.


In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB rezident (station chief) in Libya in April of this year, Waddih Haddad outlined the PFLP’s prospective program of subversive and terrorist activity, summarized as follows:

The chief purpose of the PFLP’s special actions is to increase the effectiveness of the struggle of the Palestinian resistance against Israel, Zionism, and American imperialism . . . at the present time, the PFLP is preparing a number of special operations, including a strike against the major oil reserves in various regions (Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Hong Kong, and others), the destruction of tankers and supertankers, operations against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, and Kenya, a raid on the diamond center building in Tel Aviv, and others.


W. Haddad appealed to us to help his organization obtain several types of special technical devices necessary to conduct subversive operations.


In appealing for assistance, W. Haddad clearly recognizes our aversion in principle to terrorism, and so is refraining from raising any matters related to this direction of the PFLP’s activities.


The nature of relations with W. Haddad enables us to oversee to a certain extent the operation of the PFLP’s department of foreign operations, to influence it in ways favorable to the Soviet Union, and to carry out active measures in our interests with the forces of his organization, while observing the necessary secrecy.


Taking the abovementioned into account, it would seem expedient at the next meeting to treat favorably Waddih Haddad’s request to help the PFLP with special devices. As for the specifics of providing aid, it is intended that these matters be decided on an individual case basis, keeping in mind the interests of the Soviet Union and avoiding any possibility of damage to our national security.


We request your consent.[12]

The politburo granted the request, literally approving arms shipments they Soviet leadership knew could be used against American targets and civilian commercial shipping.


The first page of the Andropov memorandum contains the signatures of most of the politburo members, including Brezhnev. The KGB informed the politburo of the smallest details of terrorist support.


A 16 May 1975 KGB report, for example, informs the politburo that the intelligence service transferred 53 foreign-made automatic weapons (two with silencers) and 34,000 rounds of ammunition to Haddad, adding a curious comment about the nature of the shipment:

The illegal transfer of weapons was made in neutral waters in the Bay of Aden at night without making contact and with strict observance of security, using a reconnaissance ship of the USSR navy. Haddad is the only foreigner to know that the weaponry in question was transferred by us.[13]

Yevgenia Albats, one of Russia’s most talented investigative journalists, briefly had access to Soviet Communist Party politburo files that confirmed Moscow’s role as a center of international terrorism support. In the chaotic days following the 1991 coup, she accessed the Soviet presidential archive and came away with bags full of photocopied terrorism documents, some raw operational paperwork and some official correspondence between the KGB and the party leadership itemizing millions of dollars of cash transfers to foreign communist parties, guerrilla forces, and terrorist groups.[14]


It was probably the largest and most damning collection of high-level Soviet documents to see the light of day. The Soviets did not always deliver its support for free. In several documented cases, Moscow encouraged the plundering and trafficking of art and antiquities as payment. Albats discovered the minutes of a 27 November 1984 politburo session that read, in part,

a) Assign the USSR KGB to inform the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Democratic Front (PDLF) of Soviet agreement in principle to ship special goods [weapons] to the PDLF valued at 15 million rubles, in exchange for a collection of art treasures of the ancient world;


b) Accept from the PDLF requests for delivery of special goods within the stated sum;


c) In cooperation with the USSR Ministry of Culture, carry out measures concerning the legal aspects of the acquired collections...


4. Assign the USSR Ministry of Culture to:


a) Receive from the USSR KGB by special list a collection of art treasures of the ancient world;


b) Determine in coordination with the USSR KGB the place and conditions for special storage of the collection (‘the gold fund’), covert scientific evaluation, and future exhibition. Together with the USSR Finance Ministry, submit according to standard procedure a proposal regarding the necessary allocations;


c) With the USSR KGB, decide on the exhibition of individual objects and groups of articles for the collection.[15]

The Palestinian group stole art and antiquities from a Lebanese bank, for which the Soviets traded $20 million worth of weapons. The treasures themselves, according to Albats, were worth as much as $9 billion.[16] (Franchising terrorism was lucrative for the Soviet bloc. The East Germans found their regime had become financially dependent on Libya, and actively facilitated Libyan-sponsored terrorism to continue the flow of petrodollars to East Berlin.) The Soviets even entertained requests from terrorists who had financed their operations by kidnapping wealthy individuals, but who had run out of people to kidnap.


Albats found the following letter to the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee from a Latin American group that read,

Dear Comrades,


We are of course trying to obtain financial means through our own efforts, including a ransom from representatives of the local oligarchy, if we succeed in kidnapping them. However, the progress of the armed struggle has caused almost all of them to flee the country, and now they live abroad. . . .[17]

Similar information has emerged from the records of the Stasi security and intelligence service of the former East Germany. Combing through original Stasi documents and defector accounts, and interviewing former Stasi officers, veteran Associated Press correspondent John O. Koehler paints a vivid picture of how the East German government operated as a Soviet proxy in support of international terrorism, and how it even pushed the Soviet leadership further into the terrorism business.


Koehler describes detailed Stasi reports of support for terrorism in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as the Stasi’s 1986 collaboration with Libyan operatives who planted a bomb in a West Berlin discotheque known to be frequented by American servicemen, killing at least three and wounding 234 – and how the Stasi and East German political leadership plotted to make the Americans think they were helping the U.S. fight terrorism without really doing so.[18]


Even Fidel Castro of Cuba was not as doctrinaire as he appeared. Embracing the enemy-of-my-enemy philosophy, the regime trained a large number of Latin American Trotskyist groups in terrorism in addition to the tens of thousands of guerrillas and terrorists loyal to the Cuban and Soviet brands of communism.[19]


Defectors from Cuba’s DGI intelligence service report that Havana operated in the Middle East among Arab radicals as part of Castro’s revolutionary network, and by the 1980s actively recruited and trained Muslim terrorists from the Middle East and South Asia.[20] Cuba and Palestinian terrorists forged a decades-long operational relationship that continues to this day.[21] Then there were the other Soviet client states and proxies, including North Korea, one of the less studied but more active communist sponsors of terrorism.[22]

The People's Republic of China and terrorism


The Soviet bloc was not alone in the communist world in support for terrorism. Newly declassified Nixon administration archives reveal that in the early 1970s the United States considered the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to be a state sponsor of terrorism.[23]


The PRC continues to develop terrorist theory as part of its own evolving military and security doctrine. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) publishing house has produced theoretical works in recent years that explicitly endorse the use of international terrorism as an asymmetrical weapon against a more powerful foe, understood to be the United States. Unrestricted Warfare, authored by PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui and published by the official military publishing house in 1999, is one of those works.


Coldly well-reasoned, the book calls for the assassination of traders and currency speculators, endorses what the authors call the “traditional terror war,” hints of al Qaeda-style attacks by arguing that “traditional ways” only “represent less than the maximum degree of terror,” and calling for the use of “superweapons” to be directed at a powerful enemy.


The PLA authors see the U.S. as especially vulnerable to such warfare, arguing that the American military is culturally unequipped to deal with the problem: “they have never taken into consideration and have even refused to consider means that are contrary to tradition and to select measures of operation other than military means.”


The U.S., the colonels wrote, should be better prepared: “What is surprising is that such a large nation unexpectedly does not have a unified command structure to deal with the threat.”[24]

The Soviet legacy on Russia


The post-Soviet Russian Federation remains stuck in a twilight zone between its totalitarian past and its future. Despite many reforms, neither the elites nor the population truly have broken with the Soviet legacy, let alone rejected it.


Russia has undergone no de-communization process that would expose the crimes and discredit the old regime. It has not, as the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, eastern Germans and Balts have tried to do, attempted to screen its new political, economic and juridical leaders to ensure they were not culpable for past state crimes. It has not removed the official iconography of the old instruments of political repression and state terror.


Instead, it has preserved the Leninist sword-and-shield emblem of the Bolshevik Cheka secret police as the crests of the internal security services, the foreign intelligence service, the national police in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the prosecutors under the State Procuracy: the sword-and-shield of the Bolshevik revolution, the sword that Lenin declared may have to smite the innocent to preserve the political elite.


It has not laid bare the terrorist archives of the Communist Party leadership (Albats had access to the archives for only a few days in the chaos following the coup against Gorbachev). Instead, it has kept them under lock and key, and passed laws keeping the secrets hidden for seventy years.


So it should come as no surprise that a KGB officer would become president of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin’s unusual ascendancy raises still further questions about the legitimacy of Russia’s democratic government, where an obscure KGB lieutenant colonel who controlled the hard currency accounts for the city of St. Petersburg suddenly became chief of the re-named units of the former KGB internal security structure, and was plucked from there to become prime minister.


From there, a series of explosions that leveled apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities propelled Putin effectively to depose an ailing and unpopular President Boris Yeltsin, and to take the presidency for himself. Those curiously timed explosions, in which hundreds of people died as they slept, were immediately blamed on Islamic Chechen terrorists seeking independence from Russia, even though they didn’t fit the Chechens’ modus operandi and were never again replicated once Putin took power.


Scholar David Satter and Russian journalists have pieced together the clues to the deadly blasts, thanks to a botched bombing of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Locals caught state security agents from Moscow in the act, the chekists lamely said the explosives were just sacks of sugar and the exercise only a drill, and the matter quietly disappeared until local journalists and Satter resurrected it, prompting questions about the legitimacy of the Putin government.[25]


Moscow’s relations with state sponsors of terrorism have changed since Soviet times. Today the ties are more commercial than ideological, to the point of shutting its eyes to the creation of future problems that Russia itself one day must confront.


An example is Moscow’s aggressive policy of selling advanced military technologies to China, Iran, and Iraq, including weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Most observers agree that the overriding purpose is to generate cash for Russia’s starving government and private sectors, and the armed forces. Moscow no longer actively supports international terrorism as a matter of policy. That role has been taken over by Iran.

State supporters of terrorism - then and now


Most of the regimes sponsoring international terrorism in 2002 are still distinctly of a Soviet-era bent.


We find, 25 years after Possony wrote his thesis, the states providing sanctuary, funds, weapons and other forms of support to international terrorists are mainly former Soviet client-regimes that survived the Soviet collapse.


The U.S. Department of State classifies seven governments worldwide as state sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.[26] Of the seven, five – Cuba under Fidel Castro, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Muammar Qaddafi, North Korea under Kim Jong-il and Syria under the Assad family – are ruled by individuals or family dynasties originally installed or propped up by the Soviet Union.


The Islamic Republic of Iran, though harshly anti-communist, took power with Soviet covert and diplomatic support in 1979 and built its substantial military on weapons from the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.


The Islamist regime in Sudan is the only of the seven that does not owe at least part of its origins to the communists, though it remains in power thanks largely to Communist Chinese weapons. (Curiously, only two of the seven, Cuba and North Korea, are Marxist-Leninist; the rest are ruled by Islamist or secular nationalist-socialist Muslims.)


Thus the Axis of Evil – which President George W. Bush identified as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea – was a Soviet creation. The present-day Arab and Islamist terrorist networks find their origins in the Soviet terrorist support campaigns.


Possony discussed the Arab and Muslim terrorist groups, some communist but most nationalist or religious, that flourished with Soviet support in the 1960s and ‘70s: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) and commando Popular Liberation Forces (PLF); the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP); the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of George Habash; the splinter PFLP General Command (PFLP-GC); the Egyptian-founded Al Fatah of Yasser Arafat and its Black September Organization branch; the Syrian-sponsored Al Saiqa, a terrorist wing of the regular Syrian army; and the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), founded by in Iraq by the Saddam Hussein regime “to balance the influence of the Egyptian-backed Al Fatah and Syrian-sponsored Al Saiqa.”


Possony itemized the Soviet-backed regimes that supported them: Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, as well as Iraq, Syria, Algeria, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.[27]


Palestinian terrorism, then aimed almost as much (sometimes even more) at anti-Soviet Arab governments in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as at Israel, owed its rise to the weapons, diplomacy, and political warfare machinery of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc.


In its process of expanding and consolidating influence in the Arab world after the 1967 war with Israel, the Soviets used the PLO as a vehicle through which to gain Arab sympathy and as an instrument to attack the United States and its Middle Eastern interests. Moscow won whether or not a peace agreement with Israel occurred.


“By identifying itself with the Palestinians and supporting their cause,” a scholar wrote in 1974 and whom Possony quoted, “the Soviet Union has attained a position where without foreclosing any of its options, it stands to gain from a failure of a settlement of a Palestinian problem as well as from its solution.”[28]


The USSR’s main reason for choosing to support terrorism and guerrilla warfare in the Middle East, he argued, was that the Soviets “could always gain by encouraging and fomenting disorder and turmoil wherever they can. The specific purpose is to obtain control over the waterways of the Dardanelles, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Straits of Aden, and the Straits of Hormuz.”[29]


This occurred in the context of radical secular movements and regimes such as Egypt under Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalistic socialism, the one-party Ba’athist regimes of Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the peculiar personal dictatorship in Libya of Qaddafi.


Marxist-Leninist ideology had little appeal in the Arab world, and the Soviets dispensed with their own Palestinian surrogate, the Communist PFLP, to embrace Yasser Arafat and his less radical but more popular Al Fatah faction.[30]


The fractious Palestinians could not unite in their campaign against Israel, and it took direct Soviet intervention to anoint Arafat, then a dynamic young man in his 30s, as leader and to prop him up politically, economically, militarily and diplomatically. Arafat consolidated control by perpetrating extremist actions that would rally Palestinians around him. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, in which Moscow’s Arab allies were trounced yet again, the Kremlin depended more and more on the PLO as its diplomatic vehicle and action arm in the region.


The PLO “served as a transmission belt for the export of KGB terrorist techniques to other regions and hence constitutes an essential element in Soviet regional and global strategy.” The Soviet propaganda apparatus gave constant, unqualified support to the PLO, with large-scale material assistance and terrorist training beginning as early as 1974.[31]


Soviet sponsorship of the PLO allowed Moscow to gain influence over other terrorist groups that depended on the Palestinians for training, weapons, sanctuary, and other assistance.[32] Noted Possony,

Clearly, there are important differences between the various bodies that constitute the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some of the fedayeen are simply nationalists, some are Islamic socialists, some – a distinct but dedicated minotiry – envision creation of a revolutionary Palestinian state ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat and they look variously to Moscow, Peking and Havana as their model.


Because of the differences that exist within the PLO, it is virtually impossible to synthesize or identify a Palestinian ideological position, but as we have already shown, the Soviets are not deterred from supporting and assisting a guerrilla movement simply because the movement is not communist. They have not been deterred from supporting Libya and assisting the PLO. In addition, PLO serves as a weapon not only against Israel but against the pro-Western Arab states, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and now Egypt; and also Lebanon, which is a special case.[33]

Indeed, some of the Soviet-backed Arab terrorist groups clung tenaciously to Islam. Possony continued,

A 1973 study of the fedayeen undertaken by the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict summarizes some of the reasons why the PLO has largely remained ‘impervious’ to communist influence despite the presence of avowed Marxist-Leninists in its ranks. Among them: ‘the tenacity of Islam, the absence of either an industrial proletariat or reservoir of discontented peasantry, personal and family rivalries, lack of sanctuaries . . . and above all the inability of Marxism-Leninism to adjust to the chameleon quality of Arab politics.[34]

Soviet support for Iran's radical fundamentalist revolution


Finding success in their new strategy of aiding non-communist Muslim radicals – and even sacrificing their own doctrinaire Leninist operatives to the more numerous and effective Palestinian nationalists and Islamists – brought the Soviets a step further toward bankrolling extreme Islamic terrorism, this time in Iran.


Soviet support for the 1979 Iranian revolution and the ascendancy of an Islamic republic under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which ushered in an era of Iran as one of the world’s prime sponsors of terrorism, is less well-known than Soviet involvement in Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, and Syria.


Iran was long a Soviet prize, a target of unsuccessful conquest by Stalin during World War II and again in the early 1950s, when the United States backed the return of the monarchy under Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Soviets invested substantially in covert operations against Iran during the Shah’s days as one of Washington’s staunchest allies in the region.


But Moscow took care never to provoke resentment among the Iranian people. “The Soviets engage in subversion, espionage and propaganda against Iranian government interests,” Iranian Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a staunch anti-communist, commented after the 1979 revolution, “but they never insult the Imam [Khomeini]. As I have often mentioned, the Soviets are no less satanic than the Americans. But they know how to avoid hurting people’s sensibilities.”[35]


Former Czechoslovak intelligence officer Ladislav Bittman writes that Moscow pursued a two-track policy toward the Shah: respectable non-involved relations on the one hand, and covert operations to undermine his government on the other.


The Soviets praised the anti-U.S. movement against the Shah and tolerated Khomeini’s religious fanaticism, while attempting to push the Iranian revolution toward communist ends under the vanguard of a well-financed and well-organized Tudeh communist party.


In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Soviet Communist Party and KGB provided covert backing to a range of Iranian radicals. KGB officer Vladimir Sakharov, a Middle East operative who defected to the U.S., stated in 1979, “They can be Islamic or nationalist so long as they are strongly anti-American and above all, show promise of being winners.”[36]


The Soviets aggressively recruited in Iran: “The KGB built a vast intelligence network among all strata of Iranian society, involving the Islamic clergy, radical students, Tudeh members who were ordered to dissociate themselves from the party immediately after they were recruited, and members of several ethnic groups fighting for national independence” inside Iran.[37]


Moscow catered to the extreme fundamentalist mullahs, providing expensively printed copies of the Koran and issuing statements supportive of Khomeini. A Soviet-controlled National Voice of Iran, based in Baku, helped organize anti-Shah demonstrations.[38] Even Iranian Communist (Tudeh) Party Secretary General Nouredin Kianouri had a Khomeini portrait in his office.


The student radicals who seized the American Embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979, sparking the 444-day hostage crisis, were more Marxist than Muslim, according to Bittman. The hostage-takers, calling themselves the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, included three Marxist groups: the Islamic-Marxist Mujahideen (now known as the People’s Mujahideen and based in Iraq), the Marxist Guerrilla Fedayeen, and the Tudeh Party.[39]



Although clerics frequently assailed the Tudeh Party, the communist group maneuvered tactically to pledge support for the Islamic fundamentalists and ordered its members to penetrate the new revolutionary government.[40]


Khomeini was anti-Soviet, but the student radicals who directed the broad revolution in Khomeini’s direction certainly were not. Said President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, “They’re Tudeh-influenced.”[41]


Radio Moscow and the clandestine, Soviet-sponsored National Voice of Iran, based in Baku and aimed at younger Iranians, incited mobs, playing an official role as a Khomeini ally. (Possony hinted at Soviet involvement more than a year before the revolution, observing that the Communist Party USA was backing anti-Shah groups in the U.S.)[42]


Though ties with Moscow quickly became strained with the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in December, the Kremlin smoothed over relations by helping Teheran circumvent Western sanctions.


For years the KGB circulated forgeries of U.S. documents to fan confusion and anti-American hysteria in Iran.[43] The Soviets sided with Khomeini during the Islamic crackdown against Iranian leftists, sacrificing their own loyal cadres. The KGB helped the ayatollah build his own elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard from members of the Soviet-backed, PLO-trained, Organization of People’s Fedayeen Guerrillas, to counter the power of the U.S.-trained Iranian army, as the shock troops of the revolution.[44]


In 1981, KGB advisers visited Iran to help the fundamentalist regime build a security force and intelligence service.[45]



The partnership didn’t last long, thanks to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Soviet neutrality during Iran’s war with Iraq, and the defection of a KGB officer in Teheran, Vladimir Kuzichkin, who revealed to the British the extent of Soviet covert operations against Iran.


Even so, Soviet crucial backing of Khomeini was decisive in helping direct the revolution Khomeini’s way, and to consolidate it with security assistance and diplomatic and propaganda support. Furthermore, it marked another point on the continuum between initial Soviet backing of non-communist Arab and Muslim radicals and the Islamist terrorism of the 21^st century.

Transition from communist to Islamist sponsorship


Astatus report finds that the hub of 21^st century terrorism is no longer old-line Communist except for pockets like the FARC of Colombia, fanatical Maoist movements like the dying Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path of Peru (though far-left, Marxist political extremism remains strong throughout Latin America, especially in Brazil) and the growing revolution in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal.


The predominant terror networks today are mostly various mutations of Islam.[46] Today we find that the mullahs of Iran adopted some of the Palestinian terrorist groups that spawned under the Soviet-backed PLO, and that the Soviet-installed regimes that provoked terrorism in the 1970s were still at it by the turn of the Christian millennium.


According to the State Department’s latest report on international terrorist trends,

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2000. It provided increasing support to numerous terrorist groups, including the Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which seek to undermine the Middle East peace negotiations through the use of terrorism.


Iraq continued to provide safe haven and support to a variety of Palestinian rejectionist groups, as well as bases, weapons, and protection to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist group that opposes the current Iranian regime.


Syria continued to provide safe haven and support to several terrorist groups, some of which oppose the Middle East peace negotiations.


Libya at the end of 2000 was attempting to mend its international image following its surrender in 1999 of two Libyan suspects for trial in the Pan Am 103 bombing. (In early 2001, one of the suspects was convicted of murder. The judges in the case found that he acted ‘in furtherance of the purposes of . . . Libyan intelligence services.’)


Cuba continued to provide safe haven to several terrorists and U.S. fugitives and maintained ties to state sponsors and Latin American insurgents.


North Korea harbored several hijackers of a Japanese Airlines flight to North Korea in the 1970s and maintained links to other terrorist groups.


Finally, Sudan continued to serve as a safe haven for members of al-Qaida, the Lebanese Hizballah, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the PIJ, and HAMAS, but it has been engaged in counterterrorism dialogue with the United States since mid-2000.[47]

Communists and Islamists are working together, collaborating with one another in the continued sponsorship of terrorism, the sheltering of known terrorists, or the incubation of destructive designs against the United States.


In 2001, for example, Cuban leader Fidel Castro visited Iran, Syria and Libya, proclaiming in a speech at Teheran University, “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up.”[48]


We see, then, a smooth transition of international terrorism from communist sponsors and theorists to communist-Islamist collaboration, and Islamist sponsorship and inspiration. Possony commented a quarter century ago,

A significant degree of coordination of terrorist activities does exist, and . . . it is many communists who are doing the coordinating. Put differently, if communist governments and political groupings, of one ideological emphasis or another, were to cease terrorist activity and assistance, the present wave of international terrorism would be squashed.[49]

Change the word “communist” to “Islamist” (as opposed to Islamic), and we find ourselves in the present day. If the communist-coordinated terrorists had been squashed, or never had existed, would the world be plagued by the present-day Palestinian, Iranian, and Islamist terrorism of the Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, Hamas, al Qaeda, and the many other violent organizations that commit mass murder in the name of God?

A new intensity: From pipe bombs and hijackings to weapons of mass destruction


The intensity and power of terrorism and threats of violence have multiplied almost infinitely since the 1970s. Yesterday’s pipe bombs, hooded gunmen, and hostage-takers, compared to today’s skyscraper attacks and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats, seem almost quaint.


Like the networks themselves, these new threats of extermination are yet another part of the communist legacy. During the Cold War, Moscow did little to promote proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in comparison to its weapons technology exports of today.


By contrast, post-Soviet Russia (including its old Communist Party bureaucracy and politicized security and military forces), as well as Communist China, have opened their inventories to terrorist regimes while claiming to be allies in the war against terrorism.


Most of the terrorist regimes on the State Department list happen to have their own illegal weapons of mass destruction programs in various stages of development, and several are suspected of proliferating weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) technology. In the words of Under Secretary of State John Bolton, “The spread of WMD to state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups is, in my opinion, the gravest security threat we now face.”


Russia and China have been the two main proliferators of WMD technology to terrorist regimes. The old Soviet arsenal remains a risk to the rest of the world, including to Russia, as biological, chemical and nuclear weapons technologies and their delivery systems proliferate to fanatics ready and even eager to use them.


Some of the proliferation fears are based on lax security and the often haphazard breakup of the USSR, which left weapons depots and hazardous compounds, including radiological substances, dangerously vulnerable to organized criminal and terrorist exploitation.


Of equal or even greater danger, however, are Moscow and Beijing’s deliberate policies to sell hyperweapon technology, including dual-use nuclear, biological and chemical weapons-production technologies and processes, as well as medium- and long-range ballistic missile systems, to terrorist regimes.


These weapons proliferation policies appear to be driven not by ideology but by cold financial considerations to keep weapons design bureaus and production lines open, bring in hard currency, and as a handy byproduct, to provide advanced weapons technologies to forces that could attack U.S. interests.


Russian government policy since the 1990s has been to provide chemical weapons technology to Syria, a range of armaments to Iran and Iraq, and to build both a nuclear reactor that can produce weapons-grade plutonium and assist in development of a long-range ballistic missile system for Teheran.[50]


Bolton starkly laid out the general details in a May, 2002 lecture at the Heritage Foundation:

Foremost is Iraq. Although it became a signatory to the BWC [Biological Weapons Convention] in 1972, and became a State Party in 1991, Iraq has developed, produced, and stockpiled biological warfare agents and weapons.


The United States strongly suspects that Iraq has taken advantage of more than three years of no U.N. inspections to improve all phases of its offensive BW [biological weapons] program. Iraq also has developed, produced, and stockpiled chemical weapons, and has shown a continuing interest in developing nuclear weapons and longer range missiles.


Next is North Korea. North Korea has a dedicated, national-level effort to achieve a BW capability and has developed and produced, and may have weaponized, BW agents in violation of the Convention. Despite the fact that its citizens are starving, the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources, including a biotechnology infrastructure, capable of producing infectious agents, toxins, and other crude biological weapons. It likely has the capability to produce sufficient quantities of biological agents for military purposes within weeks or so, and has a variety of means at its disposal for delivering these deadly weapons.


In January [2002] I also named North Korea and Iraq for their covert nuclear weapons programs in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. . . . Finally, we believe that North Korea has a sizeable stockpile of chemical weapons and can manufacture all manner of CW agents.


Then comes Iran. Iran’s biological weapons program began during the Iran-Iraq war and accelerated after Tehran learned how far along Saddam Hussein had progressed in his own program. The Iranians have all of the necessary pharmaceutical expertise, as well as the commercial infrastructure needed to produce – and hide – a biological warfare program. The United States believes Iran probably has produced and weaponized BW agents in violation of the Convention.


Again, Iran’s BW program is complemented by an even more aggressive chemical warfare program. Iran’s ongoing interest in nuclear weapons, and its aggressive ballistic missile research, development, and flight testing regimen.[51]

“Beyond the axis of evil,” Bolton added, “there are other rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction – particularly biological weapons.” They are:

First, Libya. There is no doubt that Libya continues its longstanding pursuit of nuclear weapons. . . . Among its weapons of mass destruction programs, Libya – which is not a party to the CWC – continues its goal of reestablishing its offensive chemical weapons capability, as well as pursuing an indigenous chemical warfare production capability. Libya has produced at least 100 tons of different kinds of chemical weapons. . . . the U.S. believes that Libya has continued its biological weapons program. . . . Libya is also continuing its efforts to obtain ballistic missile-related equipment, materials, technology, and expertise from foreign sources. . . .


The United States also knows that Syria has long had a chemical weapons program. It has a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin and is engaged in research and development of the more toxic and persistent nerve agent VX. . . . Syria . . . is pursuing the development of biological weapons and is able to produce at least small amounts of biological warfare agents. . . .


In addition to Libya and Syria, there is a threat coming from another BWC signatory, and that one lies just 90 miles from the U.S. mainland – namely, Cuba. . . . For four decades, Cuba has maintained a well-developed and sophisticated biomedical industry, supported until 1990 by the Soviet Union. This industry is one of the most advanced in Latin America and leads in the production of pharmaceuticals and vaccines that are sold worldwide. Analysts and Cuban defectors have long cast suspicion on the activities conducted in these biomedical facilities.


Here is what we now know: The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are convinced that such technology could support BW programs in those states.[52]

In 1998, Defense Secretary William Cohen added a bit of heft to a rather soft-line Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report on the Cuban military, stating in a letter to Congress, “I remain concerned about Cuba’s potential to develop and produce biological agents, given its biotechnology infrastructure.”


The DIA report’s overall benign view of the Cuban threat, Bolton and others argue, was due to the fact that the agency’s senior Cuba analyst, Ana Belen Montes, was a Cuban spy. Montes pled guilty to espionage for Castro in March 2002.

Wahhabi linkages emerge from Soviet fight


Old Soviet-installed terrorist regimes, remnants of Soviet-funded terrorist organizations, and uncontrolled Soviet weapons of mass destruction technology mutated all the worst products of communism into an out-of-control mega-destruction crisis that threatens entire civilizations: Organizations, individuals, and weapons with nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological weapons can now wage a form of extermination warfare with the simple resources once reserved for a superpower.


Cold War residues again haunt the United States and its allies: the PLO is now in control of a quasi-state entity it calls Palestine, led by one of the most notorious international terrorists of the 1960s and ‘70s. The Saudi Arabian regime, long propped up and defended as a bulwark against Soviet communist expansion and against Soviet-sponsored Ba’athist or other secular radical interests, only to become the source of Wahhabist rejectionism and terrorism, fell under the sights of one of its own, Osama bin Laden – himself a product, of sorts, of the reactionary extremism the Saudi regime inadvertently provoked through its massive corruption, emphasis on materialism, and religious hypocrisy.


The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rallied militant Muslims among the many who came to help the mujahideen resistance fighters in a just war against aggression and occupation. The Afghan fighters came together as a new force of their own, with some like Bin Laden marginalizing themselves to expand the war against all “infidels,” especially the United States, after the Soviet defeat. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan brought together some of the most militant of the world’s anti-Soviet Muslims, the violent, Wahhabi Islamists, uniting them with Saudi financial support as a battle-hardened internationalist force that viciously turned against the West as the USSR collapsed.


Here one can paraphrase Possony by saying, had there been no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there might never have been an Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.


Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was the first major opportunity for violent Muslims to join together in a real honest holy war that wasn’t controlled or tainted by the Palestinian question.


One of the major benefactors of the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan, apart from the United States, which sought to channel military support to the more moderate factions led by commanders like the late Ahmad Shah Masood, was Saudi Arabia. Saudi aid to the more radical elements of the mujahideen (in partnership with elements of the Pakistani military and its ISI intelligence service) popularized and strengthened Riyadh’s intolerant and violent brand of Wahhabism which made war against traditional and classical Islam in addition to the Soviets and the West.


In the 1990s, Palestinian terrorists organized under Hamas, Hezbollah and other groups, with varied Arab and Iranian backing, became more extreme than Arafat’s PLO, which found itself co-opted in a quest for diplomatic legitimacy as an embryonic Palestinian state.


Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, based variously in Sudan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, targeted the Saudi monarchy but organized globally, training tens of thousands of Islamist terrorists from around the world in its camps and building alliances and franchises with terrorist groups on every continent, and al Qaeda cells in more than 60 countries.


By the late 1990s al Qaeda had become the premier terrorist international force, based in a ravaged Afghanistan that the West had abandoned but that the Islamists, led by the Taliban militia with strong Saudi and Gulf state support, took for themselves. Al Qaeda members of various nationalities linked together in operational cells using much of the tradecraft of the KGB-trained terrorist networks of the 1980s.

Remaining Soviet-era terrorist networks


Many of the old Soviet-built terror networks remain. Some are the same old forces that were never defeated, never surrendered, never self-destructed, or never chose to join the democratic world.


The disciplined, battle-seasoned, hard-core professionals include the Irish Republican Army, the Basque ETA of Spain, the Colombian cocaine-trafficking Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and its heroin-trafficking cousin, the National Liberation Army (ELN); and the PLO, the latter of which achieved quasigovernment status under the architecture of the“Palestinian Authority.”


Revelation that the 2002 Palestinian intifada, led by a doddering 72 year-old Yasser Arafat, used booby trap bombs identical in every way to those of the IRA illustrates the continuum of the old Soviet-sponsored terror networks.[53]


Halfway around the world from the Middle East, in Colombia, authorities discovered similar explosive devices – along with at least three captured IRA men presently awaiting trial for helping the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an armed offshoot of the Colombian Communist Party, ratchet up its urban warfare capabilities and specifically to master that IRA invention, the car bomb.


Analysts are still trying to make sense of circumstantial evidence linking the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to extreme Islamist terrorism. Convicted Egyptian conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York were found to have had genuine Nicaraguan passports, illegally issued to them from the foreign ministry in Managua, to provide false identities.


Another Central American connection emerged with the 11 September 1991 attacks: In Virginia, illegal aliens from El Salvador ran fake ID rackets and provided some al Qaeda hijackers with false identification papers. Most Salvadoran organized crime and violence in the United States, according to a new study, is run by illegal aliens who formerly fought as guerrillas and terrorists in the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Salvadoran street gangs calling themselves MS-13 spread west to east across the U.S., and in a short time earned the reputation of being one of the most dangerous and violent street gangs in the country. MS-13 is “responsible for the execution of three federal agents and numerous shootings of law enforcement officers across the country,” according to the Orange County, California, District Attorney’s office.[54]


The group’s members include career gangsters from El Salvador and former combatants of the FMLN.

Terrorist support structures in the United States:
The Left and the jihadists become one

Federal officials, journalists and scholars are still learning about the new jihadist terrorist networks and their connections. They can learn much from Possony, who taught that one could divine much about terrorist groups, their sponsors, and their covert linkages simply by studying their overt traits. His methodology, structural analysis, enabled him to determine individuals’ exact relations with the Soviets, like Waddih Haddad.


Examining 21^st century terrorism and its linkages inside the United States reveals a surprising pattern: the pro-Soviet paleo-Left and old “New Left” terrorist support groups that facilitated activities for the IRA, ETA, and so forth, and more actively provided material, legal and political support for domestic terrorists of the Weather Underground, the May 19 Communist Organization, the Black Liberation Army, the Republic of New Afrika, the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) and Macheteros, among others, have made common cause with the jihadists, including al Qaeda.[55]


Several support networks exist. The International Action Center, founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and staffed by veterans of a splinter Marxist-Leninist group called the Workers World Party, organizes most of the large street demonstrations, protests, and staged media events to oppose U.S. efforts to fight Islamist terrorism, and overtly to support international groups identified as terrorist organizations. In early 2002, the group organized large, multi-day protests in solidarity with the Hamas/Hezbollah intifadah in the Middle East, and with the FARC in Colombia.[56]


Hives of lawyers who specialized in the defense of Communist clients during the Cold War have, since the Soviet collapse, invested their talents in defending terrorist causes. One of the fixtures is the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), founded in 1966 by the late William Kunstler to litigate against internal security laws and to provide legal support for political extremists, including terrorists. The CCR’s goal, according to Kunstler, was to keep in the streets those who would destroy the American system.


In its latest incarnation, the CCR has been advocating on behalf of Taliban and al Qaeda members held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


In the 1990s, Kunstler protégés Lynne Stewart and Stanley Cohen joined Ramsey Clark as the legal defense team for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “Blind Sheik” whom a jury convicted as a mastermind of terrorist conspiracies to bomb commuter bridges and tunnels in New York, the FBI field office in Manhattan, the United Nations building, and the World Trade Center in 1993.


In 2002, federal authorities arrested Stewart for allegedly helping the imprisoned sheik to send orders from prison to terrorists under his command. Stewart retained her own defense counsel, Susan Tipograph, herself a May 19 Communist Organization veteran who won notoriety in the 1970s and ‘80s by defending terrorists like Puerto Rican FALN bomb-maker William Morales.


Another support network, the New York-based National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), provides legal support to terrorist individuals and organizations. NCPPF was founded in the late 1960s to support New Left armed clandestine groups like the Weather Underground, May 19 Communist Organization, Black Liberation Army, and Puerto Rican FALN.


The NCPPF is another illustration of the nexus between communist and other far-left Americans and Islamist jihadists. In recent years the NCPPF has lobbied and litigated to weaken or repeal U.S. anti-terrorism laws, defend terrorist suspects in court, sue and agitate politically to overturn terrorist convictions; and to assist with fundraising for terrorist groups on First Amendment grounds.


NCPPF's membership includes supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the IRA, and the Shining Path of Peru. Its clients include the individuals convicted for the bombing of the U.S. Capitol in 1983, and the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center.


NCPPF President Sami al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, has been identified as a fundraiser and operative for suicide bombers abroad. Running NCPPF on a day-to-day basis is Kit Gage, a longtime legal activist and executive director of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), founded in the 1930s as the “main legal bulwark of the Communist Party USA, its fronts, and controlled organizations.” NCPPF has even broadened its base to welcome libertarians into its big tent.[57]


A common enemy, the United States, has trumped doctrinaire ideologies of both communists and Islamists. Moderate American Muslims have even likened the militant Wahhabi networks in the U.S. to communist and Soviet front organizations.[58] These are the public and semi-public, above-ground networks. What lies beneath is unknown. But the terrorists are seldom far from their supporters.


As security and terrorism expert Herbert Romerstein noted in 1981, the overt political and financial support apparatus is crucial to the function of the overall terrorist networks:

The fight against terrorism is as much a matter of political strategy as it is a matter of police tactics. Armored cars, bulletproof vests and hard-boiled negotiators should be our last recourse. More important are the ways in which we might weaken the states and organizations which sustain the terrorists.


The support apparatus is both the strength and the potential weakness of the terrorist organization. It provides them with safe houses, arms, propaganda and legal defense. . . . The support apparatus is also the recruiting ground for the active terrorist organization.[59]

Conclusion


Not only did Stefan Possony begin the American-based research that mapped Soviet bloc linkages to 1970s terrorism a quarter-century ago; his work helped prompt the U.S. intelligence community to reassess its own collection and analysis and to look in areas it had long dismissed or ignored.
Soviet politburo archives unearthed after the 1991 Moscow coup provided the final proof.


Even more, Possony was one of the first Americans to note the operational and strategic links between communist terrorists and secular Arab and extreme Islamist terrorists.


The Soviets built up the regimes that ultimately populated the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror, and essentially founded the trio of regimes now called the Axis of Evil.


Understanding the networks and tradecraft, and keeping in mind that terrorists cannot flourish without active civilian logistical, political, legal, and material support networks, is key waging the war against terrorism successfully. For these reasons, historical study of the old communist terrorist linkages and the political warfare campaigns that surrounded them, as well as the witting and unwitting American collaborators who toil to bind the counterterrorists’ hands while keeping the terrorists at large, will be vital to fighting and defeating the new terrorist enemy in the years and decades ahead.

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*J. Michael Waller is the Walter J. and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communications at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is also vice president of the Center for Security Policy. His books include Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today (Westview, 1994).

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_{[1] Stefan T. Possony and L. Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism: The Communist Connection (Washington: American Council for World Freedom, 1978).
[2] Claire Sterling, The Terror Network (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston/Reader’s Digest Press, 1981).
[3] Casey himself wrote about the terrorist networks in an essay titled, “The International Linkages: What Do We Know?” in Uri Ra’anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism – The Witnesses Speak (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1986), pp. 5-15.
[4] Possony, pp. 1-2. Emphasis in original.
[5] Possony, p. 2.
[6] Lenin, TK. Also see, Boris Ponomarev, Lenin and the World Revolutionary Process (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1980).
[7] Possony, p. 2.
[8] Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d). According to the U.S. Department of State, “For purposes of this definition, the term ‘noncombatant’ is interpreted to include, in addition to civilians, military personnel who at the time of the incident are unarmed or not on duty.” See Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 2001), introduction.
[9] Among the earlier works: Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander, Terrorism: The Soviet Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1984); Samuel T. Francis,The Soviet Strategy of Terror (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1981); Roberta Goren, The Soviet Union and Terrorism, Jillian Becker, ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984); Uri Ra’anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism – The Witnesses Speak (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1986); Herbert Romerstein, Soviet Support for International Terrorism (Washington: Foundation for a Democratic Education, 1981). Taking control of the Senate with the Reagan election of 1980, the Republican lawmakers created the first congressional panel to deal specifically with terrorism, the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, which further documented Soviet-bloc support for terrorism and the international terrorist networks. Cf The Role of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany in Fomenting Terrorism in Southern Africa, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, 2nd Session, March 22, 24, 25, 29, and 31, 1982.
[10] Constantine C. Menges, The Twilight Struggle (Washington: AEI Press, 1990), especially Chapter 2, “The Soviet Strategy of Indirect Aggression.”
[11] Possony, p. v.
[12] Translation of the original memorandum in collection of journalist Yevgenia Albats, who retrieved it and others from the Soviet presidential archives in the days following the 1991 Soviet coup. The ttranslation is published in Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia Past, Present and Future (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1994), pp. 227-229. In the Albats book, PFLP is transliterated as PLPF, and Waddih Haddad and W. Haddad as “Vadia Haddad” and “V. Haddad.”
[13] KGB memorandum to Leonid Brezhnev, 16 May 1975, No. 1218-A/OV, in Albats’ collection, quoted in Albats, p. 229.
[14] Albats shared dozens of these documents with the author in Boston and Moscow in 1992 and 1993.
[15] Original document quoted by Albats, pp. 229-230.
[16] Albats, p. 230.
[17] Stennogramma parlamentskiy slushaniy po rassledovaniyu finansovoy deyatelnosti KPSS [Transcript of parliamentary hearings investigating the financial activity of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union], Russian Federation Supreme Soviet, 10 February 1992, cited by Albats, p. 230. A copy of the original Russian stenographic notes, along with an English translation, are in Waller’s collection.
[18] John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder: Westview, 1999), pp. 325-401.
[19] Romerstein, pp. 20-21; Roger Fontaine, Terrorism: The Cuban Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1986).
[20] William Ratliff and Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier, Inside the Cuban Interior Ministry (Washington: Jamestown Foundation, 1994).
[21] For a description of the relationship, see David J. Kopilow, Castro, Israel & the PLO (Washington: Cuban-American National Foundation, 1984).
[22] Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., Terrorism: The North Korean Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1990).
[23] George Lardner, Jr., “Nixon Archives Portray Another ‘War’ on Terror,” Washington Post, 8 May 2002.
[24] Qiao Ling and Wang Xingsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Publishing House, 1999), translated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Published in the U.S. with an introduction by Al Santoli as Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America (Newsmax, 2002).
[25] David Satter, “The Shadow of Ryazan: Is Putin’s Government Legitimate?” National Review Online, 30 April 2002.
[26] “Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism,” Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 30 April 2001).
[27] Possony, pp. 26-31.
[28] Augustus R. Norton, Moscow and the Palestinians (Miami: University of Miami, 1974), cited by Possony, pp. 31-32.
[29] Possony, p. 32.
[30] Goren, pp. 106-132.
[31] Cline and Alexander, pp. 37-49. For a more detailed study of Soviet policy toward the PLO, see Richard H. Shultz, Jr., The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Warfare: Principles, Practices, and Regional Comparisons (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), pp. 76-114.
[32] Goren, p. 139.
[33] Possony, pp. 29-30.
[34] Possony, p. 31.
[35] Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Washington: Pergamon Brasseys, 1985), pp. 109-110.
[36] Bittman, p. 110.
[37] Bittman, p. 111. These include Kurdish groups such as the Marxist-Leninist PKK, which received covert KGB support through 1991 and continued to enjoy audiences with senior post-Soviet Russian officials, such as foreign intelligence chief-turned-premier Yevgeny Primakov.
[38] Bittman, pp. 111, 113.
[39] Bittman, p. 115. The People’s Mujahideen of Iran retains its Marxist-Leninist ideology as of this writing, operating in military bases inside Iraq and under Iraqi government sponsorship. The State Department terms the People’s Mujahideen a terrorist organization. The Organization of People’s Fedayeen Guerrillas, trained at PLO camps and given Soviet covert propagandistic support, became the core cadres for Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards as well as the Tudeh Youth.
[40] Bittman, p. 115-116.
[41] Bittman, pp. 115-116.
[42] Possony, p. 32.
[43] Bittman, p. 125.
[44] Bittman, pp. 125-126.
[45] Bittman, p. 126.
[46] Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 30 April 2001).
[47] “Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism,” Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 30 April 2001).
[48] “Iran and Cuba Bolster Ties, Strengthen Anti-U.S. Solidarity,” Agence France Presse, 10 May 2001.
[49] Possony, p. 1.
[50] Cf. Kori N. Schake and Judith S. Yaphe, The Strategic Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran (Washington: Institute for National Security Studies, National Defense University, McNair Paper 64, 2001).
[51] John R. Bolton, “Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Themes from Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Heritage Lectures, No. 743, 6 May 2002.
[52] Bolton.
[53] David Bamber, “IRA Role Seen In Bombs at Jenin,” Sunday Telegraph, London, 28 April 2002.
[54] Jon Ward, “Salvadoran MS-13 gang rated among the most violent,” Washington Times, 24 August 2002, p. A10.
[55]J. Michael Waller, “Domestic Front in the War on Terror,” Insight, 7 January 2002.
[56] The International Action Center publishes its organizing activities on its Website, www.iacenter.org.
[57] J. Michael Waller, “Domestic Front in the War on Terror,” Insight, 7 January 2002.
[58] Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, “Islamic Extremism: A Viable Threat to U.S. National Security,” transcript of speech at the Open Forum, U.S. Department of State, 7 January 1999; “Terrorist Threat in America: Extremist Wave Threatens to Engulf Muslim Americans,” Statement by the Islamic Supreme Council of America, The Muslim Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1999; and J. Michael Waller, “‘Wahhabi Lobby’ Takes the Offensive,” Insight, 5 August 2002.
[59] Romerstein, p. 40.}

[Ryan Ruck]

A very long but also a very informative read!

International Terrorism: The Communist Connection Revisited

Archives show Islamist terrorism linkages to Soviet Cold War intelligence

By J. Michael Waller
Posted: Saturday, June 1, 2002

PAPERS & STUDIES
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Publication Date: June 1, 2002

Seeing the unseen links

Twenty-five years ago, Stefan Possony posited the then-radical thesis that the Soviet Union was behind much of the world’s growing terrorist problem, and that otherwise independent terrorist organizations operated in international networks. Possony’s book, International Terrorism: The Communist Connection, published in 1978,[1] blazed a trail that other scholars, journalists, investigators, and intelligence officers would follow.


Polite company would seldom entertain such an idea of global, Soviet-sponsored terrorist networks, at least in the days of détente and Jimmy Carter and America’s post-Vietnam malaise. The CIA called Possony’s notion nonsense. Nobody in the prestige press of foreign policy establishment, it seemed, was willing or able to take the idea seriously.


But a few others, like Claire Sterling with the strong financial backing of Reader’s Digest,[2] did, and that combined research fired the imagination of President Ronald Reagan’s incoming national security team in 1980 and 1981.


The new CIA Director, William J. Casey, ordered a thorough review of intelligence collection and analysis to test the outside writers’ validity – and to test the competence of the U.S. intelligence community in the face of international terrorism.[3] The CIA failed the test.


Casey’s contentious intelligence review, which underwent fierce bureaucratic resistance and denounced in press leaks as “politicization of intelligence,” found that Possony was correct.


Here is what Possony found, using what he called “structured analysis” of open-source information:

There is virtually no terrorist operation or guerrilla movement anywhere in the world today, whether communist, semi-communist, or non-communist, from the Irish Republican Army to the Palestine Liberation Organization to our own Weather Underground, with which communists of one sort or another have not been involved. This includes non-communist operations and movements, for communist parties and governments always stand ready to exploit disorder in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere, however and by whomever it is fomented.

In hindsight, his point is obvious. Even so, caution ruled his analysis:

Because Moscow, Peking, Havana and other communist centers are linked to so many terrorist and guerrilla groups and organizations, and because so many of the groups look to those centers not simply for support and assistance but also for ideological inspiration, the groups often seem to be connected with one another. They are certainly cooperating with one another more and more, as if they constituted a Terrorist International, controlled and directed by some central authority. This study does not make that claim because the facts do not warrant that conclusion.


But it does recognize – and will show – that a significant degree of coordination of terrorist activities does exist, and that it is mainly communists who are doing the coordinating.


Put differently, if communist governments and political groupings, of one ideological emphasis or another, were to cease terrorist activity and assistance, the present wave of international terrorism would be quashed. Terrorism, of course, predates the communist movement, and even today not every terrorist is communist, especially in Ireland and the Middle East, but present day international terrorism is principally attributable to communists, either directly or indirectly. [4]

Linkages of communist and Arab/Islamist terrorism

Three times in the above passage, Possony cited links – relationships that facilitated operations without necessarily placing them under centralized control - to non-communist Palestinian or Middle Eastern terrorist organizations.


In do doing, he described the early stages of an international terrorist network in which the Soviet Union and other communist governments and movements facilitated the rise of non-communist terrorist organizations and networks in the Middle East and the Muslim world: Links are connections, not organizational operations of a subsidiary nature like a front or cover.


By their nature links are circumstantial. Links are not found by unearthing a secret communiqué or master plan, but by close attention to travel; exchange of personnel, money, arms, and materiel; propaganda, solidarity pronouncements, friendly acts and the provision of legal help to those who are arrested. Links are the stuff of informal working relationships that are usually more cost effective, and always less risky, than formalized ties.[5]


This prompts questions after the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States: To what degree do 21^st century Islamist terrorist networks owe their origins in the communist terrorist networks built and armed by the Soviet Union?


Had there been no USSR, would there be an Axis of Evil today?


Before discussing the Soviet incubation of Arab and Islamist terrorist organizations, let us first study how subsequent scholarship and journalism has contradicted or validated Possony’s central thesis, which is that communist countries, led by the Soviet Union and its proxies like Cuba, had their hand in terrorism throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.


First, nothing about the thesis should have been as startling as it was at the time. Soviet support for revolutionary movements that deliberately employed terrorism as a part of their politico-military strategy was a tradition dating to the Bolsheviks, whose leader, Lenin, wrote approvingly about using terrorism in principle as a tool of seizing power in the course of waging revolutions that would take over the world.[6] Moscow was a major, open backer of “national liberation movements” in 1960s Africa and Asia. But many of these movements, mainly fighting Western-backed governments and regimes, were not “terrorist” per se.


In his thesis, Possony defined terrorism as “the use of murder and violence against noncombatants, for the purpose of intimidating enemies, paralyzing their authorities and institutions, and spreading chaos within target societies.”[7]


Many if not most of the “national liberation movements” practiced terrorism under Possony’s definition, but they were organized more as irregular paramilitary forces than as purely terrorist units.


Western observers (and indeed, the Soviets themselves in internal discussions and documents that came to light after 1991) drew distinctions between Soviet support for guerrilla movements and for terrorists, subjective distinctions to be sure, but for our purposes a useful guideline for discussion.


United States law, which the federal government has employed for analytical purposes since 1983, draws the distinction thus: The term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience. The term ‘international terrorism’ means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country. The term ‘terrorist group’ means any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.[8]

The witnesses and the documents speak


The evidence compiled since 1978 from intelligence services, defectors, scholars, journalists, and ultimately from the archives of the former Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Soviet Union and elsewhere, effectively closes the door on the debate about whether or not the USSR and its proxies armed and built the international terrorist networks of the 1960s through ‘80s.


Academic conferences brought together some of the West’s top scholars and practitioners to explore the subject, bringing with them defectors, eyewitnesses, and documents. Scholarly books, congressional hearings, and some investigative journalism produced incontrovertible evidence.[9]


Among other things, the researchers and writers pieced together the patterns showing that while Soviet-line Communist Parties generally did not engage in terrorism as organizations (albeit with some very important exceptions, especially in Latin America), extremist groups outside the Soviet formal party political control system did. Moscow seized on these groups, many of which it could not control outright but could influence by providing weapons, training, and other assistance, as surrogates with which to attack the global interests of its main enemy, the United States.


Often the Soviets used their more radical satellite regimes and client states as surrogates and cutouts, providing a thin but necessary coat of deniability. Sometimes those satellite regimes and client states – Cuba and East Germany, in particular - actually pressured Moscow on their own to provide serious support to terrorist causes.


Initially, the Soviets backed “wars of national liberation” against European colonies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Later they would extend campaigns to strategic targets that would serve as stepping stones for Soviet global power projection: states that flanked or occupied Western maritime chokepoints, territories rich in strategic minerals, or locations for aircraft forward-basing and refueling.[10]


After the Soviet collapse of 1991, the Communist Party archives yielded ever more primary source documentation proving Possony yet again. Take the Possony’s statement, written in 1977, in the introduction to his book: “The Middle East should be expected to experience new incidents of communist-supported terrorism, executed mainly by extremist PLO elements led by people like Wadih Haddad.”[11]


Others have since eclipsed Haddad, but he was a major terrorist figure of his day. Documents from the Kremlin archives which came to light after the 1991 Soviet coup provide insights into Haddad’s relationship with Moscow and into the quality of Possony’s own open-source analysis.


A top secret memorandum from KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov to CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, dated 23 April 1974, illustrates the relationship, showing also that at least some terrorist groups acted as free agents which the Soviets attempted to capture as franchises. Though the KGB chief cited the Soviet leadership’s “aversion in principle to terrorism,” he did not let the principle get in the way of Soviet statecraft. The Andropov memorandum reads,


Since 1968, the Committee for State Security [KGB] has maintained clandestine contact with Waddih Haddad, Politburo member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and chief of the PFLP’s foreign operations.


In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB rezident (station chief) in Libya in April of this year, Waddih Haddad outlined the PFLP’s prospective program of subversive and terrorist activity, summarized as follows:

The chief purpose of the PFLP’s special actions is to increase the effectiveness of the struggle of the Palestinian resistance against Israel, Zionism, and American imperialism . . . at the present time, the PFLP is preparing a number of special operations, including a strike against the major oil reserves in various regions (Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Hong Kong, and others), the destruction of tankers and supertankers, operations against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, and Kenya, a raid on the diamond center building in Tel Aviv, and others.


W. Haddad appealed to us to help his organization obtain several types of special technical devices necessary to conduct subversive operations.


In appealing for assistance, W. Haddad clearly recognizes our aversion in principle to terrorism, and so is refraining from raising any matters related to this direction of the PFLP’s activities.


The nature of relations with W. Haddad enables us to oversee to a certain extent the operation of the PFLP’s department of foreign operations, to influence it in ways favorable to the Soviet Union, and to carry out active measures in our interests with the forces of his organization, while observing the necessary secrecy.


Taking the abovementioned into account, it would seem expedient at the next meeting to treat favorably Waddih Haddad’s request to help the PFLP with special devices. As for the specifics of providing aid, it is intended that these matters be decided on an individual case basis, keeping in mind the interests of the Soviet Union and avoiding any possibility of damage to our national security.


We request your consent.[12]

The politburo granted the request, literally approving arms shipments they Soviet leadership knew could be used against American targets and civilian commercial shipping.


The first page of the Andropov memorandum contains the signatures of most of the politburo members, including Brezhnev. The KGB informed the politburo of the smallest details of terrorist support.


A 16 May 1975 KGB report, for example, informs the politburo that the intelligence service transferred 53 foreign-made automatic weapons (two with silencers) and 34,000 rounds of ammunition to Haddad, adding a curious comment about the nature of the shipment:

The illegal transfer of weapons was made in neutral waters in the Bay of Aden at night without making contact and with strict observance of security, using a reconnaissance ship of the USSR navy. Haddad is the only foreigner to know that the weaponry in question was transferred by us.[13]

Yevgenia Albats, one of Russia’s most talented investigative journalists, briefly had access to Soviet Communist Party politburo files that confirmed Moscow’s role as a center of international terrorism support. In the chaotic days following the 1991 coup, she accessed the Soviet presidential archive and came away with bags full of photocopied terrorism documents, some raw operational paperwork and some official correspondence between the KGB and the party leadership itemizing millions of dollars of cash transfers to foreign communist parties, guerrilla forces, and terrorist groups.[14]


It was probably the largest and most damning collection of high-level Soviet documents to see the light of day. The Soviets did not always deliver its support for free. In several documented cases, Moscow encouraged the plundering and trafficking of art and antiquities as payment. Albats discovered the minutes of a 27 November 1984 politburo session that read, in part,

a) Assign the USSR KGB to inform the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Democratic Front (PDLF) of Soviet agreement in principle to ship special goods [weapons] to the PDLF valued at 15 million rubles, in exchange for a collection of art treasures of the ancient world;


b) Accept from the PDLF requests for delivery of special goods within the stated sum;


c) In cooperation with the USSR Ministry of Culture, carry out measures concerning the legal aspects of the acquired collections...


4. Assign the USSR Ministry of Culture to:


a) Receive from the USSR KGB by special list a collection of art treasures of the ancient world;


b) Determine in coordination with the USSR KGB the place and conditions for special storage of the collection (‘the gold fund’), covert scientific evaluation, and future exhibition. Together with the USSR Finance Ministry, submit according to standard procedure a proposal regarding the necessary allocations;


c) With the USSR KGB, decide on the exhibition of individual objects and groups of articles for the collection.[15]

The Palestinian group stole art and antiquities from a Lebanese bank, for which the Soviets traded $20 million worth of weapons. The treasures themselves, according to Albats, were worth as much as $9 billion.[16] (Franchising terrorism was lucrative for the Soviet bloc. The East Germans found their regime had become financially dependent on Libya, and actively facilitated Libyan-sponsored terrorism to continue the flow of petrodollars to East Berlin.) The Soviets even entertained requests from terrorists who had financed their operations by kidnapping wealthy individuals, but who had run out of people to kidnap.


Albats found the following letter to the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee from a Latin American group that read,

Dear Comrades,


We are of course trying to obtain financial means through our own efforts, including a ransom from representatives of the local oligarchy, if we succeed in kidnapping them. However, the progress of the armed struggle has caused almost all of them to flee the country, and now they live abroad. . . .[17]

Similar information has emerged from the records of the Stasi security and intelligence service of the former East Germany. Combing through original Stasi documents and defector accounts, and interviewing former Stasi officers, veteran Associated Press correspondent John O. Koehler paints a vivid picture of how the East German government operated as a Soviet proxy in support of international terrorism, and how it even pushed the Soviet leadership further into the terrorism business.


Koehler describes detailed Stasi reports of support for terrorism in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as the Stasi’s 1986 collaboration with Libyan operatives who planted a bomb in a West Berlin discotheque known to be frequented by American servicemen, killing at least three and wounding 234 – and how the Stasi and East German political leadership plotted to make the Americans think they were helping the U.S. fight terrorism without really doing so.[18]


Even Fidel Castro of Cuba was not as doctrinaire as he appeared. Embracing the enemy-of-my-enemy philosophy, the regime trained a large number of Latin American Trotskyist groups in terrorism in addition to the tens of thousands of guerrillas and terrorists loyal to the Cuban and Soviet brands of communism.[19]


Defectors from Cuba’s DGI intelligence service report that Havana operated in the Middle East among Arab radicals as part of Castro’s revolutionary network, and by the 1980s actively recruited and trained Muslim terrorists from the Middle East and South Asia.[20] Cuba and Palestinian terrorists forged a decades-long operational relationship that continues to this day.[21] Then there were the other Soviet client states and proxies, including North Korea, one of the less studied but more active communist sponsors of terrorism.[22]

The People's Republic of China and terrorism


The Soviet bloc was not alone in the communist world in support for terrorism. Newly declassified Nixon administration archives reveal that in the early 1970s the United States considered the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to be a state sponsor of terrorism.[23]


The PRC continues to develop terrorist theory as part of its own evolving military and security doctrine. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) publishing house has produced theoretical works in recent years that explicitly endorse the use of international terrorism as an asymmetrical weapon against a more powerful foe, understood to be the United States. Unrestricted Warfare, authored by PLA Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui and published by the official military publishing house in 1999, is one of those works.


Coldly well-reasoned, the book calls for the assassination of traders and currency speculators, endorses what the authors call the “traditional terror war,” hints of al Qaeda-style attacks by arguing that “traditional ways” only “represent less than the maximum degree of terror,” and calling for the use of “superweapons” to be directed at a powerful enemy.


The PLA authors see the U.S. as especially vulnerable to such warfare, arguing that the American military is culturally unequipped to deal with the problem: “they have never taken into consideration and have even refused to consider means that are contrary to tradition and to select measures of operation other than military means.”


The U.S., the colonels wrote, should be better prepared: “What is surprising is that such a large nation unexpectedly does not have a unified command structure to deal with the threat.”[24]

The Soviet legacy on Russia


The post-Soviet Russian Federation remains stuck in a twilight zone between its totalitarian past and its future. Despite many reforms, neither the elites nor the population truly have broken with the Soviet legacy, let alone rejected it.


Russia has undergone no de-communization process that would expose the crimes and discredit the old regime. It has not, as the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, eastern Germans and Balts have tried to do, attempted to screen its new political, economic and juridical leaders to ensure they were not culpable for past state crimes. It has not removed the official iconography of the old instruments of political repression and state terror.


Instead, it has preserved the Leninist sword-and-shield emblem of the Bolshevik Cheka secret police as the crests of the internal security services, the foreign intelligence service, the national police in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the prosecutors under the State Procuracy: the sword-and-shield of the Bolshevik revolution, the sword that Lenin declared may have to smite the innocent to preserve the political elite.


It has not laid bare the terrorist archives of the Communist Party leadership (Albats had access to the archives for only a few days in the chaos following the coup against Gorbachev). Instead, it has kept them under lock and key, and passed laws keeping the secrets hidden for seventy years.


So it should come as no surprise that a KGB officer would become president of the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin’s unusual ascendancy raises still further questions about the legitimacy of Russia’s democratic government, where an obscure KGB lieutenant colonel who controlled the hard currency accounts for the city of St. Petersburg suddenly became chief of the re-named units of the former KGB internal security structure, and was plucked from there to become prime minister.


From there, a series of explosions that leveled apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities propelled Putin effectively to depose an ailing and unpopular President Boris Yeltsin, and to take the presidency for himself. Those curiously timed explosions, in which hundreds of people died as they slept, were immediately blamed on Islamic Chechen terrorists seeking independence from Russia, even though they didn’t fit the Chechens’ modus operandi and were never again replicated once Putin took power.


Scholar David Satter and Russian journalists have pieced together the clues to the deadly blasts, thanks to a botched bombing of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Locals caught state security agents from Moscow in the act, the chekists lamely said the explosives were just sacks of sugar and the exercise only a drill, and the matter quietly disappeared until local journalists and Satter resurrected it, prompting questions about the legitimacy of the Putin government.[25]


Moscow’s relations with state sponsors of terrorism have changed since Soviet times. Today the ties are more commercial than ideological, to the point of shutting its eyes to the creation of future problems that Russia itself one day must confront.


An example is Moscow’s aggressive policy of selling advanced military technologies to China, Iran, and Iraq, including weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Most observers agree that the overriding purpose is to generate cash for Russia’s starving government and private sectors, and the armed forces. Moscow no longer actively supports international terrorism as a matter of policy. That role has been taken over by Iran.

State supporters of terrorism - then and now


Most of the regimes sponsoring international terrorism in 2002 are still distinctly of a Soviet-era bent.


We find, 25 years after Possony wrote his thesis, the states providing sanctuary, funds, weapons and other forms of support to international terrorists are mainly former Soviet client-regimes that survived the Soviet collapse.


The U.S. Department of State classifies seven governments worldwide as state sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.[26] Of the seven, five – Cuba under Fidel Castro, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Muammar Qaddafi, North Korea under Kim Jong-il and Syria under the Assad family – are ruled by individuals or family dynasties originally installed or propped up by the Soviet Union.


The Islamic Republic of Iran, though harshly anti-communist, took power with Soviet covert and diplomatic support in 1979 and built its substantial military on weapons from the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.


The Islamist regime in Sudan is the only of the seven that does not owe at least part of its origins to the communists, though it remains in power thanks largely to Communist Chinese weapons. (Curiously, only two of the seven, Cuba and North Korea, are Marxist-Leninist; the rest are ruled by Islamist or secular nationalist-socialist Muslims.)


Thus the Axis of Evil – which President George W. Bush identified as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea – was a Soviet creation. The present-day Arab and Islamist terrorist networks find their origins in the Soviet terrorist support campaigns.


Possony discussed the Arab and Muslim terrorist groups, some communist but most nationalist or religious, that flourished with Soviet support in the 1960s and ‘70s: the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) and commando Popular Liberation Forces (PLF); the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP); the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) of George Habash; the splinter PFLP General Command (PFLP-GC); the Egyptian-founded Al Fatah of Yasser Arafat and its Black September Organization branch; the Syrian-sponsored Al Saiqa, a terrorist wing of the regular Syrian army; and the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), founded by in Iraq by the Saddam Hussein regime “to balance the influence of the Egyptian-backed Al Fatah and Syrian-sponsored Al Saiqa.”


Possony itemized the Soviet-backed regimes that supported them: Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, as well as Iraq, Syria, Algeria, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.[27]


Palestinian terrorism, then aimed almost as much (sometimes even more) at anti-Soviet Arab governments in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as at Israel, owed its rise to the weapons, diplomacy, and political warfare machinery of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc.


In its process of expanding and consolidating influence in the Arab world after the 1967 war with Israel, the Soviets used the PLO as a vehicle through which to gain Arab sympathy and as an instrument to attack the United States and its Middle Eastern interests. Moscow won whether or not a peace agreement with Israel occurred.


“By identifying itself with the Palestinians and supporting their cause,” a scholar wrote in 1974 and whom Possony quoted, “the Soviet Union has attained a position where without foreclosing any of its options, it stands to gain from a failure of a settlement of a Palestinian problem as well as from its solution.”[28]


The USSR’s main reason for choosing to support terrorism and guerrilla warfare in the Middle East, he argued, was that the Soviets “could always gain by encouraging and fomenting disorder and turmoil wherever they can. The specific purpose is to obtain control over the waterways of the Dardanelles, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Straits of Aden, and the Straits of Hormuz.”[29]


This occurred in the context of radical secular movements and regimes such as Egypt under Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalistic socialism, the one-party Ba’athist regimes of Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the peculiar personal dictatorship in Libya of Qaddafi.


Marxist-Leninist ideology had little appeal in the Arab world, and the Soviets dispensed with their own Palestinian surrogate, the Communist PFLP, to embrace Yasser Arafat and his less radical but more popular Al Fatah faction.[30]


The fractious Palestinians could not unite in their campaign against Israel, and it took direct Soviet intervention to anoint Arafat, then a dynamic young man in his 30s, as leader and to prop him up politically, economically, militarily and diplomatically. Arafat consolidated control by perpetrating extremist actions that would rally Palestinians around him. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, in which Moscow’s Arab allies were trounced yet again, the Kremlin depended more and more on the PLO as its diplomatic vehicle and action arm in the region.


The PLO “served as a transmission belt for the export of KGB terrorist techniques to other regions and hence constitutes an essential element in Soviet regional and global strategy.” The Soviet propaganda apparatus gave constant, unqualified support to the PLO, with large-scale material assistance and terrorist training beginning as early as 1974.[31]


Soviet sponsorship of the PLO allowed Moscow to gain influence over other terrorist groups that depended on the Palestinians for training, weapons, sanctuary, and other assistance.[32] Noted Possony,

Clearly, there are important differences between the various bodies that constitute the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some of the fedayeen are simply nationalists, some are Islamic socialists, some – a distinct but dedicated minotiry – envision creation of a revolutionary Palestinian state ruled by a dictatorship of the proletariat and they look variously to Moscow, Peking and Havana as their model.


Because of the differences that exist within the PLO, it is virtually impossible to synthesize or identify a Palestinian ideological position, but as we have already shown, the Soviets are not deterred from supporting and assisting a guerrilla movement simply because the movement is not communist. They have not been deterred from supporting Libya and assisting the PLO. In addition, PLO serves as a weapon not only against Israel but against the pro-Western Arab states, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and now Egypt; and also Lebanon, which is a special case.[33]

Indeed, some of the Soviet-backed Arab terrorist groups clung tenaciously to Islam. Possony continued,

A 1973 study of the fedayeen undertaken by the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict summarizes some of the reasons why the PLO has largely remained ‘impervious’ to communist influence despite the presence of avowed Marxist-Leninists in its ranks. Among them: ‘the tenacity of Islam, the absence of either an industrial proletariat or reservoir of discontented peasantry, personal and family rivalries, lack of sanctuaries . . . and above all the inability of Marxism-Leninism to adjust to the chameleon quality of Arab politics.[34]

(End of part 1 due to message board upload restrictions)

[Ryan Ruck]

(Begin Part 2)

Soviet support for Iran's radical fundamentalist revolution


Finding success in their new strategy of aiding non-communist Muslim radicals – and even sacrificing their own doctrinaire Leninist operatives to the more numerous and effective Palestinian nationalists and Islamists – brought the Soviets a step further toward bankrolling extreme Islamic terrorism, this time in Iran.


Soviet support for the 1979 Iranian revolution and the ascendancy of an Islamic republic under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which ushered in an era of Iran as one of the world’s prime sponsors of terrorism, is less well-known than Soviet involvement in Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, and Syria.


Iran was long a Soviet prize, a target of unsuccessful conquest by Stalin during World War II and again in the early 1950s, when the United States backed the return of the monarchy under Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Soviets invested substantially in covert operations against Iran during the Shah’s days as one of Washington’s staunchest allies in the region.


But Moscow took care never to provoke resentment among the Iranian people. “The Soviets engage in subversion, espionage and propaganda against Iranian government interests,” Iranian Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a staunch anti-communist, commented after the 1979 revolution, “but they never insult the Imam [Khomeini]. As I have often mentioned, the Soviets are no less satanic than the Americans. But they know how to avoid hurting people’s sensibilities.”[35]


Former Czechoslovak intelligence officer Ladislav Bittman writes that Moscow pursued a two-track policy toward the Shah: respectable non-involved relations on the one hand, and covert operations to undermine his government on the other.


The Soviets praised the anti-U.S. movement against the Shah and tolerated Khomeini’s religious fanaticism, while attempting to push the Iranian revolution toward communist ends under the vanguard of a well-financed and well-organized Tudeh communist party.


In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Soviet Communist Party and KGB provided covert backing to a range of Iranian radicals. KGB officer Vladimir Sakharov, a Middle East operative who defected to the U.S., stated in 1979, “They can be Islamic or nationalist so long as they are strongly anti-American and above all, show promise of being winners.”[36]


The Soviets aggressively recruited in Iran: “The KGB built a vast intelligence network among all strata of Iranian society, involving the Islamic clergy, radical students, Tudeh members who were ordered to dissociate themselves from the party immediately after they were recruited, and members of several ethnic groups fighting for national independence” inside Iran.[37]


Moscow catered to the extreme fundamentalist mullahs, providing expensively printed copies of the Koran and issuing statements supportive of Khomeini. A Soviet-controlled National Voice of Iran, based in Baku, helped organize anti-Shah demonstrations.[38] Even Iranian Communist (Tudeh) Party Secretary General Nouredin Kianouri had a Khomeini portrait in his office.


The student radicals who seized the American Embassy in Teheran on 4 November 1979, sparking the 444-day hostage crisis, were more Marxist than Muslim, according to Bittman. The hostage-takers, calling themselves the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line, included three Marxist groups: the Islamic-Marxist Mujahideen (now known as the People’s Mujahideen and based in Iraq), the Marxist Guerrilla Fedayeen, and the Tudeh Party.[39]



Although clerics frequently assailed the Tudeh Party, the communist group maneuvered tactically to pledge support for the Islamic fundamentalists and ordered its members to penetrate the new revolutionary government.[40]


Khomeini was anti-Soviet, but the student radicals who directed the broad revolution in Khomeini’s direction certainly were not. Said President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, “They’re Tudeh-influenced.”[41]


Radio Moscow and the clandestine, Soviet-sponsored National Voice of Iran, based in Baku and aimed at younger Iranians, incited mobs, playing an official role as a Khomeini ally. (Possony hinted at Soviet involvement more than a year before the revolution, observing that the Communist Party USA was backing anti-Shah groups in the U.S.)[42]


Though ties with Moscow quickly became strained with the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in December, the Kremlin smoothed over relations by helping Teheran circumvent Western sanctions.


For years the KGB circulated forgeries of U.S. documents to fan confusion and anti-American hysteria in Iran.[43] The Soviets sided with Khomeini during the Islamic crackdown against Iranian leftists, sacrificing their own loyal cadres. The KGB helped the ayatollah build his own elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard from members of the Soviet-backed, PLO-trained, Organization of People’s Fedayeen Guerrillas, to counter the power of the U.S.-trained Iranian army, as the shock troops of the revolution.[44]


In 1981, KGB advisers visited Iran to help the fundamentalist regime build a security force and intelligence service.[45]



The partnership didn’t last long, thanks to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Soviet neutrality during Iran’s war with Iraq, and the defection of a KGB officer in Teheran, Vladimir Kuzichkin, who revealed to the British the extent of Soviet covert operations against Iran.


Even so, Soviet crucial backing of Khomeini was decisive in helping direct the revolution Khomeini’s way, and to consolidate it with security assistance and diplomatic and propaganda support. Furthermore, it marked another point on the continuum between initial Soviet backing of non-communist Arab and Muslim radicals and the Islamist terrorism of the 21^st century.

Transition from communist to Islamist sponsorship


Astatus report finds that the hub of 21^st century terrorism is no longer old-line Communist except for pockets like the FARC of Colombia, fanatical Maoist movements like the dying Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path of Peru (though far-left, Marxist political extremism remains strong throughout Latin America, especially in Brazil) and the growing revolution in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal.


The predominant terror networks today are mostly various mutations of Islam.[46] Today we find that the mullahs of Iran adopted some of the Palestinian terrorist groups that spawned under the Soviet-backed PLO, and that the Soviet-installed regimes that provoked terrorism in the 1970s were still at it by the turn of the Christian millennium.


According to the State Department’s latest report on international terrorist trends,

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2000. It provided increasing support to numerous terrorist groups, including the Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which seek to undermine the Middle East peace negotiations through the use of terrorism.


Iraq continued to provide safe haven and support to a variety of Palestinian rejectionist groups, as well as bases, weapons, and protection to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian terrorist group that opposes the current Iranian regime.


Syria continued to provide safe haven and support to several terrorist groups, some of which oppose the Middle East peace negotiations.


Libya at the end of 2000 was attempting to mend its international image following its surrender in 1999 of two Libyan suspects for trial in the Pan Am 103 bombing. (In early 2001, one of the suspects was convicted of murder. The judges in the case found that he acted ‘in furtherance of the purposes of . . . Libyan intelligence services.’)


Cuba continued to provide safe haven to several terrorists and U.S. fugitives and maintained ties to state sponsors and Latin American insurgents.


North Korea harbored several hijackers of a Japanese Airlines flight to North Korea in the 1970s and maintained links to other terrorist groups.


Finally, Sudan continued to serve as a safe haven for members of al-Qaida, the Lebanese Hizballah, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the PIJ, and HAMAS, but it has been engaged in counterterrorism dialogue with the United States since mid-2000.[47]

Communists and Islamists are working together, collaborating with one another in the continued sponsorship of terrorism, the sheltering of known terrorists, or the incubation of destructive designs against the United States.


In 2001, for example, Cuban leader Fidel Castro visited Iran, Syria and Libya, proclaiming in a speech at Teheran University, “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up.”[48]


We see, then, a smooth transition of international terrorism from communist sponsors and theorists to communist-Islamist collaboration, and Islamist sponsorship and inspiration. Possony commented a quarter century ago,

A significant degree of coordination of terrorist activities does exist, and . . . it is many communists who are doing the coordinating. Put differently, if communist governments and political groupings, of one ideological emphasis or another, were to cease terrorist activity and assistance, the present wave of international terrorism would be squashed.[49]

Change the word “communist” to “Islamist” (as opposed to Islamic), and we find ourselves in the present day. If the communist-coordinated terrorists had been squashed, or never had existed, would the world be plagued by the present-day Palestinian, Iranian, and Islamist terrorism of the Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, Hamas, al Qaeda, and the many other violent organizations that commit mass murder in the name of God?

A new intensity: From pipe bombs and hijackings to weapons of mass destruction


The intensity and power of terrorism and threats of violence have multiplied almost infinitely since the 1970s. Yesterday’s pipe bombs, hooded gunmen, and hostage-takers, compared to today’s skyscraper attacks and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats, seem almost quaint.


Like the networks themselves, these new threats of extermination are yet another part of the communist legacy. During the Cold War, Moscow did little to promote proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in comparison to its weapons technology exports of today.


By contrast, post-Soviet Russia (including its old Communist Party bureaucracy and politicized security and military forces), as well as Communist China, have opened their inventories to terrorist regimes while claiming to be allies in the war against terrorism.


Most of the terrorist regimes on the State Department list happen to have their own illegal weapons of mass destruction programs in various stages of development, and several are suspected of proliferating weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) technology. In the words of Under Secretary of State John Bolton, “The spread of WMD to state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups is, in my opinion, the gravest security threat we now face.”


Russia and China have been the two main proliferators of WMD technology to terrorist regimes. The old Soviet arsenal remains a risk to the rest of the world, including to Russia, as biological, chemical and nuclear weapons technologies and their delivery systems proliferate to fanatics ready and even eager to use them.


Some of the proliferation fears are based on lax security and the often haphazard breakup of the USSR, which left weapons depots and hazardous compounds, including radiological substances, dangerously vulnerable to organized criminal and terrorist exploitation.


Of equal or even greater danger, however, are Moscow and Beijing’s deliberate policies to sell hyperweapon technology, including dual-use nuclear, biological and chemical weapons-production technologies and processes, as well as medium- and long-range ballistic missile systems, to terrorist regimes.


These weapons proliferation policies appear to be driven not by ideology but by cold financial considerations to keep weapons design bureaus and production lines open, bring in hard currency, and as a handy byproduct, to provide advanced weapons technologies to forces that could attack U.S. interests.


Russian government policy since the 1990s has been to provide chemical weapons technology to Syria, a range of armaments to Iran and Iraq, and to build both a nuclear reactor that can produce weapons-grade plutonium and assist in development of a long-range ballistic missile system for Teheran.[50]


Bolton starkly laid out the general details in a May, 2002 lecture at the Heritage Foundation:

Foremost is Iraq. Although it became a signatory to the BWC [Biological Weapons Convention] in 1972, and became a State Party in 1991, Iraq has developed, produced, and stockpiled biological warfare agents and weapons.


The United States strongly suspects that Iraq has taken advantage of more than three years of no U.N. inspections to improve all phases of its offensive BW [biological weapons] program. Iraq also has developed, produced, and stockpiled chemical weapons, and has shown a continuing interest in developing nuclear weapons and longer range missiles.


Next is North Korea. North Korea has a dedicated, national-level effort to achieve a BW capability and has developed and produced, and may have weaponized, BW agents in violation of the Convention. Despite the fact that its citizens are starving, the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources, including a biotechnology infrastructure, capable of producing infectious agents, toxins, and other crude biological weapons. It likely has the capability to produce sufficient quantities of biological agents for military purposes within weeks or so, and has a variety of means at its disposal for delivering these deadly weapons.


In January [2002] I also named North Korea and Iraq for their covert nuclear weapons programs in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. . . . Finally, we believe that North Korea has a sizeable stockpile of chemical weapons and can manufacture all manner of CW agents.


Then comes Iran. Iran’s biological weapons program began during the Iran-Iraq war and accelerated after Tehran learned how far along Saddam Hussein had progressed in his own program. The Iranians have all of the necessary pharmaceutical expertise, as well as the commercial infrastructure needed to produce – and hide – a biological warfare program. The United States believes Iran probably has produced and weaponized BW agents in violation of the Convention.


Again, Iran’s BW program is complemented by an even more aggressive chemical warfare program. Iran’s ongoing interest in nuclear weapons, and its aggressive ballistic missile research, development, and flight testing regimen.[51]

“Beyond the axis of evil,” Bolton added, “there are other rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction – particularly biological weapons.” They are:

First, Libya. There is no doubt that Libya continues its longstanding pursuit of nuclear weapons. . . . Among its weapons of mass destruction programs, Libya – which is not a party to the CWC – continues its goal of reestablishing its offensive chemical weapons capability, as well as pursuing an indigenous chemical warfare production capability. Libya has produced at least 100 tons of different kinds of chemical weapons. . . . the U.S. believes that Libya has continued its biological weapons program. . . . Libya is also continuing its efforts to obtain ballistic missile-related equipment, materials, technology, and expertise from foreign sources. . . .


The United States also knows that Syria has long had a chemical weapons program. It has a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin and is engaged in research and development of the more toxic and persistent nerve agent VX. . . . Syria . . . is pursuing the development of biological weapons and is able to produce at least small amounts of biological warfare agents. . . .


In addition to Libya and Syria, there is a threat coming from another BWC signatory, and that one lies just 90 miles from the U.S. mainland – namely, Cuba. . . . For four decades, Cuba has maintained a well-developed and sophisticated biomedical industry, supported until 1990 by the Soviet Union. This industry is one of the most advanced in Latin America and leads in the production of pharmaceuticals and vaccines that are sold worldwide. Analysts and Cuban defectors have long cast suspicion on the activities conducted in these biomedical facilities.


Here is what we now know: The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are convinced that such technology could support BW programs in those states.[52]

In 1998, Defense Secretary William Cohen added a bit of heft to a rather soft-line Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report on the Cuban military, stating in a letter to Congress, “I remain concerned about Cuba’s potential to develop and produce biological agents, given its biotechnology infrastructure.”


The DIA report’s overall benign view of the Cuban threat, Bolton and others argue, was due to the fact that the agency’s senior Cuba analyst, Ana Belen Montes, was a Cuban spy. Montes pled guilty to espionage for Castro in March 2002.

Wahhabi linkages emerge from Soviet fight


Old Soviet-installed terrorist regimes, remnants of Soviet-funded terrorist organizations, and uncontrolled Soviet weapons of mass destruction technology mutated all the worst products of communism into an out-of-control mega-destruction crisis that threatens entire civilizations: Organizations, individuals, and weapons with nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological weapons can now wage a form of extermination warfare with the simple resources once reserved for a superpower.


Cold War residues again haunt the United States and its allies: the PLO is now in control of a quasi-state entity it calls Palestine, led by one of the most notorious international terrorists of the 1960s and ‘70s. The Saudi Arabian regime, long propped up and defended as a bulwark against Soviet communist expansion and against Soviet-sponsored Ba’athist or other secular radical interests, only to become the source of Wahhabist rejectionism and terrorism, fell under the sights of one of its own, Osama bin Laden – himself a product, of sorts, of the reactionary extremism the Saudi regime inadvertently provoked through its massive corruption, emphasis on materialism, and religious hypocrisy.


The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rallied militant Muslims among the many who came to help the mujahideen resistance fighters in a just war against aggression and occupation. The Afghan fighters came together as a new force of their own, with some like Bin Laden marginalizing themselves to expand the war against all “infidels,” especially the United States, after the Soviet defeat. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan brought together some of the most militant of the world’s anti-Soviet Muslims, the violent, Wahhabi Islamists, uniting them with Saudi financial support as a battle-hardened internationalist force that viciously turned against the West as the USSR collapsed.


Here one can paraphrase Possony by saying, had there been no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there might never have been an Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.


Soviet-occupied Afghanistan was the first major opportunity for violent Muslims to join together in a real honest holy war that wasn’t controlled or tainted by the Palestinian question.


One of the major benefactors of the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan, apart from the United States, which sought to channel military support to the more moderate factions led by commanders like the late Ahmad Shah Masood, was Saudi Arabia. Saudi aid to the more radical elements of the mujahideen (in partnership with elements of the Pakistani military and its ISI intelligence service) popularized and strengthened Riyadh’s intolerant and violent brand of Wahhabism which made war against traditional and classical Islam in addition to the Soviets and the West.


In the 1990s, Palestinian terrorists organized under Hamas, Hezbollah and other groups, with varied Arab and Iranian backing, became more extreme than Arafat’s PLO, which found itself co-opted in a quest for diplomatic legitimacy as an embryonic Palestinian state.


Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, based variously in Sudan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, targeted the Saudi monarchy but organized globally, training tens of thousands of Islamist terrorists from around the world in its camps and building alliances and franchises with terrorist groups on every continent, and al Qaeda cells in more than 60 countries.


By the late 1990s al Qaeda had become the premier terrorist international force, based in a ravaged Afghanistan that the West had abandoned but that the Islamists, led by the Taliban militia with strong Saudi and Gulf state support, took for themselves. Al Qaeda members of various nationalities linked together in operational cells using much of the tradecraft of the KGB-trained terrorist networks of the 1980s.

Remaining Soviet-era terrorist networks


Many of the old Soviet-built terror networks remain. Some are the same old forces that were never defeated, never surrendered, never self-destructed, or never chose to join the democratic world.


The disciplined, battle-seasoned, hard-core professionals include the Irish Republican Army, the Basque ETA of Spain, the Colombian cocaine-trafficking Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and its heroin-trafficking cousin, the National Liberation Army (ELN); and the PLO, the latter of which achieved quasigovernment status under the architecture of the“Palestinian Authority.”


Revelation that the 2002 Palestinian intifada, led by a doddering 72 year-old Yasser Arafat, used booby trap bombs identical in every way to those of the IRA illustrates the continuum of the old Soviet-sponsored terror networks.[53]


Halfway around the world from the Middle East, in Colombia, authorities discovered similar explosive devices – along with at least three captured IRA men presently awaiting trial for helping the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an armed offshoot of the Colombian Communist Party, ratchet up its urban warfare capabilities and specifically to master that IRA invention, the car bomb.


Analysts are still trying to make sense of circumstantial evidence linking the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to extreme Islamist terrorism. Convicted Egyptian conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York were found to have had genuine Nicaraguan passports, illegally issued to them from the foreign ministry in Managua, to provide false identities.


Another Central American connection emerged with the 11 September 1991 attacks: In Virginia, illegal aliens from El Salvador ran fake ID rackets and provided some al Qaeda hijackers with false identification papers. Most Salvadoran organized crime and violence in the United States, according to a new study, is run by illegal aliens who formerly fought as guerrillas and terrorists in the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Salvadoran street gangs calling themselves MS-13 spread west to east across the U.S., and in a short time earned the reputation of being one of the most dangerous and violent street gangs in the country. MS-13 is “responsible for the execution of three federal agents and numerous shootings of law enforcement officers across the country,” according to the Orange County, California, District Attorney’s office.[54]


The group’s members include career gangsters from El Salvador and former combatants of the FMLN.

Terrorist support structures in the United States:
The Left and the jihadists become one

Federal officials, journalists and scholars are still learning about the new jihadist terrorist networks and their connections. They can learn much from Possony, who taught that one could divine much about terrorist groups, their sponsors, and their covert linkages simply by studying their overt traits. His methodology, structural analysis, enabled him to determine individuals’ exact relations with the Soviets, like Waddih Haddad.


Examining 21^st century terrorism and its linkages inside the United States reveals a surprising pattern: the pro-Soviet paleo-Left and old “New Left” terrorist support groups that facilitated activities for the IRA, ETA, and so forth, and more actively provided material, legal and political support for domestic terrorists of the Weather Underground, the May 19 Communist Organization, the Black Liberation Army, the Republic of New Afrika, the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) and Macheteros, among others, have made common cause with the jihadists, including al Qaeda.[55]


Several support networks exist. The International Action Center, founded by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and staffed by veterans of a splinter Marxist-Leninist group called the Workers World Party, organizes most of the large street demonstrations, protests, and staged media events to oppose U.S. efforts to fight Islamist terrorism, and overtly to support international groups identified as terrorist organizations. In early 2002, the group organized large, multi-day protests in solidarity with the Hamas/Hezbollah intifadah in the Middle East, and with the FARC in Colombia.[56]


Hives of lawyers who specialized in the defense of Communist clients during the Cold War have, since the Soviet collapse, invested their talents in defending terrorist causes. One of the fixtures is the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), founded in 1966 by the late William Kunstler to litigate against internal security laws and to provide legal support for political extremists, including terrorists. The CCR’s goal, according to Kunstler, was to keep in the streets those who would destroy the American system.


In its latest incarnation, the CCR has been advocating on behalf of Taliban and al Qaeda members held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


In the 1990s, Kunstler protégés Lynne Stewart and Stanley Cohen joined Ramsey Clark as the legal defense team for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “Blind Sheik” whom a jury convicted as a mastermind of terrorist conspiracies to bomb commuter bridges and tunnels in New York, the FBI field office in Manhattan, the United Nations building, and the World Trade Center in 1993.


In 2002, federal authorities arrested Stewart for allegedly helping the imprisoned sheik to send orders from prison to terrorists under his command. Stewart retained her own defense counsel, Susan Tipograph, herself a May 19 Communist Organization veteran who won notoriety in the 1970s and ‘80s by defending terrorists like Puerto Rican FALN bomb-maker William Morales.


Another support network, the New York-based National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF), provides legal support to terrorist individuals and organizations. NCPPF was founded in the late 1960s to support New Left armed clandestine groups like the Weather Underground, May 19 Communist Organization, Black Liberation Army, and Puerto Rican FALN.


The NCPPF is another illustration of the nexus between communist and other far-left Americans and Islamist jihadists. In recent years the NCPPF has lobbied and litigated to weaken or repeal U.S. anti-terrorism laws, defend terrorist suspects in court, sue and agitate politically to overturn terrorist convictions; and to assist with fundraising for terrorist groups on First Amendment grounds.


NCPPF's membership includes supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the IRA, and the Shining Path of Peru. Its clients include the individuals convicted for the bombing of the U.S. Capitol in 1983, and the 1993 bombing of the New York World Trade Center.


NCPPF President Sami al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida, has been identified as a fundraiser and operative for suicide bombers abroad. Running NCPPF on a day-to-day basis is Kit Gage, a longtime legal activist and executive director of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), founded in the 1930s as the “main legal bulwark of the Communist Party USA, its fronts, and controlled organizations.” NCPPF has even broadened its base to welcome libertarians into its big tent.[57]


A common enemy, the United States, has trumped doctrinaire ideologies of both communists and Islamists. Moderate American Muslims have even likened the militant Wahhabi networks in the U.S. to communist and Soviet front organizations.[58] These are the public and semi-public, above-ground networks. What lies beneath is unknown. But the terrorists are seldom far from their supporters.


As security and terrorism expert Herbert Romerstein noted in 1981, the overt political and financial support apparatus is crucial to the function of the overall terrorist networks:

The fight against terrorism is as much a matter of political strategy as it is a matter of police tactics. Armored cars, bulletproof vests and hard-boiled negotiators should be our last recourse. More important are the ways in which we might weaken the states and organizations which sustain the terrorists.


The support apparatus is both the strength and the potential weakness of the terrorist organization. It provides them with safe houses, arms, propaganda and legal defense. . . . The support apparatus is also the recruiting ground for the active terrorist organization.[59]

Conclusion


Not only did Stefan Possony begin the American-based research that mapped Soviet bloc linkages to 1970s terrorism a quarter-century ago; his work helped prompt the U.S. intelligence community to reassess its own collection and analysis and to look in areas it had long dismissed or ignored.
Soviet politburo archives unearthed after the 1991 Moscow coup provided the final proof.


Even more, Possony was one of the first Americans to note the operational and strategic links between communist terrorists and secular Arab and extreme Islamist terrorists.


The Soviets built up the regimes that ultimately populated the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror, and essentially founded the trio of regimes now called the Axis of Evil.


Understanding the networks and tradecraft, and keeping in mind that terrorists cannot flourish without active civilian logistical, political, legal, and material support networks, is key waging the war against terrorism successfully. For these reasons, historical study of the old communist terrorist linkages and the political warfare campaigns that surrounded them, as well as the witting and unwitting American collaborators who toil to bind the counterterrorists’ hands while keeping the terrorists at large, will be vital to fighting and defeating the new terrorist enemy in the years and decades ahead.

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*J. Michael Waller is the Walter J. and Leonore Annenberg Professor of International Communications at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is also vice president of the Center for Security Policy. His books include Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today (Westview, 1994).

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_{[1] Stefan T. Possony and L. Francis Bouchey, International Terrorism: The Communist Connection (Washington: American Council for World Freedom, 1978).
[2] Claire Sterling, The Terror Network (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston/Reader’s Digest Press, 1981).
[3] Casey himself wrote about the terrorist networks in an essay titled, “The International Linkages: What Do We Know?” in Uri Ra’anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism – The Witnesses Speak (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1986), pp. 5-15.
[4] Possony, pp. 1-2. Emphasis in original.
[5] Possony, p. 2.
[6] Lenin, TK. Also see, Boris Ponomarev, Lenin and the World Revolutionary Process (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1980).
[7] Possony, p. 2.
[8] Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d). According to the U.S. Department of State, “For purposes of this definition, the term ‘noncombatant’ is interpreted to include, in addition to civilians, military personnel who at the time of the incident are unarmed or not on duty.” See Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 2001), introduction.
[9] Among the earlier works: Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander, Terrorism: The Soviet Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1984); Samuel T. Francis,The Soviet Strategy of Terror (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1981); Roberta Goren, The Soviet Union and Terrorism, Jillian Becker, ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984); Uri Ra’anan, et al., eds., Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism – The Witnesses Speak (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1986); Herbert Romerstein, Soviet Support for International Terrorism (Washington: Foundation for a Democratic Education, 1981). Taking control of the Senate with the Reagan election of 1980, the Republican lawmakers created the first congressional panel to deal specifically with terrorism, the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, which further documented Soviet-bloc support for terrorism and the international terrorist networks. Cf The Role of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and East Germany in Fomenting Terrorism in Southern Africa, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, 2nd Session, March 22, 24, 25, 29, and 31, 1982.
[10] Constantine C. Menges, The Twilight Struggle (Washington: AEI Press, 1990), especially Chapter 2, “The Soviet Strategy of Indirect Aggression.”
[11] Possony, p. v.
[12] Translation of the original memorandum in collection of journalist Yevgenia Albats, who retrieved it and others from the Soviet presidential archives in the days following the 1991 Soviet coup. The ttranslation is published in Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia Past, Present and Future (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1994), pp. 227-229. In the Albats book, PFLP is transliterated as PLPF, and Waddih Haddad and W. Haddad as “Vadia Haddad” and “V. Haddad.”
[13] KGB memorandum to Leonid Brezhnev, 16 May 1975, No. 1218-A/OV, in Albats’ collection, quoted in Albats, p. 229.
[14] Albats shared dozens of these documents with the author in Boston and Moscow in 1992 and 1993.
[15] Original document quoted by Albats, pp. 229-230.
[16] Albats, p. 230.
[17] Stennogramma parlamentskiy slushaniy po rassledovaniyu finansovoy deyatelnosti KPSS [Transcript of parliamentary hearings investigating the financial activity of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union], Russian Federation Supreme Soviet, 10 February 1992, cited by Albats, p. 230. A copy of the original Russian stenographic notes, along with an English translation, are in Waller’s collection.
[18] John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder: Westview, 1999), pp. 325-401.
[19] Romerstein, pp. 20-21; Roger Fontaine, Terrorism: The Cuban Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1986).
[20] William Ratliff and Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier, Inside the Cuban Interior Ministry (Washington: Jamestown Foundation, 1994).
[21] For a description of the relationship, see David J. Kopilow, Castro, Israel & the PLO (Washington: Cuban-American National Foundation, 1984).
[22] Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr., Terrorism: The North Korean Connection (New York: Crane Russak, 1990).
[23] George Lardner, Jr., “Nixon Archives Portray Another ‘War’ on Terror,” Washington Post, 8 May 2002.
[24] Qiao Ling and Wang Xingsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Publishing House, 1999), translated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Published in the U.S. with an introduction by Al Santoli as Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America (Newsmax, 2002).
[25] David Satter, “The Shadow of Ryazan: Is Putin’s Government Legitimate?” National Review Online, 30 April 2002.
[26] “Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism,” Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 30 April 2001).
[27] Possony, pp. 26-31.
[28] Augustus R. Norton, Moscow and the Palestinians (Miami: University of Miami, 1974), cited by Possony, pp. 31-32.
[29] Possony, p. 32.
[30] Goren, pp. 106-132.
[31] Cline and Alexander, pp. 37-49. For a more detailed study of Soviet policy toward the PLO, see Richard H. Shultz, Jr., The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Warfare: Principles, Practices, and Regional Comparisons (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), pp. 76-114.
[32] Goren, p. 139.
[33] Possony, pp. 29-30.
[34] Possony, p. 31.
[35] Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Washington: Pergamon Brasseys, 1985), pp. 109-110.
[36] Bittman, p. 110.
[37] Bittman, p. 111. These include Kurdish groups such as the Marxist-Leninist PKK, which received covert KGB support through 1991 and continued to enjoy audiences with senior post-Soviet Russian officials, such as foreign intelligence chief-turned-premier Yevgeny Primakov.
[38] Bittman, pp. 111, 113.
[39] Bittman, p. 115. The People’s Mujahideen of Iran retains its Marxist-Leninist ideology as of this writing, operating in military bases inside Iraq and under Iraqi government sponsorship. The State Department terms the People’s Mujahideen a terrorist organization. The Organization of People’s Fedayeen Guerrillas, trained at PLO camps and given Soviet covert propagandistic support, became the core cadres for Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards as well as the Tudeh Youth.
[40] Bittman, p. 115-116.
[41] Bittman, pp. 115-116.
[42] Possony, p. 32.
[43] Bittman, p. 125.
[44] Bittman, pp. 125-126.
[45] Bittman, p. 126.
[46] Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 30 April 2001).
[47] “Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism,” Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2000 (Washington: U.S. Department of State, 30 April 2001).
[48] “Iran and Cuba Bolster Ties, Strengthen Anti-U.S. Solidarity,” Agence France Presse, 10 May 2001.
[49] Possony, p. 1.
[50] Cf. Kori N. Schake and Judith S. Yaphe, The Strategic Implications of a Nuclear-Armed Iran (Washington: Institute for National Security Studies, National Defense University, McNair Paper 64, 2001).
[51] John R. Bolton, “Beyond the Axis of Evil: Additional Themes from Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Heritage Lectures, No. 743, 6 May 2002.
[52] Bolton.
[53] David Bamber, “IRA Role Seen In Bombs at Jenin,” Sunday Telegraph, London, 28 April 2002.
[54] Jon Ward, “Salvadoran MS-13 gang rated among the most violent,” Washington Times, 24 August 2002, p. A10.
[55]J. Michael Waller, “Domestic Front in the War on Terror,” Insight, 7 January 2002.
[56] The International Action Center publishes its organizing activities on its Website, www.iacenter.org.
[57] J. Michael Waller, “Domestic Front in the War on Terror,” Insight, 7 January 2002.
[58] Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, “Islamic Extremism: A Viable Threat to U.S. National Security,” transcript of speech at the Open Forum, U.S. Department of State, 7 January 1999; “Terrorist Threat in America: Extremist Wave Threatens to Engulf Muslim Americans,” Statement by the Islamic Supreme Council of America, The Muslim Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1999; and J. Michael Waller, “‘Wahhabi Lobby’ Takes the Offensive,” Insight, 5 August 2002.
[59] Romerstein, p. 40.}

[Ryan Ruck]

Russia: Terror's KGB Roots

A year ago today, my friend Alexander Litvinenko died in a London
hospital, leaving behind a wife and young son. Sasha was poisoned by a
tiny nuclear device containing polonium-210-which, the British Crown
Prosecution Service concluded, was planted on him by Russian secret
agents. In its way, his murder was an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

This is nothing new for Russia. The KGB has long used terrorist
tactics and worked closely with organizations like Yasser Arafat's
PLO. The year before, in July 2005, Sasha wrote in a confidential
report prepared for a special commission of the Italian Parliament
investigating KGB activities in Italy that, "Until recently the KGB
had been in charge of all international terrorism." The manner of his
death suggests that Russia today, under the leadership of former KGB
lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin, is up to its old tricks.

The KGB's forerunner, the Cheka (later NKVD), was created by Lenin and
Felix Dzerzhinsky expressly to eliminate Russia's aristocracy,
intellectuals and dissidents—-anyone who threatened the Soviet state
from the inside. Under Stalin, the NKVD started to murder its
opponents abroad: Ignatz Reiss near Lausanne in 1937, Yevhen
Konovalets in Amsterdam in 1938, Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. In
1953, the Soviet secret service tried to kill Marshal Tito in Belgrade.

Stalin's death didn't dampen the Kremlin's appetite for international
terror. After the Litvinenko murder, the Russian foreign intelligence
service claimed that Russia had not taken part in any assassinations
abroad since 1959. That is not true. An Afghan leader, Hafizullah
Amin, was first poisoned and then shot by a KGB special squad in Kabul
in 1979. A former Chechen president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was blown
up by Russian agents in Qatar in 2004.

In 1964, the KGB station in Mexico City set up a sabotage and
intelligence group led by Manuel Andara y Ubeda, a Nicaraguan KGB
agent. He led a group of Sandinistas to scope out the U.S. border with
Mexico for possible targets, such as oil pipelines, for KGB sabotage
teams. Its codename was Iskra, or "spark," inspired by the title of
Lenin's revolutionary newspaper. The KGB also trained and financed the
Sandinistas who seized the National Palace in Managua and dozens of
hostages in 1978. They briefed a senior KGB official on the plan on
the eve of the raid.

In the Mideast, one of the KGB's star recruits was Wadi Haddad, the
deputy leader and head of foreign operations of the Marxist-Leninist
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1970, the KGB
made him an agent, according to files delivered to British
intelligence by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected
to the U.K. in 1992. The most dramatic terrorist strike organized by
Haddad was the Sept. 6, 1970 attack on four airliners bound for New
York. The hijacking attempt on an El Al Boeing 707 departing from Tel
Aviv failed after one of the two terrorists was shot by an air
marshal. The other three airlines were successfully diverted to other
landing strips by the hijackers. The passengers and crew of a Pan Am
Boeing 747 were evacuated and the plane was blown up; in the other two
cases, the terrorists negotiated prisoner swaps. (Those were more
innocent pre-9/11 times.) Thanks to the Mitrokhin files, we know that
the KGB provided arms to Haddad, and it is a fair assumption that
his handlers were aware of his plans.

A KGB officer, Vasili Fyodorovich Samoilenko, cultivated Arafat for a
long time. A 1974 photograph shows them together at a wreath-laying
ceremony in Moscow; during this visit, the Soviets called the PLO "the
sole legitimate representative of the Arab people of Palestine," a
controversial stance for that era that sealed their close alliance.
From then on, the KGB trained PLO guerrillas at its Balashikha
special-operations training school east of Moscow and provided most of
the weapons used in its attacks on Israeli targets. PLO intelligence
officers also attended one-year courses at the KGB's Andropov
Institute; some of them ended up being recruited by the KGB.

Soviet satellites did their share. During the late 1960s Arafat had
also been courted by the Cairo station chief of the Romanian foreign
intelligence service (DIE), Constantin Munteanu, who brought him to
Bucharest. Arafat and Nicolai Ceausescu became good friends. Late in
1972 Romanian intelligence formed an alliance with the PLO, according
to former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, who said the Romanians
"suppl[ied] it with blank passports, electronic surveillance
equipment, and weapons for its operations." Ceausescu told acting head
of the DIE (and future defector) Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa: "Moscow is
helping the PLO build up its muscles. I am feeding its brains."
According to Mr. Pacepa's 1987 book, Red Horizons: "Arafat and his
KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat's top
deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum,
Sudan."

According to various sources, Ilyich Ram rez S nchez, better known as
Carlos the Jackal, the most notorious terrorist in the 1970s and early
1980s, was among those who attended Soviet and Cuban training camps.
He lived for a time in East Germany.

The murder of Sasha Litvinenko should be called what it really was: a
terror attack on British soil. Countless people were endangered by
radiation, traces of which were found on British Airways planes, in
London hotels and restaurants. In the meantime, the suspected
murderer, Andrei Lugovoi, is a candidate for the Russian parliament in
next month's elections, and openly mocks British attempts to have him
extradited to face trial.

Sasha was right. Post-Soviet Russia is a breeding ground for terrorism
just like the Soviet Union was.

[Mr. Volodarsky, an independent intelligence analyst who lives in
London, is a former GRU (Soviet military intelligence) special
operations officer.]

Boris Volodarsky adds the following note:

It is interesting that the article has already appeared in Russian
translation:

http://www.inopressa.ru/wsj/2007/11/23/12:19:42/kgb

[Ryan Ruck]

The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror

The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi's new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the "right-wing" influence on Islamic extremism, "The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad." Taken together (with his entire book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian ideologies of the past. -- The Editors.

Although many Nazis found new and ideologically welcoming homes in Egypt and Syria after World War II, the Grand Mufti's Palestinian national movement itself, bereft of its Nazi patron, was an orphan. No sovereign state of any consequence supported it. On the contrary, most of the surrounding Arab states, all of them buoyed by postcolonial nationalism and looking for political stability, perceived the Palestinian cause, especially as embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, as a threat. Egypt aggressively suppressed the Brotherhood. Saudi and Jordanian royalty watched the growth of radical Islam with suspicion. Syria and Lebanon, trying to move toward more open societies in the pre-Ba'athist era, feared the Brotherhood's opposition to western-style civil rights and liberties and its fierce condemnation of westernized Arab societies.

More to the point, each of these states coveted some or all of what was formerly British Mandatory Palestine and were no more enthusiastic about the creation of a new Arab state there than they were about the creation of Israel. As a result of these complex national ambitions and antagonisms, no state for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine was created. Even though Israel offered the return of territories gained in the 1948 war at the Rhodes armistice conference of February 1949, the Arab leaders (among whom there were no representatives from the Arabs of the former Palestine) rejected Israel's peace offers, declared jihad, and condemned the Arab refugees to eternal refugee status, while also illegally occupying the remaining areas that the United Nations had envisioned as a Palestinian state—as Arafat himself tells us in his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker?). Egypt herded Palestinian Arabs into refugee camps in its new fiefdom in the Gaza Strip, assassinated their leaders, and shot anyone who tried to leave. Jordan illegally annexed the west Bank and maintained martial law over it for the next nineteen years.

Egypt was particularly conscious of the threat the Muslim Brotherhood posed to the westernized and increasingly secularized society it was trying to build, and both King Farouk and later Gamal Abdel Nasser took brutal and effective steps to repress the movement. They also made sure that the 350,000 Palestinians whom the Egyptian army had herded into refugee camps in Gaza would develop no nationalist sentiments or activism. Egyptian propaganda worked hard to redirect the Palestinians' justifiable anti- Egypt sentiments toward an incendiary hatred of Israel. Its secret police engineered the creation and deployment of the fedayeen (terrorist infiltrators) movement, which between 1949 and 1956 carried out over nine thousand terror attacks against Israel, killing more than six hundred Israelis and wounding thousands. These fedayeen were mostly Arab refugees, trained and armed by Egypt.

As the conflict with Israel hardened throughout the 1950s, Nasser came to see that Palestinian nationalism, if carefully manipulated, could be an asset instead of just a threat and an annoyance. Although the fedayeen terrorism prompted Israel to invade the Sinai in 1956, the Egyptian leader saw the value in being able to deploy a force that did his bidding but was not part of Egypt's formal military; which could make tactical strikes and then disappear into the amorphous demography of the west Bank or the Gaza Strip, giving Egypt plausible deniability for the mayhem it had created. But Nasser's ability to support such a useful terrorist group was limited by the failed economy over which he presided; and so, in 1964, he was delighted to cooperate with the Soviet Union in the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Brainchild of the KGB

As Ion Mihai Pacepa, onetime director of the Romanian espionage service (DIE), later explained, the PLO was conceived at a time when the KGB was creating "liberation front" organizations throughout the Third world. Others included the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created in 1964 with help from Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro. But the PLO was the KGB's most enduring achievement.

In 1964, the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Soviet blueprint for a Palestinian National Charter—a document drafted in Moscow—and made Ahmad Shukairy, the KGB's agent of influence, the first PLO chairman. The Romanian intelligence service was given responsibility for providing the PLO with logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the KGB and the East German Stasi, everything, according to Ion Pacepa, "came from Bucharest. Even the PLO uniforms and the PLO stationery were manufactured in Romania free of charge, as a 'comradely help.' During those years, two Romanian cargo planes filled with goodies for the PLO landed in Beirut every week."

The PLO came on the scene at a critical moment in Middle East history. At the Khartoum conference held shortly after the Six-Day war, the defeated and humiliated Arab states confronted the "new reality" of an Israel that seemed unbeatable in conventional warfare. The participants of the conference decided, among other things, to continue the war against Israel as what today would be called a "low intensity conflict." The PLO's Fatah forces were perfect to carry out this mission.

The Soviets not only armed and trained Palestinian terrorists but also used them to arm and train other professional terrorists by the thousands. The International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (CPSU), the Soviet Security Police (KGB), and Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) all played major roles in this effort. From the late 1960s onwards, moreover, the PLO maintained contact with other terror groups—some of them neo-Nazi and extreme right-wing groups—offering them support and supplies, training and funding.

The Soviets also built Moscow's Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University to serve as a base of indoctrination and training of potential "freedom fighters" from the Third world. More specialized training in terrorism was provided at locations in Baku, Odessa, Simferopol, and

Tashkent. Mahmoud Abbas, later to succeed Yassir Arafat as head of the PLO, was a graduate of Patrice Lumumba U, where he received his Ph.D. in 1982 after completing a thesis partly based on Holocaust denial.

Cuba was also used as a base for terrorist training and Marxist indoctrination, part of a symbiotic relationship between its revolutionary cadre and the PLO. The Cuban intelligence service (DGI) was under the direct command of the KGB after 1968. Palestinian terrorists were identified in Havana as early as 1966; and in the 1970s DGI representatives were dispatched to PLO camps in Lebanon to assist terrorists being nurtured by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In late April 1979, an agreement was reached for the PFLP to have several hundred of its terrorists trained in Cuba, following a meeting between its chief George Habash and Cuban officials.

The PLO and the Arab States

In the chaotic aftermath of the Six-Day war, Yassir Arafat had seen an opportunity for himself and his still embryonic Fatah terror organization in the rubble of the Arab nations' war machines and the humiliation of the Arab world. He forged an alliance with President Nasser, whom he won over to his belief that after traditional warfare had failed them yet again, the future of the conflict for the Arabs was in the realm of terrorism, not the confrontation of massed armies. From September to December 1967, Nasser supported Arafat in his attempt to infiltrate the west Bank and to develop a grassroots foundation for a major terror war against Israel. These efforts were unsuccessful because local west Bank Palestinians cooperated with Israel and aided in the pursuit of Arafat and his Fatah operatives.

Despite such setbacks, Arafat later described this era in his authorized biography as the time of his most successful statecraft. When word reached him of Israel's post-Six- Day-war peace overtures to the recently defeated Arab countries, he and his adjutants understood at once that if there were ever peace between Israel and Jordan, for instance, there would be no hope for a Palestinian state. So he set off on a grueling exercise in shuttle diplomacy throughout the major Arab countries, preaching the need to reject unconditionally any peace agreement with the Jewish state.

Arafat later claimed credit for the results of the Khartoum conference (August–September 1967), in which all the Arab dictators unanimously voted to reject Israel's offer to return much of the land it had occupied as a result of the war in exchange for peace. Had he not intervened, Israel might conceivably have made peace with Jordan, and the west Bank would have reverted to Jordanian sovereignty, leaving his dream of leading a state there stillborn.

But while Arafat's proposals to engage in a continuing terror war might be enthusiastically received by Arab leaders, there was no support to speak of among the Arabs of the west Bank, who readily gave him up to Israeli authorities. Arafat was forced to flee with the Israel Defense Forces hot on his trail, and finally established a base for his force in the city of Salt, in southwestern Jordan. From there he executed terrorist raids across the Jordan river and began to set up clandestine contacts with officers in the Jordan Legion, almost half of whom were Palestinians.

The Israeli army, under the direction of Moshe Dayan, launched a limited invasion of Jordan in March 1968 to stop Arafat's raids. Its objective was the village of Karama, near the Jordan river, where most of Arafat's men were encamped. The raid took a terrible toll of terrorist fighters. when Jordanian artillery forces, under the command of Palestinians, unexpectedly opened fire on the Israeli force, the Israelis retreated, not wishing to escalate the raid into a confrontation with Jordan.

Showing his brilliance as a propagandist, Arafat redefined Israel's strategic retreat into a rout. Organizing his defeated and demoralized force into a cavalcade, he marched into Salt with guns firing victoriously in the air, claiming in effect that it was his force, rather than fear of a diplomatic incident, that had caused the Israelis to move back. Arafat claimed that he had liberated both Palestinian and Jordanian karameh ("dignity" in Palestinian Arabic) by smashing the Israeli force and driving it back across the Jordan river in shame and disarray. It was pure fiction, but the Arabs believed it. Soon money and recruits were pouring in, and Arafat was able to reconstitute and equip his haggard Fatah force. Shrewdly leveraging his "victory," Arafat challenged Ahmad Shukairy as head of the PLO in February 1969. Acting through Nasser, the Soviets backed Arafat and he emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Arab terrorist war against Israel. while remaining distinct organizations, the PLO and Fatah were unified beneath the umbrella of his leadership.

At this point, Soviet involvement became critical. Under Russian tutelage, Arafat signed the "Cairo Agreement" in November 1969, which allowed him, with overt Egyptian and Syrian backing and covert Russian support, to move a large part of his force into southern Lebanon. There they set up centers of operation to prepare for terror attacks against Israel's northern border, while Arafat and the rest of his force remained in Jordan.

The three years of Arafat's sojourn in Jordan were not without internal problems. Fatah terrorists routinely clashed with Jordanian soldiers (more than nine hundred armed encounters between 1967 and 1970). Arafat's men used Mafia tactics to smuggle cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, and to extort money from local Jordanians, setting up roadblocks to exact tolls and kidnapping notables for ransom to finance "the revolution." when Jordanian forces tried to keep order, Fatah engaged and in some cases killed them. Jordan's King Hussein was not eager for a confrontation.

Faced with Arafat's threats of civil war, he offered the PLO leader a position in the Jordanian parliament. Arafat refused, saying that his only goal in life was to destroy Israel. When the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Joseph Cisco, came to Jordan in April 1970, Arafat organized massive anti-American riots throughout the country, during which one American military attaché was murdered and another kidnapped. Humiliated before his most important ally, Hussein did nothing.

In July 1970, Egypt and Jordan accepted U.S. secretary of state William Rogers' plan for Israel's withdrawal from the west Bank and Gaza in exchange for peace and recognition. But instead of embracing the plan and taking control of the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat denounced the Rogers proposal, reiterating his determination to reject any peace agreement. He then organized riots throughout Jordan in order to prevent a political solution. The liberated Palestine he sought would stretch from the Jordan river to the sea, with no Israel, and could only be achieved through fire and blood. All peace agreements that left Israel intact were in his view betrayals of the Palestinian cause.

Nasser was furious and let King Hussein know that he had withdrawn his support for Arafat. Blundering ahead, Arafat announced it was now time to overthrow King Hussein, and he launched an insurrection.

Throughout August 1970, fighting between Arafat's forces and the Jordan Legion escalated. Arafat looked forward to support from Syria when he launched his final coup, but the Syrians had backed off because they had learned that the United States had given Israel a green light to intervene if they became involved.

The final straw came on September 6, 1970, when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), nominally under Arafat's control, skyjacked one Swiss and two American airliners. Two of the planes landed in Jordan, where they were emptied of their passengers and then blown up. The passengers were held as hostages, to be released in exchange for PLO and other terrorists in Israeli jails. At this point, King Hussein declared martial law, and ordered Arafat and his men out of Jordan. Arafat responded by demanding a national unity government with himself at its head. Hussein then ordered his 55,000 soldiers and 300 tanks to attack PLO forces in Amman, Salt, Irbid, and all Palestinian refugee camps.

In eleven days it was over. Seeing his forces tottering on the brink of total defeat and perhaps annihilation, Arafat, having promptly fled to safety in Sudan, agreed to face a tribunal of Arab leaders who would adjudicate an end to the conflict. After six hours of deliberation, the rulers of Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan decided in favor of King Hussein. And to make matters worse, Arafat's last patron, the dictator Nasser, died of a heart attack while seeing members of the tribunal off at the Cairo airport. As Hussein forced the remaining PLO terrorists out of his cities, Arafat had no choice but to leave. By March 1971, he had made his way clandestinely to Lebanon, the only Arab country too weak to throw him out.

Once in Lebanon, he sought to take control of the PLO forces, but he discovered that his chief surviving officers quite correctly blamed him for the Jordan debacle, which had become known as "Black September." Their resentment for the great and senseless loss of life in Jordan led to two attempts on his life.

Arafat not only survived, but was able to use his ample diplomatic skills to turn the tables on his opponents inside Fatah and the PLO. He argued that in the few short years that he had led his liberation army, he had awakened Palestinian nationalism (in fact, he had virtually invented it), recruited and armed a substantial terror army (the PLO forces in Lebanon were unscathed by the Black September catastrophe), initiated war against Israel, rebuffed efforts by Egypt and Syria to control the PLO, made his organization into a state within a state in both Jordan and Lebanon, and raised substantial support from a growing number of rich expatriate Palestinians and supporters throughout the Arab world. By early 1971, despite the animosity that his debacle in Jordan had engendered, he successfully reestablished himself as the unchallenged PLO military and political leader.

Arafat's ability to stay at the top of Fatah and the PLO in Lebanon was the result, at least in part, of the support he received from the USSR. Soviet interest in Arafat was motivated largely by his success in organizing and motivating his terrorist followers. The Soviet Union's Cold war agenda required someone with just those talents to expand and develop the terror arm of Soviet activity in the Third world, and especially in the Muslim world. Within a few years, Russian-trained PLO operatives were manning a dozen terror-training camps in Syria and Lebanon, and deploying terror cells across the globe from Germany to Nicaragua, Turkey to Iran.

By 1973, Arafat was a Soviet puppet (and would remain such until the fall of the USSR). His adjutants, including Mahmoud Abbas, were being trained by the KGB in guerrilla warfare, espionage, and demolition; and his ideologues had gone to North Vietnam to learn the propaganda Tao of Ho Chi Minh.

The PLO Discovers "Wars of National Liberation"

As early as 1964, Arafat had sent Abu Jihad (later the leader of the PLO's military operations) to North Vietnam to study the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare as waged by Ho Chi Minh. At this time, Fatah also translated the writings of North Vietnam's General Nguyen Giap, as well as the works of Mao and Che Guevara, into Arabic.

Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh's success in mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation. Ho's chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap's counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation:

"Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand."

At the same time that he was getting advice from General Giap, Arafat was also being tutored by Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958–1962): wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.

To make sure that they followed this advice, the KGB put Arafat and his adjutants into the hands of a master of propaganda: Nicolai Ceausescu, president-for-life of Romania.

For the next few years, Ceausescu hosted Arafat frequently and gave him lessons on how to apply the advice of Giap, Yazid, and others in the Soviet orbit. Arafat's personal "handler," Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of the Romanian military intelligence, had to work hard on his sometimes unruly protégé. Pacepa later recorded a number of sessions during which Arafat railed against Ceausescu's injunctions that the PLO should present itself as a people's revolutionary army striving to right wrongs and free the oppressed: he wanted only to obliterate Israel. Gradually, though, Ceausescu's lessons in Machiavellian statecraft sank in. During his early Lebanon years, Arafat developed propaganda tactics that would allow him to create the image of a homeless people oppressed by a colonial power. This makeover would serve him well in the west for decades to come.

Although Arafat was pioneering the use of skyjacking during this time and setting off a wave of copycat airborne terrorism, he discovered that even the flimsiest and most transparent excuses sufficed for the western media to exonerate him and blame Israel for its retaliatory or preventive attacks, and to accept his insistence that he was a statesman who could not control the terrorists he was in fact orchestrating.

But while Arafat was finally absorbing and applying the lessons he learned from his Romanian and North Vietnamese hosts and handlers, as Pacepa describes it in Red Horizons, the Soviets still questioned his dependability. So, with Pacepa's help, they created a highly specialized "insurance policy." Using the good offices of the Romanian ambassador to Egypt, they secretly taped Arafat's almost nightly homosexual interactions with his bodyguards and with the unfortunate preteen orphan boys whom Ceausescu provided for him as part of "Romanian hospitality." with videotapes of Arafat's voracious pedophilia in their vault, and knowing the traditional attitude toward homosexuality in Islam, the KGB felt that Arafat would continue to be a reliable asset for the Kremlin.

Whether or not Arafat's homosexuality was the key to the Soviets' control over him, it is clear that by the early 1970s the PLO had joined the ranks of other socialist anti-colonial "liberation" movements, both in its culture and in its politics; and had reframed its terror war as a "people's war" similar to those of the other Marxist-Leninist terrorist guerrillas in China, Cuba, and Vietnam. Thanks to input from Ceausescu, General Giap, and the Algerians, Arafat gradually saw the wisdom of jettisoning his fulminations about "throwing the Jews into the sea," and in its place he developed the images of the "illegal occupation" and "Palestinian national self-determination," both of which lent his terrorism the mantle of a legitimate people's resistance. Of course, there was one ingredient missing in this imaginative reconfiguration of the struggle: There had never been a "Palestinian people," or a "Palestinian nation," or a sovereign state known as "Palestine."

Creating "Palestine"

The term Palestine ( in Arabic) was an ancient name for the general geographic region that is more or less today's Israel. The name derives from the Philistines, who originated from the Eastern Mediterranean and invaded the region in the eleventh and twelfth centuries B.C. The Philistines were apparently from Greece, or perhaps Crete, or the Aegean Islands, or Ionia. They seem to be related to the Bronze Age Greeks, and they spoke a language akin to Mycenaean Greek.

Their descendants were still living on the shores of the Mediterranean when roman invaders arrived a thousand years later. The Romans corrupted the name to "Palestina," and the area under the sovereignty of their littoral city states became known as "Philistia." Six hundred years later, the Arab invaders called the region "Falastin."

Throughout all subsequent history, the name designated only a vague geographical entity. There was never a nation of "Palestine," never a people known as the "Palestinians," nor any notion of "historic Palestine." The region never enjoyed any sovereign autonomy, but instead remained under successive foreign sovereign domains, from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Fatimids, Ottomans and British.

During the British Mandate period (1922–1948), the Arabs of the area had their own designation for the region: Balad esh-Sham (the country, or province, of Damascus). In early 1947, in fact, when the UN was exploring the possibility of the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, various Arab political and academic spokespersons vociferously protested against such a division because, they argued, the region was really a part of southern Syria. Because no such people as "Palestinians" had ever existed, it would be an injustice to Syria to create a state ex nihilo at the expense of Syrian sovereign territory.

During the nineteen years from Israel's victory in 1948 to Israel's victory in the Six-Day war, all that remained of the territory initially set aside for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine under the conditions of the UN partition was the West Bank, under illegal Jordanian sovereignty, and the Gaza Strip, under illegal Egyptian rule. Never during these nineteen years did any Arab leader anywhere in the world argue for the right of national self-determination for the Arabs of these territories. Even Yassir Arafat, from his earliest terrorist days until 1967, used the term "Palestinians" only to refer to the Arabs who lived under, or had fled from, Israeli sovereignty; and the term "Palestine" only to refer to Israel in its pre-1967 borders.

In the PLO's original founding Charter (or Covenant), Article 24 states: "this Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the west Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area." For Arafat, "Palestine" was not the west Bank or the Gaza Strip, which after 1948 belonged to other Arab states. The only "homeland" for the PLO in 1964 was the State of Israel.

However, in response to the Six-Daywar and Arafat's mentoring by the Soviets and their allies, the PLO revised its Charter on July 17, 1968, to remove the language of Article 24, thereby newly asserting a "Palestinian" claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Part of the reframing of the conflict, along with adopting the identity of an "oppressed people" and "victim of colonialism," then, was the creation, ex nihilo, of "historic Palestine" and the ancient "Palestinian people" who had lived in their "homeland" from "time immemorial," who could trace their "heritage" back to the Canaanites, who were forced from their homeland by the Zionists, and who had the inalienable right granted by international law and universal justice to use terror to reclaim their national identity and political self-determination.

That this was a political confection was, perhaps inadvertently, revealed to the West by Zahir Muhse'in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism. [Emphasis added.]

Arafat himself asserted the same principle on many occasions. In his authorized biography he says, "The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."

But even these admissions—that the concept of a "Palestinian people" and a "Palestinian homeland" were invented for political purposes to justify and legitimize terrorism and genocide—could not stem the enthusiasm of western leaders. Within the space of a few years, the Middle East conflict with Israel was radically reframed. No longer was little Israel the vulnerable David standing against the massive Goliath of the Arab world. As the PLO's Communist-trained leaders saw the inroads that Vietnam, Cuba, and other "liberation struggles" had made in the west, Arafat promoted the same script for the Palestinians. Now it was Israel who was the bullying Goliath, a colonial power in the Middle East oppressing the impoverished, unarmed, helpless, hapless, and hopeless Palestinians.

Despite the changing imagery, however, one thing remained constant. From his earliest days, Arafat was clear that the PLO's aim was "not to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place . . . not to subjugate the enemy but to destroy him." The Palestinian nationalism that he and his Communist advisers created would be the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d'etre.

[Ryan Ruck]

Russians Suspected in Shooting of Kremlin Critic Near D.C.

One year ago, Kremlin critic Paul Joyal was gunned down in the driveway of his suburban Maryland home. The case remains unsolved — but some see the hand of Russia in the shooting.

Joyal, 53, is the former chief of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a former business partner of retired Soviet KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin.

In February 2007, Joyal appeared on NBC's "Dateline" and accused the Kremlin of seeking to silence its critics abroad.

Joyal said he suspected the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the assassination of dissident former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died from a dose of the rare radioactive Isotope polonium-210 in London in 2006.

On March 1, 2007, four days after his "Dateline" appearance, Joyal was returning to his home in Adelphi, Md., after meeting with Kalugin in Washington, D.C. As he stepped out of his car in his driveway, two men jumped out of nearby bushes. One grabbed him from behind, and Joyal was shot in the abdomen.

He spent the next 20 days in an induced coma and underwent five operations to repair the damage to his intestines, Congressional Quarterly reports.

Prince George County police considered the shooting a random street crime.

But Karl Milligan, a retired Prince George County police detective who knows Joyal, thinks otherwise.

For one thing, Milligan noted that Joyal's home is located in a remote subdivision with no drive-through traffic.

"It's so secluded you'd hardly know anybody lived there," Milligan, who spent decades in homicide before becoming chief of the intelligence unit, told CQ.

"Crime was very low there and still is. There were no [violent] incidents prior" to the attack and none since.

What's more, Joyal's assailants ran off after the shooting without taking his wallet, computer, briefcase or car.

Kalugin told CG: "Why were they waiting for him? That's not how robbers act. There are dozens of houses in the neighborhood. Why would they pick his? And why would they wait for him in the bushes at the house?"

The day after Joyal was shot, Russian journalist Ivan Safronov fell to his death from his 5th-story window in Moscow.

"A military correspondent for the daily Kommersant, Safronov was working on a story about the Kremlin's furtive sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and jet fighters to Syria," said journalist Alex Shoumatoff.

The FBI was briefly involved in the Joyal case, but did not pursue it for long.

Paul Goble, a U.S. government specialist on Soviet and post-Soviet states, told CG:

"If the Russians were behind the attack on Paul Joyal, then they crossed a line that they had not [crossed] earlier even in Soviet times — attacking a native-born American citizen on American territory."

[Ryan Ruck]

British Detectives Hunt Cold War Killer Who Used Poison-Tipped Umbrella as Murder Weapon

British detectives are back on the trail of a Cold War-era killer who used a poison-tipped umbrella to slay a communist defector.

British detectives acknowledged Friday that they had questioned suspects in the 1978 death of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov. The playwright and broadcaster was a stern critic of his country's communist regime in reports for the British Broadcasting Corp. and Radio Free Europe.

Markov was jabbed in the thigh with an umbrella tip as he waited for a bus on London's Waterloo Bridge. He developed a fever and died three days later. British government scientists later discovered the umbrella had been used to inject a pinhead-sized pellet of the poison ricin into Markov's leg.

Though no one has ever been charged with the killing, many suspected the KGB and Bulgarian secret police of involvement. KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky has previously said Russian authorities offered help to Bulgaria for the murder plot.

The case remained one of the most remarkable espionage-related deaths in London until the killing of ex-Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006. Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic, died after he ingested the radioactive element, polonium-210, most likely from a cup of tea laced with the poison.

Police in London said the Markov case has never been closed, and that officers are following up a raft of new leads.

A small team of officers from London's Metropolitan Police went to Bulgaria in May in connection with the inquiry into Markov's death, a police spokeswoman said Friday on condition of anonymity in line with police department policy. She said the inquiry remains open and has been a particularly complex investigation.

Officers also visited Bulgaria in March and in April last year to review files and request access to witnesses, including Communist-era secret police officers.

Though Markov's killer has never been charged, Vladimir Todorov, a former intelligence chief, was jailed in Bulgaria in 1992 on charges of destroying files related to the case.

Andrei Tsvetanov, the Bulgarian investigator in charge of the case was quoted by Bulgaria's Dnevnik daily as saying, "We are offering our full cooperation to our British colleagues and I can assure that now we have a 100 percent exchange of information on both sides — something we lacked so far."

[Ryan Ruck]

Britain's Top Spy 'Poisoned By Russia'

Britain's top spy is fighting for his life amid fears he has been poisoned by a Russian agent.

Alex Allan, the head of intelligence agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, was found unconscious at his west London home on Monday.

The civil servant, 56, remains in a coma as toxicology experts examine his blood.

The possible assassination attempt could be linked to Allan's recent warning that Russia has become the third biggest threat to national security behind al-Qaeda and Iran, British newspapers report.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who Allan regularly briefed on security issues, was immediately informed of Allan's condition.

The possible murder plot follows former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko's death in November.

The Russian dissident and writer was murdered in London amid rumours he was poisoned with radioactive polonium by Russian agents.

Friends of Allan, who is a renowned health fanatic, are puzzled by his sudden illness.

"He is therefore a prime target for an assassination attempt by Britain's enemies," The Sun reported security expert Chris Dobson as saying.

"The nature of his sudden illness, if it is an assassination attempt, points towards the FSB, successors of Russia's KGB.

'They are acknowledged masters of assassination by poison."

Allan's 58-year-old Australian wife Katie Clemson died in November after battling cancer.

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Russia, Georgia, and Islamic Terrorism

By Daniel Greenfield Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Russia is the world's biggest non-Muslim sponsor of Islamic terrorism

It is no secret that Russia is the world’s biggest non-Muslim sponsor of Islamic terrorism. Russian weapons and rubles flow into Iran and Syria, and from there to terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. Russian personnel train the Iranians, who in turn train Iraqi Shiite terrorists on the best way to kill American soldiers.

While the US was getting ready to take down Saddam Hussein, Russia was using its best delaying tactics in the UN, while rushing its top of the line weapons into Iraq. Putin knew that Saddam was finished and that Iraq’s debt to Russia would never be paid. Nevertheless, the doomed Saddam got the best the Russian armories had to offer in order to kill as many American troops as possible. After the invasion, Russian officials would boast of the increased demand for their weapons in the Muslim world.

In Lebanon, once again Russian weapons flowed to Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) terrorists. Top-of-the-line Russian weapons destroyed Israeli tanks and killed Israeli soldiers. And once again Russian officials boasted about their weapons being behind it all. And when Israel pulled out, Russia sent two detachments of its Chechen Muslim troops to Lebanon.

According to President Putin, the Chechens, as Muslims, will find it easier to “establish contacts with the local population” (Interfax, October 10). Alu Alkhanov, president of Chechnya’s pro-Russian administration, observed: “Importantly, all of these men strictly observe the Muslim rites which will play a role in Lebanon”

Remember Russia’s Chechen Muslim soldiers because you’ll see them again soon. This time marching into Georgia.

The Cedar Revolution failed. the radical Islamists of Hizbullah became a major player in Lebanon’s new order. Which meant that Iran and Syria were major players. Which meant that Russia, which stood behind them both, was a major player again. And all it took was a few thousand dead.

Meanwhile, Putin and Medvedev are not just supplying weapons to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the rest of the elite in Iran, but providing them with nuclear technology. Technology that puts Iran on track toward a nuclear bomb, which when detonated over Israel will not only remove the biggest obstacle in Russia’s longtime plans to control the Middle East, but to execute a Second Holocaust as well.

Some people may wonder how, in the wake of Beslan and the numerous bombings by Muslim terrorists on its own soil, can Russia continue to support and work together with Muslim terrorists? The answer is that Putin and his merry band of ex-KGB operatives do not object to Muslim terrorists. They like them a lot, they helped train them, they continue to supply to them—so long as they’re not fighting against Russia.

Putin, like nearly every Russian leader before him, views Muslim terror as a valuable strategic tool. Russia’s tightly controlled mosques preach Jihad… they just preach it against Russia’s enemies, as when the Supreme Mufti of Russia, Talgat Tadzhuddin, called for a “single-’(Russian)-Orthodox Islamic’ Jihad against the empire of Satan” when the US overthrew Saddam Hussein. Unlike Putin’s critics, he didn’t end up in a jail cell strapped down in a psychiatric hospital or dead of a suspicious suicide. Perish the thought, here he is with Vladimir Putin. And he remains well funded by the Russian government.

Russia fights against Islamic seperatists, in order to control them and turn them into loyal subjects and troops again, as was done during the days of the USSR. And Russia’s campaign in Chechnya is not about fighting Islamic terror, but about consolidating its hold on all the countries it used to control. And those campaigns are not limited to Muslim regions, but Christian ones as well. They include the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia… and Georgia as well. Because Christian or Muslim, it makes no difference to the Ex-Communists in power. They are determined to once again rule over them all.

Russia’s KGB masters have used many tools to achieve their objectives. They’ve employed blackmail, intimidation, poison, election fraud, street violence, and of course, outright invasion by Russian “peacekeepers”. But above all else, the KGB has excelled at one tool—propaganda.

And so we come to Georgia once again. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 failed to achieve its goals. But that doesn’t mean that Vladimir Putin has decided to take a break and spend all his time posing and primping with tigers, karate outfits, and rap stars for the adulation of his own government-controlled media. The FSB/KGB propaganda machine, which over the last few years has accused Georgia and President Saakashvili of every conceivable thing is now trying to plant stories claiming that Georgia is in league with Muslim terrorists against Russia.

As the world’s largest non-Muslim sponsor of Islamic terror, Russia accusing anyone else of collaborating with Muslim terrorists is already obscene. Numerous top ranking KGB defectors, including former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of Romania’s intelligence service, Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, and others, who have stated repeatedly that Russia was behind much of the world’s Islamic terror and that it continues to play that role today. They have even drawn connections between Al Queda and the KGB/FSB. While these allegations are debatable, Al Queda’s number 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri spent some time in Russia, and ex-KGB agents have alleged that he was trained by them.

But let’s put Russia’s own extensive ties to Islamic terrorism on hold for a minute, and focus on the situation in Georgia.

Russia’s assault on Georgia is a virtual carbon copy of the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia. Like the Clinton Administration, Vladimir Putin used phony claims of ethnic cleansing to invade Georgia in order to force the independence of two regions with sizable Muslim populations inside Georgia. Essentially it was a mirror image of what happened in Yugoslavia, except this time Russia was the invader, Georgia was the victim, and rather than Kosovo and Croatia—the two statelets in question were, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. (South Ossetia is a “country” of some 50,000 people which is only recognized by Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and former Sandinista terrorist leader Daniel Ortega, which should tell you something right there.)

Now Russia is spreading claims that Georgia is in league with Muslim Jihadis and plotting against it. There’s one problem with that. Georgia is a mostly Christian country, while both Abkhazia and South Ossetia are regions that hold sizable Muslim minorities. Do Muslim terrorists really want to prevent independence for two regions that demographically are much more Muslim than Georgia?

Especially when the Mufti of Abkhazia, Timur Dzyba, has called on the Muslim world to recognize Abkhazian independence and laid out extensive plans for Islamizing it by importing Muslims from Turkey.

It was Russia who took its Muslim Chechen troops and marched them into Georgia. Those Muslim soldiers carried South Ossetian flags (you remember that thriving nation of 50,000 people, whose independence Russia was fighting for), and who were those Chechen troops fighting for Russia under a South Ossetian flag? They were former Chechen Muslim terrorists and guerrillas who switched sides and fought for Russia under Sulim Yamadayev as the Vostok Battalion.

Sulim Yamadayev, a Muslim thug, had been responsible for numerous gruesome atrocities committed by him and under his command. His men were known for the classic Muslim beheading, as well as carrying out gruesome tortures on their bodies, while hiding the bodies. In Georgia, this battalion of Muslim throat-slitters participated in the murder, rape, plunder and abuse of Georgian Christians in a pogrom designed to ethnically cleanse the city of Gori.

It was Putin who brought Muslim terrorists in uniform into the heart of Georgia, to rob and kill, backed by the full might of the Russian military. It was the Russian Government that did it in order to carve out two parts of Georgia with a sizable Muslim minority, and turn them into full fledged countries. And all of this was done under the command of the GRU, the Russian foreign military intelligence directorate created by Leon Trotsky, that has long since become an object of horror to anyone in the region.

Unlike the Russian propaganda about their intelligence services seizing a briefcase from a dead terrorist that supposedly contained notes incriminating the Georgian government—these are all facts. (These are the same intelligence services which report that people in their custody somehow keep committing suicide.) They are events that large numbers of people witnessed. They are part of the historical record. They represent information that can be researched independently without relying on the Russian security services or their Western stooges.

But let’s continue exploring the credibility of their accusation that it is Georgia, not Russia, that is allied with Muslim terrorists.

Russia’s attempt to carve up Georgia was enthusiastically endorsed by Muslims.

The support of Russia’s actions on the part of the Islamic community of the Caucasus and several other Muslim states shows that the Islamic world still remains Russia’s staunch ally despite the virtual isolation of the country on the part of the West. There is no other European country that can boast of such a position in the Muslim community, representatives of the Islamic clergy of Russia, North Ossetia and Abkhazia said during their meeting with reporters.

When President Medvedev officially announced the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Muslim clergy of the Caucasus was one of the first communities to have approved the Kremlin’s decision. Muslim clergymen congratulated the people of the two republics on their long-awaited independence and urged the world Islamic community to follow Russia’s example.

“I would like to address the Islamic world to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, deputy mufti of Abkhazia, Timur Dzyba said.

Timur incidentally has big plans for Islamizing Abkhazia by importing millions of Muslims from Turkey. Turkey’s Islamist government and Ahmadinejad in Iran, have both pledged to cooperate with Moscow in “rebuilding” Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Russia’s military and political actions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia are likely to have another unintended consequence: they are likely to make it easier and more attractive for Muslim émigrés from the North Caucasus to return there and change the ethno-religious balance not only in these two republics but in the region more generally.

At present, Muslims constitute approximately 35 percent of the populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but both Muslim leaders there and analysts in Moscow say that the new situation which has arisen in the wake of Russia’s moves in Georgia is certain to increase that figure, possibly to the tipping point of more than 50 percent.

In an interview given to “NZ-Religii” and published today, Timur Dzyba, the mufti of Abkhazia, said that Muslims in his republic – including Abkhaz, North Caucasians, Tatars, Bashkirs and Turks – have been able to maintain their share of the population in recent times but now expect to expand it.

All this is unsurprising as Muslims in Georgia had been complaining that President Saakashvili was “Christianizing” Georgia by placing a cross on the flag and inserting too many of the country’s past Christian values. Of course, under an Abkhazian state, in which Russia will help funnel Muslim immigrants to expand the territory under control, that won’t be a problem;

During the Soviet period, Abkhazian Islam became weaker, but it would seem that since the fall of the USSR, the establishment of links between Abkhazians of Georgia and descendants of Abkhazian immigrants in Turkey has somewhat favoured an Islamic revival

And eventually Georgia will go the way of Abkhazia as well. That is Putin’s plan.

As a Christian country surrounded by Muslim countries, Georgia has made attempts to reach out to them. Less so than most Western European countries. What it has not done is employed Muslim terrorists in its armed forces—as Russia has. It has not financed and armed Muslim terrorists, as Russia has. It has not provided nuclear technology to Muslim terrorists, as Russia has. It does not control mosques which preach Jihad against the United States—as Russia does.

After all the horrors perpetrated by the KGB, anyone who takes claims made by the same people who were in the KGB as fact… sight unseen, is making a profound mistake. And anyone who supports the side of the ex-Communist thugs who not only tortured innocents, trained terrorists, assassinated dissidents in the past—but are still doing it today, need to ask themselves if they aren’t playing Dhimmi to monsters who filled mass graves every bit as enthusiastically as the Nazis did.

But if anyone wants evidence of a meeting between a top leader in the South Ossetian war with Islamic terrorists, that’s easy to come by.


In 2006, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met with Hamas terrorist leader Khaled Meshaal. That same year Vladimir Putin invited Hamas leaders to visit him in Moscow, and stated that he does not consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization.

These are not secret revelations from intelligence sources, but open stories in major media outlets of top Russian officials meeting with and welcoming Islamic terrorists.

I do not believe that the Serbian people, despite their closer ethnic ties to Russia than to Georgia, would want to see what was done to them, done to another country in their name. In fact, a major Abkhazian site uses NATO’s actions in Kosovo as a precedent for what Russia is doing in Georgia. Is that really what anyone who is outraged by NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia wants to support?


Nor is arguing for Russia’s partition of Georgia, any kind of counter-Jihad effort. Russia’s goal is to create two states that will have larger Muslim population percentages than Georgia as a whole. And those populations are meant to continue expanding through repatriation from Turkey. That means Russia will eventually have created its own Kosovo out of parts of Georgia. How in the world is supporting the party that used Muslim troops and is creating countries where Muslims will eventually become a majority, counter-Jihadist?

And to dismantle the last leg of this stool, the Obama Administration is not supporting Georgia at the expense of Russia. In fact, the Obama Administration has turned its back on Georgia, in favor of a reboot with Russia. Obama snubbed Saakashvili in favor of Putin’s pet, Medvedev. Obama had earlier compared the Russian invasion of Georgia, with the US invasion of Iraq. So opposing Georgia and supporting Russia is not the anti-Obama line—it is Obama’s line. You are not opposing Obama if you support appeasing Russia and betraying Georgia. You are supporting Obama.

When McCain looked into Putin’s eyes, he said that he could see three letters, KGB. Ask yourself. Do you see what McCain sees, or do you see what Obama sees?

Because beyond the politics, there’s the question of conscience. While the countries involved are far away, this debate carries a burden of flesh and blood. Russian propaganda claims that Georgia is in league with Muslim terrorists operating in its territory, and that Georgian leaders are actively involved in planning attacks on it. Russia has tried to sell this same line before, but it has implications far beyond plain propaganda. By promoting and distributing this claim, those who do it are providing Russia with a casus belli for invading Georgia, the next time a terrorist attack happens in the Caucasus.

Do you remember Russian tanks suppressing the uprising in Hungary? Do you remember them in the streets of Prague? Do you want part of the responsibility for those tanks in the streets of Tbilisi? Do you want the Muslim butchers of Gori roaming through a peaceful city, robbing, raping and murdering? Because this is not academic. This is not just about words in which no one gets hurt and we all go home afterward. This is about a totalitarian country which has murdered hundreds of reporters, imprisoned dissidents in psychiatric hospitals and jailed their lawyers, carried out assassinations worldwide, that is now determined to conquer a country it once controlled. And it wants to use you to do it.

We may not always do good, but we can always refuse to collaborate with evil. That is our choice. For those brave Russians and Jews who defied the KGB in Soviet times, this was a dangerous and costly choice. For us it is as easy as doing the right thing.

Supporting Russia’s campaign against Georgia does not hurt the Jihad, it helps it. It does not hurt Obama, it runs in tandem with what he is already doing. It does not reject NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia, it copies them and endorses them. But above all else, there’s a simple question to be answered here.

Do you want to help the KGB thugs who provided Saddam with the weapons used to murder US soldiers? Who are providing Iran with nuclear technology in order to commit genocide? Who are the largest non-Muslim state sponsoring Islamic terrorism?

We always have the ability to do the right thing. To refuse to collaborate with evil. To refuse to be Dhimmis for either Islam or the KGB. That is the power of moral choice. That is the power of doing the right thing. That is the power of refusing to collaborate with evil. That is the power of being free. Because the power of evil comes from its ability to seduce you, to trick you, or to finally compel you to serve its ends. The power of good comes from refusing to do its bidding. And that is why only those who refuse to collaborate with evil, are truly free.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/22238

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Russia Engages Hamas

from Barry Rubin - RubinReports.blogspot.com

Friday, 02 July 2010 04:42 Wow, I'm not used to my predictions coming true this fast! In a meeting with a diplomat, I said that one of the most important features of the Middle East soon would be a Russian alliance with the Islamist forces. Russia was already Syria's arms' supplier and ally, Iran's friend (though it did support limited sanctions because there are other interests it must consider), and now is working with Hizballah. It was only a matter of time, I added, before Russia took a pro-Hamas stance as well. I walked home quickly, sat down, and opened my computer and here it is: "Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov [pictured] said...that his country was doing the right thing in its direct talks with the Hamas organization. 'Yes, we are holding talks with Hamas - because it was elected by a large Palestinian majority in free elections, according to all elements....''' But this is okay says Lavrov, because Moscow is telling Hamas to become moderate and is even "witnessing positive movements." If you believe that Russia is going to persuade Hamas to be moderate, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. What is clear, however, is that Hamas has convinced Russia to be even more extreme in its Middle East policy. And by the way, if Lavrov read this blog he'd know that the Hamas regime was not elected by a large Palestinian majority, it was imposed in a violent coup. This is not the first such Russia-Hamas meeting but now it is a formal and publicly declared diplomatic action. In theory, the United States should approach Moscow and say that it is really unhelpful and the U.S. government is ticked off about it. But just after a successful meeting with the Russian president and ignoring the arrest of a huge Russian spy ring in the United States, President Barack H. Obama will do nothing. This is a mistake as it tells Russia once again that it again trample on U.S. policy at no cost whatsoever. Signal sent: Russia strong; America weak. America must listen to Russia; Russia doesn't have to listen to America. Once again, the White House won't even notice that this failure has happened, much less correct it. A Russian alliance with the main revolutionary Islamist bloc led by Iran is now an established fact. Of course, Moscow won't do everything Tehran wants but it will do a great deal in that direction. Will the U.S. government notice that even if Russia voted for the UN sanctions it is still subverting U.S. regional policies in a dozen other ways? No. And when Russian companies break the UN sanctions for which Moscow voted Washington won't notice that either. But aren't the Russians worried to back radical Islamists because of its own Islamist problem? On the contrary, one advantage of doing so is to buy off Iran from backing these revolutionary groups inside Russia. One more step in the erosion of U.S. credibility and power in the world. Yawn!

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WikiLeaks Evidence: Russia Sponsoring Islamic Terror

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Written by Christian Gomez

Sunday, 12 December 2010 10:15

2 The release of over 250,000 diplomatic cables has revealed a lot about the intricacies of U.S. diplomacy. However, one aspect of the WikiLeaks release that has been much under the media's radar is what the leaked cables have said about Russia and its surrogate-state sponsorship of what would most accurately be described as an international terrorist network. In a diplomatic cable dated August 6, 2008, regarding a meeting between U.S. and Russian experts on the export of Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS) from Russia, the State Department expressed its concern about "Russian ammunition, sold to Venezuela ... found in possession of the FARC" Colombian terrorist group. Four days later, in another cable, the State Department reiterated its concern regarding "recovered Russian-origin ammunition in Colombia, the ongoing Russian sale of advanced Igla-S MANPADS to Venezuela," which "have all reinforced growing concerns about the risk of increasing proliferation of arms to terrorist and criminal organizations in the region." When "questions and comparisons were raised by the U.S. side about Russian ammunition, sold to Venezuela, and found in possession of the FARC," the cable states that the leader of the Russian delegation, a Col. Oleg Skabara, "first suggested that the ammunition did not come from Russia, but was probably a sale from 'unlicensed production,' a suggestion that it was manufactured in a third country without appropriate permits from Russia." When the U.S. delegation did not buy into Skabara's explanation so easily, indicating "that the ammunition carried factory stamps, and that we provided this information," the Russians tried to brush off the accusation by asserting "that the meeting was to discuss MANPADS, not ammunition, and that these are different weapons and the approach, scale, and control applied to them are different." Again, Russia only offered feeble assurances that it was in the process of "carrying out an investigation," and restated its position that the scenario of Russian MANPADS supplied to Venezuela making their way to the hands of FARC terrorists was "impossible." However, such a scenario is not as impossible as Skabara would have one believe. Prior to the arrest of Russian arms seller Victor Bout, the infamous "Merchant of Death," Bout told undercover DEA agents posing as FARC members — including DEA agent Louis Milione who recalled the conversation — that he would supply them with a vast assortment of weapons: "Anti-personnel mines, fragmentation grenades, armor piercing rockets ... all within the context of speaking about a shared ideology of communism and fighting against the Americans." Another concern brought to the attention of the Russians, as mentioned in the same cable, was that of "Russian-made Eritrean MANPADS discovered in Somalia." The Russian side responded only by stating that its "relationship with Eritrea is not strong, thus Russia cannot guarantee any further useful information on this issue." When the "U.S. delegation then reiterated a request ... for a detailed list of all Soviet and Russian MANPADS transfers to Eritrea and the HOA [Horn of Africa] in general," the cables state that the "Russian delegation responded that this was impossible, as all records of MANPADS transfers prior to the year 2000 were destroyed in accordance with Russian laws governing classified information." In another cable, then-U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ronald P. Spogli observed that "Putin's Russia bears little resemblance to communist ideals." Nevertheless, Spogli noted that "this fact has not deterred Italian communists and other radical left politicians from being openly pro-Russia on the basis of ideological solidarity." Among the most well-known and active of Italian communists and radicals is the terrorist organization Red Brigades/Communist Combatant Party (BRCCP), which originated as an offshoot of Renato Curcio's Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse in Italian) founded in 1969. During the Cold War, Red Brigades members were known to travel across the Iron Curtain into communist Czechoslovakia, where they would receive instruction at the KGB-run special training center in Karlovy Vary. Between 1999 and 2003, the BRCCP claimed responsibility for the assassination of three Italians, including Massimo D'Antona, an advisor to the cabinet of Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema. Although D'Antona was a member of Italy's left-wing political apparatus, his assassination embodies the original objectives of the Red Brigades, as laid out by Renato Curcio: "Faced with working-class terror, the bourgeoisie by now has an obligatory course: to reestablish control by intensified repression and progressive militarization of the state." Through the application of terror tactics, the steady erosion of a state's existing power structures into an unbearable repressive regime has historically been the method by which communists and other terrorists have sought to foster dissent and instigate armed revolution. This is no different from what the Red Brigades/BCCP and Islamist terrorists have endeavored to accomplish. Just as the Red Brigades relied on Soviet aid, weapons, ammunition, and training for its survival, this diplomatic cable reveals the Italian communists' continued solidarity with Moscow. In one recent cable dated February 18, 2009, in what is described as an "action request for Posts in Abu Dhabi, Amman, Cairo, Kuwait City, Manama, and Riyadh," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton relays instructions requesting them to "raise with appropriate government officials our [U.S.] concerns about Russian plans to transfer the S-300 long-range air-defense system to Iran." Clinton reemphasizes this point: "In the spirit of our bilateral cooperation, we request your government's support in urging Russia to not transfer a highly sophisticated air-defense system to Iran." In the cable, Clinton even specifically names Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov as having "brushed off U/S ... concerns over such a transfer." It also states that Lavrov "did not reiterate Russia's year-long position that the S-300 transfer depends on Iranian behavior," which indicates that Russia is planning to move forward with the weapons system transfer regardless of Iran's current actions. In the following sequence of talking points, listed in the cable and below, Clinton outlines the history behind the weapons transfer along with Russia's unwillingness to cooperate with U.S. concerns: • In 2005 Russia signed a contract to sell the modern long-range S-300 air defense missile system to Iran. • In 2006, after it was exposed that Iran was not in compliance with its international nuclear obligations, Russia assured us it would not complete the transfer until Iran changed course. • Despite these assurances, we are concerned that Russia is in a position to deliver the S-300 to Iran as soon as a political decision is taken. • Moreover, when we raised our concerns in recent senior-level conversations with Russian officials, we were not reassured by the Russian response. Meanwhile, as if the news of Russia's armament of Iran is not alarming enough, another cable made reference to the resurgence of the once pro-Soviet Tudeh Party within the government of Iran. In the cable it is stated that an unnamed Iraninan "former non-Marxist revolutionary activist" has avowed that Iran's "Tudeh (communist) party is reorganizing support among factory and government workers, and intellectuals." These "many former Tudeh sympathizers," the activist claimed, "hold positions in the bureaucracy and elsewhere." It should be noted that the Tudeh was the party to which Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh belonged before he was overthrown by the CIA in the 1953 d'etat, which the CIA warned would lead to blowback — and such was the case in 1979 with the Islamic revolution and the taking of American hostages. The reemergence of the communist Tudeh Party and the increased Russian arms sales to state sponsors of terrorism — Iran, Venezuela, and possibly Eritrea — along with expressed solidarity of Italian communists with Russia, reads almost like a page from the Cold War. This would all seem to vindicate the claims made by Sergei Tretyakov, one of the highest-ranking members of the Russian FSB (successor to Soviet KGB) to defect the United States, who stated that Russia currently views the United States as a "target."

[vector7]

Companion Threads:

• Is Russia Behind 9/11 ? [no Doubt !!!]
  
• The Left's Unholy Alliance with Islam
  
• Putin's Spies in America
  
• The Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated both the Clinton and Obama Administrations
  
• Attempts to Push Sharia Law on America
  
• Is Barack Obama a real Manchurian candidate?
• COMMUNISTS KNEW IN 1992 that BARACK WOULD BE PRESIDENT
  
• Obama: Anti-Colonial President, Plans for the next term

Terrorism - How Russia is Using Islam to Build Communism

In this weekly video news update for October 1 - 7, 2012, JBS CEO Art Thompson discusses and provides evidence for how Russia is using Islamic terrorism to build Communism and how communism is providing weapons and training to support Islamic governments.





Exposing Terrorism: Inside The Terror Triangle




Exposing Terrorism: Inside The Terror Triangle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZzrT0Rg1aY

JBS CEO Art Thompson reveals there is more to the war on terror than meets the eye. He discusses terrorism, how it has been used in the past, reveals the state sponsors and others in the supporting network and demonstrates how Islam is being used to mask the real culprits.

In this weekly video news update for October 1 - 7, 2012,

JBS CEO Art Thompson discusses how Russia is using Islamic terrorism to build Communism. He explains how communism is providing weapons and training to support Islamic governments. He provides evidence through several publications.

[Avvakum]

It does not suprise me that Putin's Regime is involved with terrorism. After all, he and his supporters have practically a 'love affair' with Islam;

Islam is inseparable part of Russia’s society and culture - Putin

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Published: 30 August, 2012, 14:46



President Vladimir Putin congratulated the Russian Hajj Mission on its 10th anniversary, and said that Islam has become integral to Russia’s religious, cultural and social fabric.
“Traditions of Islam are based on eternal values of kindness, mercifulness and justice. Millions of people in our country practice this ancient religion,” Putin wrote in a telegram published on the Kremlin’s website.
The letter was forwarded to the participants of the anniversary meeting, which took place in Grozny, the capital of the Republic of Chechnya, on Thursday.
Putin also saluted the Muslim community for being active participants in the country’s public life, developing broad charity initiatives and strengthening family values. The wider Muslim community is opposed to all forms of religious intolerance and extremism, the Russian President wrote.
“I want to stress that the state’s estimation of fruitful activities of Muslim organizations is very high and the state guarantees its citizens the opportunity to follow the norms of their religion including the pilgrimage to the holy places of Islam,” he said, adding that the Hajj Mission has made numerous strides in resolving issues related to Russian believers’ pilgrimages to Mecca, Saudi Arabia.



No, this corrupt clique of ex-Soviet Apparatchiks and 'Mafiya' Oligarchs does not have the interests of Russia in hand at all, and from what i've read and seen, all true Russian Nationalism is suppressed while Moslem migration increases into the major Russian cities and the Government pimps itself out to Middle-and Far-Eastern interests. Even the modern Russian Orthodox Church is primarily a business concern staffed by 'former' Soviet Agents-a new and more degenerate form of 'Sergianism'.

[American Patriot]

Any idea what that is about Thorongil212? Anyone else? Something is in that particular message, the HTML or something. Everyone check your machines please. That was some kind of javascript exploit I've not seen til now.

[Avvakum]

Any idea what that is about Thorongil212? Anyone else? Something is in that particular message, the HTML or something. Everyone check your machines please. That was some kind of javascript exploit I've not seen til now.

? Not quite sure what you mean. I remember finding the initial article on RT or somewhere, and I highlighted it in green for emphasis. I'm not particularly computer-literate, so i'm not sure what the problem was.

[American Patriot]

Take a look at the screen capture. The box in the front shows there was a threat on that page of some sort.

I am not sure how many others might have looked at the page so I took some stuff off the page that might have been dangerous.

I suggest every run scans on their machines though. Mine caught it and notified me of the problem. I'm not sure if anyone else saw it, or got infected by something.

All I was asking you Thor was do you know much about the page you captured that off from and did you experience any issues?

[Avvakum]

Take a look at the screen capture. The box in the front shows there was a threat on that page of some sort.

I am not sure how many others might have looked at the page so I took some stuff off the page that might have been dangerous.

I suggest every run scans on their machines though. Mine caught it and notified me of the problem. I'm not sure if anyone else saw it, or got infected by something.

All I was asking you Thor was do you know much about the page you captured that off from and did you experience any issues?

I really don't know where exactly I found the article; I remember wanting to search for an article about Putin's blatant Moslem pandering, 200,000+ moslems praying in the streets of Moscow, etc...And I came up with that. I didn't experience any real major problem with my computer that night, although it did seem to run real sluggish for a while after that inexpectedly, come to think of it. In the future I'll just have to be more careful about things like this, but like I said, I don't know much about computers and such.

[American Patriot]

I just went to a site for something called "Beta Lights" ( a radioactive light, using tritium which is on all the time) and the site is a manufactuerer and reseller. That site had a similar issue a type of "obfuscation threat" it was called embedded in the image.

I'm beginning to think they are images that are using a type of encryption called steganography. That is, some kind of message is hidden inside of the image. In this case it's a program using javascript. I suspect it is a new form of attack on the users with various browsers to redirect them to something perhaps.