Connections to the KGB
by Ion Mihai Pacepa
Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving
my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in
laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo
planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet
bloc states did much the same....
I was given the KGB's "personal file" on
Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by
KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha
special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom
him as the future PLO leader.
First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo,
replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born
in Jerusalem and was therefore
a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB's disinformation department then went to work
on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine),
turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist
organization al-Fatah.
Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout
the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host
to many Palestinian students....
Arafat was an important undercover operative for the
KGB. Right after the 1967 Six
Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the
PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel
Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB
asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism"
during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist
pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to
have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism"
was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols
of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian
intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism....
In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest
for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply
have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that
you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu
told him for the umpteenth time....
Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer
ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red
Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins
of current anti-Americanism.
Sources: Wall Street Journal (September 24, 2003) |