Revealing past games played by Moscow in shaping the present Middle East landscape, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa wrote an Aug. 24 article titled "Russian Footprints." "The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war," Pacepa began. He then listed the Russian weapons used by Hezbollah. What does it all mean? A former high official within the communist bloc intelligence system, Pacepa noted that today's international terrorism was conceived at KGB headquarters following Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. Pacepa quotes his Russian intelligence boss, Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky: "In today's world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon." It was this same KGB general who admitted to Pacepa that, "Airplane hijacking is my own invention."
Given the grandiose sociological conceptions of revolutionary communism, terrorism was never a stand-alone tactic. It was a small part in a much larger, integrated whole. Enhancing and supplementing the massive nuclear striking power of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces, the emerging terrorist networks of the Third World were to be integrated with criminal networks and anti-capitalist political movements. The nexus formed by these would include drug trafficking operations, the infiltration and use of organized crime, money laundering, blackmail, the creation of legitimate businesses as false fronts and economic sabotage. The old Soviet economy and conventional military forces were no longer front and center. New tools were needed for a new type of war.
The testimony of communist bloc defectors long ago revealed the development of interlocking structures - part criminal, part terrorist and part revolutionary. According to information provided by Czech communist defector Jan Sejna, Russia's strategy was formulated over a five-year period following Stalin's death. The objective was to overthrow the United States as the world's leading power. KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn described the plan as a forty-year affair, involving the controlled collapse of the communist bloc during the "final phase" and the adoption of deceptive reforms in order to disorient Western strategists. Five strategic ingredients connected with this plan were listed in Joseph Douglass's 1990 book, Red Cocaine, as follows: (1) educating Third World leaders who could lead revolutions in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia; (2) training terrorists and "national liberation fighters"; (3) infiltration and exploitation of international drug trafficking "as a political and intelligence weapon to use against the bourgeois societies and as a mechanism for recruiting agents of influence around the world"; (4) Infiltrate international organized crime and to create new mafia organizations; and (5) to prepare a global network for sabotage against the United States. (And what else would the collapse of the World Trade Center be, other than "sabotage"?)
Few analysts would dare argue that this long-range strategy remains the basis for present-day Kremlin policy; nevertheless, Moscow appears to be following its old plan with minor improvisations. The Russian government continues to work with communist dictators and "national liberation movements in the Third World" (like Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il and the communist government in Beijing). As one example out of many, the current head of the PLO was trained in Russia (like his predecessor). As reported by reliable sources in Pakistan, the Russians are currently supplying Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Russian weapons are used by Hezbollah and by the communist insurgency in Colombia. Leading experts in the Italian mafia have long noted Russia's dominant role as the new headquarters of international organized crime and drug trafficking (which furthers clandestine arms trafficking as well). We have no idea, as yet, the effectiveness of the KGB's use of organized crime in the struggle to manipulate or plunder capitalism; but we ought to be worried.
Pacepa's claim that Russia originated international terrorism (and airline hijacking) as its own strategic instrument is not disputed. Other communist defectors have confirmed Russia's role in supporting terrorist forces worldwide. Soviet bloc countries have long supplied "liberation fighters" throughout the world. Today, Vladimir Putin's new Soviet bloc includes militant Islam. According to Pacepa, "In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov ... [said], a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon ... against Israel and its main supporter, the United States."
The White House and other Western governments have long refused to credit the testimony of top intelligence defectors from Russia and its former satellites. No intelligence expert dares to bring the evidence together. This is because capitalism has become hedonistic, predicated on economic optimism (required for continued growth). Certain realistic pronouncements or admissions, involving pessimistic assessments, are strictly out of bounds. Such assessments are considered to be politically damaging to presidents and prime ministers. Entire governments are now predicated on a fanciful futurism, on the falsification of economic data; dedicated to unrealistic peace plans and absurd attempts to transform backward societies into like-minded suburbs of the First World.
Unfortunately, a bad situation doesn't go away because you refuse to believe in it. Russia has been working against America in the Middle East for many decades. As KGB Gen. Yury Andropov explained to Pacepa, the Muslim world was a petri dish in which the Russians might "nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought." You merely combine Islam with class struggle and you get the Iranian Revolution proclaiming America as the "Great Satan." According to Pacepa, "The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch." The idea that America and Israel form a fascist/imperialist bloc is an old Soviet construct. It is straight from Stalin's playbook. The Kremlin's plan would work, according to Pacepa, because Islam "would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom."
Moscow's anti-Jewish propaganda has so succeeded that a frightening percentage of Americans have fallen for it. What must be understood, first and foremost, by all those who fret over the wickedness of America and Israel, is that the very terms that have come into fashion today originated in the think tanks of the world's most infamous criminal regime - not as an honest attempt to understand international events, but as a psychological warfare operation codenamed "Zionist Governments" (Sionistskiye Gosudarvstva). If the United States were portrayed as a "Jewish fiefdom," the Arab world would stop thinking of the threat from Moscow. All eyes would be narrowed in the direction of Washington. According to Pacepa, the KGB ordered its sister agencies in the satellite countries to "export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world."
The disinformation campaign against Israel and the United States has spread, like an infection, throughout the world. It is now found everywhere, not merely in the Middle East. Old Nazi lies, thought to be dead, are now presented as fresh news. Americans and Europeans no longer remember the past, and don't realize that history is now repeating itself. Only this time the envisioned holocaust isn't merely for the Jews, but for Americans. "We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds," wrote Pacepa, "because we knew we could not win any military battles." But once you have conquered billions of minds, the military battles are yours without argument.
Those who see in Russia a weak economic power have not considered the equalizing potential of clandestine networks, psychological warfare, strategically organized corruption and blackmail, and nuclear terrorism. Moscow's combination play could prove deadly. No effective counter-strategy is likely to emerge from Washington because a regime predicated on economic optimism cannot acknowledge the truth, cannot accept the negative implications of ongoing Russian enmity. The Cold War never ended. The nuclear arms race continues - while America falls behind. The first nuclear blows are being set up, and we are led to believe that Arab terrorists will be responsible. The U.S. economy is ready to topple. All one needs is a little (or a big) push.
