Arafat’s Soviet Connection: Another ”Legacy” the Media Will Ignore
Written by Cinnamon Stillwell
ChronWatch, CA
Nov 12 2004
Earlier this year, Frontpage.com interviewed Ion Mihai Pacepa,
former acting chief of Communist Romania’s espionage service. In the
course of the interview, Pacepa elaborated on his previous dealings
with Yassir Arafat and the PLO. It turns out that both were
creations of the Soviet Union, whose classic anti-Semitism combined
with Cold War geopolitical alliances, made them hostile to Israel.
And in Arafat, they found the perfect mouthpiece through which to try
and destroy the Jewish State.
Although ultimately unsuccessful in this goal, the propaganda
offensive did incalculable damage to Israe’s reputation, even to this
day. In particular, the language of anti-Zionism, also created by
the Soviet Union (read more about that here:
), made a lasting impression.
In light of Arafat’s recent demise and the mainstream media’s
collective amnesia about his legacy of tyranny and terrorism, it
seemed fitting to revive the Pacepa interview. The section dealing
with Arafat and the PLO is excerpted below. To read the entire
interview, follow the link at the bottom.
FP: Tell us about the PLO and its connection to the Soviet regime.
Pacepa: The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for
”liberation” organizations. There was the National Liberation Army
of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto ”Che”
Guevara. Then there was the National Liberation Army of Colombia,
created by the KGB in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro, which was
soon deeply involved in kidnappings, hijackings, bombings, and
guerrilla warfare. In later years the KGB also created the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out
numerous bombing attacks on the ”Palestinian territories” occupied
by Israel, and the ”Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia,” created
by the KGB in 1975, which organized numerous bombing attacks against
U.S. airline offices in Western Europe.
In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian
representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian
National Charter–a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The
Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were
also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence
agent who became the first PLO chairman. (During the Six-Day War he
escaped from Jerusalem disguised as a woman, thereafter becoming such
a symbol within the bloc intelligence community that one of its later
influence operations–aimed at making the West consider Arafat a
moderate–was given the codename ”Shuqairy.”) This new PLO was
headed by a Soviet-style Executive Committee made up of 15 members
who, like their comrades in Moscow, also headed departments. As in
Moscow–and Bucharest–the chairman of the Executive Committee became
the general commander of the armed forces as well. The new PLO also
had a General Assembly, which was the Soviet-inspired name given to
all East European parliaments after World War II.
Based on another ”socialist division of labor,” the Romanian
espionage service (DIE) was responsible for providing the PLO with
logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the
KGB and the East German Stasi, everything else 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, and were unloaded by Arafat’s men.
FP: You have discussed your personal knowledge of how Arafat was
created and cultivated by the KGB and how the Soviets actually
designed him to be the future leader of the PLO. Illuminate this
picture for us please.
Pacepa: ”Tovarishch Mohammed Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat
al-Qudwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar,” was built into a
Palestinian leader by the KGB in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day
Arab-Israeli War. In that war Israel humiliated two of the Soviet
Union’s most important allies in the Arab world of that time, Egypt
and Syria, and the Kremlin thought that Arafat could help repair the
Soviet prestige. Arafat had begun his political career as leader of
the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah, whose fedayeen were
being secretly trained in the Soviet Union. In 1969, the KGB managed
to catapult him up as chairman of the PLO executive committee.
Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was also a Soviet puppet,
publicly proposed the appointment.
Soon after that, the KGB tasked Arafat to declare war on American
”imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black
International, an organization that was also financed by the KGB.
Arafat claimed to have coined the word ”imperial-Zionism,” but in
fact Moscow had invented this battle cry many years earlier,
combining the traditionally Russian anti-Semitism with the new
Marxist anti-Americanism.
FP: Why has the American and Israeli leadership been deceived so long
about Arafat’s criminal and terrorist activities?
Pacepa: Because Arafat is a master of deceit–and I unfortunately
contributed to that. In March 1978, for instance, I secretly brought
Arafat to Bucharest to involve him in a long-planned Soviet/Romanian
disinformation plot. Its goal was to get the United States to
establish diplomatic relations with him, by having him pretend to
transform the terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile that was
willing to renounce terrorism. Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev
believed that newly elected U.S. president Jimmy Carter would swallow
the bait. Therefore, he told the Romanian dictator that conditions
were ripe for introducing Arafat into the White House. Moscow gave
Ceausescu the job because by 1978 my boss had become Washington’s
most favored tyrant. ”The only thing people in the West care about
is our leaders,” the KGB chairman said, when he enrolled me in the
effort of making Arafat popular in Washington. ”The more they come
to love them, the better they will like us.”
”But we are a revolution,” Arafat exploded, after Ceausescu
explained what the Kremlin wanted from him. ”We were born as a
revolution, and we should remain an unfettered revolution.” Arafat
expostulated that the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and
discipline to become a formal state. That statehood was only
something for a future generation. That all governments, even
Communist ones, were limited by laws and international agreements,
and he was not willing to put any laws or other obstacles in the way
of the Palestinian struggle to eradicate the state of Israel.
My former boss was able to persuade Arafat into tricking President
Carter only by resorting to dialectical materialism, for both were
fanatical Stalinists who knew their Marxism by heart. Ceausescu
sympathetically agreed that ”a war of terror is your only realistic
weapon,” but he also told his guest that, if he would transform the
PLO into a government-in-exile and would pretend to break with
terrorism, the West would shower him with money and glory. ”But you
have to keep on pretending, over and over,” my boss emphasized.
Ceausescu pointed out that political influence, like dialectical
materialism, was built upon the same basic tenet that quantitative
accumulation generates qualitative transformation. Both work like
cocaine, let’s say. If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change
your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you
into an addict, a different man. That’s the qualitative
transformation. And in the shadow of your government-in-exile you
can keep as many terrorist groups as you want, as long as they are
not publicly connected with your name.
In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he
convinced President Jimmy Carter that he could persuade Arafat to
transform his PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile, if the
United States would establish official relations with him.
Thereupon, President Carter publicly hailed Ceausescu as a ”great
national and international leader” who had ”taken on a role of
leadership in the entire international community.”
Three months later I was granted political asylum by the United
States, and Romania’s tyrant lost his dream of getting the Nobel
Peace Prize. A quarter of a century later, however, Arafat remains
in place as the PLO chairman and seems to still be on track with the
Kremlin’s game of deception. In 1994, Arafat was granted the Nobel
Peace Prize because he agreed to transform his terrorist organization
into a kind of government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority) and
pretended, over and over, that he would abolish the articles in the
1964 PLO Covenant that call for the destruction of the state of
Israel and would eradicate Palestinian terrorism. At the end of the
1998-99 Palestinian school year, however, all one hundred and fifty
new schoolbooks used by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority described
Israel as the ”Zionist enemy” and equated Zionism with Nazism. Two
years after the Oslo Accords were signed, the number of Israelis
killed by Palestinian terrorists rose by 73% compared to the two year
period preceding the agreement.
To read the entire interview, go to:
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