030924_arafat_kgb.asp
If you are interested in what is behind the anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism
abounding these days, visit Google.com
and search for: ION MIHAI PACEPA ARAFAT.
What turns up is informative.
Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc,
is the author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), and he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.
He knows. He was part of the KGB's program of disinformation.
The answer, of course, is America's enemies, who found
anti-Semitism (disguised as anti-Zionism) to be a good source of anti-Americanism
around the world.
Excerpts from a really good article below.
September 22, 2003
COMMENTARY
The KGB's Man
By ION MIHAI PACEPA
... the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained,
armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.
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 ...
Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat.
According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots,"
with more than $300 million ...
KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities.
... those crazy Americans were still naive enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat
into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov
thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote
Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.
Right after that meeting, 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 ... The KGB distributed
it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many
Palestinian students. ...
Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, ... the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist.
...
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.
The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good
at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve
"his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence,
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations,
while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager,"
his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." 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. Ceausescu was euphoric over
the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their
fake displays of the olive branch.
In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter.
Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile
if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us.
Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe,
as a "great national and international leader" ...
. . .
Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get
his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his -- all because he continued to play the
role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a
government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to
Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the
Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.
On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking
him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of
the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." ...
Updated September 22, 2003
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