KGB bigwig: We made Arafat. - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

popo · 09-23-2003, 06:28 PM

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...aaeBm4,00.html

The KGB's Man

By ION MIHAI PACEPA

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But 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 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. 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 stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

* * *
"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve 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 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. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.

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" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."

* * *
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." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

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.

Updated September 22, 2003

Sun Tzu · 09-23-2003, 07:13 PM

Since this appears to be a growing trend, none of which I disagree with except the diminished neutrality (but hey this is what opinions are for), I’m curious to find hear what your opinion is. I assuming with multiple threads devoted to this person many (if not all) see him being the cause of the problems.

Hypothetically speaking: Lets say Arafat is whacked (because banishing wont stop him) What do you see happening?

Mojo_PeiPei · 09-23-2003, 07:32 PM

Killing him wouldn't be a good move, it would give the Palestinians something to rally behind. Isolating him hasn't seemed to work so it really doesn't leave many alternatives however...

Very interesting read, just goes to further show how big of a dusche Arafat.

popo · 09-23-2003, 07:59 PM

I actually do not agree with the idea of killing or exiling Arafat. I can only see that if Arafat were exiled, it would be harder for anyone to come up the ranks to replace him because he'd be suspected by Palestinians as having worked with Israel on Arafat's exile.

Killing Arafat would turn him into a martyr and the same thing would happen IMO.

I think the only way to handle the situation is to simply ignore him. He is a man who lost the spotlight until Abbas resigned and Israel threatened to exile him. Only then did he take center-stage and do his song & dance and gloriously wave to the crowd.

Pressure Abbas back into the PM job and force Arafat to hand over more power.

The_Dude · 09-23-2003, 08:11 PM

Hmm....I dont know how much truth lies in this article.

i did read the entire thing over dinner and it sounded extremely cool.

anyway, is there any independant verfication to some of the things that he suggested in the article.

btw, this appeared in the "commentary" section of the wsj. i dont know how significant that is.

Mojo_PeiPei · 09-23-2003, 08:16 PM

Here is some stuff I posted on the "Kill Arafat" thread:

Quote:

JUst found this of the net, some good shit on this morally righteous leader.
http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/arafat.html#howdid

Here are a few snips since the page is rather lengthy...

Yasser Arafat, Fatah's leader, has claimed that he was born in Jerusalem. That may or may not be true. What is known is that he was brought up and educated in Egypt after his parents had emigrated from Palestine. It is important to note that they were NOT "refugees" or "exiles." They had simply moved to Egypt in the 1920s ... more than twenty years BEFORE the State of Israel came into existence! So if Yasser wants to fix blame where it belongs, he should be cursing on his parents' graves for making the choice to leave Palestine and stop blaming the Jews of Palestine who chose to stay and create a Jewish State.

Arafat's actual name was Abd al-Rahman abd al-Bauf Arafat al-Qud al-Husseini. He shortened it to obscure his kinship with the notorious Nazi and ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini."
-----------
According to the Jewish Press (March 14 1997) a tape of Arafat recorded by the Israeli Secret Service, ordering the execution of 2 American diplomats (Cleo Noel and George Moore) was given to the State Department. Sid Zion in the New York Daily News wrote:

"To treat Arafat like a statesman when you have him taped ordering the killing of American diplomats makes one wonder what John Gotti is doing in jail, forget about Jonathan Pollard!"

On the night of March 2, 1973, PLO gunmen pumped 40 bullets into the bodies of the US ambassador to Sudan and two other diplomats held hostage at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum.
Almost exactly 24 years later, the man who ordered the killings was warmly received in Washington DC by the leader of the American people.

US ambassador Cleo Noel, US charge d'affaires George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid were among a group of diplomats held hostage by eight members of Yasser Arafat's Black September a faction of the PLO during a reception at the Saudi embassy in the Sudanese capital. The terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy, as well as other Palestinians being held in Israel and European prisons.

After President Richard Nixon refused to negotiate, Arafat's commander, Abu Iyad, in touch with the terrorists by high-frequency transmitter from PLO headquarters in Beirut, gave the instruction "Remember Nahr al-Bard. The people's blood in the Nahr al-Bard cries out for vengeance. We and the rest of the world are watching you." The radio messages were intercepted by Israeli intelligence, and transcripts later handed to the US State Department and Nixon.

"Nahr al-Bard", a reference to a terrorist training facility in Lebanon which had been attacked by Israeli troops 11 days earlier, was the code phrase ordering the gunmen to execute their hostages. At 9:06 pm on March 2, Noel, Moore and Eid were taken to the embassy basement, lined up against the wall and shot. "The terrorists fired from the floor upward, to prolong their agony of their victims by striking them first in the feet and legs, before administering the coup de grace," wrote Neil Livingstone and David Halevy in Inside the PLO (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990).

A few minutes later, Beirut PLO headquarters again radioed the terrorists. This time it was Arafat himself at the microphone. The PLO chairman asked whether the "Nahr al-Bard" code word had been understood. He was assured the instruction had already been carried out.
------
The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has salted away billions of pounds for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in secret foreign bank accounts and investments, including property in London. The disclosure about the hidden wealth of his PLO comes amid deepening economic hardship in his Gaza and West Bank fiefdoms.
...The disclosures are also likely to prompt international donors, including the European Union countries, to ask why Mr Arafat is still demanding aid for his Palestinian authority. Nor will they have been impressed by his decision to invite Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia's president, to Bethlehem.

- Tom Gross, London Sunday Telegraph, December 5, 1999

The link http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/arafat.html#howdid says alot of the same stuff at least about his origins, although I will admit the site is definently Pro-Israel.

09-23-2003, 06:28 PM	#1 (permalink)
popo Psycho	KGB bigwig: We made Arafat. http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...aaeBm4,00.html The KGB's Man By ION MIHAI PACEPA The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But 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 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. 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 stashed in Swiss bank accounts. * * * "I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11. In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naïve 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 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. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions. Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps. 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" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world." * * * 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." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks. 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. Updated September 22, 2003

09-23-2003, 07:13 PM	#2 (permalink)
Sun Tzu Conspiracy Realist Location: The Event Horizon	Since this appears to be a growing trend, none of which I disagree with except the diminished neutrality (but hey this is what opinions are for), I’m curious to find hear what your opinion is. I assuming with multiple threads devoted to this person many (if not all) see him being the cause of the problems. Hypothetically speaking: Lets say Arafat is whacked (because banishing wont stop him) What do you see happening? __________________ *To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.- Stephen Hawking*

09-23-2003, 07:32 PM	#3 (permalink)
Mojo_PeiPei Kiss of Death Location: Perpetual wind and sorrow	Killing him wouldn't be a good move, it would give the Palestinians something to rally behind. Isolating him hasn't seemed to work so it really doesn't leave many alternatives however... Very interesting read, just goes to further show how big of a dusche Arafat. __________________ To win a war you must serve no master but your ambition.

09-23-2003, 08:11 PM	#5 (permalink)
The_Dude The GrandDaddy of them all! Location: Austin, TX	Hmm....I dont know how much truth lies in this article. i did read the entire thing over dinner and it sounded extremely cool. anyway, is there any independant verfication to some of the things that he suggested in the article. btw, this appeared in the "commentary" section of the wsj. i dont know how significant that is. __________________ "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

09-23-2003, 07:59 PM	#4 (permalink)
popo Psycho	I actually do not agree with the idea of killing or exiling Arafat. I can only see that if Arafat were exiled, it would be harder for anyone to come up the ranks to replace him because he'd be suspected by Palestinians as having worked with Israel on Arafat's exile. Killing Arafat would turn him into a martyr and the same thing would happen IMO. I think the only way to handle the situation is to simply ignore him. He is a man who lost the spotlight until Abbas resigned and Israel threatened to exile him. Only then did he take center-stage and do his song & dance and gloriously wave to the crowd. Pressure Abbas back into the PM job and force Arafat to hand over more power.