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Tuesday, September 23, 2003
[Arafat] The KGB's Man

[Arafat] The KGB's Man
By Ion Mihai Pacepa - Commentary - Wall Street Journal September 22, 2003

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

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