Author: Ion Mihai Pacepa
Publication: South Asia Analysis
Group
Date: September 23, 2003
URL: http://www.saag.org/BB/view.asp?msgID=1939
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