OTHER VIEWS

The KGB's Man

ION MIHAI PACEPA

Special Commentary

New York

T

he 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 responsi-
ble 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 prof-
itable for Arafat. According to Forbes
magazine, he is today the sixth wealthi-
est among the world's "kings,queens
and despots," with more than $300 mil-
lion stashed in Swiss bank accounts.
"I invented the hijackings [of passen-
ger 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 invent-
ing 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 lists,
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
naive enough to revere national leaders.
We would make Arafat into just such a

Ion 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.

10/10
2003

34

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.

Revisionist History

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 intelli-
gence. 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, replac-
ing them with fictitious documents say-
ing that he had been born in Jerusalem
and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB's disinformation depart-
ment 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 through-
out 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 lan-
guages 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 ideolo-
gy and an image, just as it did for loyal
Communists in our international front

Integral KGB Role

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 appoint-
ment. 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
Zionist-imperialist 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 direct-
ed to help Arafat improve "his extraor-
dinary 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

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger
planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met
him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in
the early 1970.

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.

you'll break with terrorism and that
you'll recognize Israel — over, and over
and over," Ceausescu told him for the
wnpteenth 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
ged, would transform his brutal PLO
a law-abiding- b 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 interna-
tional community."
Triumphant, Ceausescu brought
home a joint communique in which the
American president stated that his
friendly relations with Ceausescu served
"the cause of the world."

Nobel And Terror

Three months later, I was granted polit-
ical 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 let-
ting it continue unabated.
Two years after signing the Oslo
Accords, the number of Israelis killed by
Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73
percent.
On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton
concluded his public remarks to Arafat
by thanking him for "decades and
decades and decades of tireless represen-
tation 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 con-
solidated his control over the Palestinian
Authority and marshaled his young fol-
lowers for more suicide attacks.

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal
copyright 2000, Dow Jones & Company
Inc.
rights reserved.

