He hasn't changed since his days as a KGB-backed terrorist.
BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, January 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, January 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
Last week
Israel seized a boat carrying 50 tons of Iranian-made mortars,
long-range missiles and antitank rockets destined for the Palestinian
Authority. The vessel, Karim A., is owned
by the Palestinian Authority, and its captain and several crewmen are
members of the Palestinian naval police. I am not surprised to see that
Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my
years at the top of Romania's foreign intelligence
service.
I became
directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was
being financed and manipulated by the KGB. In the 1967 Six-Day War,
Israel humiliated two of the Soviet
Union's Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A couple of months later,
the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Gen. Alexander Sakharovsky,
landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had charged the KGB
to "repair the prestige" of "our Arab friends"
by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate
Israel. The main KGB asset in this joint venture was a "devoted
Marxist-Leninist"--Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah, the Palestinian
military force.
Gen. Sakharovsky asked us in Romanian intelligence to help the KGB bringing Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters
secretly
to the Soviet Union via Romania, in order for them to be indoctrinated
and trained. During that same year, the Soviets maneuvered to have
Arafat named chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organizaiton, with
public help from Egypt's ruler, Gamal Abdel
Nasser.
In 1972, the
Kremlin established a "socialist division of labor" for supporting
international terrorism. Romania's main clients in this new market were
Libya and the PLO. A year later,
a Romanian intelligence adviser assigned to the PLO headquarters in
Beirut reported that Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO
commando team headed by Arafat's top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American
diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand
the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert
Kennedy.
"St-stop
th-them!" Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu yelled in his nervous
stutter, when I reported the news. He had turned as white as a sheet.
Just six months earlier Arafat's liaison
officer for Romania, Ali Hassan Salameh, had led the PLO commando team
that took the Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games, and
Ceausescu had become deathly afraid that his name might be implicated in
that awful crime.
It was
already too late to stop the Abu Jihad commandos. After a couple of
hours we learned they had seized the participants at a diplomatic
reception organized by the Saudi Embassy
in Khartoum and were asking for Sirhan's release. On March 2, 1973,
after President Nixon refused the terrorists' demand, the PLO commandos
executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr.,
his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian
charge d'affaires Guy Eid.
In May 1973,
during a private dinner with Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about
his Khartoum operation. "Be careful," Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a
Western-educated lawyer who had just
retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. "No matter how high up you
are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing."
"Who, me? I never had anything to do with that operation," Arafat said, winking mischievously.
"That wasn't a
Nidal operation. It was ours," Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat's liaison
officer for Romania, told me. Even Ceausescu's adviser to Arafat, who
was well familiar with his craftiness,
was taken by surprise. "Why kill your own people?" Col. Constantin
Olcescu asked.
"We want to
mount some spectacular operations against the PLO, making it look as if
they had been organized by Palestinian extremist groups that accuse the
chairman of becoming too
conciliatory and moderate," Salameh explained. According to him, Arafat
even asked the PLO Executive Committee to sentence Nidal to death for
assassinating the PLO representative in London.
For more than
30 years the U.S. government has considered Arafat a key to achieving
peace in the Middle East. But for more than 20 years, Washington also
believed that Ceausescu was
the only communist ruler who could open a breech in the Iron Curtain.
During the Cold War era, two American presidents went to Bucharest to
pay him tribute. In November 1989, when the Romanian Communist Party
re-elected Ceausescu, he was congratulated by the
United States. Three weeks later, he was accused of genocide and
executed, dying as a symbol of communist tyranny.
It is high
time the U.S. end the Arafat fetish as well. President Bush's current
war on international terrorism provides an excellent opportunity.
Mr. Pacepa was
the
highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the
former Soviet bloc. He is author of "Red Horizons" (1987), a memoir.
A year and a half later, Pacepa wrote more about Arafat:
The KGB's Man
Moscow turned Arafat into a terrorist.
BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, September 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
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.
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. Mr. 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."
Moscow turned Arafat into a terrorist.
BY ION MIHAI PACEPA
Saturday, September 27, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
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.
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 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 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, Gen. 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.
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.
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