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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. Here is what Gen. Pacepa had to say about Yasser Arafat...

The KGB's Man--By ION MIHAI PACEPA (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.

Link:

http://www.geocities.com/munichseptember1972/the_kgb_man.htm

I did a simple general search of Google for the author and couldn't not bring this back, it was on the first page of links. LOL

It is very much on target, exposure of more communists.

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February 26, 2004, 8:28 a.m.
Kerry’s Soviet Rhetoric
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement got its spin from the Kremlin.

By Ion Mihai Pacepa

Part of Senator John Kerry's appeal to a certain segment of
Americans is his Vietnam-veteran status coupled with his
antiwar activism during that period. On April 12, 1971, Kerry
told the U.S. Congress that American soldiers claimed to him
that they had, "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires
from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the
power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,
razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

The exact sources of that assertion
should be tracked down. Kerry also
ought to be asked who, exactly,
told him any such thing, and what it
was, exactly, that they said they did
in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation
now protect these individuals from
prosecution for any such
admissions. Or did Senator Kerry
merely hear allegations of that sort
as hearsay bandied about by
members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been
discredited)? To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the
disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide
throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that
time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility.
One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as
photographs and "news reports" about invented American war
atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated
magazines that would then flack them to reputable news
organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News
organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their
sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy
organizations to fake many such reports and spread them
around the free world.

As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of
Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the
U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist
movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov
managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged
about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus,
poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap
between America and European public opinion through our
disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our
most significant success."

The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to
condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first
American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's
orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the
chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the
Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international
organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans
dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with
anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations,
and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It
was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and
received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's
international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a
year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had
Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities,
Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day
operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote
from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering
from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one
of these organizations' propaganda sheets.

The KGB campaign to assault the U.S. and Europe by means of
disinformation was more than just a few Cold War dirty tricks.
The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states, indeed its
whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger
Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the
use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the
dialectical advance of world Communism.

The Stockholm conference held annual international meetings up
to 1972. In its five years of existence it created thousands of
"documentary" materials printed in all the major Western
languages describing the "abominable crimes" committed by
American soldiers against civilians in Vietnam, along with
counterfeited pictures. All these materials were manufactured by
the KGB's disinformation department. I would print up these
materials in hundreds of thousands of copies each.

The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) was tasked to
distribute these KGB-concocted "incriminating documents" all
over Western Europe. And ordinary people often bought it hook,
line, and sinker. "Even Attila the Hun looks like an angel when
compared to these Americans," a West German businessman
reprovingly told me after reading one such report.

The Italian, Greek, and Spanish Communist parties serviced by
Bucharest were much affected by this material and their activists
regularly distributed translations. They also handed them out to
the participants at anti-American demonstrations around the
world.

Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were
KGB-funded operations, too. I can no longer look at a petition
for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of
the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB."

In 1978, when I broke with Communism, my DIE was
propagating the line that Washington's adventure in Vietnam
had wasted over $200 trillion. This waste, we warned darkly,
would soon generate European inflation, recession, and
unemployment.

As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar
movement in America. In 1976, Andropov gave my own
Romanian DIE credit for helping his KGB do so.

Leftist intellectuals in America now look to Europe — steeped for
years in anti-American propaganda from the Soviet Union — for
"a sane and frank European criticism of the Bush
administration's war policy." Indeed, anti-Americanism in
Europe today is almost as ferocious as it was during Vietnam.
France and Germany insist we are torturing the al Qaeda
prisoners held at Guantanamo Base. The Mirror, a British
newspaper, is confident that President Bush and Prime Minister
Tony Blair were "killing innocents in Afghanistan." The Paris
daily Le Monde put Jean Baudrillard on its front page asserting
that "the Judeo-Christian West, led by America, not only
provoked the [September 11] terrorist attacks, it actually
desired them."

In June 2002, a documentary film on "U.S. war crimes" in
Afghanistan was shown in the German Bundestag by the
crypto-Communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The film
faithfully reincarnated the style of old Soviet-bloc
"documentaries" demonizing the U.S. war in Vietnam. According
to this 20-minute movie, American soldiers were involved in the
torture and murder of some 3,000 Taliban prisoners in the
region of Mazar-e-Sharif. One witness in the film even claimed
he had seen an American soldier break the neck of one Afghan
prisoner and pour acid on others.

During my last meeting with Andropov, he said, wisely, "now all
we have to do is to keep the Vietnam-era anti-Americanism
alive." Andropov was a shrewd judge of human nature. He
understood that in the end our original involvement would be
forgotten, and our insinuations would take on a life of their own.
He knew well that it was just the way human nature worked.

— Ion Mihai Pacepa was acting chief of Romania's espionage
service and national-security adviser to the country's president.
He is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have
defected from the former Soviet bloc.