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By BORIS VOLODARSKY
The KGB's forerunner, the Cheka (later NKVD), was created by Lenin and Felix
Dzerzhinsky expressly to eliminate Russia's aristocracy, intellectuals and
dissidents -- anyone who threatened the Soviet state from the inside. Under
Stalin, the NKVD started to murder its opponents abroad: Ignatz Reiss near
Lausanne in 1937, Yevhen Konovalets in Amsterdam in 1938, Leon Trotsky in
Mexico in 1940. In 1953, the Soviet secret service tried to kill Marshal
Tito in Belgrade.
In 1964, the KGB station in Mexico City set up a sabotage and intelligence
group led by Manuel Andara y Ubeda, a Nicaraguan KGB agent. He led a group
of Sandinistas to scope out the U.S. border with Mexico for possible
targets, such as oil pipelines, for KGB sabotage teams. Its codename was
Iskra, or "spark," inspired by the title of Lenin's revolutionary newspaper.
The KGB also trained and financed the Sandinistas who seized the National
Palace in Managua and dozens of hostages in 1978. They briefed a senior KGB
official on the plan on the eve of the raid. In the Mideast, one of the
KGB's star recruits was Wadi Haddad, the deputy leader and head of foreign
operations of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP). In 1970, the KGB made him an agent, according to files
delivered to British intelligence by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB
archivist who defected to the U.K. in 1992. The most dramatic terrorist
strike organized by Haddad was the Sept. 6, 1970 attack on four airliners
bound for New York. The hijacking attempt on an El Al Boeing 707 departing
from Tel Aviv failed after one of the two terrorists was shot by an air
marshal. The other three airlines were successfully diverted to other
landing strips by the hijackers. The passengers and crew of a Pan Am Boeing
747 were evacuated and the plane was blown up; in the other two cases, the
terrorists negotiated prisoner swaps. (Those were more innocent pre-9/11
times.) Thanks to the Mitrokhin files, we know that the KGB provided arms to
Haddad, and it is a fair assumption that his handlers were aware of his
plans.
Soviet satellites did their share. During the late 1960s Arafat had also
been courted by the Cairo station chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence
service (DIE), Constantin Munteanu, who brought him to Bucharest. Arafat and
Nicolai Ceausescu became good friends. Late in 1972 Romanian intelligence
formed an alliance with the PLO, according to former KGB Colonel Oleg
Gordievsky, who said the Romanians "suppl[ied] it with blank passports,
electronic surveillance equipment, and weapons for its operations."
Ceausescu told acting head of the DIE (and future defector) Gen. Ion Mihai
Pacepa: "Moscow is helping the PLO build up its muscles. I am feeding its
brains." According to Mr. Pacepa's 1987 book, "Red Horizons": "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."
Sasha was right. Post-Soviet Russia is a breeding ground for terrorism just
like the Soviet Union was.