The Cold War Roots Of Islamist Terrorism

Ion Mihai Pacepa led Romania’s foreign intelligence service and was an aide to
dictator Nicolae Ceausescu before defecting to the United States in 1978.

In his new book, “Disinformation,” he and his co-author, U.S. scholar
Ronald Rychlak, claim that under the leadership of Yury Andropov, the Soviet
KGB helped sow the seeds of today’s anti-American and anti-Israeli hatred in
the Arab and Muslim world by initiating a sophisticated and covert propaganda
campaign in the early 1970s.

Humiliated by the defeat of the Soviet-backed Arab states in their 1967 war
against Israel, they write, Andropov devised the operation to discredit the
Jewish state and present Zionism as “Nazi-style racism” while at the
same time restoring Moscow’s stature in the region.

The authors claim the operation, code-named SIG, was launched in 1972 and
involved sending thousands of agents of influence into the Arab and Islamic
world to foster anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment. Some of the agents were
drawn from among the Muslim minorities of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw
Pact countries.

Pacepa — whose 1987 book, “Red Horizons,” sent shockwaves through
the Soviet bloc with its revelations about the Ceausescu regime — is still
living under CIA protection some 35 years after his defection. He doesn’t speak
to the media directly but agreed to answer RFE/RL’s questions in writing
through an intermediary.

‘Enemy Of Freedom’

“Before I left Romania for good in 1978, [Romania's foreign intelligence
service] had sent around 500 such undercover agents to various Islamic
countries. Most of them were religious servants, engineers, medical doctors,
teachers, and art instructors,” Pacepa told RFE/RL.

He added that the book “spells out the process by which the United States,
which had saved the world from Nazism, the Holocaust, and one of the most
destructive dictatorships the world has ever known — the Soviet empire — has
now become [seen as] an enemy of freedom for millions in the Arab world.”

The Middle East was a key battlefield in the Cold War, and Moscow spent
considerable resources courting Arab states in the region and vocally backing
the Palestinian cause. But “Disinformation” adds some shocking
details that don’t appear to be corroborated elsewhere.

WATCH: A promotional
trailer for “Disinformation”

For example, Pacepa and Rychlak write that the KGB facilitated the translation
and distribution of thousands of copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion,” a forged tsarist-era, anti-Semitic pamphlet that purported to
describe plans for Jewish domination of Europe.

The book also alleges that the KGB assisted and trained groups like the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine in planning and executing terrorist
attacks.

“The cumulative effect of the portrayal of the United States as a criminal
Zionist surrogate should have made some dent over more than two decades. After
September 11, 2001, thousands of Palestinians danced in the street for days in
a row to celebrate the glorious victory over the American evil,” Pacepa
told RFE/RL.

“Tsarist anti-Semitism spawned the pogroms. Nazi anti-Semitism engendered
the Holocaust. Soviet anti-Semitism generated today’s international
terrorism.”

According to Pacepa and Rychlak, Andropov saw the Islamic world as “a
petri dish in which the KGB community could nurture a virulent strain of
America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.”

Holier Than Thou

They write that the SIG operation in the Muslim world grew out of an earlier
KGB campaign to discredit the Vatican in the West and among Jews.

That operation, codenamed “Seat 12,” sought to besmirch the record of
Pope Pius XII for failing to do enough to save Jews from the Holocaust. It
involved the aggressive promotion of the 1963 play “The Deputy: A
Christian Tragedy” by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth. Pacepa and
Rychlak allege this was aimed at posthumously destroying the wartime pontiff’s
image as someone who made successful efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust.

Rychlak, a professor at the University of Mississippi and an authority on Pius
XII, called the operation a great success for Moscow.

“After Pius XII has passed away, in the early 1960s, now you create a
play, and not just a play — you have books written about it, you have articles
written about it, you make sure it gets translated and produced around the
world,” Rychlak says. “And what you do is, you don’t just discredit a
pope, you discredit the Catholic Church, Christianity itself, the idea of
religion in some ways, and, ultimately, Western values. And it accomplished a
great deal of what [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev and the Soviets wanted to
accomplish.”

Pius XII’s actions during World War II have long been controversial among
Western historians. He directed the church to discreetly aid Jews and
reiterated the Vatican’s teachings against racism. But he maintained the Vatican’s
neutrality in the war and has been criticized for not taking a more active role
and for his public silence about the fate of the Jews.