Report: Soviets spread anti-Israel propaganda to Arabs
Book by former soviet officer who defected to West reveals that in 1970s, USSR distributed propaganda against Israel, US to Arab countries
The secret operation of the Communist government: The USSR’s highest ranking intelligence official who defected to the west claims in his new book that the root cause of Islamic terror against the US and Israel can be found in activities of KGB agents in the 1970s.
According to the book, details from which were published in the British Daily Mail, the Soviet agency was actively disseminating anti-US and anti-Israel propaganda to Muslim countries.
Related stories:
- Litvinenko’s killers used polonium worth USD 10m
- Iranian minister discusses infiltration to Mossad
- 'Wallenberg possibly outlived death date'
The book further argues that Yuri Andropov, who led the KGB for 15 years before becoming president of the Soviet Union, sent hundreds of agents and thousands of propaganda sources to Muslim countries. In 1972, according to the book, "Andropov's disinformation machinery was working around the clock to persuade the Islamic world that Israel and the United States intended to transform the rest of the world into a Zionist fiefdom.”
The book also claims that Andropov said that the Muslim world was a petri dish for growing bacteria, which enabled the KGB to gauge how hatred of the US could give rise to support for the Marxist-Lenin line within Muslim countries.
Titled "Disinformation," the book was written by the former Romanian intelligence chief Lt. Gen Ion Mihail Pacepa, and Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi. In the book, the former senior ranking Romanian official reveals the techniques he, like other Communist bloc leaders, used for decades, until he defected to the US in 1978.
In 1967, shortly prior to the Six Day War, Andropov was appointed head of the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB. During his time as head, he implemented more moderate methodologies than were used in the past.
In 1973, he became a full member of the Politburo, the supreme organization of the Communist Party in Russia. Upon the 1982 death of Leonid Brezhnev, Andropov became General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union, although his health was already poor. Over the 15 months of his rule, he worked to improve the economic situation, but died before he could make his mark.
Protocols distributed in Arab countries
Andropov is the one who ordered the translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic. The Protocols were a fabricated anti-Semitic publication that held much sway among certain audiences. The pamphlet purports to reveal a series of "protocols" for secret discussions held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, according to which there was an international Jewish organization plotting to take over the world, in cooperation with the "Freemasonry” group. Germany’s Nazi government introduced the protocols to substantiate their dealings with the Jews.
According to the book, the KGB distributed many copies of the Protocols in Muslim countries, in an attempt to cultivate hatred of Jews and the US. In 1983, a Soviet court ruled that the Protocols were an anti-Semitic forgery, and forbade their distribution in the Soviet Union – the first country in which they were distributed.
Pacepa wrote in the book that in 1972, the Romanian Intelligence Service received the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, translated into Arabic, from the KGB. The purpose was to prove that the Zionists are trying to take over the world, and the Americans are trying to help them. He was ordered, Pacepa said, to distribute the Protocols in Arab countries.
“During my later years in Romania, every month DIE (secret police) disseminated thousands of copies throughout its Islamic sphere of influence,” Pacepa wrote in the book. “In the meetings I had with my counterparts in the Hungarian and Bulgarian services, with whom I enjoyed particularly close relations at that time, I learned that they were also sending such influence agents into their own Islamic spheres of influence.”
But the Soviets were not only promoting anti-Semitic propaganda, according to the book, they had active hand in at least two terrorist attacks in Israel. The 1972 terrorist attack at Ben Gurion Airport which killed 24 people and wounded dozens; and in a refrigerator bomb attack in Jerusalem's Zion Square in July 1975, which killed 15 people and left dozens injured.
- Receive Ynetnews updates
directly to your desktop
