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Arafat: The KGB's Man

(Wall Street Journal) - Ion Mihai Pacepa Yasser Arafat is a career terrorist, trained, armed, and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades. Before I defected to America from Romania from my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat $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. After meeting with KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972, 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. The KGB's disinformation department turned Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine) into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah, which Arafat has headed since 1957. Right after the 1967 Six-Day War, Moscow got Arafat appointed chairman of the PLO. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve what the KGB file called "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." "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. 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 PA), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated.
2003-09-24 00:00:00
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