KGB Building -- Associated Press

KGB Building — Associated Press

Did the KGB use anti-Semitism as a cold war strategy to isolate the United States?  A new book suggests they did.  According to a new book by a high-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer who defected to the West, the KGB deliberately fomented anti-Semitism in Muslim countries in order to turn them against the United States.  Several media sources are reporting on these fascinating tidbits from a new book which describes former KGB chief Yuri Andropov’s disinformation campaign.  The Daily Mail reports:

‘According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which the KGB community could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.’

Those claims come from former Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Mihail Pacepa and University of Mississippi law professor Ronald Rychlak.

In their book, titled Disinformation, Pacepa spills the secrets he kept for decades as head of Romania’s spy apparatus and secret police, the DIE, before he secured political asylum in the U.S. in 1978.

Many scholars have observed the similarities between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.  Similarly, many commentators have observed the overlap between hatred of Israel and hatred of the United States.  But the new reports, if true, suggest that the connections were cultivated much more deliberately than had been previously understood.  For example, over at Breitbart, William Bigelow writes:

Pacepa reveals that Andropov’s plan for creating hatred of the United States was to revive and foment anti-semitism. Andropov believed correctly that the United States would stand with Israel, and if the European left and the Islamic world could be manipulated into thinking that America was run by Jews, they would turn against America.

Andropov told the disinformation specialists to work on catalyzing anti-semitism, and was rewarded when Palestinian terrorists who were trained in secret at the KGB’s Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow hijacked an El Al plane in 1969 and flew it to Algeria, where they held its 32 Jews aboard for 5 weeks. While they were held, Andropov and his minions used the media to depict America and Israel as threats to world peace.

Later, Pacepa notes, Andropov broadened his plans; heretofore it was to hijack Israeli planes, but it mushroomed into organizing public executions of “Zionists.” Dr. George Habash, Marxist leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a protégé of Andropov’s, said, “Killing one Jew far from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.”

Bigelow’s account continues and is well worth reading.  If Pacepa’s report holds up, it will shed important new light on the contemporary resurgence of anti-Semitism.