Top Level Soviet Defector in New Book: Anti-Israel Sentiment Is the Result of a KGB Plot

by Zach Pontz


A new book written by the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West claims that a secret 1970s-era KGB plot is the cause for much of the Islamic anger directed towards Israel and the United States, the UK’s Daily Mail reports.

Romanian Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa writes that high ranking Soviet politician Yuri Andropov, through an initiative to seed the Muslim world with anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment, sent hundreds of agents and thousands of copies of propaganda literature to Muslim countries during the decade.

According to Pacepa: “By 1972, 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.

“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.”

Pacepa headed Romania’s spy apparatus and secret police, the DIE, before he secured political asylum in the U.S. in 1978. The book, Disinformation, written with University of Mississippi law professor Ronald Rychlak, is the first time he has so thoroughly addressed the secrets he was privy to during his service.


Andropov’s program was in revenge for Israel’s humiliating defeat of Soviet allies Syria and Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War, Pacepa explains. Part of the plan included disseminating the first Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian-forged 1905 propaganda book that alleged Jews controlled the world.

As part of his role in Romania, Pacepa writes that he was ordered to disseminate the document.

“During my later years in Romania,” he recalls, “every month the DIE disseminated thousands of copies throughout its Islamic sphere of influence. 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.”

The KGB took “secret credit” for a host of terror attacks against Israeli targets in the 1970s, Pacepa claims, listing eleven such incidents, including the May 30, 1972 attack on Ben Gurion Airport, which left 22 dead and 76 wounded.


Pacepa and Rychlak conclude that much of the anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and elsewhere can be traced back to the Soviet program.

According to the authors, the Kennedy-era Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s disinformation campaigns “widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism,” and “Andropov’s disinformation turned the Islamic world against the United States and ignited the international terrorism that threatens us today.”

Zach Pontz

Source: http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/06/26/top-level-soviet-defector-in-new-book-anti-israel-sentiment-is-the-result-of-a-kgb-plot/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.