TERROR: A SOVIET EXPORT
November 2, 1980 | © The New York Times
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By Robert Moss
A tantalizing footnote in a bulky C.I.A. study of Soviet covert action dated Feb. 6 and presented to the House Select Committee on Intelligence early this year stated that the Soviet Union is spending roughly $200 million a year on support of “national liberation” movements. What this means in practice is that the Soviet Union is currently giving arms, military training, funds and operational intelligence to organizations that often engage in terrorist acts against Western countries and nations whose governments are generally friendly to the West.
Official Soviet spokesmen of course deny that Moscow supports “terrorism,” and they have issued vigorous denunciations of specific terrorist actions. Indeed, repeated Soviet claims that they are assisting “national liberation” forces fighting “imperialism” in the third world have led to much semantic confusion. One often hears, for example, that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Yet it remains clear that, whatever its political purposes, an armed political group engaged in bombing, sabotage, kidnapping or murder, especially of civilians, is practicing terrorism. The Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.), for instance, which is openly supported by the Soviet Union, must be counted a terrorist organization — even if some prominent Western politicians choose to express the view that it is not.
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In Professor Pipes’s view, “nearly all the elements of Soviet global strategy are essentially an adaptation to foreign policy of methods which had been learned by the Bolsheviks and their allies when they were in the underground fighting the imperial regime.”
At a secret meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders held in Prague in August 1973, Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev paid tribute to the role of the “national liberation” movements in changing the “correlation of forces” in favor of “socialist countries.” His speech — the contents of which became known to the British and American Governments through leaks by East European delegates — suggested that the Soviet Union is seeking to exploit terrorism as a calculated instrument of foreign policy. Since Brezhnev made his speech, the Soviet Union has notably increased its support for one national liberation movement, the P.L.O., which has become a coordinator of many international terrorist groups as well as a revolutionary vanguard in the Middle East.
Medics attend to one of four civilian victims of a P.L.O. attack on Nahariya, Israel, in 1979. Palestinian commandos are often trained by Soviet-bloc instructors and armed with Russian weapons.
According to Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, terrorists currently receive training at more than 40 establishments inside the Soviet Union. The most important training camps are located in the suburbs of Moscow, in Simferopol in the Crimea, and in the cities of Baku, Tashkent and Odessa. Similar camps have been set up in the satellite countries in Eastern Europe: for example, at Karlovy Vary and Doupov in Czechoslovakia, at Varna in Bulgaria, at Lake Varna in Hungary and near Finsterwalde in East Germany. Maj. Gen. Jan Sejna, a former First Secretary at the Defense Ministry in Prague who defected in 1968, has reported that the training programs in his country are run under the direct supervision of the Soviet internal-security and intelligence agencies, the K.G.B. (Committee for State Security) and the G.R.U. (Soviet Military Intelligence). The same pattern seems to apply throughout the Soviet bloc, including Cuba. Soviet advisers are also deployed at terrorist training camps in the Middle East.
Although precise figures are impossible to obtain, the number of recruits from the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, Western Europe and the Far East who have received instruction in the Soviet bloc in guerrilla warfare, sabotage, street fighting, assassination techniques and undercover operations is thought to total many thousands. Since 1974, according to P.L.O. defectors, more than 1,000 Palestinians alone have been trained in Soviet-bloc camps. Courses at the Soviet military academy near Simferopol have been attended by groups from rival wings of the P.L.O., including Al Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (P.F.L.P.) and the Palestine Liberation Front (P.L.F.). Zehdi Labib Terzi, the P.L.O.’s United Nations observer, said in a 1979 interview that “the Soviet Union, and all the socialist countries… open up their military academies to… our freedom fighters.”
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However, West European intelligence sources maintain that this story was a blind, intended to camouflage the fact that Carlos had been recruited by the K.G.B. as a link man with international terrorist groups, especially the P.F.L.P.
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Carlos achieved international notoriety after a series of operations — including the attempted murder of a prominent Jewish businessman, Joseph Edward Sieff, in London in December 1973 and rocket attacks on El Al aircraft at Paris’s Orly Airport in 1975 — that culminated in the kidnapping of oil ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna in December 1975.
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In September 1975, Dutch police arrested four Syrians who belonged to a team that had planned to hijack a train carrying Soviet Jews; the Syrians confessed that they had been trained at a camp outside Moscow.
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Most weapons used by international terrorists originate in the Soviet bloc. It was a Czech-manufactured Skorpion machine pistol that was used to murder Aldo Moro. The P.F.L.P. has used Soviet-made heat-seeking Strela anti-aircraft missiles (SAM-7’s) in a series of unsuccessful attempts to attack civilian airliners. Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Z.A.P.U.) guerrillas made more effective use of SAM-7’s in bringing down two civilian aircraft last year. In 1978, Spanish security officials discovered that a Basque nationalist group, Freedom for the Basque Homeland (E.T.A.), was using special new cartridges developed for the Czech Army that had never previously been used outside the Soviet bloc.
The fact that terrorist groups use Soviet-bloc weapons is not in itself evidence of direct Soviet support for their operations. Plenty of middlemen play a role in international arms traffic, one of the most prominent of these being Libya’s volatile leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who in 1976 concluded with the Soviet Union what was possibly the largest arms deal in history. According to the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, Libya served as a conduit for the delivery of Soviet-made arms to the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.), the Baader-Meinhof network in West Germany, the Japanese Red Army and the Arm of the Arab Revolution (Carlos’s group), as well as to insurgents in Turkey, Yemen, Chile, the Philippines and other countries.
But Soviet-bloc countries have also made direct deliveries of arms to terrorist organizations. Zehdi Terzi has revealed that the P.L.O. receives “direct consignments” of arms and explosives from the Soviet Union. The inventory of Soviet-made weapons now in the possession of the P.L.O. includes T-34 and T-54 tanks, as well as medium artillery. According to Western intelligence sources, an agreement to maintain a direct arms pipeline was reached during the visit of Yasir Arafat, P.L.O. chairman, to Moscow in March 1979.
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On April 24, 1979, West German police arrested a seven-man P.L.O. hit team in West Berlin. The leader of the squad was Ali Shalbiya, a key lieutenant to the P.L.O.’s intelligence chief, Abu Iyad. Within days, two more P.L.O. squads were intercepted as they attempted to cross the Austrian and Dutch borders. Under questioning, the Palestinians confessed that their mission had been to blow up fuel depots and other major industrial installations in West Berlin. Senior officials in West Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution believe that the M.f.S. provided operational data for this abortive raid, as well as for other strikes against targets in the Federal Republic. (Last fall, West German security discovered that the M.f.S. was playing host in East Berlin to a P.L.O. team, code-named “Force 17.”)
As the role of East Germany suggests, the Soviet Union delegates much of the sensitive work of providing liaison with terrorist groups to proxies. Most of the East European secret services, like the M.f.S., operate under complete Russian control; other surrogates, though not always so compliant, are equally valuable. The most important of these are Cuba, the radical Arab states and the ubiquitous P.L.O.
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The close ties that now exist between Moscow and the P.L.O. date from the summer of 1974, when Yasir Arafat visited Moscow as an official guest. Today, regular liaison between Moscow and the P.L.O. leadership is assured through the Soviet Embassy in Beirut, which provides cover for the most important K.G.B. station in the Middle East. (Of the 88 accredited Soviet diplomats in Beirut, 37 have been identified by Western intelligence sources as K.G.B. or G.R.U. officers.) The key link man between Moscow and the P.L.O. is Aleksandr Soldatov, the Soviet Ambassador, who arrived in Lebanon in September 1974.
Working closely with Yasir Arafat, Soldatov has succeeded in building a trustworthy “Soviet lobby” inside the P.L.O., whose leadership is divided among rival factions, some of them more sympathetic to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Moslem Brotherhood, the conservative monarchies of the Persian Gulf or to the Chinese than to the Soviet Union. Defectors from the P.L.O. and high-level prisoners interrogated by the Israelis have revealed that Arafat currently meets with Soldatov on an average of once a week, and confers with the Soviet Ambassador before authorizing any major terrorist operation or political maneuver. Western diplomats who have monitored Soldatov’s activities in Beirut found that, in the space of six weeks earlier this year, the two men had at least seven lengthy consultations.
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Western intelligence sources believe that Abu Jihad’s departure on a secret visit to Moscow two days after the March 15 meeting between Arafat and Soldatov was connected with a plan to increase efforts to destabilize the conservative Arab monarchies of the Gulf.
Vladimir N. Sakharov, a Middle East specialist who defected from the K.G.B. in 1971, has described the increasing Soviet investment in subversive operations in the Arabian peninsula. While based in Sana, Yemen, Sakharov served as translator at meetings between K.G.B. officers and “top operatives of insurgent groups operating on the Arabian peninsula and in the Persian Gulf emirates.” He has also reported that some of the terrorists who participated in the professionally organized seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca last November — an attack that rocked national and international confidence in the stability of the Saudi royal house — were “among those [he] had heard mentioned as part of the Soviet-sponsored People’s Front of the Arabian Peninsula.” West European intelligence sources have disclosed that some of the Mecca insurgents (whose battle plan called for subsequent uprisings in Medina, Taif and Riyadh) had been trained by Cuban and East German instructors at a camp near Lahej in South Yemen, where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has taken its recruits in the past. Soviet interest in the P.L.O. as a revolutionary vanguard in the Gulf is heightened by its failure to date to form an effective Saudi Communist Party; one was set up in 1975, but it has remained semidormant.
The P.L.O. currently enjoys close ties with some of the Iranian revolutionary leaders who rose to power with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. One of the most intriguing delegates at the Fatah conference in Damascus at the end of May, for example, was Arbas-Agha Zahani whose nom de guerre is Abu Sharif. He was then the head of the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran Enghelab, a post he resigned in a power play in June that was designed to weaken the position of the relatively “moderate” President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. (Abu Sharif was subsequently reappointed deputy chief of the Pasdaran Enghelab.)
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A special P.L.O. unit, whose members had received intelligence training in the Soviet Union, was dispatched to Teheran to assist in rooting out “counterrevolutionaries.” Abu Sharif repaid his personal debt to the P.L.O. by successfully lobbying — with the backing of, among others, one of the Ayatollah’s grandsons — for a big Iranian contribution to the Palestinian war chest and for the dispatch of more than 200 Iranian “volunteers” to fight with the P.L.O. in southern Lebanon.
The current head of the P.L.O. network in Iran is Hani al-Hassan, alias Abu Hassan, a Jordanian citizen who belongs to Arafat’s inner circle of advisers. Before he was sent to Teheran, Abu Hassan served as deputy chief of Fatah’s security department. He enjoys a remarkable entree to Khomeini and other key members of the Iranian regime — so much so that one Western diplomat suggests that the P.L.O. envoy should be counted as one of the most influential men in Teheran. In light of the Ayatollah’s antipathy toward the Soviet Union, it is doubtful whether Abu Hassan could have attained this position if he were considered to be one of the K.G.B.’s trusted men in the P.L.O. What makes close ties with the Soviet Union even less likely is the fact that Abu Hassan received his military training in China.
Nonetheless, Abu Hassan’s activities in Teheran have served the Soviet Union well.
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After the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war in September, the P.L.O. continued to lean toward the Iranians, raising the possibility that the Palestinians might cause trouble for some of the Arab states, notably Jordan, which had sided with Iraq.
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The usefulness of the P.L.O. to the Soviet Union extends far beyond the Middle East. At Fatah and P.F.L.P. training camps in Lebanon, Syria, South Yemen and Libya — where many Soviet-bloc instructors can be found — there is a steady intake of insurgents from places as far afield as the Netherlands and Australia.
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According to reliable Arab sources, non-Arabs trained at Hamouriya (south of Damascus) included four members of West Germany’s Red Army Faction, six Red Brigades members from Italy, three Spaniards connected with the Basque E.T.A., four Red Star Army members from Japan, 32 Filipinos and other Asians, 180 Africans, 170 Iranians, 28 Argentinians (mostly from the guerrilla organization called the Montonero Peronist Movement), 12 Brazilians — many of them members of the extreme-left Popular Revolutionary Vanguard, and 130 Turks, including members of the People’s Liberation Army.
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Soviet influence over the P.L.O. should not be confused with outright control. Fatah is not a Marxist-Leninist organization, and the P.F.L.P. — which is — has criticized the Soviet Union in the past for being overly cautious. Similarly, when the P.L.O. — or any other group — launches a terrorist attack with Soviet-trained commandos and Soviet-supplied arms, it does not always follow that the attack was ordered or even sanctioned by the U.S.S.R. Yasir Arafat has been prepared to work very closely with the Soviet Union, but the relationship has been the focus for bitter controversy within the Palestinian movement. Despite these divisions, the P.L.O. showed itself ready to apologize for Moscow’s actions following the invasion of Afghanistan.
The overall picture of Soviet support for international terrorism is necessarily incomplete, and is likely to remain so unless Ambassador Aleksandr Soldatov, or another operative of the same caliber, should decide to defect to the West and recount his story.
Few Western Governments have shown much interest in putting the issue of Soviet-sponsored terrorism on their foreign-policy agendas. The reasons for this apparent coyness are debatable.
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For those who have convinced themselves that recognition of the P.L.O. and the creation of a Palestinian state are the keys to peace in the Middle East and guaranteed oil at reasonable prices, there may be a similar disinclination to deal with evidence that points the other way.
November 2, 1980 | © The New York Times
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