Photo/The Daily Mail
A new book out Tuesday, Disinformation, by former Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Mihail Pacepa and University of Mississippi law professor Ronald Rychlak, claims that anti-American Islamic terrorism had its roots in a secret 1970s-era KGB plot aimed at the United States and Israel by flooding Muslim countries with carefully targeted propaganda, The Daily Mail reports.
Pacepa is the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West and now lives under cover in the United States since he was granted political asylum by Jimmy Carter in 1978. Before his defection, Pacepa headed up the DIE, Romania’s spying operation and secret police. According to Pacepa and Rychlak, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB during the 1970′s, “masterminded” the plot to turn the middle east against the United States while head of the KGB during that time. To facilitate his crushing, sweeping plan against the U.S., Andropov ordered the first Arabic translation of a 1905 Russian propaganda book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that alleged Jews were plotting to take over Europe and were being helped by the United States.
In 1972 Pacepa’s DIE agency ‘received from the KGB an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with “documentary” material, also in Arabic, “proving” that the United States was a Zionist country.”
Photo/The Daily Mail
He was ‘ordered,’ he adds, ‘to “discreetly” disseminate both “documents” throughout Islamic countries and, he writes, the KGB disseminated ‘thousands of copies’ in Muslim countries during the 1970s. ‘By 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. 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.’
Throughout later years in Romania, Pacepa recalls ‘every month the DIE disseminated thousands of copies throughout its Islamic sphere of influence.’ (According to a review on Amazon, the Soviets disbursed 4,000 agents to the Islamic world, “armed with hundreds of thousands of copies of the most infamous anti-Semitic book in history.) ‘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.’
Conclusion: Much of the hatred for America in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world can be traced to the clandestine, disinformation campaigns run by the Soviets in which Pacepa played a major role. According to this book, those campaigns turned the Islamic world against the United States and ignited the international terrorism that threatens America today.
