1/
I Spy With My Little Eye - Part Two: Operation SIG, the KGB, and the War Against
America - The Thread 🧵
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”
Zuheir Mohsen, Senior PLO leader, 1977
For many who read Part One of this series, they’d be forgiven for thinking that the current situation we see around us was mostly born out of a union between the Nazis and Islamists who shared ideological views of expansionism, global domination, and a violent hatred for the Jewish people, as well as by the aiding and abetting of both by the CIA. To some degree, they’d be right. But that’s just a small part of the story. But the Nazis for the most part were focused on one two things: The destruction of the Jewish people, and the destruction of Communism.
But the Communist Soviet Union had other ideas: To subvert the Nazis, destroy the Jews, and their ultimate goal, to destroy the United States.
I Spy With My Little Eye - Part Two: Operation SIG, the KGB, and the War Against
America - The Thread 🧵
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”
Zuheir Mohsen, Senior PLO leader, 1977
For many who read Part One of this series, they’d be forgiven for thinking that the current situation we see around us was mostly born out of a union between the Nazis and Islamists who shared ideological views of expansionism, global domination, and a violent hatred for the Jewish people, as well as by the aiding and abetting of both by the CIA. To some degree, they’d be right. But that’s just a small part of the story. But the Nazis for the most part were focused on one two things: The destruction of the Jewish people, and the destruction of Communism.
But the Communist Soviet Union had other ideas: To subvert the Nazis, destroy the Jews, and their ultimate goal, to destroy the United States.
2/
The Russian Revolution that Inspired Revolt
I’ve already written about the Russian Revolution in Part One, but it’s what it created afterwards that is the essence of this article.
One of the longest running antisemitic blood libels, dating back centuries, about some mysterious Jewish Cabal running the world with ambitions to control governments, banks and all of civilization, took a dark turn just before and after the Russian Revolution.
And the consequences these lies have had on the Jewish people ended up costing the lives of millions of people. It’s one of the main lies used by the Nazis to justify not only the Holocaust, but also their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Simultaneously, it’s one of the main lies used by Stalin to justify numerous pogroms and atrocities against the Jews. And following the success of the Russian Revolution in winning power, it inspired the growth of Communism shortly after World War One all across Eastern and Western Europe, and both North and South America. After World War Two, where the Red Army defeated the Nazis, it inspired the rise of Communism right across Asia, especially China.
The Russian Revolution that Inspired Revolt
I’ve already written about the Russian Revolution in Part One, but it’s what it created afterwards that is the essence of this article.
One of the longest running antisemitic blood libels, dating back centuries, about some mysterious Jewish Cabal running the world with ambitions to control governments, banks and all of civilization, took a dark turn just before and after the Russian Revolution.
And the consequences these lies have had on the Jewish people ended up costing the lives of millions of people. It’s one of the main lies used by the Nazis to justify not only the Holocaust, but also their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Simultaneously, it’s one of the main lies used by Stalin to justify numerous pogroms and atrocities against the Jews. And following the success of the Russian Revolution in winning power, it inspired the growth of Communism shortly after World War One all across Eastern and Western Europe, and both North and South America. After World War Two, where the Red Army defeated the Nazis, it inspired the rise of Communism right across Asia, especially China.
3/
The Beginning of the Beginning
Towards the end of World War Two, the American OSS under Allen Dulles had signed an agreement with Karl Wolff under Operation Sunrise. Simultaneously, the first steps were taken to recruit Reinhard Gehlen and other Nazis under him to form the secret program under CIA control, the Gehlen Organization.
But here is where the twist comes. The Soviets had already flooded Germany with Soviet spies, and the Soviets knew about these operations before, during and after, and they infiltrated them. Not only did they infiltrate these operations, but they also infiltrated Operation Paperclip, and ultimately, the entire CIA.
During the war, every intelligence agency had managed to send double agents to each every one of their enemies, as well as their allies. The US as operatives in Germany and Russia, but also in Britain and other European allies. The British had sent MI6 agents to infiltrate Germany and Russia, but also other European countries as well as Canada and the US. Germany did the same, as did the Soviets. But it was this specific infiltration by the Soviets that changed everything.
The Beginning of the Beginning
Towards the end of World War Two, the American OSS under Allen Dulles had signed an agreement with Karl Wolff under Operation Sunrise. Simultaneously, the first steps were taken to recruit Reinhard Gehlen and other Nazis under him to form the secret program under CIA control, the Gehlen Organization.
But here is where the twist comes. The Soviets had already flooded Germany with Soviet spies, and the Soviets knew about these operations before, during and after, and they infiltrated them. Not only did they infiltrate these operations, but they also infiltrated Operation Paperclip, and ultimately, the entire CIA.
During the war, every intelligence agency had managed to send double agents to each every one of their enemies, as well as their allies. The US as operatives in Germany and Russia, but also in Britain and other European allies. The British had sent MI6 agents to infiltrate Germany and Russia, but also other European countries as well as Canada and the US. Germany did the same, as did the Soviets. But it was this specific infiltration by the Soviets that changed everything.
4/
Rise of the Beast
Paranoid was a great word to describe Joseph Stalin. His rise to power was through the spilling of blood, and he knew that to stay in power, others would come for his blood. His predecessor, Lenin, and Lenin’s leadership team first created the Cheka (R W Pringle, 2024)
The Cheka played a prominent role in the Russian Civil War and aided in crushing the anti-Soviet Kronshtadt and Antonov rebellions in 1921. But their methods quickly became increasingly violent and out of control. When Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, it was discovered that the Cheka, which in 1921 had a staff of more than 250,000, was responsible for the execution of more than 140,000 people. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s chief during the early years of Soviet power, molded the service into an effective, merciless tool of the ruling Communist Party (G Lotha, RAND, 1994)
In 1922 the Cheka was replaced by the GPU (State Political Administration) in an effort by the Communist Party to reduce the scale of the Cheka’s terror. A year later the GPU was renamed the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) and given additional duties, including the administration of “corrective” labor camps and the surveillance of the population.
As Joseph Stalin consolidated his power and directed the modernization of the Soviet Union, the OGPU implemented the forced collectivization of agriculture and the deportation of the kulaks (wealthy peasants) and staged show trials of “enemies of the people.” By the early 1930s the OGPU controlled all Soviet security functions, directing a vast army of informers in factories, government offices, and the Red Army. During this period the OGPU also conducted covert operations on foreign soil to disrupt the activities of the regime’s opponents, some of whom it kidnapped and murdered (G Young, KGB Functions and Internal Organization, 2016)
In 1934 the OGPU was absorbed into the new NKVD, which helped Stalin to consolidate his power by carrying out purges. More than 750,000 people were executed in 1937–38 alone, including tens of thousands of party officials and military and security officers. Among the victims were more than half of the members of the ruling Central Committee, as well as the NKVD’s first two chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolay Yezhov. Yezhov was succeeded as head of the NKVD by Lavrenty Beria, who served from 1938 to 1953 (ibit)
In 1941 all security responsibilities were transferred from the NKVD to the NKGB. Both became ministries within the Communist government. Beria, as a member of the ruling Central Committee, continued to supervise the two ministries while serving as head of the MVD. Beria also was responsible for the Soviet Union’s fledgling nuclear weapons program and oversaw intelligence operations directed at the US and British atomic bomb projects.
Soviet foreign intelligence in the last decade of Stalin’s life was incredible in both its scope and success. During World War Two, the MGB conducted operations in Nazi-occupied Europe. One of its networks, the “Red Orchestra,” was made up of several hundred agents and informers, including agents in the German ministries of foreign affairs, labor, propaganda, and economics.
Declassified Russian and American documents indicate that the Soviet Union had placed at least five agents in the US nuclear weapons program alone, and possibly as many as 300 to 500 agents inside the US government by 1945. The British diplomatic and security establishments had also been infiltrated by important agents, including Kim Philby, a senior British intelligence officer. Evidence suggests that Soviet agents in Britain passed 15,000 to 20,000 documents to Moscow between 1941 and 1945. British and American agents of Soviet intelligence were for the most part ideological supporters of the regime, and many were members of communist parties, disseminating communist propaganda and ideology widely into those countries (CIA Archives, Declassified, 2001)
Rise of the Beast
Paranoid was a great word to describe Joseph Stalin. His rise to power was through the spilling of blood, and he knew that to stay in power, others would come for his blood. His predecessor, Lenin, and Lenin’s leadership team first created the Cheka (R W Pringle, 2024)
The Cheka played a prominent role in the Russian Civil War and aided in crushing the anti-Soviet Kronshtadt and Antonov rebellions in 1921. But their methods quickly became increasingly violent and out of control. When Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, it was discovered that the Cheka, which in 1921 had a staff of more than 250,000, was responsible for the execution of more than 140,000 people. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka’s chief during the early years of Soviet power, molded the service into an effective, merciless tool of the ruling Communist Party (G Lotha, RAND, 1994)
In 1922 the Cheka was replaced by the GPU (State Political Administration) in an effort by the Communist Party to reduce the scale of the Cheka’s terror. A year later the GPU was renamed the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration) and given additional duties, including the administration of “corrective” labor camps and the surveillance of the population.
As Joseph Stalin consolidated his power and directed the modernization of the Soviet Union, the OGPU implemented the forced collectivization of agriculture and the deportation of the kulaks (wealthy peasants) and staged show trials of “enemies of the people.” By the early 1930s the OGPU controlled all Soviet security functions, directing a vast army of informers in factories, government offices, and the Red Army. During this period the OGPU also conducted covert operations on foreign soil to disrupt the activities of the regime’s opponents, some of whom it kidnapped and murdered (G Young, KGB Functions and Internal Organization, 2016)
In 1934 the OGPU was absorbed into the new NKVD, which helped Stalin to consolidate his power by carrying out purges. More than 750,000 people were executed in 1937–38 alone, including tens of thousands of party officials and military and security officers. Among the victims were more than half of the members of the ruling Central Committee, as well as the NKVD’s first two chiefs, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolay Yezhov. Yezhov was succeeded as head of the NKVD by Lavrenty Beria, who served from 1938 to 1953 (ibit)
In 1941 all security responsibilities were transferred from the NKVD to the NKGB. Both became ministries within the Communist government. Beria, as a member of the ruling Central Committee, continued to supervise the two ministries while serving as head of the MVD. Beria also was responsible for the Soviet Union’s fledgling nuclear weapons program and oversaw intelligence operations directed at the US and British atomic bomb projects.
Soviet foreign intelligence in the last decade of Stalin’s life was incredible in both its scope and success. During World War Two, the MGB conducted operations in Nazi-occupied Europe. One of its networks, the “Red Orchestra,” was made up of several hundred agents and informers, including agents in the German ministries of foreign affairs, labor, propaganda, and economics.
Declassified Russian and American documents indicate that the Soviet Union had placed at least five agents in the US nuclear weapons program alone, and possibly as many as 300 to 500 agents inside the US government by 1945. The British diplomatic and security establishments had also been infiltrated by important agents, including Kim Philby, a senior British intelligence officer. Evidence suggests that Soviet agents in Britain passed 15,000 to 20,000 documents to Moscow between 1941 and 1945. British and American agents of Soviet intelligence were for the most part ideological supporters of the regime, and many were members of communist parties, disseminating communist propaganda and ideology widely into those countries (CIA Archives, Declassified, 2001)
5/
When Communism met Islam
Stalin was openly antisemitic, and the Communist Party had declared itself as the enemy of Zionism and the Jewish people throughout his reign. It was one of the key factors that brought Stalin and Hitler together to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
As mentioned in Part One, the Soviet Union alienated its Muslims, and this led to many Muslim emigres leaving the Soviet Union westwards, many joining the Nazis to fight to reclaim their Russia.
The Soviets at the time also believed that the main objective of the Zionist movement was to bring about a mass immigration of Jews into Israel from countries where they had been scattered among the general population, with a special emphasis placed on the Soviet Union. They feared that the wealthy Jews would leave together with all their wealth.
Antisemitism was at an all time high and the communists were actively disseminating the fake Peotocols of the Elders of Zion.
Later, under Joseph Stalin's rule, he initially accepted a limited emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union into Israel so that he could invest in what he hoped would be a socialist Israel. In his mind, Israel could be a satellite of the Soviet Union inside the Middle East, and could become a central hub for Soviet intelligence, influence, and propaganda.
As the Soviets infiltrated deeper into the Nazi behemoth, they learned how the Nazis had sent senior officials and intelligence agents to the Middle East before the war, and the affection for the Nazis by the Arab Nationalists.
With the back and forth counterintelligence operations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War started to take shape. The CIA had their Gehlen Organization, but the Soviets had infiltrated that quite early on, and through the Nazis from that organization who they’d converted into Soviet spies predominantly in Eastern Europe and East Germany, the CIA intercepts were often filled with manufactured and false information.
But the focus of Soviet intelligence became more and more in the Middle East where they learned how powerful and effective the Nazi propaganda campaigns were in influencing the Arab states, especially with antisemitic and anti-Western propaganda before and after the independence of the state of Israel. The Soviets spent years and enormous resources learning everything they could about the messaging, the people involved, the main players, and then ultimately in recruiting an entire organization of their own, bringing thousands of Arab Nationalists to the Soviet Union for training and indoctrination.
One of the most infamous Arab Nationalists central to everything going on across the entire region was the protege of Amin al Husseini… Yasser Arafat.
When Communism met Islam
Stalin was openly antisemitic, and the Communist Party had declared itself as the enemy of Zionism and the Jewish people throughout his reign. It was one of the key factors that brought Stalin and Hitler together to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
As mentioned in Part One, the Soviet Union alienated its Muslims, and this led to many Muslim emigres leaving the Soviet Union westwards, many joining the Nazis to fight to reclaim their Russia.
The Soviets at the time also believed that the main objective of the Zionist movement was to bring about a mass immigration of Jews into Israel from countries where they had been scattered among the general population, with a special emphasis placed on the Soviet Union. They feared that the wealthy Jews would leave together with all their wealth.
Antisemitism was at an all time high and the communists were actively disseminating the fake Peotocols of the Elders of Zion.
Later, under Joseph Stalin's rule, he initially accepted a limited emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union into Israel so that he could invest in what he hoped would be a socialist Israel. In his mind, Israel could be a satellite of the Soviet Union inside the Middle East, and could become a central hub for Soviet intelligence, influence, and propaganda.
As the Soviets infiltrated deeper into the Nazi behemoth, they learned how the Nazis had sent senior officials and intelligence agents to the Middle East before the war, and the affection for the Nazis by the Arab Nationalists.
With the back and forth counterintelligence operations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War started to take shape. The CIA had their Gehlen Organization, but the Soviets had infiltrated that quite early on, and through the Nazis from that organization who they’d converted into Soviet spies predominantly in Eastern Europe and East Germany, the CIA intercepts were often filled with manufactured and false information.
But the focus of Soviet intelligence became more and more in the Middle East where they learned how powerful and effective the Nazi propaganda campaigns were in influencing the Arab states, especially with antisemitic and anti-Western propaganda before and after the independence of the state of Israel. The Soviets spent years and enormous resources learning everything they could about the messaging, the people involved, the main players, and then ultimately in recruiting an entire organization of their own, bringing thousands of Arab Nationalists to the Soviet Union for training and indoctrination.
One of the most infamous Arab Nationalists central to everything going on across the entire region was the protege of Amin al Husseini… Yasser Arafat.
6/
Active Measures
Aktivnye meropriyatiya, “active measures,” was a term used by the Soviet Union (USSR) from the 1950s onward to describe a gamut of covert and deniable political influence and subversion operations, including (but not limited to) the establishment of front organizations, the backing of friendly political movements, the orchestration of domestic unrest and the spread of disinformation. The Committee for State Security, the KGB’s Service A, was its primary active measures department, and was originally Service D, meaning “disinformation”. (M Galeoti, Russia’s Covert Geopolitical Operations, 2019)
In many ways, active measures reflect the wartime mentality of the Soviet leadership, as similar tactics were used by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, but much less frequently thereafter. For the KGB, however, active measures increasingly became central to its mission abroad in the postwar period, something made explicit by then–KGB chair Yuri Andropov in his Directive No. 0066 of 1982. Tellingly, the KGB’s official definition of “intelligence” was “a secret form of political struggle which makes use of clandestine means and methods for acquiring secret information of interest and for carrying out active measures to exert influence on the adversary and weaken his political, economic, scientific and technical and military positions.”
Active Measures
Aktivnye meropriyatiya, “active measures,” was a term used by the Soviet Union (USSR) from the 1950s onward to describe a gamut of covert and deniable political influence and subversion operations, including (but not limited to) the establishment of front organizations, the backing of friendly political movements, the orchestration of domestic unrest and the spread of disinformation. The Committee for State Security, the KGB’s Service A, was its primary active measures department, and was originally Service D, meaning “disinformation”. (M Galeoti, Russia’s Covert Geopolitical Operations, 2019)
In many ways, active measures reflect the wartime mentality of the Soviet leadership, as similar tactics were used by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, but much less frequently thereafter. For the KGB, however, active measures increasingly became central to its mission abroad in the postwar period, something made explicit by then–KGB chair Yuri Andropov in his Directive No. 0066 of 1982. Tellingly, the KGB’s official definition of “intelligence” was “a secret form of political struggle which makes use of clandestine means and methods for acquiring secret information of interest and for carrying out active measures to exert influence on the adversary and weaken his political, economic, scientific and technical and military positions.”
7/
Operation ZARATHUSTRA: Antisemitic disinformation Through Active Measures Campaigns (1950s-1960s)
(Pacepa and Rychlak 2013)
In the late 1950s, the KGB embarked on an active measures campaign to alienate West Germany from its Western partners by portraying it as the epicenter of a new wave of Nazi antisemitism, an approach analogous to Moscow’s tactics in its war against Ukraine. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former top general in the Romanian foreign intelligence service (DIE) prior to defecting to United States in 1978, the KGB launched the operation in 1957-1958 and codenamed it Operation ZARATHUSTRA to “symbolize that German antisemitism was as immortal as Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphoristic book Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Led by Ivan Agayants, the head of the KGB’s First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate’s specialized disinformation section Service A (founded as Department D in 1959), Operation ZARATHUSTRA entered its testing phase.
Before deploying the plot abroad, Agayants first needed to gauge the effect of the antisemitic provocations that his team planned to carry out. In late 1959, he directed a squad of intelligence officers to covertly topple Jewish tombstones and deface a cemetery with swastikas and antisemitic slogans in a village not far from Moscow.
The officers avoided detection and reported back to Agayants that, while most villagers had been shocked and appalled by the vandalism, a small number reignited their own antisemitic viewpoints as a result and became anti-Jewish activists. With the “success” of this type active measures (covert information operations) validated, Agayants gradually took Operation ZARATHUSTRA global.
The Kremlin appears to have cultivated and coordinated these operations in West Germany. In 1960, British intelligence declassified two encrypted messages sent from Moscow to Berlin. The first telegram, dated December 1959, read, “In West Germany, our comrades have an extremely easy task for they will be able to use the Nazis for discrediting the class enemies.” This message was circulated to Communist Party activists in West Germany with the help of East German authorities. The journalist who broke this story alleged that the message also detailed how the authorities could cast the apprehended provocateurs as Nazis given their activities, and if necessary, Nazi leaflets could be provided by a special division of the East Berlin Ministry of State Security (Stasi) to aid the masquerade. This message circulated shortly before the Christmas 1959 Cologne incidents of vandalism.
In the second intercepted missive, assessed to be from January 1960, Moscow lauded the success of its active measures campaign. It read, “undercover comrades have proved to the world that a potential Nazi threat exists not only in Germany but in the whole Western world. The socialist [Soviet] government’s argument that West Germany is a potential bastion of Nazism and that consequentially West Germany must under no circumstances be re-armed has been considerably strengthened.”
Operation ZARATHUSTRA: Antisemitic disinformation Through Active Measures Campaigns (1950s-1960s)
(Pacepa and Rychlak 2013)
In the late 1950s, the KGB embarked on an active measures campaign to alienate West Germany from its Western partners by portraying it as the epicenter of a new wave of Nazi antisemitism, an approach analogous to Moscow’s tactics in its war against Ukraine. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former top general in the Romanian foreign intelligence service (DIE) prior to defecting to United States in 1978, the KGB launched the operation in 1957-1958 and codenamed it Operation ZARATHUSTRA to “symbolize that German antisemitism was as immortal as Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphoristic book Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Led by Ivan Agayants, the head of the KGB’s First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate’s specialized disinformation section Service A (founded as Department D in 1959), Operation ZARATHUSTRA entered its testing phase.
Before deploying the plot abroad, Agayants first needed to gauge the effect of the antisemitic provocations that his team planned to carry out. In late 1959, he directed a squad of intelligence officers to covertly topple Jewish tombstones and deface a cemetery with swastikas and antisemitic slogans in a village not far from Moscow.
The officers avoided detection and reported back to Agayants that, while most villagers had been shocked and appalled by the vandalism, a small number reignited their own antisemitic viewpoints as a result and became anti-Jewish activists. With the “success” of this type active measures (covert information operations) validated, Agayants gradually took Operation ZARATHUSTRA global.
The Kremlin appears to have cultivated and coordinated these operations in West Germany. In 1960, British intelligence declassified two encrypted messages sent from Moscow to Berlin. The first telegram, dated December 1959, read, “In West Germany, our comrades have an extremely easy task for they will be able to use the Nazis for discrediting the class enemies.” This message was circulated to Communist Party activists in West Germany with the help of East German authorities. The journalist who broke this story alleged that the message also detailed how the authorities could cast the apprehended provocateurs as Nazis given their activities, and if necessary, Nazi leaflets could be provided by a special division of the East Berlin Ministry of State Security (Stasi) to aid the masquerade. This message circulated shortly before the Christmas 1959 Cologne incidents of vandalism.
In the second intercepted missive, assessed to be from January 1960, Moscow lauded the success of its active measures campaign. It read, “undercover comrades have proved to the world that a potential Nazi threat exists not only in Germany but in the whole Western world. The socialist [Soviet] government’s argument that West Germany is a potential bastion of Nazism and that consequentially West Germany must under no circumstances be re-armed has been considerably strengthened.”
8/
Operation 100, Operation HORIZON and Operation RAINBOW
wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/oper…
1967 was a very significant year for both the Soviet Union in general, but also the KGB.
In November 1967, the Soviet Union celebrated the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Earlier, in May 1967, a new chairman of the KGB was appointed. Nikita Khrushchev’s one-time protégé who later turned against him Vladimir Semichastny was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev’s favorite, Yuri Andropov (Kovacevic, 2021).
Andropov was the longest serving chairman of the Soviet state security service and one of the very few whose career did not end in disgrace or death. Andropov’s policies left a lasting impact on many spheres of both Soviet and post-Soviet political and social life in Russia. For instance, most of the present Russian leadership, including the president Vladimir Putin, entered the KGB while Andropov was at the helm (Ibit).
Operation HORIZON was a significant espionage operation carried out by the KGB against the West in 1967 and 1968. It’s the expansion of an earlier operation codenamed Operation 100. While Operation 100 tasked the counterintelligence units of the Lithuanian KGB to work against the intelligence personnel (officers and agents) of the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, and Israel, Operation HORIZON expanded its field of activities to include diplomats from Canada, sailors from Germany and Sweden, and specialists (expert workers in Soviet industries) from France and Belgium (Ibit).
Operation 100, Operation HORIZON and Operation RAINBOW
wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/oper…
1967 was a very significant year for both the Soviet Union in general, but also the KGB.
In November 1967, the Soviet Union celebrated the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Earlier, in May 1967, a new chairman of the KGB was appointed. Nikita Khrushchev’s one-time protégé who later turned against him Vladimir Semichastny was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev’s favorite, Yuri Andropov (Kovacevic, 2021).
Andropov was the longest serving chairman of the Soviet state security service and one of the very few whose career did not end in disgrace or death. Andropov’s policies left a lasting impact on many spheres of both Soviet and post-Soviet political and social life in Russia. For instance, most of the present Russian leadership, including the president Vladimir Putin, entered the KGB while Andropov was at the helm (Ibit).
Operation HORIZON was a significant espionage operation carried out by the KGB against the West in 1967 and 1968. It’s the expansion of an earlier operation codenamed Operation 100. While Operation 100 tasked the counterintelligence units of the Lithuanian KGB to work against the intelligence personnel (officers and agents) of the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, and Israel, Operation HORIZON expanded its field of activities to include diplomats from Canada, sailors from Germany and Sweden, and specialists (expert workers in Soviet industries) from France and Belgium (Ibit).
9/
“Hitler’s Pope” - Operation SEAT 12
ucatholic.com/blog/unmasking…
During the Stalin period and after his death, the Soviet government exploited antisemitism for propaganda and disinformation purposes and to target perceived foreign adversaries. In one disinformation operation to discredit the Vatican, the KGB targeted Pope Pius XII, the leader of the Catholic Church (1939-58) and an ardent opponent of communism, whose tenure during World War II continues raising questions among scholars. In his 2013 book Disinformation, Pacepa described his role in a KGB operation to defame the pontiff. Pacepa traced the decision to target Pius XII to Stalin himself and the 1945 Radio Moscow broadcast proclaiming Pope Pius XII to be “Hitler’s Pope,” an allegation implying Pius’s support for antisemitism and the Nazi crimes against the Jews. But it was Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev who approved a concerted disinformation campaign against the Pope in February 1960.
As part of the campaign, Pacepa writes, the KGB tasked the Romanian DIE with infiltrating the Vatican archives, hoping to find kompromat (compromising information in Russian) on the Pope to use in future disinformation operations against Pius XII. The DIE dubbed the mission SEAT-12. Pacepa’s job was to secure access to the Vatican archives in exchange for a (false) Romanian commitment to resume diplomatic relations and provide a loan to the Holy See. Pacepa told Vatican officials that Romania needed the archives to “find historical roots that would help the Romanian government publicly justify its change of heart toward the Holy See.” For two years, three DIE officers posing as priests dug through the papal archives, finding no kompromat but still passing documents related to Pius XII to the KGB.
In 1963, Agayants, reportedly told Pacepa and his colleagues about a new phase of “SEAT-12.” Agayants claimed that the KGB masterminded the production of “The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy,” a controversial theater play by a German producer, accusing Pius XII of inaction regarding Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust. “The Deputy” has been “translated into more than 20 languages” and performed in “more than 80 cities worldwide.”
The KGB continued active measures to “compromise” the Catholic Church, including the “study” of its connections to “fascist regimes” into the mid-1970s.
“Hitler’s Pope” - Operation SEAT 12
ucatholic.com/blog/unmasking…
During the Stalin period and after his death, the Soviet government exploited antisemitism for propaganda and disinformation purposes and to target perceived foreign adversaries. In one disinformation operation to discredit the Vatican, the KGB targeted Pope Pius XII, the leader of the Catholic Church (1939-58) and an ardent opponent of communism, whose tenure during World War II continues raising questions among scholars. In his 2013 book Disinformation, Pacepa described his role in a KGB operation to defame the pontiff. Pacepa traced the decision to target Pius XII to Stalin himself and the 1945 Radio Moscow broadcast proclaiming Pope Pius XII to be “Hitler’s Pope,” an allegation implying Pius’s support for antisemitism and the Nazi crimes against the Jews. But it was Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev who approved a concerted disinformation campaign against the Pope in February 1960.
As part of the campaign, Pacepa writes, the KGB tasked the Romanian DIE with infiltrating the Vatican archives, hoping to find kompromat (compromising information in Russian) on the Pope to use in future disinformation operations against Pius XII. The DIE dubbed the mission SEAT-12. Pacepa’s job was to secure access to the Vatican archives in exchange for a (false) Romanian commitment to resume diplomatic relations and provide a loan to the Holy See. Pacepa told Vatican officials that Romania needed the archives to “find historical roots that would help the Romanian government publicly justify its change of heart toward the Holy See.” For two years, three DIE officers posing as priests dug through the papal archives, finding no kompromat but still passing documents related to Pius XII to the KGB.
In 1963, Agayants, reportedly told Pacepa and his colleagues about a new phase of “SEAT-12.” Agayants claimed that the KGB masterminded the production of “The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy,” a controversial theater play by a German producer, accusing Pius XII of inaction regarding Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust. “The Deputy” has been “translated into more than 20 languages” and performed in “more than 80 cities worldwide.”
The KGB continued active measures to “compromise” the Catholic Church, including the “study” of its connections to “fascist regimes” into the mid-1970s.
10/
Virulent Antisemitism Under Andropov’s KGB
The Kremlin’s reckless use of antisemitism to spread disinformation in pursuit of its own strategic objectives did not cease as the Cold War progressed further into the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the Soviet Union’s most lasting and vicious antisemitic active measures operations took place during this period under the leadership of KGB head Yuri Andropov. While Andropov’s tenure as the Soviet leader from late 1982 to early 1984 was short-lived, his15-year legacy as Chairman of the KGB was undeniably impactful.
According to Mitrokhin, Andropov had a personal interest and obsession with countering Zionism - Zionism being second only to the United States as a target at that time for Soviet active measures.
Conspiracy theorist thinking in Moscow played a large role in the KGB’s disinformation efforts targeting Jewish groups. Arkadiy Shevchenko, the Under Secretary-General of the United Nations in the mid-1970s who defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1978, writes in his own account, Breaking with Moscow, how “many [in Moscow] are inclined towards the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control center somewhere in the United States.” This shadowy group, they believed, in large part consisted of the Jewish lobby. Combined with Soviet concerns over global perceptions of its treatment of Jewish emigres, these conspiratorial ideations caused Andropov’s KGB to embark on a decades-long campaign of antisemitic active measures, including disinformation.
From the Mitrokhin Archives shorturl.at/uT3DI
Virulent Antisemitism Under Andropov’s KGB
The Kremlin’s reckless use of antisemitism to spread disinformation in pursuit of its own strategic objectives did not cease as the Cold War progressed further into the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the Soviet Union’s most lasting and vicious antisemitic active measures operations took place during this period under the leadership of KGB head Yuri Andropov. While Andropov’s tenure as the Soviet leader from late 1982 to early 1984 was short-lived, his15-year legacy as Chairman of the KGB was undeniably impactful.
According to Mitrokhin, Andropov had a personal interest and obsession with countering Zionism - Zionism being second only to the United States as a target at that time for Soviet active measures.
Conspiracy theorist thinking in Moscow played a large role in the KGB’s disinformation efforts targeting Jewish groups. Arkadiy Shevchenko, the Under Secretary-General of the United Nations in the mid-1970s who defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1978, writes in his own account, Breaking with Moscow, how “many [in Moscow] are inclined towards the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control center somewhere in the United States.” This shadowy group, they believed, in large part consisted of the Jewish lobby. Combined with Soviet concerns over global perceptions of its treatment of Jewish emigres, these conspiratorial ideations caused Andropov’s KGB to embark on a decades-long campaign of antisemitic active measures, including disinformation.
From the Mitrokhin Archives shorturl.at/uT3DI
11/
Operation SIG - The anti-Israel KGB Operation That Changed Everything
(Pacepa, 2006)
In 1978, when the former Intelligence Chief of Romania, Ion Pacepa, defected to the United States and began to share the inner workings of the entire KGB and Soviet intelligence apparatus, some historians tried to discredit his information, as well as some of his books, and framed him as the sole source of this information thus claiming only some of it was credible.
But Pacepa was far from the only source or defector who provided the CIA and western world with critical and accurate information on the KGB. One of the most important sources was Vasili Mitrokhin, the chief archivist for Soviet intelligence who brought with him thousands of documents and handwritten notes by the KGB leadership shorturl.at/uT3DI
In 1948, as Israel declared its independence, the armies of five Arab nations attacked the new nation. Stalin, hopeful that Israel’s socialist roots would lead it to join the Communist bloc, instructed a country it controlled, Czechoslovakia, to provide Israel with the arms needed for defense. Israel at the time was under a heavy arms embargo by the British government.
However, upon later learning of Stalin’s murder of 20 million people, Israeli society rejected communism. Then when Israel joined the British and French in the operation to take the Suez in 1956, the Soviets were incensed. “Israel’s participation with the United Kingdom and France in the 1956 Suez campaign further alienated the Soviet government, which wrote a letter to Jerusalem (as well as to Paris and London) threatening rocket attacks and promising direct military support to the Egyptian army.” (Richard Kemp, Exposing the Soviet Lie of Israeli Apartheid, 2022)
As a result, Moscow shifted its support to Arab dictatorships. Arab nations became increasingly dependent on Moscow’s weapons and military training. The KGB recruited Arab agents to head up a guerilla army and propaganda campaign. In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel, this Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
Operation SIG was the KGB operation to sow worldwide disapproval for the US and Israel, with an extreme emphasis on Israel and Jews. SIG is the Russian acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Jewish (or Zionist) Government”.
The operation was first conceived during the late 1950’s as a safeguard mechanism in case Stalin failed to turn the young Jewish state into a Soviet puppet. It was designed KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and entrusted to Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa of the Romanian Intelligence Agency, and several senior KGB operatives including Major Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn, Major Vasily Mitrokhin, Colonel Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, and Czech Intelligence Officer Ladislav Bittman.
In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel again, Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel again, Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
Operation SIG - The anti-Israel KGB Operation That Changed Everything
(Pacepa, 2006)
In 1978, when the former Intelligence Chief of Romania, Ion Pacepa, defected to the United States and began to share the inner workings of the entire KGB and Soviet intelligence apparatus, some historians tried to discredit his information, as well as some of his books, and framed him as the sole source of this information thus claiming only some of it was credible.
But Pacepa was far from the only source or defector who provided the CIA and western world with critical and accurate information on the KGB. One of the most important sources was Vasili Mitrokhin, the chief archivist for Soviet intelligence who brought with him thousands of documents and handwritten notes by the KGB leadership shorturl.at/uT3DI
In 1948, as Israel declared its independence, the armies of five Arab nations attacked the new nation. Stalin, hopeful that Israel’s socialist roots would lead it to join the Communist bloc, instructed a country it controlled, Czechoslovakia, to provide Israel with the arms needed for defense. Israel at the time was under a heavy arms embargo by the British government.
However, upon later learning of Stalin’s murder of 20 million people, Israeli society rejected communism. Then when Israel joined the British and French in the operation to take the Suez in 1956, the Soviets were incensed. “Israel’s participation with the United Kingdom and France in the 1956 Suez campaign further alienated the Soviet government, which wrote a letter to Jerusalem (as well as to Paris and London) threatening rocket attacks and promising direct military support to the Egyptian army.” (Richard Kemp, Exposing the Soviet Lie of Israeli Apartheid, 2022)
As a result, Moscow shifted its support to Arab dictatorships. Arab nations became increasingly dependent on Moscow’s weapons and military training. The KGB recruited Arab agents to head up a guerilla army and propaganda campaign. In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel, this Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
Operation SIG was the KGB operation to sow worldwide disapproval for the US and Israel, with an extreme emphasis on Israel and Jews. SIG is the Russian acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Jewish (or Zionist) Government”.
The operation was first conceived during the late 1950’s as a safeguard mechanism in case Stalin failed to turn the young Jewish state into a Soviet puppet. It was designed KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and entrusted to Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa of the Romanian Intelligence Agency, and several senior KGB operatives including Major Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn, Major Vasily Mitrokhin, Colonel Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, and Czech Intelligence Officer Ladislav Bittman.
In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel again, Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel again, Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
12/
Anti-Israel Propaganda in Overdrive
“We have yet to understand fully how Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda influenced the world. In those individual instances where this influence is evident, it is apparent just how negatively it impacted the lives of Jews around the globe.” (Tabarovsky, 2019).
Even before former KGB operatives revealed the details of Operation SIG, some of the methods used by the Soviets to carry out propaganda campaigns were revealed. Many of the techniques below that were developed by the Soviets, and prior by Goebbels Nazi propaganda division, and that were revealed in declassified CIA and KGB documents should be quite familiar to all of you reading this:
1. Distortion and Deception. Deception includes outright lying as well as the highly successful techniques of “distortion,” including spin. Deception includes repeating the “big lie”, a lie so big that it defies any logical thinking.
2. Repetition of the lie. A lie repeated enough tends to become believed. This phenomenon, the “illusory truth effect,” has been well-studied and replicated. Former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov said, “We have only to keep repeating our themes that the United States and Israel are fascists, Imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews”. Paul and Matthews (2016) refer to this as the Russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model. This technique is distinctly observed when the answer is always “blame the occupation” and “Israeli aggression”, no matter what the question.
3. Defamation and Misdirection, such as blaming the victim. Tawil (2019a) provides a recent example - “When terrorists fire rockets at Israeli civilians, the campaign blames Israel for retaliating to cease these attacks.”
4. The hijacking of emotions and the deliberate misuse of sentiment. For example, using images of crying mothers and babies as discussed in Konn and Lam (2018) and Ben Zikri (2018).
One tactic to disinform is to blame all wrong on some adversary, a monstrous bogey man. For the Operation SIG campaign against the Jewish State, the KGB chose the Jews as the bogeymen. Arab antisemitism was already rampant when the KGB created Operation SIG. Pre-existing Muslim antisemitism provided a perfect platform to plant fake stories and disinformation about Jews and Israel.
Indeed, the genius of the KGB’s Operation SIG was that it brought into alliance Arab adherents of Pan-Arabism, Pan-Islamism, and Nazism around what they had in common: hatred for Jews, Israel, and democracy.
“Most isms ultimately lead to war, and Arab nationalism is no exception.”
Pan-Arabism has as its goal to unite all Arab countries as a single Arab nation. In the case of the region, this Pan-Arab nation was always Bilad al Sham, or Greater Syria. To invert this goal against the Jews, the KGB manufactured the concept of Greater Israel, which today has become one of the most widely disseminated falsehoods still heavily pushed by propagandists.
Pan-Islamism’s goal is to reunite all lands that were ever under Islamic rule into an Islamic State. Arab Nazism calls for subjugation or murder of Jews as vermin. Operation SIG brought together existing antisemitism with existing irredentist movements to advance its aim to turn world opinion against Israel.
Anti-Israel Propaganda in Overdrive
“We have yet to understand fully how Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda influenced the world. In those individual instances where this influence is evident, it is apparent just how negatively it impacted the lives of Jews around the globe.” (Tabarovsky, 2019).
Even before former KGB operatives revealed the details of Operation SIG, some of the methods used by the Soviets to carry out propaganda campaigns were revealed. Many of the techniques below that were developed by the Soviets, and prior by Goebbels Nazi propaganda division, and that were revealed in declassified CIA and KGB documents should be quite familiar to all of you reading this:
1. Distortion and Deception. Deception includes outright lying as well as the highly successful techniques of “distortion,” including spin. Deception includes repeating the “big lie”, a lie so big that it defies any logical thinking.
2. Repetition of the lie. A lie repeated enough tends to become believed. This phenomenon, the “illusory truth effect,” has been well-studied and replicated. Former KGB chairman Yuri Andropov said, “We have only to keep repeating our themes that the United States and Israel are fascists, Imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews”. Paul and Matthews (2016) refer to this as the Russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model. This technique is distinctly observed when the answer is always “blame the occupation” and “Israeli aggression”, no matter what the question.
3. Defamation and Misdirection, such as blaming the victim. Tawil (2019a) provides a recent example - “When terrorists fire rockets at Israeli civilians, the campaign blames Israel for retaliating to cease these attacks.”
4. The hijacking of emotions and the deliberate misuse of sentiment. For example, using images of crying mothers and babies as discussed in Konn and Lam (2018) and Ben Zikri (2018).
One tactic to disinform is to blame all wrong on some adversary, a monstrous bogey man. For the Operation SIG campaign against the Jewish State, the KGB chose the Jews as the bogeymen. Arab antisemitism was already rampant when the KGB created Operation SIG. Pre-existing Muslim antisemitism provided a perfect platform to plant fake stories and disinformation about Jews and Israel.
Indeed, the genius of the KGB’s Operation SIG was that it brought into alliance Arab adherents of Pan-Arabism, Pan-Islamism, and Nazism around what they had in common: hatred for Jews, Israel, and democracy.
“Most isms ultimately lead to war, and Arab nationalism is no exception.”
Pan-Arabism has as its goal to unite all Arab countries as a single Arab nation. In the case of the region, this Pan-Arab nation was always Bilad al Sham, or Greater Syria. To invert this goal against the Jews, the KGB manufactured the concept of Greater Israel, which today has become one of the most widely disseminated falsehoods still heavily pushed by propagandists.
Pan-Islamism’s goal is to reunite all lands that were ever under Islamic rule into an Islamic State. Arab Nazism calls for subjugation or murder of Jews as vermin. Operation SIG brought together existing antisemitism with existing irredentist movements to advance its aim to turn world opinion against Israel.
13/
Back to SIG (The SIG Report - Cohen and Boyd)
ynetnews.com/articles/0,734…
In support of its goal, the KGB’s operation created joint ventures and recruited “thousands of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors. All had the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world.” (Pacepa, 2006)
Sound familiar?
Pacepa further wrote that “the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the US”. According to Pacepa, KGB chairman Yury Andropov told him, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
Pacepa recounted that by the time he left Romania in 1978, the Soviets “had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world... In addition, they spread throughout the Islamic world an Arabic translation of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy.”
Around 1967, the KGB’s proxy started creating media (films and printed material in various languages) to promote its new narrative of Jews as bogeymen:
1. The Jews (the Zionists) are responsible for antisemitism,
2. Zionist organizations worldwide engage in espionage,
3. Zionism is a Trojan Horse for Imperialism and Racism in the third world (Hazan, 2017, pp 151-152),
4. The Jews collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and
5. Holocaust Inversion, that is, Israelis as Nazis (Hazan, 2017, p. 151-155).
Back to SIG (The SIG Report - Cohen and Boyd)
ynetnews.com/articles/0,734…
In support of its goal, the KGB’s operation created joint ventures and recruited “thousands of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors. All had the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world.” (Pacepa, 2006)
Sound familiar?
Pacepa further wrote that “the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the US”. According to Pacepa, KGB chairman Yury Andropov told him, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.”
Pacepa recounted that by the time he left Romania in 1978, the Soviets “had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world... In addition, they spread throughout the Islamic world an Arabic translation of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy.”
Around 1967, the KGB’s proxy started creating media (films and printed material in various languages) to promote its new narrative of Jews as bogeymen:
1. The Jews (the Zionists) are responsible for antisemitism,
2. Zionist organizations worldwide engage in espionage,
3. Zionism is a Trojan Horse for Imperialism and Racism in the third world (Hazan, 2017, pp 151-152),
4. The Jews collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, and
5. Holocaust Inversion, that is, Israelis as Nazis (Hazan, 2017, p. 151-155).
14/
Distortion and Deception: The Fabrication of History
“History is full of … events that seem familiar, that elicited a sense of mild to deep understanding, but whose true historical context is different than we imagine”
Before the KGB created the PLO, and before the establishment of Israel as a nation/state of the Jews (with both Arab and Jewish citizens), the goal of the neighboring Arab nations was to absorb the land of Israel under Arab/Muslim control. The aspiration was to ethnically cleanse the region of its Jews and creating a Greater Syria, or expanding Egyptian and Syrian occupation of the area as part of a pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic empire.
In support of these territorial expansion strategies, in 1948 the armies of Egypt and Transjordan joined other Arab armies to invade the newly established State of Israel. Following this invasion, Egypt and Transjordan retained the lands they succeeded in conquering. Their war created two sets of refugees:
1) Some of the Arabs of the region who left their homes before or during the war, and 2) a larger number (almost all) of Jews ejected from their homes in Arab lands and Judea and Samaria. Under the guidance of the KGB, the idea of the Arab refugees as a distinct people took hold. In particular, the KGB generated a storyline that nowadays is often taken as factual:
1. The PLO, from its start, expressed the will of the Arabs living in the geographic region Palestine, rather than the will of Moscow to create divisions and overthrow democracy.
2. Palestine is not just the name for a geographic region, but the home for a distinct and indigenous people, the Palestinian Arabs. Its Jewish citizens are colonizers from some unidentified foreign country. (In contrast, the Jews consider their return to their homeland as self-emancipation, as witnessed in Leon Pinsker’s 1882 pamphlet “Auto-Emancipation.”)
3. Israel practices apartheid in which the Arab citizens of Israel are prevented from advancing.
4. Arab poverty in the territories controlled by Arabs is due to Israel, rather than to the Arab rulers Hamas and the PLO.
Distortion and Deception: The Fabrication of History
“History is full of … events that seem familiar, that elicited a sense of mild to deep understanding, but whose true historical context is different than we imagine”
Before the KGB created the PLO, and before the establishment of Israel as a nation/state of the Jews (with both Arab and Jewish citizens), the goal of the neighboring Arab nations was to absorb the land of Israel under Arab/Muslim control. The aspiration was to ethnically cleanse the region of its Jews and creating a Greater Syria, or expanding Egyptian and Syrian occupation of the area as part of a pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic empire.
In support of these territorial expansion strategies, in 1948 the armies of Egypt and Transjordan joined other Arab armies to invade the newly established State of Israel. Following this invasion, Egypt and Transjordan retained the lands they succeeded in conquering. Their war created two sets of refugees:
1) Some of the Arabs of the region who left their homes before or during the war, and 2) a larger number (almost all) of Jews ejected from their homes in Arab lands and Judea and Samaria. Under the guidance of the KGB, the idea of the Arab refugees as a distinct people took hold. In particular, the KGB generated a storyline that nowadays is often taken as factual:
1. The PLO, from its start, expressed the will of the Arabs living in the geographic region Palestine, rather than the will of Moscow to create divisions and overthrow democracy.
2. Palestine is not just the name for a geographic region, but the home for a distinct and indigenous people, the Palestinian Arabs. Its Jewish citizens are colonizers from some unidentified foreign country. (In contrast, the Jews consider their return to their homeland as self-emancipation, as witnessed in Leon Pinsker’s 1882 pamphlet “Auto-Emancipation.”)
3. Israel practices apartheid in which the Arab citizens of Israel are prevented from advancing.
4. Arab poverty in the territories controlled by Arabs is due to Israel, rather than to the Arab rulers Hamas and the PLO.
15/
THE PLO AS AN APPARATUS OF THE KGB
According to Pacepa, the “Palestinian Liberation Army” was contrived by the KGB, much like the KGB devised the Bolivian National Liberation Army. It created this Arab army in the early 1960s following the failure of the troops of various Arab states to destroy Israel. Pacepa (2006) stated that the KGB drafted the Palestinian National Charter and handpicked the 422 members of the PLO council that approved it.
Andropov told Pacepa, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel” (Pacepa, 2006). Likewise, both the Palestine National Covenant and Palestinian Constitution were drafted in Moscow.
In understanding the real purpose of the PLO, it’s useful to know that the 1964 charter, article 24, specifically demanded control of Israeli lands and expressly excluded lands already under Arab control, Judea and Samaria (written as the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) and Gaza.
The KGB masterfully established an anti-democratic and anti-Zionist sentiment via the Arabs. This was then disseminated throughout the UN and global NGOs including Amnesty International and many others. The KGB’s campaign was a historic success. It started with huge expenditure on personnel by the KGB. In his review of Pacepa and Rychicak’s book (2013), former CIA Director R. James Woolsey (2013) comments: “Gen. Pacepa writes that there were more in the Soviet bloc working on dezinformatsiya than in the armed forces and defense industry!”
Pacepa (2006) notes that with KGB financing, the PLO hijacked 82 planes in 1969 alone. PLO strongman Yasser Arafat (along with KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky) claims credit as the originator of airplane hijacking. Following Pacepa’s revelations of Arafat’s claim, Muammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat each offered US$1 million for the assassination of Pacepa.
According to the Mitrokhin Archives, the KGB singled out Yasser Arafat to help it in its campaign of disinformation. The KGB trained Arafat at “its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in 1969 decided to groom him as the future PLO leader” (Pacepa, 2003 and confirmed by a KGB document in the Mitrokhin Archives). In a February 1972 discussion with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, Andropov told Pacepa that the KGB would mold Arafat’s Marxist ideals into a rabid anti-Zionist.
Pacepa (2003) wrote, “In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American ‘imperial-Zionism’… It appealed to him [Arafat] so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, ‘imperial-Zionism’ was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.”
Using Arafat, the KGB also built on the Nazi antisemitism advanced by Mufti al-Husseini. The KGB “also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him [Arafat] - the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews”
Dalin (2005) writes, “the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp. Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to the Fatah. The Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi La Nation Européenne, also went on the Fatah payroll. Still another Belgian, the neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, recruited by the PLO… Arafat always revered al-Husseini”.
THE PLO AS AN APPARATUS OF THE KGB
According to Pacepa, the “Palestinian Liberation Army” was contrived by the KGB, much like the KGB devised the Bolivian National Liberation Army. It created this Arab army in the early 1960s following the failure of the troops of various Arab states to destroy Israel. Pacepa (2006) stated that the KGB drafted the Palestinian National Charter and handpicked the 422 members of the PLO council that approved it.
Andropov told Pacepa, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel” (Pacepa, 2006). Likewise, both the Palestine National Covenant and Palestinian Constitution were drafted in Moscow.
In understanding the real purpose of the PLO, it’s useful to know that the 1964 charter, article 24, specifically demanded control of Israeli lands and expressly excluded lands already under Arab control, Judea and Samaria (written as the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) and Gaza.
The KGB masterfully established an anti-democratic and anti-Zionist sentiment via the Arabs. This was then disseminated throughout the UN and global NGOs including Amnesty International and many others. The KGB’s campaign was a historic success. It started with huge expenditure on personnel by the KGB. In his review of Pacepa and Rychicak’s book (2013), former CIA Director R. James Woolsey (2013) comments: “Gen. Pacepa writes that there were more in the Soviet bloc working on dezinformatsiya than in the armed forces and defense industry!”
Pacepa (2006) notes that with KGB financing, the PLO hijacked 82 planes in 1969 alone. PLO strongman Yasser Arafat (along with KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky) claims credit as the originator of airplane hijacking. Following Pacepa’s revelations of Arafat’s claim, Muammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat each offered US$1 million for the assassination of Pacepa.
According to the Mitrokhin Archives, the KGB singled out Yasser Arafat to help it in its campaign of disinformation. The KGB trained Arafat at “its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in 1969 decided to groom him as the future PLO leader” (Pacepa, 2003 and confirmed by a KGB document in the Mitrokhin Archives). In a February 1972 discussion with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, Andropov told Pacepa that the KGB would mold Arafat’s Marxist ideals into a rabid anti-Zionist.
Pacepa (2003) wrote, “In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American ‘imperial-Zionism’… It appealed to him [Arafat] so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, ‘imperial-Zionism’ was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.”
Using Arafat, the KGB also built on the Nazi antisemitism advanced by Mufti al-Husseini. The KGB “also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him [Arafat] - the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews”
Dalin (2005) writes, “the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, an SS officer in the Mauthausen extermination camp. Another former Nazi, Johann Schuller, was found supplying arms to the Fatah. The Belgian Jean Tireault, secretary of the neo-Nazi La Nation Européenne, also went on the Fatah payroll. Still another Belgian, the neo-Nazi Karl van der Put, recruited by the PLO… Arafat always revered al-Husseini”.
16/ (Cont.)
Following Arafat’s death, control of the PLO passed to another KGB operative, Mahmoud Abbas (Mitrokhin, 1992), the current leader of the Palestinian Authority. The Mitrokhin documents note that the KGB began to recruit Abbas around 1979 when he arrived in Moscow for graduate studies. While there, he wrote as his dissertation “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, a conspiracy theory about the Holocaust that included accusations that the Jews helped Hitler.
To this day, as evidenced even in video recordings, Abbas continues to espouse this conspiracy theory. In 2018 he said in Arabic that while the Holocaust did happen, it was caused not by antisemites but rather by the Jews. His speech added that Jews did not seek to create Israel and that Jews have no connection to the Land of Israel (“Abbas says Jews’ behavior, not anti-Semitism, caused the Holocaust,” 2018).
The above evidence shows that the KGB, not the Palestinian people, chose Arafat and Abbas. Arafat used his autocracy for personal gain. During Arafat’s lifetime, he diverted between $1 billion to $3 billion to his personal accounts.
Dana (2015) writes that corruption by the PLO continues; as many as 81% of the Palestinians view Palestinian Authority institutions as corrupt. Democratically elected Abbas is now in the 15th year of his 4-year term.
Following Arafat’s death, control of the PLO passed to another KGB operative, Mahmoud Abbas (Mitrokhin, 1992), the current leader of the Palestinian Authority. The Mitrokhin documents note that the KGB began to recruit Abbas around 1979 when he arrived in Moscow for graduate studies. While there, he wrote as his dissertation “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”, a conspiracy theory about the Holocaust that included accusations that the Jews helped Hitler.
To this day, as evidenced even in video recordings, Abbas continues to espouse this conspiracy theory. In 2018 he said in Arabic that while the Holocaust did happen, it was caused not by antisemites but rather by the Jews. His speech added that Jews did not seek to create Israel and that Jews have no connection to the Land of Israel (“Abbas says Jews’ behavior, not anti-Semitism, caused the Holocaust,” 2018).
The above evidence shows that the KGB, not the Palestinian people, chose Arafat and Abbas. Arafat used his autocracy for personal gain. During Arafat’s lifetime, he diverted between $1 billion to $3 billion to his personal accounts.
Dana (2015) writes that corruption by the PLO continues; as many as 81% of the Palestinians view Palestinian Authority institutions as corrupt. Democratically elected Abbas is now in the 15th year of his 4-year term.
17/
The Conception of Palestine
Part of the operation was to redefine who is a Palestinian, claiming the land belongs to only the Arabs and denying Jewish historical and religious attachment to Israel.
In 1919, after the Ottoman-Turks lost WWI, Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire. In 1920, and finalized in 1922, the League of Nations created the “Mandate for Palestine,” which laid down the legal right of Jews to settle anywhere in western Palestine.
In 1922, the British split the geographic region known as the British Mandate for Palestine in two. The Arab Palestine territory to the west of the Jordan river was named Trans-Jordan.
The borders of many modern Arab countries in the region are the result of the British and French carving up the former Ottoman Empire with borders along map meridians rather than by indigenous populations, geographic logic, or sustainability. This simplistic concoction of borders served the needs of the British and French, but in doing so created artificial nationalities that never existed before: the Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, and Iraqis, according to Dawisha in his book “Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century: From Triumph to Despair”. Much of today’s conflicts in the Middle East can be attributed to this approach. For example, the Kurdish people were split across three of these newly created political entities and thus denied their own homeland.
During the 19 years that Trans-Jordan occupied the territories west of the Jordan river and until recently, no Arab state was ever created, nor a separate state for its Arab residents.
Bassam Tawil, a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East, notes that many Palestinian officials and media outlets refer to Israel as “occupied Palestine… For them, all Jews are settlers and colonizers, and all cities inside Israel -- Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Eilat, as well as Lod, the hometown of Rina [a 17-year-old Jewish girl killed by an Arab terrorist] are “occupied. In the eyes of Palestinians, in fact all of Israel is “occupied” and a “settlement.” (Tawil, 2019a).
That new anti-Israel narrative started by talking about the Arabs of the Palestinian region as a distinct people, the Palestinians, even though these Arabs failed to meet the commonly held criteria of peoplehood. Peoplehood typically is understood to be a group of people who possess distinctness in language, religion, history, culture, historical sovereignty, national literature, and such. For example, the Kurds, Armenians, Catalonians, Bangladeshis, Slovakians, Slovenes, and Jews are peoples.
The uniqueness of Arab Palestinians needed to be constructed from scratch since they lacked the criteria required for peoplehood, but this creation was and is essential to claim the land of Israel as the homeland for Arabs alone as Palestinians.
The Conception of Palestine
Part of the operation was to redefine who is a Palestinian, claiming the land belongs to only the Arabs and denying Jewish historical and religious attachment to Israel.
In 1919, after the Ottoman-Turks lost WWI, Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire. In 1920, and finalized in 1922, the League of Nations created the “Mandate for Palestine,” which laid down the legal right of Jews to settle anywhere in western Palestine.
In 1922, the British split the geographic region known as the British Mandate for Palestine in two. The Arab Palestine territory to the west of the Jordan river was named Trans-Jordan.
The borders of many modern Arab countries in the region are the result of the British and French carving up the former Ottoman Empire with borders along map meridians rather than by indigenous populations, geographic logic, or sustainability. This simplistic concoction of borders served the needs of the British and French, but in doing so created artificial nationalities that never existed before: the Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, and Iraqis, according to Dawisha in his book “Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century: From Triumph to Despair”. Much of today’s conflicts in the Middle East can be attributed to this approach. For example, the Kurdish people were split across three of these newly created political entities and thus denied their own homeland.
During the 19 years that Trans-Jordan occupied the territories west of the Jordan river and until recently, no Arab state was ever created, nor a separate state for its Arab residents.
Bassam Tawil, a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East, notes that many Palestinian officials and media outlets refer to Israel as “occupied Palestine… For them, all Jews are settlers and colonizers, and all cities inside Israel -- Tel Aviv, Haifa, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Eilat, as well as Lod, the hometown of Rina [a 17-year-old Jewish girl killed by an Arab terrorist] are “occupied. In the eyes of Palestinians, in fact all of Israel is “occupied” and a “settlement.” (Tawil, 2019a).
That new anti-Israel narrative started by talking about the Arabs of the Palestinian region as a distinct people, the Palestinians, even though these Arabs failed to meet the commonly held criteria of peoplehood. Peoplehood typically is understood to be a group of people who possess distinctness in language, religion, history, culture, historical sovereignty, national literature, and such. For example, the Kurds, Armenians, Catalonians, Bangladeshis, Slovakians, Slovenes, and Jews are peoples.
The uniqueness of Arab Palestinians needed to be constructed from scratch since they lacked the criteria required for peoplehood, but this creation was and is essential to claim the land of Israel as the homeland for Arabs alone as Palestinians.
18/ (Cont.)
“Historically, the Palestinian ‘desire for statehood’ and ‘need for liberation’ was invented in large part by the Soviet Union,” (Christopher Fish writing in the Stanford Review 2008). He writes, “Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, a historical fabrication born out of a communist thirst for expansion and an Arab resentment of the existence of Israel.”
The Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine identified themselves as people of Greater Syria. This ambition of creating Greater Syria remains today.
While some Arab families (like the Jews) had lived in the pre-British Mandate Palestine for generations, most were immigrants from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many forcibly relocated by their Islamic Ottoman rulers, some as punishment.
Nonetheless, the current Chairman of the PLO (and President of the Palestinian Authority) asserted without evidence that the current Arab inhabitants of the area are the descendants of the Canaanites, one of the peoples who lived in the area about 5,000 years ago (“Palestinian Authority President Abbas at Jalazone Refugee Camp,” 2019). Even more damning for Abbas’s assertion are genetic studies published in the American Journal of Human Genetics which show that present-day Lebanese, not the Arabs under Abbas’s control, descended from the ancient Canaanites.
The KGB’s creation of a new, separate identity for the Arabs living in the western portion of British Mandate Palestine as a distinct and ancient people has been met with considerable skepticism among Arabs.
In 1946, Prof. Philip K. Hitti, author of the book “The Arabs,” testified at the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history”.
In 1956, Ahmad Shukeiri, a founder of the PLO, echoed this in his testimony before the UN Security Council in his capacity as Ambassador of the Arab League, “Such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but the southern portion of Greater Syria. It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria” (Behan, 2018).
In 2012, Palestinian Minister Fathi Hammad said, “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Damietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims” Yasser Arafat himself was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt.
Columbia history professor Rashid Khalidi, an expert on Palestinian identity, would acknowledge that before World War I “Palestine” did not exist in Arab consciousness. Zionist land development served as a magnet for Arabs from Middle Eastern countries who came to Palestine in search of a better life and eventually became “Palestinians.”
Creating a national identity of Palestinian Arabs as a pre-existing people required inventing a post-truth history. Nazmi Al-Ju’beh, associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University, acknowledged this in 2008 when he wrote that Arab Palestinian identity was invented solely to destroy Israel. He writes, “There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict” (Al-Ju’beh, 2008). Khalidi (1997) writes similarly.
“Historically, the Palestinian ‘desire for statehood’ and ‘need for liberation’ was invented in large part by the Soviet Union,” (Christopher Fish writing in the Stanford Review 2008). He writes, “Palestinian nationalism is, therefore, a historical fabrication born out of a communist thirst for expansion and an Arab resentment of the existence of Israel.”
The Arabs living in the British Mandate of Palestine identified themselves as people of Greater Syria. This ambition of creating Greater Syria remains today.
While some Arab families (like the Jews) had lived in the pre-British Mandate Palestine for generations, most were immigrants from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, many forcibly relocated by their Islamic Ottoman rulers, some as punishment.
Nonetheless, the current Chairman of the PLO (and President of the Palestinian Authority) asserted without evidence that the current Arab inhabitants of the area are the descendants of the Canaanites, one of the peoples who lived in the area about 5,000 years ago (“Palestinian Authority President Abbas at Jalazone Refugee Camp,” 2019). Even more damning for Abbas’s assertion are genetic studies published in the American Journal of Human Genetics which show that present-day Lebanese, not the Arabs under Abbas’s control, descended from the ancient Canaanites.
The KGB’s creation of a new, separate identity for the Arabs living in the western portion of British Mandate Palestine as a distinct and ancient people has been met with considerable skepticism among Arabs.
In 1946, Prof. Philip K. Hitti, author of the book “The Arabs,” testified at the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history”.
In 1956, Ahmad Shukeiri, a founder of the PLO, echoed this in his testimony before the UN Security Council in his capacity as Ambassador of the Arab League, “Such a creature as Palestine does not exist at all. This land is nothing but the southern portion of Greater Syria. It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria” (Behan, 2018).
In 2012, Palestinian Minister Fathi Hammad said, “Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians, and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Damietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims” Yasser Arafat himself was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt.
Columbia history professor Rashid Khalidi, an expert on Palestinian identity, would acknowledge that before World War I “Palestine” did not exist in Arab consciousness. Zionist land development served as a magnet for Arabs from Middle Eastern countries who came to Palestine in search of a better life and eventually became “Palestinians.”
Creating a national identity of Palestinian Arabs as a pre-existing people required inventing a post-truth history. Nazmi Al-Ju’beh, associate professor of history and archaeology at Birzeit University, acknowledged this in 2008 when he wrote that Arab Palestinian identity was invented solely to destroy Israel. He writes, “There is no way to understand this identity apart from the conflict” (Al-Ju’beh, 2008). Khalidi (1997) writes similarly.
19/
Lying and the Repetition of the Lie
The essence of disinformation is the willingness to lie and get others to spread the lie.
Everything above dealt with the fake narrative that was devised by the KGB. We’re now going to focus on the additional tactics used in Operation SIG and by the PLO: Creating and disseminating lies, using “useful idiots” and “willing collaborators” to repeat the lie, and infiltrating organizations to be seen as trustworthy.
David Meir-Levi (2007b) wrote: “Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing leftwing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the propaganda line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation. Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation : ‘Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.’”
Fish (2008) quotes advice from Algerian Minister of Information Muhammed Yazid to Yasser Arafat: “wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab States, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees. Instead present the Palestinian struggle as one for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.”
The KGB and other communist leaders continued to influence, if not control, the PLO. Pacepa (2003) tells that “in March 1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington.” He writes that Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu instructed Arafat to pretend that he would break with terrorism and recognize Israel and say this over and over, a fake offering of the olive branch.
Most Westerners mistakenly believe that when the PLO and Hamas refer to “occupied lands” they mean the territories that Arab nations lost to Israel during their 1967 war. However, it is clear from the various Palestinian Arab documents and speeches that what the Palestinian Arab leadership refers to as “occupied land” is the entirety of Israel, that is, the destruction of Israel.
Deceiving the West works as a tactic in changing public opinion, giving the illusion that Arafat was willing to become a statesman, offering peace with the Jewish State in exchange for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to create a homeland for the Arab Palestinian. Israel, indeed, handed control of territory to the PLO in return for the promise of peace. Two years after Israel signed and complied with the Oslo accords, it became clear that Arafat’s commitment was a tactical lie. Arab terrorism against Jews increased under Palestinian semi-autonomy. The number of Israelis murdered by Arab terrorists increased by 73%. Bedein (2019) writes, “People do not generally know that the PA, the PLO administrative arm, has enacted an unprecedented ordinance to provide an automatic gratuity – for life – for anyone who murders a Jew. This is Abbas’s Pay-to-slay.”
Lying is effective, particularly when the lie is repeated. Spinny (2017) notes that societal collective memories may produce false memories from repeated lies.
Even outrageous lying is effective not only because some who hear it will believe it, but because useful idiots, willing collaborators, journalists, and anti-Israel activists echo the lies to each other.
Lying and the Repetition of the Lie
The essence of disinformation is the willingness to lie and get others to spread the lie.
Everything above dealt with the fake narrative that was devised by the KGB. We’re now going to focus on the additional tactics used in Operation SIG and by the PLO: Creating and disseminating lies, using “useful idiots” and “willing collaborators” to repeat the lie, and infiltrating organizations to be seen as trustworthy.
David Meir-Levi (2007b) wrote: “Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing leftwing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the propaganda line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation. Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation : ‘Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.’”
Fish (2008) quotes advice from Algerian Minister of Information Muhammed Yazid to Yasser Arafat: “wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab States, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees. Instead present the Palestinian struggle as one for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.”
The KGB and other communist leaders continued to influence, if not control, the PLO. Pacepa (2003) tells that “in March 1978, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington.” He writes that Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu instructed Arafat to pretend that he would break with terrorism and recognize Israel and say this over and over, a fake offering of the olive branch.
Most Westerners mistakenly believe that when the PLO and Hamas refer to “occupied lands” they mean the territories that Arab nations lost to Israel during their 1967 war. However, it is clear from the various Palestinian Arab documents and speeches that what the Palestinian Arab leadership refers to as “occupied land” is the entirety of Israel, that is, the destruction of Israel.
Deceiving the West works as a tactic in changing public opinion, giving the illusion that Arafat was willing to become a statesman, offering peace with the Jewish State in exchange for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to create a homeland for the Arab Palestinian. Israel, indeed, handed control of territory to the PLO in return for the promise of peace. Two years after Israel signed and complied with the Oslo accords, it became clear that Arafat’s commitment was a tactical lie. Arab terrorism against Jews increased under Palestinian semi-autonomy. The number of Israelis murdered by Arab terrorists increased by 73%. Bedein (2019) writes, “People do not generally know that the PA, the PLO administrative arm, has enacted an unprecedented ordinance to provide an automatic gratuity – for life – for anyone who murders a Jew. This is Abbas’s Pay-to-slay.”
Lying is effective, particularly when the lie is repeated. Spinny (2017) notes that societal collective memories may produce false memories from repeated lies.
Even outrageous lying is effective not only because some who hear it will believe it, but because useful idiots, willing collaborators, journalists, and anti-Israel activists echo the lies to each other.
20/
The Useful Idiots
Lying is effective for deception; getting others to spread the lie serves as a force multiplier. Another tactic of deception employed by the KGB to weaken or destroy Israel is by exploiting the “Useful Idiot.” This term, attributed to Vladimir Lenin, refers to recruiting a useful pawn, one who is not aware of being manipulated, to disseminate one’s propaganda.
The device works well with young, impressionable youth looking for a cause to support. Rachel Corrie, for example, died standing in front of a bulldozer clearing out the tunnels used by terrorists to attack Israeli civilians from Gaza. Her death became a huge propaganda success. These and other elements of cognitive hacking (ways to manipulate perception) are explored in Cybenko, Giani, and Thompson (2002).
A report issued by the research institute Data and Society (Donovan & Friedberg, 2019) identifies the tools and tactics the PLO and others use to employ well-meaning journalists and others to disseminate misleading and outright false information.
One technique to influence reporters involves planting a fake story that looks like legitimate news in some friendly outlet (such as RT or Aljazeera). “Then they (the Russians) use fake accounts to amplify the story, repeatedly tweeting it, making it appear like it is being shared by real people, making it ‘trend’, until someone like a journalist, or maybe a politician, shares it and it goes into the mainstream”.
Other times, reporters needing a news report to file, collaborate with their Arab handlers who arrange for an event. For example, Tuvia Tenenbom (2015a) posed in the territories as a naïve German reporter and discovered how the Palestinian Authority organizes fake news events for naïve reporters who show up needing to file a story. His PA handler drove him to a location and asked him to document for his newspaper, an event they staged for him.
Another technique Tenenbom (2015b) discovered involves locating those already convinced that Jews are evil. He writes that NGOs use their money to “implant hate in the heart of the Palestinian against the Jew… They (the NGOs) believe to the core of their being that the Jews are bad”. These NGOs bring in naïve European youth to “to catch the Jew” (the title of his book). Gerstenfeld (2015) provides details on how NGOs provide economic and political support to collaborate with those who produce fake anti-Israel propaganda. At other times, the tactic is to create an event. Hamas, for example, massed thousands of civilians intermixed with their armed soldiers to cross into Israel. They use the resultant deaths in their propaganda war, taking the spotlight off Hamas’s failure to build an economy for those it governs. NGO Monitor publishes descriptions of the funding and activities of NGOs in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Robert Cialdini (2007) notes that an effective way to influence and persuade people is by reciprocation, i.e I will march in your parade if you march in mine. We seek out informational sources from like-minded people. In the US, antisemites joined special interest groups, even ones with contrary viewpoints, to sway those groups toward antisemitism (Engel, 2019). Lipstadt (2019, p. 195) wrote, “Using a language of shared oppression, progressive groups have made Israel part of the matrix of their concerns.”
The Useful Idiots
Lying is effective for deception; getting others to spread the lie serves as a force multiplier. Another tactic of deception employed by the KGB to weaken or destroy Israel is by exploiting the “Useful Idiot.” This term, attributed to Vladimir Lenin, refers to recruiting a useful pawn, one who is not aware of being manipulated, to disseminate one’s propaganda.
The device works well with young, impressionable youth looking for a cause to support. Rachel Corrie, for example, died standing in front of a bulldozer clearing out the tunnels used by terrorists to attack Israeli civilians from Gaza. Her death became a huge propaganda success. These and other elements of cognitive hacking (ways to manipulate perception) are explored in Cybenko, Giani, and Thompson (2002).
A report issued by the research institute Data and Society (Donovan & Friedberg, 2019) identifies the tools and tactics the PLO and others use to employ well-meaning journalists and others to disseminate misleading and outright false information.
One technique to influence reporters involves planting a fake story that looks like legitimate news in some friendly outlet (such as RT or Aljazeera). “Then they (the Russians) use fake accounts to amplify the story, repeatedly tweeting it, making it appear like it is being shared by real people, making it ‘trend’, until someone like a journalist, or maybe a politician, shares it and it goes into the mainstream”.
Other times, reporters needing a news report to file, collaborate with their Arab handlers who arrange for an event. For example, Tuvia Tenenbom (2015a) posed in the territories as a naïve German reporter and discovered how the Palestinian Authority organizes fake news events for naïve reporters who show up needing to file a story. His PA handler drove him to a location and asked him to document for his newspaper, an event they staged for him.
Another technique Tenenbom (2015b) discovered involves locating those already convinced that Jews are evil. He writes that NGOs use their money to “implant hate in the heart of the Palestinian against the Jew… They (the NGOs) believe to the core of their being that the Jews are bad”. These NGOs bring in naïve European youth to “to catch the Jew” (the title of his book). Gerstenfeld (2015) provides details on how NGOs provide economic and political support to collaborate with those who produce fake anti-Israel propaganda. At other times, the tactic is to create an event. Hamas, for example, massed thousands of civilians intermixed with their armed soldiers to cross into Israel. They use the resultant deaths in their propaganda war, taking the spotlight off Hamas’s failure to build an economy for those it governs. NGO Monitor publishes descriptions of the funding and activities of NGOs in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Robert Cialdini (2007) notes that an effective way to influence and persuade people is by reciprocation, i.e I will march in your parade if you march in mine. We seek out informational sources from like-minded people. In the US, antisemites joined special interest groups, even ones with contrary viewpoints, to sway those groups toward antisemitism (Engel, 2019). Lipstadt (2019, p. 195) wrote, “Using a language of shared oppression, progressive groups have made Israel part of the matrix of their concerns.”
21/
The UN Takes the Stage
2021-2025.state.gov/wp-content/upl…
(GEC Special Report 2024)
At the same time as domestic antisemitic media coverage surged in the Soviet Union to criticize the emigration of Jews from the country to Israel, a controversial draft resolution emerged in the Third Committee of the UN’s General Assembly. In 1975, resolution 3379 on the “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination” appeared aimed at determining “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The Kremlin and Andropov’s KGB had attempted to pass this resolution originally in 1965, but failed, so were eager to throw the Soviet Union’s weight behind the resolution this time, first and foremost because the KGB was the ghost writer and secret patron of its creation.
Despite not formally sponsoring the initial draft of resolution 3379, the USSR, especially Andropov’s KGB, worked relentlessly to lay the groundwork for influencing the developing world to adopt the resolution and its core antisemitic tenet even before the draft existed. Per Pacepa, by 1975 the “KGB community” had “disseminated hundreds of anti-American and antisemitic cartoons around UN headquarters in New York” to such an extent that the DIE “had to assign a graphics expert to its station in New York. Pacepa claims Andropov used to extol the effectiveness of cartoons in convincing audiences in the developing world. When a group led by Arab missions to the UN formally introduced the resolution, the stage already had been set by the KGB and its Soviet bloc allies.
Resolution 3379 narrowly passed on November 10, 1975, with 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstaining. The Kremlin considered the resolution’s passing a major diplomatic victory and a demonstration of the Soviet Union’s support for Arab countries. Soviet propaganda outlets across the USSR, some of which still exist in Russia today, hailed the resolution in a slew of antisemitic articles comparing Zionism to fascism and Hitler’s Third Reich as well as channeling the essence of The Protocols. According to Israeli scholar Baruch A. Hazan, in the mid-1970s, “virtually all instruments of international propaganda had been mobilized to battle Zionism.” The Soviet media spread disinformation equating Zionism with Nazism and Israeli soldiers with Nazis, dismissing acts of antisemitism as Zionist “provocations,” and portraying Zionists as spies.
Scholar of antisemitism William Korey also documented an extensive chronology of virulently antisemitic Soviet state media articles meant to demonize Zionism in the late 1970s in his book Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism.
At the urging of President George H.W. Bush, the UN General Assembly ultimately voted to repeal resolution 3379 on December 16, 1991. Many newly emerged countries from the collapsed Communist bloc as well as the disintegrating Soviet Union voted in favor of the repeal.
However, during the 2001 UN Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, the event demonstrated a stark illustration of the ease with which progressive antizionism devolves into dehumanization of the Jews. The UN attempted to use this conference to once again bring back Resolution 3379 under pressure by the Arab lobby.
In Durban, self-described anti-racists, including international NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, stood by as Jewish participants were harassed and prevented from speaking. Booths displayed posters picturing Jews with hooked noses and bloodied hands, and ones equating Zionism with Nazism (Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference, 2002)
Hundreds of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed, along with flyers bearing Hitler’s photo, captioned “What if I had won?” What began with a demonization of Israel quickly turned into a demonization of “Jews of the entire world,” who were portrayed as “accomplices of this evil regime.” (Ibit)
The UN Takes the Stage
2021-2025.state.gov/wp-content/upl…
(GEC Special Report 2024)
At the same time as domestic antisemitic media coverage surged in the Soviet Union to criticize the emigration of Jews from the country to Israel, a controversial draft resolution emerged in the Third Committee of the UN’s General Assembly. In 1975, resolution 3379 on the “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination” appeared aimed at determining “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The Kremlin and Andropov’s KGB had attempted to pass this resolution originally in 1965, but failed, so were eager to throw the Soviet Union’s weight behind the resolution this time, first and foremost because the KGB was the ghost writer and secret patron of its creation.
Despite not formally sponsoring the initial draft of resolution 3379, the USSR, especially Andropov’s KGB, worked relentlessly to lay the groundwork for influencing the developing world to adopt the resolution and its core antisemitic tenet even before the draft existed. Per Pacepa, by 1975 the “KGB community” had “disseminated hundreds of anti-American and antisemitic cartoons around UN headquarters in New York” to such an extent that the DIE “had to assign a graphics expert to its station in New York. Pacepa claims Andropov used to extol the effectiveness of cartoons in convincing audiences in the developing world. When a group led by Arab missions to the UN formally introduced the resolution, the stage already had been set by the KGB and its Soviet bloc allies.
Resolution 3379 narrowly passed on November 10, 1975, with 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstaining. The Kremlin considered the resolution’s passing a major diplomatic victory and a demonstration of the Soviet Union’s support for Arab countries. Soviet propaganda outlets across the USSR, some of which still exist in Russia today, hailed the resolution in a slew of antisemitic articles comparing Zionism to fascism and Hitler’s Third Reich as well as channeling the essence of The Protocols. According to Israeli scholar Baruch A. Hazan, in the mid-1970s, “virtually all instruments of international propaganda had been mobilized to battle Zionism.” The Soviet media spread disinformation equating Zionism with Nazism and Israeli soldiers with Nazis, dismissing acts of antisemitism as Zionist “provocations,” and portraying Zionists as spies.
Scholar of antisemitism William Korey also documented an extensive chronology of virulently antisemitic Soviet state media articles meant to demonize Zionism in the late 1970s in his book Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism.
At the urging of President George H.W. Bush, the UN General Assembly ultimately voted to repeal resolution 3379 on December 16, 1991. Many newly emerged countries from the collapsed Communist bloc as well as the disintegrating Soviet Union voted in favor of the repeal.
However, during the 2001 UN Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, the event demonstrated a stark illustration of the ease with which progressive antizionism devolves into dehumanization of the Jews. The UN attempted to use this conference to once again bring back Resolution 3379 under pressure by the Arab lobby.
In Durban, self-described anti-racists, including international NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, stood by as Jewish participants were harassed and prevented from speaking. Booths displayed posters picturing Jews with hooked noses and bloodied hands, and ones equating Zionism with Nazism (Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference, 2002)
Hundreds of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed, along with flyers bearing Hitler’s photo, captioned “What if I had won?” What began with a demonization of Israel quickly turned into a demonization of “Jews of the entire world,” who were portrayed as “accomplices of this evil regime.” (Ibit)
22/
The Left Wing
(The Tabarovsky Paper)
If the line separating antizionism and antisemitism is as clear as the left insists, why do some of its most prominent activists, politicians, and intellectuals cross it so often? Because the form of antizionism they choose to engage is, in fact, grounded in antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Despite the fact that non-antisemitic criticism of Israel and Zionism is possible, and countless people, including Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, engage in it daily, parts of the left which have become progressively more influential have opted for a worldview, hermeneutic logic, and rhetorical devices that are not just similar to but founded in the deadly tropes of the antisemitic theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theory. It is a style of antizionism that was formulated and infused into the global hard-left discourse by the Soviet Union through a massive international propaganda campaign, which it ran between 1967 and approximately 1988, Operation SIG. The campaign then continued again from 1995 with the creation of the FSB.
That campaign presented Zionism in demonizing, conspiracist terms and associated Israel with all of humanity’s greatest evils such as racism, settler colonialism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism, and apartheid. It asserted that Zionists controlled the world’s finances, politics, and media. It routinely invented blood libel-like stories about Israelis. It claimed that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and were complicit in the Holocaust, that they incited antisemitism and were themselves antisemitic, and that they complained about antisemitism in order to smear the left. It inverted the Holocaust, presenting Israelis as the Nazis.
(Tabarovsky, 2018)
In resurrecting these age-old deadly fantasies for the global left, it drew on far-right conspiracy theories, including those peddled by the Nazis in the Arab states. Some of the most important ideologues of this campaign held personal antisemitic views.
The adoption of these tropes by the left began in the 1970s. Michael Billig, a scholar of conspiracy theory, observed that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the British anti Zionist hard left deployed openly antisemitic tropes and noted that one in particular, which equated Zionism with Nazism, had Soviet origins. In fact, every anti Zionist trope that he quoted from the British left wing was based on portions of Soviet conspiratorial anti Zionist discourse (M Billig, “Anti-Semitic Themes and the British Far Left, 1984)
Another scholar of conspiracy theory, Jovan Byford, notes that in the 1970s and the 1980s, “the far-left in Britain and on the continent viewed Middle Eastern politics almost exclusively through the prism of Soviet anti Zionism.” He classified this as conspiracy theory, noting that Soviet anti Zionism patterns persist today both “in the anti-Israel propaganda in the Middle East” and, slightly sanitized, “in the discourse of a segment of the contemporary liberal and leftist intelligentsia.” (Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories, 2011)
Perhaps the most trenchant critique of leftwing antisemitism at the time came from a committed British socialist, Steve Cohen. Cohen was no Zionist. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, he said he sat down to write a condemnation, went “to the left press as source material, and became horrified by what I was reading.” In 1984 he published his influential book That’s Funny - You Don’t Look Antisemitic, dissecting his left-wing comrades’ conspiratorial antisemitic discourse posing as criticism of Israel. Among other things, he referred to a similarity between the British left’s anti Zionist rhetoric and that propagated by the Soviets at the time. More recently, Daniel Randall, also a British socialist, had offered a detailed analysis tracing contemporary far-left antisemitic anti Zionism back to the Soviet anti Zionist campaigns and has issued an urgent appeal to abandon this legacy (Steve Cohen, 2005)
The Left Wing
(The Tabarovsky Paper)
If the line separating antizionism and antisemitism is as clear as the left insists, why do some of its most prominent activists, politicians, and intellectuals cross it so often? Because the form of antizionism they choose to engage is, in fact, grounded in antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Despite the fact that non-antisemitic criticism of Israel and Zionism is possible, and countless people, including Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, engage in it daily, parts of the left which have become progressively more influential have opted for a worldview, hermeneutic logic, and rhetorical devices that are not just similar to but founded in the deadly tropes of the antisemitic theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theory. It is a style of antizionism that was formulated and infused into the global hard-left discourse by the Soviet Union through a massive international propaganda campaign, which it ran between 1967 and approximately 1988, Operation SIG. The campaign then continued again from 1995 with the creation of the FSB.
That campaign presented Zionism in demonizing, conspiracist terms and associated Israel with all of humanity’s greatest evils such as racism, settler colonialism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism, and apartheid. It asserted that Zionists controlled the world’s finances, politics, and media. It routinely invented blood libel-like stories about Israelis. It claimed that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis and were complicit in the Holocaust, that they incited antisemitism and were themselves antisemitic, and that they complained about antisemitism in order to smear the left. It inverted the Holocaust, presenting Israelis as the Nazis.
(Tabarovsky, 2018)
In resurrecting these age-old deadly fantasies for the global left, it drew on far-right conspiracy theories, including those peddled by the Nazis in the Arab states. Some of the most important ideologues of this campaign held personal antisemitic views.
The adoption of these tropes by the left began in the 1970s. Michael Billig, a scholar of conspiracy theory, observed that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the British anti Zionist hard left deployed openly antisemitic tropes and noted that one in particular, which equated Zionism with Nazism, had Soviet origins. In fact, every anti Zionist trope that he quoted from the British left wing was based on portions of Soviet conspiratorial anti Zionist discourse (M Billig, “Anti-Semitic Themes and the British Far Left, 1984)
Another scholar of conspiracy theory, Jovan Byford, notes that in the 1970s and the 1980s, “the far-left in Britain and on the continent viewed Middle Eastern politics almost exclusively through the prism of Soviet anti Zionism.” He classified this as conspiracy theory, noting that Soviet anti Zionism patterns persist today both “in the anti-Israel propaganda in the Middle East” and, slightly sanitized, “in the discourse of a segment of the contemporary liberal and leftist intelligentsia.” (Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories, 2011)
Perhaps the most trenchant critique of leftwing antisemitism at the time came from a committed British socialist, Steve Cohen. Cohen was no Zionist. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, he said he sat down to write a condemnation, went “to the left press as source material, and became horrified by what I was reading.” In 1984 he published his influential book That’s Funny - You Don’t Look Antisemitic, dissecting his left-wing comrades’ conspiratorial antisemitic discourse posing as criticism of Israel. Among other things, he referred to a similarity between the British left’s anti Zionist rhetoric and that propagated by the Soviets at the time. More recently, Daniel Randall, also a British socialist, had offered a detailed analysis tracing contemporary far-left antisemitic anti Zionism back to the Soviet anti Zionist campaigns and has issued an urgent appeal to abandon this legacy (Steve Cohen, 2005)
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The Paris Trial
On April 24, 1973, a Paris court indicted forty three-year-old Robert Legagneux, a senior functionary in the French Communist Party and the Soviet embassy employee in charge of its French language weekly publication URSS, “for inciting racial hatred and violence.” (Nan Robertson, “Paris Court Rules Reds Defamed Jews,” New York Times, April 25, 1973)
The problem arose with the publication of an article titled “The School of Obscurantism,” originally carried by the Soviet news agency Novosti, in URSS in September of 1972. Testifying in court, Jacob Kaplan, the Grand Rabbi of France who survived the Nazi occupation and stood against Vichy government’s treatment of Jews, stated that the article was “the most violently antisemitic statement published in France since the end of Nazism.”
In its content and rhetorical approach, the article was a typical representative of the anti Zionist smear genre that had blossomed in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Six Day War. It opened by drawing a parallel between the false 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin by the paramilitary troops of Irgun and Lehi and the 1968 Song Mi massacre of Vietnamese civilians by the American military, a misleading analogy that did little to explicate and much to anger. It then equated Israel with Nazi Germany by accusing it of treating the Muslim citizens in the “occupied Arab lands of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan” the same way that Nazi Germany had treated Jews, another spurious equation, which is today known as Holocaust inversion. Today, wrote M. Zandenberg, the author of the piece, it was the Jews who were throwing Arabs “into ghettos, behind the barbed wire of concentration camps.” (Ibit)
All the antisemitic tropes have been debunked by others in our own time. The articles provided enough material for LICRA and Rencontres to sue for racial defamation and incitement to discrimination, hatred, or racial violence. Since the Soviet embassy enjoyed diplomatic immunity, the plaintiffs sued Legagneux, who oversaw the publication of the U.R.S.S. Only the first article, which was published by a French-language magazine domiciled in France, figured in the proceedings.(Ibit)
The trial attracted considerable media attention. The plaintiffs drew on an illustrious group of witnesses, including the aforementioned Grand Rabbi of France and René Cassin, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning French jurist who had been a driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Emanuel Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism: The Paris Trial, p16-17, 1974).
But the high point of the trial came when Grigory Svirsky, a Soviet writer living in Israel, testified about the source of Zandenberg’s article. It turned out that Zandenberg borrowed entire passages, typos included, from a 1906 pamphlet called The Jewish Question… or the Impossibility of Granting Full Rights to Jews, authored by S. Rossov, a member of the ultra-nationalist, antisemitic Black Hundreds movement, which incited pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The only difference between “The School of Obscurantism” and the 1906 pamphlet was that whenever the former used the word “Jew,” the latter used the word “Zionist.” (Emanuel Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism: The Paris Trial, p18-22, 1974)
Rossov’s source of supposed religious quotes in his pamphlet is important. He had lifted them from translations by Alexei Shmakov, one of the most prominent Russian Black Hundredists who dedicated his life to unmasking the Jewish conspiracy that he believed was strangling Russia.
Nothing could be more embarrassing for the Soviet Union, which positioned itself as the vanguard of the global struggle against racism, than to be caught spreading right-wing, racist, antisemitic propaganda in Europe. Evidently recognizing that it had no case, and wishing for it all to go away, the defense called no witnesses.
The Paris Trial
On April 24, 1973, a Paris court indicted forty three-year-old Robert Legagneux, a senior functionary in the French Communist Party and the Soviet embassy employee in charge of its French language weekly publication URSS, “for inciting racial hatred and violence.” (Nan Robertson, “Paris Court Rules Reds Defamed Jews,” New York Times, April 25, 1973)
The problem arose with the publication of an article titled “The School of Obscurantism,” originally carried by the Soviet news agency Novosti, in URSS in September of 1972. Testifying in court, Jacob Kaplan, the Grand Rabbi of France who survived the Nazi occupation and stood against Vichy government’s treatment of Jews, stated that the article was “the most violently antisemitic statement published in France since the end of Nazism.”
In its content and rhetorical approach, the article was a typical representative of the anti Zionist smear genre that had blossomed in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Six Day War. It opened by drawing a parallel between the false 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin by the paramilitary troops of Irgun and Lehi and the 1968 Song Mi massacre of Vietnamese civilians by the American military, a misleading analogy that did little to explicate and much to anger. It then equated Israel with Nazi Germany by accusing it of treating the Muslim citizens in the “occupied Arab lands of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan” the same way that Nazi Germany had treated Jews, another spurious equation, which is today known as Holocaust inversion. Today, wrote M. Zandenberg, the author of the piece, it was the Jews who were throwing Arabs “into ghettos, behind the barbed wire of concentration camps.” (Ibit)
All the antisemitic tropes have been debunked by others in our own time. The articles provided enough material for LICRA and Rencontres to sue for racial defamation and incitement to discrimination, hatred, or racial violence. Since the Soviet embassy enjoyed diplomatic immunity, the plaintiffs sued Legagneux, who oversaw the publication of the U.R.S.S. Only the first article, which was published by a French-language magazine domiciled in France, figured in the proceedings.(Ibit)
The trial attracted considerable media attention. The plaintiffs drew on an illustrious group of witnesses, including the aforementioned Grand Rabbi of France and René Cassin, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning French jurist who had been a driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Emanuel Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism: The Paris Trial, p16-17, 1974).
But the high point of the trial came when Grigory Svirsky, a Soviet writer living in Israel, testified about the source of Zandenberg’s article. It turned out that Zandenberg borrowed entire passages, typos included, from a 1906 pamphlet called The Jewish Question… or the Impossibility of Granting Full Rights to Jews, authored by S. Rossov, a member of the ultra-nationalist, antisemitic Black Hundreds movement, which incited pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The only difference between “The School of Obscurantism” and the 1906 pamphlet was that whenever the former used the word “Jew,” the latter used the word “Zionist.” (Emanuel Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism: The Paris Trial, p18-22, 1974)
Rossov’s source of supposed religious quotes in his pamphlet is important. He had lifted them from translations by Alexei Shmakov, one of the most prominent Russian Black Hundredists who dedicated his life to unmasking the Jewish conspiracy that he believed was strangling Russia.
Nothing could be more embarrassing for the Soviet Union, which positioned itself as the vanguard of the global struggle against racism, than to be caught spreading right-wing, racist, antisemitic propaganda in Europe. Evidently recognizing that it had no case, and wishing for it all to go away, the defense called no witnesses.
24/
The People Behind the Propaganda: Yevgeny Yevseyev - The Most Classified Man of the USSR
tabletmag.com/sections/arts-…
One of the most prominent Soviet Zionologists was Yevgeny Yevseyev. It was only decades after the Paris trial concluded that the Russian historian Gennady Kostyrchenko discovered that he, and not a “M. Zandenberg,” was the real author of the incriminating article that sparked it. By the time URSS included his pseudonymous piece in its bulletin in September of 1972, he had already made a name for himself as an author of Fascism under the Blue Star, whose obviously antisemitic tropes, including the equation of Zionism with German fascism, which in 1971 still shocked the Western public, attracted harsh criticism in the West (R Okuneva, “Antisemitic Notions: Strange Analogies” in Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences, 1984).
Yevseyev’s background is typical of several prominent Zionologists. He was the Soviet equivalent of Johann Von Leers aka Omar Amin. He had been trained as an “Arabist”, a Middle East specialist with knowledge of Arabic, at prestigious Moscow institutions that groomed a trustworthy cadre for the Soviet foreign policy establishment. Graduating in 1958, he received a plum appointment in the Middle East section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), and the same year joined the Soviet embassy in Cairo, where he rose from Arabic interpreter to third secretary. Returning to Moscow in 1963, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Arab Nationalism and Arab Socialism in United Arab Republic’s Political Practice.” He then left the diplomatic service (some claim that he was dismissed) and joined the Soviet Academy of Sciences, specifically, the Institute of Philosophy, where he reported to Yelena Modrzhinskaya, who headed the department of Scientific Criticism of Anticommunism and was herself an important figure in Soviet Zionology.
(Modrzhinskaya’s biography included serving as an NKVD intelligence officer under Stalin henchman Lavrenty Beria, being stationed in Soviet intelligence residency in London, and being privy to the intelligence received from the Cambridge Five spy ring. One of her contributions to the late-Soviet anti Zionist campaign was The Poison of Zionism, a slim volume illustrated with Der Stürmer-like cartoons.)
Despite switching to the Academy of Sciences, Yevseyev retained high-level connections at the KGB, the Central Committee, and the MFA, as well as important membership in the Soviet-Palestinian Society. Being a nephew of Boris Ponomarev, a powerful chief of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, who played a central role in formulating Soviet foreign policy (including Soviet relations with foreign left-wing parties), probably helped him to stay relevant. It is likely because of Yevseyev’s high-level connections and notoriety that the KGB classified his name during the Paris trial.
The Institute of Philosophy conferred academic credentials and gave scholarly cover for Yevseyev’s antizionist “critique.” From there, he authored numerous articles demonizing Zionism and promulgating the use of the now-familiar tropes equating Zionism with Nazism, fascism, and racism. In 1973, he delivered a lecture in Arabic titled “Middle East in Zionist and Imperialist Plans” at a Soviet-sponsored conference in Cairo. In 1978 he defended his next-level dissertation “Zionism in the System of Anticommunism.”
As the Paris trial incident demonstrates, Yevseyev used Russian pre-revolutionary pogromist literature as a source of information on Jews and Zionists. His background as an Arabist helps explain an additional case of antisemitic plagiarism identified by the writer Emanuel Litvinoff. In 1969, he was found to have borrowed fake statistics about American Jews from a 1957 pamphlet called America, A Zionist Colony, which was published in Cairo. Litvinoff notes that in 1957, Egypt’s anti-Jewish propaganda was overseen by Johannes van Leers, a Nazi.
The People Behind the Propaganda: Yevgeny Yevseyev - The Most Classified Man of the USSR
tabletmag.com/sections/arts-…
One of the most prominent Soviet Zionologists was Yevgeny Yevseyev. It was only decades after the Paris trial concluded that the Russian historian Gennady Kostyrchenko discovered that he, and not a “M. Zandenberg,” was the real author of the incriminating article that sparked it. By the time URSS included his pseudonymous piece in its bulletin in September of 1972, he had already made a name for himself as an author of Fascism under the Blue Star, whose obviously antisemitic tropes, including the equation of Zionism with German fascism, which in 1971 still shocked the Western public, attracted harsh criticism in the West (R Okuneva, “Antisemitic Notions: Strange Analogies” in Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences, 1984).
Yevseyev’s background is typical of several prominent Zionologists. He was the Soviet equivalent of Johann Von Leers aka Omar Amin. He had been trained as an “Arabist”, a Middle East specialist with knowledge of Arabic, at prestigious Moscow institutions that groomed a trustworthy cadre for the Soviet foreign policy establishment. Graduating in 1958, he received a plum appointment in the Middle East section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), and the same year joined the Soviet embassy in Cairo, where he rose from Arabic interpreter to third secretary. Returning to Moscow in 1963, he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Arab Nationalism and Arab Socialism in United Arab Republic’s Political Practice.” He then left the diplomatic service (some claim that he was dismissed) and joined the Soviet Academy of Sciences, specifically, the Institute of Philosophy, where he reported to Yelena Modrzhinskaya, who headed the department of Scientific Criticism of Anticommunism and was herself an important figure in Soviet Zionology.
(Modrzhinskaya’s biography included serving as an NKVD intelligence officer under Stalin henchman Lavrenty Beria, being stationed in Soviet intelligence residency in London, and being privy to the intelligence received from the Cambridge Five spy ring. One of her contributions to the late-Soviet anti Zionist campaign was The Poison of Zionism, a slim volume illustrated with Der Stürmer-like cartoons.)
Despite switching to the Academy of Sciences, Yevseyev retained high-level connections at the KGB, the Central Committee, and the MFA, as well as important membership in the Soviet-Palestinian Society. Being a nephew of Boris Ponomarev, a powerful chief of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, who played a central role in formulating Soviet foreign policy (including Soviet relations with foreign left-wing parties), probably helped him to stay relevant. It is likely because of Yevseyev’s high-level connections and notoriety that the KGB classified his name during the Paris trial.
The Institute of Philosophy conferred academic credentials and gave scholarly cover for Yevseyev’s antizionist “critique.” From there, he authored numerous articles demonizing Zionism and promulgating the use of the now-familiar tropes equating Zionism with Nazism, fascism, and racism. In 1973, he delivered a lecture in Arabic titled “Middle East in Zionist and Imperialist Plans” at a Soviet-sponsored conference in Cairo. In 1978 he defended his next-level dissertation “Zionism in the System of Anticommunism.”
As the Paris trial incident demonstrates, Yevseyev used Russian pre-revolutionary pogromist literature as a source of information on Jews and Zionists. His background as an Arabist helps explain an additional case of antisemitic plagiarism identified by the writer Emanuel Litvinoff. In 1969, he was found to have borrowed fake statistics about American Jews from a 1957 pamphlet called America, A Zionist Colony, which was published in Cairo. Litvinoff notes that in 1957, Egypt’s anti-Jewish propaganda was overseen by Johannes van Leers, a Nazi.
25/
Taking the Propaganda Global - Novosti
The Paris trial illustrated two ways in which Soviet propaganda reached the West: Soviet embassy publications, and the powerful international network of the Novosti press agency, also known as the APN.
Novosti was a crucial player in the Soviet foreign propaganda machine. Established with the KGB’s help, intelligence officers comprised a significant portion of its editorial staff. It was active in 110 countries and maintained connections with 140 major international and national agencies. Testifying to the significance of the agency, the Novosti chair was a ministerial-level position (N Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1985)
Novosti played a central role in helping to strategize and execute the global Soviet anti Zionist campaign. One of the tools at its disposal was the printing and distribution of pocket-size pamphlets in foreign languages, which delivered the Soviet view of Jews and Zionism to foreign audiences.
Novosti also planned to deliver propaganda materials to Soviet embassies and Novosti bureaus, including a special film it produced about the status of Soviet Jewry and a series of presentations on the difficult life of “toiling Jews” in the West and “on the failures of Zionist propaganda, which is aimed at inciting antisemitism.” (Gody, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003)
Taking the Propaganda Global - Novosti
The Paris trial illustrated two ways in which Soviet propaganda reached the West: Soviet embassy publications, and the powerful international network of the Novosti press agency, also known as the APN.
Novosti was a crucial player in the Soviet foreign propaganda machine. Established with the KGB’s help, intelligence officers comprised a significant portion of its editorial staff. It was active in 110 countries and maintained connections with 140 major international and national agencies. Testifying to the significance of the agency, the Novosti chair was a ministerial-level position (N Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1985)
Novosti played a central role in helping to strategize and execute the global Soviet anti Zionist campaign. One of the tools at its disposal was the printing and distribution of pocket-size pamphlets in foreign languages, which delivered the Soviet view of Jews and Zionism to foreign audiences.
Novosti also planned to deliver propaganda materials to Soviet embassies and Novosti bureaus, including a special film it produced about the status of Soviet Jewry and a series of presentations on the difficult life of “toiling Jews” in the West and “on the failures of Zionist propaganda, which is aimed at inciting antisemitism.” (Gody, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003)
26/
The Embassies
Some insights into the role of Soviet embassies in propagating anti Zionist demonization can be gleaned from correspondence between the long-serving Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and his superiors in Moscow.
In a July 7, 1970 memo titled “Some Thoughts on Fighting Hostile, Anti-Soviet and Anti-Socialist-Bloc Activities by American Zionist and Pro-Zionist Circles,” Dobrynin provided Moscow with an analysis of Zionists’ apparent success at penetrating the American establishment. He attributed the success to several factors: the all-powerful Israel lobby, the “excessive public activity” of more than 300 Jewish organizations, the presence of a large number of Jews in influential positions in American media, business, and AFL-CIO leadership, and support from the Pentagon. Having tapped into several antisemitic tropes at once and confirmed Moscow’s belief that a powerful Zionist conspiracy operated against it in Washington, Dobrynin noted that the Zionist element “had struck deep roots in the American soil” and that fighting it successfully required “a unified and carefully coordinated plan.” (Elena Modrzhinskaia and Vladimir Lapskii, Iad sionizma, Moscow: Pedagogika, 1983).
In February of 1971, Moscow directed Dobrynin to study closely the American Jewish community and American Zionist organizations, paying particular attention to the ways Zionists “manipulated American public opinion” in general and members of Congress in particular. The embassy was to work to undermine Zionist influence among Republicans and Democrats, investigate Zionist connections with the “American monopolistic capital”, and to study financial and industrial enterprises controlled by “Jewish capital.” (Evgenii Evseev, Fashizm pod goluboi zvezdoi, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1971).
It was the embassy’s task to take note of any contradictions among American Jews with regards to the Soviet Union, Israel, and the Nixon administration, and to propose ideas for using these “to discredit and weaken the unity of anti-Soviet Zionist forces.”
The embassy was further tasked with demonstrating to the American public that Zionists were hostile to American national interests and undermined the all-important relationship between the two superpowers (a talking point that also appeared in Beglov’s New York Times article). Dobrynin was to report on any instances of antisemitism in the United States, particularly among the political elites, propose ways to use these in Soviet anti Zionist propaganda, and work with progressive American Jewish and mainstream press to expose hostile Zionist actions.
Dobrynin’s correspondences illustrated the degree to which Soviet anti Zionist ideology had imbibed classic antisemitic conspiracism. Tropes about Jewish disloyalty are here as well, presenting Jews as foreign elements in America who stood in the way of peace. The conspiracy fantasy of an all-powerful Israel lobby is a direct reflection of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that fed Soviet Zionologists’ conspiracy theories. Some of the proposed actions, such as sowing discord among American Jews and driving a wedge between Jews and non-Jews in America, sound outright malicious - Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman reported on a KGB operation attempting to drive a wedge between American Jews and Blacks, as well as a series of other “active measures” seeking to undermine Jewish communities worldwide. (Ibit)
This exchanges also illustrated the fact that although Soviet officials seemed to understand that the American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism was hardly united (hence Moscow was directing Dobrynin to work with progressive Jews and to deepen divisions within the Jewish community), they nevertheless posited the presence of an “excessive” number of Jews in “influential positions” as an explanation for America’s “pro-Zionist” policy, as though every American Jew was a channel of Zionist influence.
The Embassies
Some insights into the role of Soviet embassies in propagating anti Zionist demonization can be gleaned from correspondence between the long-serving Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and his superiors in Moscow.
In a July 7, 1970 memo titled “Some Thoughts on Fighting Hostile, Anti-Soviet and Anti-Socialist-Bloc Activities by American Zionist and Pro-Zionist Circles,” Dobrynin provided Moscow with an analysis of Zionists’ apparent success at penetrating the American establishment. He attributed the success to several factors: the all-powerful Israel lobby, the “excessive public activity” of more than 300 Jewish organizations, the presence of a large number of Jews in influential positions in American media, business, and AFL-CIO leadership, and support from the Pentagon. Having tapped into several antisemitic tropes at once and confirmed Moscow’s belief that a powerful Zionist conspiracy operated against it in Washington, Dobrynin noted that the Zionist element “had struck deep roots in the American soil” and that fighting it successfully required “a unified and carefully coordinated plan.” (Elena Modrzhinskaia and Vladimir Lapskii, Iad sionizma, Moscow: Pedagogika, 1983).
In February of 1971, Moscow directed Dobrynin to study closely the American Jewish community and American Zionist organizations, paying particular attention to the ways Zionists “manipulated American public opinion” in general and members of Congress in particular. The embassy was to work to undermine Zionist influence among Republicans and Democrats, investigate Zionist connections with the “American monopolistic capital”, and to study financial and industrial enterprises controlled by “Jewish capital.” (Evgenii Evseev, Fashizm pod goluboi zvezdoi, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1971).
It was the embassy’s task to take note of any contradictions among American Jews with regards to the Soviet Union, Israel, and the Nixon administration, and to propose ideas for using these “to discredit and weaken the unity of anti-Soviet Zionist forces.”
The embassy was further tasked with demonstrating to the American public that Zionists were hostile to American national interests and undermined the all-important relationship between the two superpowers (a talking point that also appeared in Beglov’s New York Times article). Dobrynin was to report on any instances of antisemitism in the United States, particularly among the political elites, propose ways to use these in Soviet anti Zionist propaganda, and work with progressive American Jewish and mainstream press to expose hostile Zionist actions.
Dobrynin’s correspondences illustrated the degree to which Soviet anti Zionist ideology had imbibed classic antisemitic conspiracism. Tropes about Jewish disloyalty are here as well, presenting Jews as foreign elements in America who stood in the way of peace. The conspiracy fantasy of an all-powerful Israel lobby is a direct reflection of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that fed Soviet Zionologists’ conspiracy theories. Some of the proposed actions, such as sowing discord among American Jews and driving a wedge between Jews and non-Jews in America, sound outright malicious - Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman reported on a KGB operation attempting to drive a wedge between American Jews and Blacks, as well as a series of other “active measures” seeking to undermine Jewish communities worldwide. (Ibit)
This exchanges also illustrated the fact that although Soviet officials seemed to understand that the American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism was hardly united (hence Moscow was directing Dobrynin to work with progressive Jews and to deepen divisions within the Jewish community), they nevertheless posited the presence of an “excessive” number of Jews in “influential positions” as an explanation for America’s “pro-Zionist” policy, as though every American Jew was a channel of Zionist influence.
27/
The Echo Chamber of the Western Left
Another important channel for delivering the Soviet conspiracist perspective on Zionism to Western audiences was direct engagement with the Western left, often conducted via a special department within CPSU’s Central Committee, which handled relations with foreign Communist parties (Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007)
Moscow first learned that foreign Communists were sensitive to the “Jewish question” after an outcry that followed the revelations of Stalin’s secret murder in 1952 of prominent Soviet Jewish cultural figures. Another vociferous protest by foreign comrades came in 1963, when the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published an openly antisemitic book “Judaism without Embellishment”. These events embarrassed Khrushchev and taught him, and other Soviet leaders, that they had to carefully manage Jewish-related issues (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, p501)
Thus, the Central Committee was alerted in the spring of 1966 that leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) approached the Soviet Embassy in London, requesting help in preparing a statement “on the status of the Jewish population in the USSR.” Their appeal was a result of questions raised by Jewish Communists in the wake of a new spate of reports of anti-Jewish discrimination in the USSR. In response, the Soviet ambassador in the United Kingdom was to impart the “correct” perspective on Soviet Jewry to British comrades, and Novosti was to send relevant “informational materials and articles” to be passed on to the CPGB leadership.
Moscow also built a strong relationship with the American Communist Party (CPUSA). One example of the two parties’ cooperation in the sphere of the “Jewish question” and anti Zionist propaganda appears in a November 19, 1971 memorandum, which informed the Central Committee that Hyman Lumer, a member of the political committee of CPUSA’s National Committee and editor-in-chief of CPUSA’s Political Affairs theoretical journal, was coming to Moscow to attend a conference on Trotskyism and requested help in preparing “materials for unmasking the Zionist anti-Soviet campaign.” Lumer planned to incorporate these materials in a series of articles and a pamphlet intended “for wide distribution within the US.” (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 518).
The Central Committee memo proposed that Lumer meet with the usual go-to Soviet Jews who knew how to communicate the Soviet party line to foreigners (the group included the ubiquitous Vergelis of the Sovetish heymland.) The material Lumer collected during this trip appeared in his 1973 book Zionism: Its Role in World Politics.
Moscow, in turn, republished Lumer’s output in at least two Russian language collected volumes on Zionism, which included contributions by other foreign leftists. These two volumes illustrate the mechanism through which Moscow’s ideologues created a global anti Zionist echo chamber: Lumer and other foreign leftists learned the “correct” position on Zionism, Israel, and Jews from their Soviet handlers and conveyed this position to their own constituencies via home publications. The latter, in turn, were republished in the USSR, where Soviet domestic propaganda could claim that the world’s “progressive forces” saw eye to eye with Moscow on Israel and Zionism (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, p527–538).
Facilitating the workings of the anti Zionist echo chamber, undoubtedly, was Moscow’s generous financing, whose purpose was to ensure outward unity on all key political questions. For example, between 1958 and 1980, CPUSA received $28 million in subsidies from Moscow. Annual subsidies grew each year after that, to reach $3 million in 1988. (The money was used, among other things, to publish CPUSA’s People’s Daily World.) (Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007)
The Echo Chamber of the Western Left
Another important channel for delivering the Soviet conspiracist perspective on Zionism to Western audiences was direct engagement with the Western left, often conducted via a special department within CPSU’s Central Committee, which handled relations with foreign Communist parties (Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007)
Moscow first learned that foreign Communists were sensitive to the “Jewish question” after an outcry that followed the revelations of Stalin’s secret murder in 1952 of prominent Soviet Jewish cultural figures. Another vociferous protest by foreign comrades came in 1963, when the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published an openly antisemitic book “Judaism without Embellishment”. These events embarrassed Khrushchev and taught him, and other Soviet leaders, that they had to carefully manage Jewish-related issues (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, p501)
Thus, the Central Committee was alerted in the spring of 1966 that leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) approached the Soviet Embassy in London, requesting help in preparing a statement “on the status of the Jewish population in the USSR.” Their appeal was a result of questions raised by Jewish Communists in the wake of a new spate of reports of anti-Jewish discrimination in the USSR. In response, the Soviet ambassador in the United Kingdom was to impart the “correct” perspective on Soviet Jewry to British comrades, and Novosti was to send relevant “informational materials and articles” to be passed on to the CPGB leadership.
Moscow also built a strong relationship with the American Communist Party (CPUSA). One example of the two parties’ cooperation in the sphere of the “Jewish question” and anti Zionist propaganda appears in a November 19, 1971 memorandum, which informed the Central Committee that Hyman Lumer, a member of the political committee of CPUSA’s National Committee and editor-in-chief of CPUSA’s Political Affairs theoretical journal, was coming to Moscow to attend a conference on Trotskyism and requested help in preparing “materials for unmasking the Zionist anti-Soviet campaign.” Lumer planned to incorporate these materials in a series of articles and a pamphlet intended “for wide distribution within the US.” (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 518).
The Central Committee memo proposed that Lumer meet with the usual go-to Soviet Jews who knew how to communicate the Soviet party line to foreigners (the group included the ubiquitous Vergelis of the Sovetish heymland.) The material Lumer collected during this trip appeared in his 1973 book Zionism: Its Role in World Politics.
Moscow, in turn, republished Lumer’s output in at least two Russian language collected volumes on Zionism, which included contributions by other foreign leftists. These two volumes illustrate the mechanism through which Moscow’s ideologues created a global anti Zionist echo chamber: Lumer and other foreign leftists learned the “correct” position on Zionism, Israel, and Jews from their Soviet handlers and conveyed this position to their own constituencies via home publications. The latter, in turn, were republished in the USSR, where Soviet domestic propaganda could claim that the world’s “progressive forces” saw eye to eye with Moscow on Israel and Zionism (Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, p527–538).
Facilitating the workings of the anti Zionist echo chamber, undoubtedly, was Moscow’s generous financing, whose purpose was to ensure outward unity on all key political questions. For example, between 1958 and 1980, CPUSA received $28 million in subsidies from Moscow. Annual subsidies grew each year after that, to reach $3 million in 1988. (The money was used, among other things, to publish CPUSA’s People’s Daily World.) (Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007)
28/
Revising the Definition of Zionism
One of the lasting contributions of Soviet anti Zionist propaganda to the Western left’s anti-Israel discourse was to decouple Zionism from its original meaning. It was Soviet propaganda that developed what Steve Cohen, the British socialist and author, called “transcendental” anti Zionism, an anti Zionism that “transcends anything done by the Israeli state,” which continues to dominate the worldview of parts of contemporary left. This form of anti Zionism, Cohen argued, could easily exist without Israel, without Zion and even without Zionism… Anti-Zionism without Zion has the same transcendental qualities as antisemitism without Jews, it has no necessary relationship to anything a real Zionist, or real Jew is doing. It exists in the air quite apart from material reality, except for the reality it creates for itself. (Spartak Beglov, “A Soviet View on Jews,” New York Times, January 23, 1971)
While Soviet officials always claimed that their anti Zionist position was consistent with that of Lenin, in fact, by the 1960s, they had radically redefined the meaning of Zionism. Scholar Lukasz Hirszowicz demonstrated this by examining the evolution of the definitions of Zionism in Soviet encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionaries between the 1920s and 1970s.
Hirszowicz observed that early Soviet definitions, while “tendentious and imperfect,” could still help the reader grasp the actual meaning of Zionism. The definitions noted that Zionism arose in response to antisemitism and that it held a view (erroneous and harmful, from the Marxist-Leninist perspective) that Jews were a nation. The definitions were “not particularly virulent,” nor did they contain references to Zionism as “racist or fascist.” Importantly, wrote Hirszowicz, no one reading the early definitions would have viewed Zionism as “a force of universal significance”: the reader would have recognized that it was limited in its relevance to Jews, Palestine, and the Middle East.
By the mid-1960s, this began to change. References to Zionism as a response to antisemitism disappeared, as did the Zionist view of Jews as a nation. Soviet dictionaries now associated Zionism exclusively with the Jewish bourgeoisie, presenting it as inimical to the interests of the working class. Importantly, Zionism acquired a clear international and conspiracist dimension. It was described as a “far-flung system of organizations” connected to “imperialist states” and “monopolistic circles.” Zionism’s “specific objectives and activities” became “global and regional, precisely in that order,” wrote Hirszowicz. The idea of “international Zionism” as a nefarious global network that is hostile to the Soviet Union appeared at this time (A Rivtchin, Red Terror: How the Soviet Union Shaped the Modern Anti-Zionist Discourse, 2019).
In American-Soviet relations, Zionism was said to conduct “subversive activities against the détente”, in other words, being an enemy of peace. Zionism was “extremist in its nationalism, chauvinistic and racist,” allying itself with “a whole assortment of reactionary forces, including Nazi Germany and Italy.” Zionists were said to employ “terrorist methods and resort to criminal means of gathering funds.” It was an ideology that “‘progressive Jews’ regarded as a ‘variety of fascism.’” (Gjerde, Soviet elites in the aftermath of the Six-Day War)
Revising the Definition of Zionism
One of the lasting contributions of Soviet anti Zionist propaganda to the Western left’s anti-Israel discourse was to decouple Zionism from its original meaning. It was Soviet propaganda that developed what Steve Cohen, the British socialist and author, called “transcendental” anti Zionism, an anti Zionism that “transcends anything done by the Israeli state,” which continues to dominate the worldview of parts of contemporary left. This form of anti Zionism, Cohen argued, could easily exist without Israel, without Zion and even without Zionism… Anti-Zionism without Zion has the same transcendental qualities as antisemitism without Jews, it has no necessary relationship to anything a real Zionist, or real Jew is doing. It exists in the air quite apart from material reality, except for the reality it creates for itself. (Spartak Beglov, “A Soviet View on Jews,” New York Times, January 23, 1971)
While Soviet officials always claimed that their anti Zionist position was consistent with that of Lenin, in fact, by the 1960s, they had radically redefined the meaning of Zionism. Scholar Lukasz Hirszowicz demonstrated this by examining the evolution of the definitions of Zionism in Soviet encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionaries between the 1920s and 1970s.
Hirszowicz observed that early Soviet definitions, while “tendentious and imperfect,” could still help the reader grasp the actual meaning of Zionism. The definitions noted that Zionism arose in response to antisemitism and that it held a view (erroneous and harmful, from the Marxist-Leninist perspective) that Jews were a nation. The definitions were “not particularly virulent,” nor did they contain references to Zionism as “racist or fascist.” Importantly, wrote Hirszowicz, no one reading the early definitions would have viewed Zionism as “a force of universal significance”: the reader would have recognized that it was limited in its relevance to Jews, Palestine, and the Middle East.
By the mid-1960s, this began to change. References to Zionism as a response to antisemitism disappeared, as did the Zionist view of Jews as a nation. Soviet dictionaries now associated Zionism exclusively with the Jewish bourgeoisie, presenting it as inimical to the interests of the working class. Importantly, Zionism acquired a clear international and conspiracist dimension. It was described as a “far-flung system of organizations” connected to “imperialist states” and “monopolistic circles.” Zionism’s “specific objectives and activities” became “global and regional, precisely in that order,” wrote Hirszowicz. The idea of “international Zionism” as a nefarious global network that is hostile to the Soviet Union appeared at this time (A Rivtchin, Red Terror: How the Soviet Union Shaped the Modern Anti-Zionist Discourse, 2019).
In American-Soviet relations, Zionism was said to conduct “subversive activities against the détente”, in other words, being an enemy of peace. Zionism was “extremist in its nationalism, chauvinistic and racist,” allying itself with “a whole assortment of reactionary forces, including Nazi Germany and Italy.” Zionists were said to employ “terrorist methods and resort to criminal means of gathering funds.” It was an ideology that “‘progressive Jews’ regarded as a ‘variety of fascism.’” (Gjerde, Soviet elites in the aftermath of the Six-Day War)
29/
The Political Tool
The conspiracist, “transcendental” Soviet anti Zionism was born in response to specific challenges Soviet leadership faced at home and abroad. The Cold War, the intensifying competition in the Middle East, the war for allegiances in the developing world, the growing Jewish national movement at home and the Soviet Jewry movement abroad: these challenges arose nearly simultaneously, demanding urgent solutions and proactive propaganda support. (Randall, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left, p210)
Conspiracist anti Zionism proved to be a multipurpose propaganda device capable of addressing all these problems at once. Cleverly constructed, it provided authorities with an opening to deny that it was antisemitic. After all, if one analyzed Soviet propaganda carefully, the only Jews and Jewish institutions it demonized were those that could be classified as hostile to the socialist vision: religious, capitalist, and nationalist. Demonization of political enemies was an integral part of Soviet political culture. If capitalism, nationalism, and religion as a whole were fair game, why couldn’t one attack their specific Jewish variants? (I Tabarovsky, Zombie Anti Zionism, 2024)
The answer, of course, is that demonization of the Jews has such a long history that demonization of some Jews immediately thrusts the door open to demonizing the people as a whole. Moreover, it serves as a dog whistle for antisemites. It is hardly an accident that it was members of the antisemitic right-wing Russian nationalist movement that responded with such zeal to the authorities’ need to develop a propagandistic weapon against Zionists and Israel (Ibit)
Although the Soviets always denied that their propaganda was antisemitic, internally there was an awareness that the problem existed. Within the Academy of Sciences, moderate critics of Zionism protested the Zionologists’ output, which they viewed as a profanation of scholarship. In 1976, the Institute of Oriental Studies, a central player in the development and legitimization of Soviet anti Zionist propaganda, organized an internal conference to tease out the thorny issue of anti Zionism versus antisemitism. At the conference, the moderate anti Zionists attacked the extremists. (When one of the radicals stood up to defend her Zionologist colleague by referencing his father’s heroic death in World War II, someone in the audience quipped: “Was it the Zionists who killed him?”)
Among Soviet leadership, too, there were those who understood that the campaign went against the original internationalist principles articulated by Lenin. A behind-the-scenes tug-of-war developed between conservative supporters of Zionologists in the Party and the security services apparatus and their opponents. With time, some of the Zionologists found themselves losing positions and even had trouble publishing some of their most extreme work. The Central Committee resisted Zionologists’ ongoing urging to harden its anti Zionist propaganda even further, recognizing, and fearing, that it might lead to pogroms.
And yet, the Soviet anti Zionist campaign continued unabated. The reasons for continuing with it would have been complex, but one of them, undoubtedly, was the fact that conspiracist anti Zionism had simply proven too useful a tool to give up. Anti Zionism helped Moscow bond both with its Arab allies and the Western hard left of all shades. Having appointed Zionism as a scapegoat for humanity’s greatest evils, Soviet propaganda could score points by equating it with racism in African radio broadcasts and with Ukrainian nationalism on Kyiv TV (Ibit)
Conspiracist anti Zionist rhetoric helps today’s progressives make important political alliances and fundraise. It helps create an illusion of a just cause and generate votes. “Conspiracy theorists are above all propagandists,” noted Quassim Cassam, a scholar of conspiracy theory, “tend to be politics-based rather than evidence-based.”
End of Part 2
The Political Tool
The conspiracist, “transcendental” Soviet anti Zionism was born in response to specific challenges Soviet leadership faced at home and abroad. The Cold War, the intensifying competition in the Middle East, the war for allegiances in the developing world, the growing Jewish national movement at home and the Soviet Jewry movement abroad: these challenges arose nearly simultaneously, demanding urgent solutions and proactive propaganda support. (Randall, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left, p210)
Conspiracist anti Zionism proved to be a multipurpose propaganda device capable of addressing all these problems at once. Cleverly constructed, it provided authorities with an opening to deny that it was antisemitic. After all, if one analyzed Soviet propaganda carefully, the only Jews and Jewish institutions it demonized were those that could be classified as hostile to the socialist vision: religious, capitalist, and nationalist. Demonization of political enemies was an integral part of Soviet political culture. If capitalism, nationalism, and religion as a whole were fair game, why couldn’t one attack their specific Jewish variants? (I Tabarovsky, Zombie Anti Zionism, 2024)
The answer, of course, is that demonization of the Jews has such a long history that demonization of some Jews immediately thrusts the door open to demonizing the people as a whole. Moreover, it serves as a dog whistle for antisemites. It is hardly an accident that it was members of the antisemitic right-wing Russian nationalist movement that responded with such zeal to the authorities’ need to develop a propagandistic weapon against Zionists and Israel (Ibit)
Although the Soviets always denied that their propaganda was antisemitic, internally there was an awareness that the problem existed. Within the Academy of Sciences, moderate critics of Zionism protested the Zionologists’ output, which they viewed as a profanation of scholarship. In 1976, the Institute of Oriental Studies, a central player in the development and legitimization of Soviet anti Zionist propaganda, organized an internal conference to tease out the thorny issue of anti Zionism versus antisemitism. At the conference, the moderate anti Zionists attacked the extremists. (When one of the radicals stood up to defend her Zionologist colleague by referencing his father’s heroic death in World War II, someone in the audience quipped: “Was it the Zionists who killed him?”)
Among Soviet leadership, too, there were those who understood that the campaign went against the original internationalist principles articulated by Lenin. A behind-the-scenes tug-of-war developed between conservative supporters of Zionologists in the Party and the security services apparatus and their opponents. With time, some of the Zionologists found themselves losing positions and even had trouble publishing some of their most extreme work. The Central Committee resisted Zionologists’ ongoing urging to harden its anti Zionist propaganda even further, recognizing, and fearing, that it might lead to pogroms.
And yet, the Soviet anti Zionist campaign continued unabated. The reasons for continuing with it would have been complex, but one of them, undoubtedly, was the fact that conspiracist anti Zionism had simply proven too useful a tool to give up. Anti Zionism helped Moscow bond both with its Arab allies and the Western hard left of all shades. Having appointed Zionism as a scapegoat for humanity’s greatest evils, Soviet propaganda could score points by equating it with racism in African radio broadcasts and with Ukrainian nationalism on Kyiv TV (Ibit)
Conspiracist anti Zionist rhetoric helps today’s progressives make important political alliances and fundraise. It helps create an illusion of a just cause and generate votes. “Conspiracy theorists are above all propagandists,” noted Quassim Cassam, a scholar of conspiracy theory, “tend to be politics-based rather than evidence-based.”
End of Part 2
30/
References
1 Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference,” American Society of International Law 96 (2002)
2 Alan Rosenbaum, “Learning Lessons from the Antisemitic Durban Conference,” The Jerusalem Post, July 1, 2021, jpost.com/diaspora/antis….
4 Joëlle Fiss, The Durban Diaries: What Really Happened at the UN Conference against Racism (New York: American Jewish Committee, Brussels: European Union of Jewish Students, 2008)
5 Farah Stockman, “Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of Antisemitism,” New York Times, December 23, 2018, nytimes.com/2018/12/23/us/….
6 Karen Zraick, “Ilhan Omar’s Latest Remarks on Israel Draw Criticism,” New York Times, March 1, 2019, nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/….
7 Ron Kampeas, “Freshman Rep Ilhan Omar says AIPAC Pays Politicians to be Pro-Israel,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 10, 2019, jta.org/quick-reads/il….
8 Aaron Bandler, “CAIR SF Head Says ‘Zionist Organizations’ Are the Enemy, Warns of ‘Zionist Synagogues,’” The Jewish Journal, December 8, 2021, jewishjournal.com/news/343182/ca….
9 For an overview of Soviet antizionist campaigns of 1967-1988, see Izabella Tabarovsky, “Soviet Antizionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism,” Fathom, May, 2019, fathomjournal.org/soviet-anti-zi…; and Izabella Tabarovsky, “Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon,” Tablet, June 6, 2019, tabletmag.com/sections/arts-….
10 Michael Billig, “Anti-Semitic Themes and the British Far Left: Some Social-Psychological Observations on Indirect
11 Aspects of the Conspiracy Tradition,” in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. C. F. Graumann and S. Moscovici (New York: Springer, 1987), 115–136.
12 Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (n.p.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 62–65.
13 Steve Cohen, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic: An Anti-Racist Analysis of Left Antisemitism (n.p.: Engage, 2005), ix.
14 Daniel Randall, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists (n.p.: No Pasaran Media, 2021), 76–116.
15 Seth Mandel, “The Jews Who Are Complicit in Jew Hatred,” Commentary, July/August 2021, commentary.org/articles/seth-….
16 Nan Robertson, “Paris Court Rules Reds Defamed Jews,” New York Times, April 25, 1973, nytimes.com/1973/04/25/arc….
17 Emanuel Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism: The Paris Trial (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 16–18.
18 Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism, 67–71; Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika: Ot Brezhneva do Gorbacheva, part 1: Vlast'—Evreiskii vopros, intelligentsiia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2019), 500.
19 Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism, 22, 70.
20 Mendel Beilis, Blood Libel: The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis (Chicago: Beilis Publishing, 2011).
21 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 500–501; Grigorii Svirskii, “Khozhdenie v shtrafniki. Parizhskii tribunal. O moikh dushevnykh druz'iakh—edinomyslakh,” in Shtrafniki (n.p., n.d.), shtrafniki.narod.ru/svirski-frames….
22 Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism, 100–102, 116.
References
1 Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference,” American Society of International Law 96 (2002)
2 Alan Rosenbaum, “Learning Lessons from the Antisemitic Durban Conference,” The Jerusalem Post, July 1, 2021, jpost.com/diaspora/antis….
4 Joëlle Fiss, The Durban Diaries: What Really Happened at the UN Conference against Racism (New York: American Jewish Committee, Brussels: European Union of Jewish Students, 2008)
5 Farah Stockman, “Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of Antisemitism,” New York Times, December 23, 2018, nytimes.com/2018/12/23/us/….
6 Karen Zraick, “Ilhan Omar’s Latest Remarks on Israel Draw Criticism,” New York Times, March 1, 2019, nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/….
7 Ron Kampeas, “Freshman Rep Ilhan Omar says AIPAC Pays Politicians to be Pro-Israel,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 10, 2019, jta.org/quick-reads/il….
8 Aaron Bandler, “CAIR SF Head Says ‘Zionist Organizations’ Are the Enemy, Warns of ‘Zionist Synagogues,’” The Jewish Journal, December 8, 2021, jewishjournal.com/news/343182/ca….
9 For an overview of Soviet antizionist campaigns of 1967-1988, see Izabella Tabarovsky, “Soviet Antizionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism,” Fathom, May, 2019, fathomjournal.org/soviet-anti-zi…; and Izabella Tabarovsky, “Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon,” Tablet, June 6, 2019, tabletmag.com/sections/arts-….
10 Michael Billig, “Anti-Semitic Themes and the British Far Left: Some Social-Psychological Observations on Indirect
11 Aspects of the Conspiracy Tradition,” in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. C. F. Graumann and S. Moscovici (New York: Springer, 1987), 115–136.
12 Jovan Byford, Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (n.p.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 62–65.
13 Steve Cohen, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic: An Anti-Racist Analysis of Left Antisemitism (n.p.: Engage, 2005), ix.
14 Daniel Randall, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists (n.p.: No Pasaran Media, 2021), 76–116.
15 Seth Mandel, “The Jews Who Are Complicit in Jew Hatred,” Commentary, July/August 2021, commentary.org/articles/seth-….
16 Nan Robertson, “Paris Court Rules Reds Defamed Jews,” New York Times, April 25, 1973, nytimes.com/1973/04/25/arc….
17 Emanuel Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism: The Paris Trial (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 16–18.
18 Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism, 67–71; Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika: Ot Brezhneva do Gorbacheva, part 1: Vlast'—Evreiskii vopros, intelligentsiia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2019), 500.
19 Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism, 22, 70.
20 Mendel Beilis, Blood Libel: The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis (Chicago: Beilis Publishing, 2011).
21 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 500–501; Grigorii Svirskii, “Khozhdenie v shtrafniki. Parizhskii tribunal. O moikh dushevnykh druz'iakh—edinomyslakh,” in Shtrafniki (n.p., n.d.), shtrafniki.narod.ru/svirski-frames….
22 Litvinoff, Soviet Antisemitism, 100–102, 116.
31/ (Cont.)
23 Ruth Okuneva, “Antisemitic Notions: Strange Analogies” in Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences, ed. Theodore Freedman (New York: Freedom Library Press of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, New York, 1984), 266–381.
24 Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 gody (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003).
25 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 501.
26 Evgenii Evseev, Fashizm pod goluboi zvezdoi (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1971).
27 Elena Modrzhinskaia and Vladimir Lapskii, Iad sionizma (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1983).
28 Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 404.
29 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 527–538.
30 Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 406.
31 Emanuel Litvinoff, “Soviet Antizionism or Antisemitism?,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 3, no. 4 (1968): 12. On Von Leers heading Nasser’s Institute for the Study of Zionism, see Kevin Coogan, audio interview with Dave Emory, “For the Record,” August 5, 2002, spitfirelist.com/for-the-record….
32 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 530.
33 politico.eu/article/vladim…
34 levada.ru/en/2022/01/28/…
35 politico.eu/article/vladim…
36 politico.eu/article/vladim…
37 cst.org.uk/data/file/3/b/…, p.3
38 cst.org.uk/data/file/3/b/…, p.3
39 isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/upl…
40 cst.org.uk/news/blog/2022…
41 Harvey Klehr, Jon Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), Kindle edition, section: “Fifty Years of Soviet Subsidies.”
42 Victor Loupan and Pierre Lorrain, L’argent de Moscou: L’histoire la plus secrete du PCF (Paris: Plon, 1994), 231–234.
43 Martin Deeson, “Still Flying the Red Flag,” Independent, May 23, 2005, independent.co.uk/news/media/sti….
44 Loupan and Lorrain, L’argent de Moscou.
45 Deeson, “Still Flying the Red Flag.”
46 Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World.
47 Loupan and Lorrain, L’argent de Moscou, 212.
48 Beatrice de Graaf, Evaluating Counterterrorism Performance: A Comparative Study (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), Kindle edition without page numbers.
49 Jonathan S. Tobin, “Opposing Honors for Angela Davis Isn’t Racist,” National Review, January 11, 2019, nationalreview.com/2019/01/opposi….
50 Scott A. Shay, Conspiracy U: A Case Study (n.p.: Wicked Son, 2021), 45, 81–83.
51 Lucy Fisher, “Ex-Communist Who Defended Stalin Will Lead Corbyn’s Team,” Times of London, May 16, 2017, thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-com….
52 Daniel Sugarman, “Corbyn Appoints Anti-Israel Activist Andrew Murray as Campaign Chief,” Jewish Chronicle, May 15, 2017 thejc.com/news/uk/corbyn….
53 Lukasz Hirszowicz, “Soviet Perceptions of Zionism,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 9, no. 1 (1979): 53–65.
54 E. L. Solmar, “Protocols of Anti-Zionists,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 8, no. 2 (1978): 57–66, 62.
55 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 525.
56 Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism,” 72.
57 Quassim Cassam, Conspiracy Theories (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 89.
58 Andreas Umland, “Soviet Antisemitism after Stalin,” East European Jewish Affairs 29, nos. 1–2 (1999): 159–168, 164.
59 David Duke in Russia, ADL, page saved on Web Archive, web.archive.org/web/2013123115….
60 Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault and Joseph Stabile, “Confronting Russia’s Role in Transnational White Supremacy Extremism,” Just Security, February 6, 2020, justsecurity.org/68420/confront….
61 Soviet Russia, The Creator of the PLO and the Palestinian People, W E Brand, 2014
62 Former Soviet Spy Sees the Long Arm of the KGB in Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism, K R. Timmerman, 2013
63 CIA TS Archives, Research Study - The Soviet-Palestinian Connection Since the October 1973 War, 1975 (Declassified 2017)
64 CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991: A Documentary Collection, Editors Gerald K. Haines Robert E. Leggett, Center for the Study of intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, WashingtonDC, 2001
65 digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/colon…
23 Ruth Okuneva, “Antisemitic Notions: Strange Analogies” in Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union: Its Roots and Consequences, ed. Theodore Freedman (New York: Freedom Library Press of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, New York, 1984), 266–381.
24 Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 gody (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003).
25 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 501.
26 Evgenii Evseev, Fashizm pod goluboi zvezdoi (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1971).
27 Elena Modrzhinskaia and Vladimir Lapskii, Iad sionizma (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1983).
28 Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 404.
29 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 527–538.
30 Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia, 406.
31 Emanuel Litvinoff, “Soviet Antizionism or Antisemitism?,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 3, no. 4 (1968): 12. On Von Leers heading Nasser’s Institute for the Study of Zionism, see Kevin Coogan, audio interview with Dave Emory, “For the Record,” August 5, 2002, spitfirelist.com/for-the-record….
32 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 530.
33 politico.eu/article/vladim…
34 levada.ru/en/2022/01/28/…
35 politico.eu/article/vladim…
36 politico.eu/article/vladim…
37 cst.org.uk/data/file/3/b/…, p.3
38 cst.org.uk/data/file/3/b/…, p.3
39 isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/upl…
40 cst.org.uk/news/blog/2022…
41 Harvey Klehr, Jon Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), Kindle edition, section: “Fifty Years of Soviet Subsidies.”
42 Victor Loupan and Pierre Lorrain, L’argent de Moscou: L’histoire la plus secrete du PCF (Paris: Plon, 1994), 231–234.
43 Martin Deeson, “Still Flying the Red Flag,” Independent, May 23, 2005, independent.co.uk/news/media/sti….
44 Loupan and Lorrain, L’argent de Moscou.
45 Deeson, “Still Flying the Red Flag.”
46 Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World.
47 Loupan and Lorrain, L’argent de Moscou, 212.
48 Beatrice de Graaf, Evaluating Counterterrorism Performance: A Comparative Study (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), Kindle edition without page numbers.
49 Jonathan S. Tobin, “Opposing Honors for Angela Davis Isn’t Racist,” National Review, January 11, 2019, nationalreview.com/2019/01/opposi….
50 Scott A. Shay, Conspiracy U: A Case Study (n.p.: Wicked Son, 2021), 45, 81–83.
51 Lucy Fisher, “Ex-Communist Who Defended Stalin Will Lead Corbyn’s Team,” Times of London, May 16, 2017, thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-com….
52 Daniel Sugarman, “Corbyn Appoints Anti-Israel Activist Andrew Murray as Campaign Chief,” Jewish Chronicle, May 15, 2017 thejc.com/news/uk/corbyn….
53 Lukasz Hirszowicz, “Soviet Perceptions of Zionism,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 9, no. 1 (1979): 53–65.
54 E. L. Solmar, “Protocols of Anti-Zionists,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 8, no. 2 (1978): 57–66, 62.
55 Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 525.
56 Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism,” 72.
57 Quassim Cassam, Conspiracy Theories (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 89.
58 Andreas Umland, “Soviet Antisemitism after Stalin,” East European Jewish Affairs 29, nos. 1–2 (1999): 159–168, 164.
59 David Duke in Russia, ADL, page saved on Web Archive, web.archive.org/web/2013123115….
60 Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault and Joseph Stabile, “Confronting Russia’s Role in Transnational White Supremacy Extremism,” Just Security, February 6, 2020, justsecurity.org/68420/confront….
61 Soviet Russia, The Creator of the PLO and the Palestinian People, W E Brand, 2014
62 Former Soviet Spy Sees the Long Arm of the KGB in Today’s Muslim Anti-Semitism, K R. Timmerman, 2013
63 CIA TS Archives, Research Study - The Soviet-Palestinian Connection Since the October 1973 War, 1975 (Declassified 2017)
64 CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991: A Documentary Collection, Editors Gerald K. Haines Robert E. Leggett, Center for the Study of intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, WashingtonDC, 2001
65 digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/colon…
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