This weekend’s horrific string of coordinated terror attacks in Paris at the hands of ISIS left Russian President Vladimir Putin joining Barack Obama in a vow to wipe out the radical Islamic terror group ISIS. It’s an ironic promise given Russia’s tangled involvement with radical Islam.
Recently I reached out to the highest ranking official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, author of the book Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, for his thoughts on Putin’s power grab in the Middle East and what that may mean for Israel and America. As always, his insights are a refreshing, if challenging declaration of the truth of how we got into this mess and what we need to do to get out of it.
The most horrifying fact of the matter is that Russia has been linked to radical Islamic terrorism for decades. What does this mean when it comes to Putin’s entanglement in Syria, the Iran deal, and Israel’s anticipation of inevitable regional conflict? Is Putin the savior of the Christian west, or is he using a moral platform as a ruse in order to mask a desire to dominate the East?
According to Lt. Gen. Pacepa:
Soviet leaders advocated the use of terrorism over military force decades ago.
Some omniscient media outfits suggest that the terrorist attack on Paris and Russia’s current military involvement in the Middle East conflict may mark the beginning of World War III. I no longer have access to Russian classified information, nor do I wish to play the armchair general, but I do have reason to suggest that the Kremlin will rather intensify its ongoing terrorist war. General Aleksandr Sakharovsky had been communist Romania’s chief intelligence adviser and my de facto boss before leading the whole Soviet bloc espionage community during the Cold War for an unprecedented term of 16 years, and he used to pontificate: “In today’s world, where nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, our main weapon should be terrorism.”
The Soviet hatred of America spurred on a Soviet-Muslim armed alliance.
In 1972, KGB chairman Yury Andropov elevated Sakharovsky’s terrorism to an anti-American armed doctrine for the whole Muslim world. During those days, the KGB disinformation machinery portrayed the United States as a war-mongering, Zionist country financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (the KGB’s derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress), the aim of which was to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. Andropov was convinced that that would generate mass terrorism against the United States–one billion adversaries could cause far greater damage than could a mere 150 million. Andropov proved right–no wonder he became the first KGB officer to be enthroned in the Kremlin.
The KGB community threw millions of dollars and thousands of people into that gigantic project. Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure the results of a sustained disinformation operation. Nevertheless, it is safe to presume that over the course of twenty-plus years the combination of spreading tens of thousands of Protocols within the Islamic world along with portraying the United States there as a criminal Zionist instrument should have left some trace.
The Iranian hostage crisis in ’79, the Beirut barracks bombing in ’83, 9/11 and the decapitation of journalist Daniel Pearl can all be traced back to the KGB’s influence over radical Islam.
Witness the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The grisly decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 symbolizes this KGB legacy. The mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, gruesomely murdered Pearl because he was an American Jew.
What should we do?
Lt. Gen. Pacepa notes that Soviet power was ultimately conquered through a Truth Campaign fought through the media. Whether it was Voice of America or Radio Free Europe in the 1950’s, or Ronald Reagan’s infamous “evil empire” campaign in the 1980’s, the best weapon wielded by the free world was the truth about the evils of the USSR broadcast through a free media. That is how we won the Cold War without firing a shot.
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