The State Department contends that the assassination of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three American officials who defended him was an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment reaction to a low-budget film called Innocence of Muslims. That is nothing more than a fairytale lullaby designed to put American outrage to sleep. The only reaction to this fantasy seems to have been among the Muslim terrorist leaders, who understand it as a go-ahead to attack our embassies all around the world with impunity. Our embassy in Pakistan is now under siege. Thousands of other “angry” Muslims are now screaming “Death to America” and burning American flags in front of our embassies in Egypt, Indonesia, Sudan, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Yemen, Germany, and Great Britain, to mention just a few.
During the years I spent at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community I unfortunately came to know many tyrants quite well, and I learned for a fact that they despise appeasers. In April 1978, President Jimmy Carter hailed Romania’s communist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader.” I was standing next to the two of them at the White House, and I could hardly believe my ears. A few hours later, I was in the car with Ceausescu, driving away from the White House. He took a bottle of alcohol and splashed it all over his face, in reaction to having been affectionately kissed by the U.S. president in the Oval Office. “Peanut-head,” Ceausescu muttered in disgust.
Three months later, President Carter signed my request for political asylum, and I told him who Ceausescu really was, and how he had reacted to that kiss at the White House. On the memorable day of July 19, 1979, however, I watched the TV news with disbelief, as President Carter did it again. He affectionately kissed Leonid Brezhnev on both cheeks during their first encounter in Vienna.
Brezhnev also despised appeasers, as I also knew for a fact. Five months after the infamous Carter-Brezhnev kiss, a KGB terrorist squad assassinated Hafizullah Amin, the American-educated prime minister of Afghanistan, and replaced him with a Soviet puppet. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and President Carter feebly protested by boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. This new sign of American weakness gave rise to the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden’s terrorism.
In the 1990s, the U.S. government virtually ignored bin Laden’s first assault on the World Trade Center, the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. During that same period, we entrusted our national security and foreign policy tasks into the hands of the United Nations — which responded on May 3, 2001, by ejecting the United States from its Human Rights Commission.
We had barely set foot in the 21st century, when bin Laden’s terrorists unleashed a relentless war against our country, with the disastrous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Soon after that, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), expelled the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (AEIA), and let loose a venomous anti-American campaign. “Let’s exterminate our sworn enemy U.S. imperialists!” reads a slogan inside North Korean jet cockpits, sailors’ cabins, and army guard posts.
When Ronald Reagan became president, the U.S. was being treated with contempt by most petty tyrants around the world. The Soviet Union was on the march in Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, Ethiopia, Syria, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, and, of course, Afghanistan. President Reagan reversed all these trends by calling the tyrants and their tyrannies by their real names, and treating them as such. Remember his “Evil Empire”? The Soviet press agency TASS said those words demonstrated that Reagan was a “bellicose, lunatic anti-Communist.” But it was precisely that “lunatic anti-Communist” who won the 44-year Cold War and returned America to greatness.
Unfortunately, in 1993 we got another wishy-washy president, who reinstated Carter’s policy of appeasing Communist tyrants. On April 22, 2000, during a Holy Week, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, President Bill Clinton’s marshals forcibly seized and returned to Communist Cuba a six-year-old boy who had miraculously escaped alive from a boat that had sunk with his mother, who had been trying to free her only child from Castro’s tyranny.
To Fidel Castro, the bright-eyed, telegenic Elián González was a “traitor” who could become a symbol of freedom for both the exiles in Miami and the people of Havana, and who could therefore damage Castro’s image at home and abroad. Therefore, soon after Elián was found floating around the ocean in an inner tube, Castro assembled 300,000 Cubans on Havana’s streets to protest the “kidnapping” of Elian by the United States. Then Castro tried to lure Elián back — as Ceausescu had tried on me, after I had escaped from Romania. Elián’s two Cuban grandmothers were dispatched to the United States, bringing photo albums with pictures of Elián’s relatives, schoolmates, home, dog, parrot, and empty school desk “waiting for you to return.” Cuba supplied the grandmothers with new clothes and travel expenses. They were, of course, accompanied by Cuban handlers, who managed their every move in the United States.
Elián himself did not fall for Castro’s tricks. Unfortunately, President Clinton and his attorney general, Janet Reno, did swallow the bait, and the boy went back to Cuba. It was not long before Russia’s Pravda began crowing: “It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.”[2]
Elián González became an international symbol of freedom. Today the Miami house where he lived as a free child is a popular museum, where visitors can see a popular shrine to the boy — who is now a 19-yer-old prisoner on a starving Communist island. Elián’s school uniform still hangs in the Miami closet, along with dozens of outfits that he never got a chance to wear. A giant image of the Associated Press photo showing an American federal agent pointing an automatic weapon toward Elián, who had been hiding in a bedroom closet, is also on display.[3]
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According to international law, our embassies are part of the United States, and an armed attack on any U.S. embassy is considered an act of war against the U.S. So far, every indication is that the armed attack on our consulate in Benghazi was planned and carried out by terrorists. If this proves to be true, then the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens was indeed an act of war against the U.S.
A Libyan security guard at the consulate, who was seriously injured during that so-called “spontaneous” attack but survived, has testified that “there wasn’t a single ant outside” until 9:35 p.m., when as many as 125 armed men descended on the compound from all directions. The men lobbed grenades into the compound, shouting “God is great.” They wounded the guard, and then moved to the villas that make up the consulate compound.
For his part, the interim president of Libya, Mohamed el-Megarif, stated that the terrorists had chosen a “specific date” for this attack, and that “foreigners” took part in it.
Our ambassador to Libya was indeed murdered on September 11, 2012, the day when the United States was mourning the death of some three thousand Americans who had also been killed by Islamic terrorists. That day also happened to be the very day the Kremlin was celebrating a significant anniversary — 125 years since the birth of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB, now rechristened as FSB.
Was the Kremlin involved in the assassination of our ambassador in Libya? We do not know yet. But we do know that the ambassador was killed with Russian weapons and ammunition. We also know that the Kremlin and its intelligence organizations have a penchant for symbolism, a weapon of the emotions successfully wielded by all Russian tsars and their Communist successors.
The emblem of the Soviet Union consisted of a hammer and a sickle, to symbolize the alliance between the proletariat and the peasants. The emblem of the KGB was a sword and a shield, symbolizing its duties: to put the country’s enemies to the sword, and to shield and protect the Communist revolution. Most of the KGB-financed international terrorist organizations were called “liberation” movements, to symbolize the Kremlin’s commitment to liberating the rest of the world from “American tyranny.” The Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East (which was created and financed by the KGB), the National Liberation Army of Columbia” (FARC), created by the KGB with help from Fidel Castro (which became deeply involved in kidnapping, hijacking, bombing and guerrilla warfare), and the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, are just a few of them.
Moreover, I know for a fact that KGB chief Yury Andropov and his East European viceroys raised a glass of champagne to celebrate the terrorist bomb that exploded in Jerusalem’s Zion Square on July 4, 1975, leaving 15 dead and 64 wounded. That was a slap at the United States, whose national day is the Fourth of July. It was also significant that the first attack on New York’s World Trade Center, which was intended to knock the North Tower into the South Tower and to generate mass killing, took place on February 26, 1993, when the Kremlin was celebrating 41 years since the first Soviet nuclear test. The suicide attack against the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole, in which 17 sailors were killed and 39 injured, took place on October 12, 2000. That was the anniversary of the beginning of Israel’s major offensive of 1973, which was decisive in Israel’s winning the Yom Kippur War. The significance of the failed bombing attempts over Detroit and New York on Christmas Day 2009 needs no explanation.
Finally, we also know that during the Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state, but that now the KGB is the state. In 2003, three years after the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin plunked himself down on the Kremlin throne, some 6,000 former officers of the KGB — that organization responsible for having slaughtered at least 20 million people in the Soviet Union alone — were running Russia’s federal and local governments.
As I no longer live in the bear’s lair, I do not have inside information confirming whether the criminal attack of our consulate in Benghazi was masterminded by the former KGB officers now running Russia. But our FBI is a superb organization, capable of learning the correct answer. Unfortunately, for political reasons, the administration and the leaders of the Democratic Party have publicly rushed to conclusions without knowing the truth. For them, the prestige and the security of the administration seem to be a lot more important than the prestige and the security of the United States.
Americans are proud people who dearly love their country. Let’s hope that in November they will choose to protect the security and the prestige of the United States, not of the current administration.
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Endnotes:
[1] Sang-Hun Choe, “N. Korea fuels hatred of all things American,” The Associated Press, January 15, 2003, internet edition.
[1] President Nicolae Ceausescu’s State Visit to the USA: April 12-17, 1978, English version. Bucharest: Meridiane Publishing House, 1978, p. 78.
[2] “American capitalism gone with a whimper,” Pravda, April 27, 2004.
[3] Elián González saga still vivid for many, 10 years later,” CNN, April 22, 2010.
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Image made courtesy shutterstock photo / Heiko Kiera
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