#kgb

“Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same....

I was given the KGB's ‘personal file’ on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. 

First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a ‘palestinian’ by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called ‘Falastinuna’ (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the ‘palestinian’ terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many ‘palestinian’ students....

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American ‘imperial-Zionism’ during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him 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....

In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝 𝑜𝑛 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢'𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑘 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑚 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢'𝑙𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑔𝑛𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝐼𝑠𝑟𝑎𝑒𝑙 -- 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time....”

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of “Red Horizons” (Regnery, 1987)

Sources: Wall Street Journal (September 24, 2003)

Throwback to this Kagurabachi ad that tore through the October 6, 2025 issue of The New York Times' International Edition to celebrate the series' second anniversary 🗡️ Featuring Chihiro “cutting into our world” 🔥