The Venona Secrets:
Exposing Soviet Espionage
and America's Traitors
by Herbert Romerstein
with Eric BreindelThe Spike
by Arnaud De Borchgrave
and Robert MossThe Terror Network
by Claire Sterling
Posted on 03/13/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by ScaniaBoy
SOVIET TERROR LINKS FOUND IN LEBANON
Our major media have long ignored or downplayed evidence linking the Soviet Union and its satellites to international terrorism. When Robert Moss, co- author of The Spike, told an international conference on terrorism held in Jerusalem in 1981 that the PLO had become a Soviet surrogate in the Middle East, the reaction of the representatives of the press was one of cynicism mixed with hostility. Wall Street Journal correspondent Susan Weaver explained the negative reaction to Moss's statement, saying that linking the KGB with world terrorism through the PLO "cast a dark shadow on what remained of Henry Kissinger's carefully designed policy of detente."
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Washington Post writer Blaine Hardin attacked The Terror Network, an excellent book by Claire Sterling exposing the international terrorist movement and its close ties to the communist countries when it was published last year. Hardin informed Miss Sterling that it was a mistake to publish material, which would provide aid and comfort to the "radical right." Claire Sterling disregarded Mr. Hardin's counsel She published an important article in the September 1982 issue of Reader's Diqest exposing the links between Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terrorist who tried to kill the Pope, and the Bulgarian secret police, who are under the control of the Soviet KGB. The media have given this sensational article little attention.
The charges of Soviet involvement in the international terrorist movement that have been made by Robert Moss, Alexander Haig, Claire Sterling and others were strikingly confirmed by documents captured by the Israeli Army in Lebanon. But rather than catapulting this long ignored fact to the front pages, the documentary evidence found by the Israelis has also been largely ignored by Big Media.
Claire Sterling's Charges
In the The Terror Network, Claire Sterling showed that the Soviet Union had long been deeply involved in training and equipping every Palestinian terrorist group. She said, "Russian military hardware and expertise had in fact furnished the officers' corps, tactics, and superb modern armament for all the Palestinians' combined forces, the most formidable guerrilla army on earth." She charged that Palestinians had been sent in large numbers to the Soviet Union for terrorist training. They traveled to Moscow in Aeroflot planes. They received indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism and training in the use of a variety of Soviet weapons, explosives, and urban guerrilla tactics. Miss Sterling said that the training camps in the USSR and Eastern Europe offered 54 courses for Palestinians and other foreigners in 1977. She said that 35 of these courses were given in the Soviet Union itself. Eight were given in East Germany, four in Bulgaria, four in Czechoslovakia, and three in Poland.
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Despite the evidence that was provided by captured terrorists such as Hader and information obtained from other sources, our media and Western governments in general went along with the fiction that the Soviets had nothing to do with terrorism. The Soviets contended that they had no control over the use the Palestinians made of the arms they gave them. Claire Sterling says that Western governments were all too willing to go along with that fiction. She points out that in the spring of 1980, Dutch police arrested four Spanish terrorists who were heading home after receiving terrorist training in South Yemen, a Soviet satellite. They confessed that they were part of a group of 13 that had been sent for training by the Basque terrorist group, ETA. Miss Sterling says this made headlines all over Western Europe, but no government was willing to confront the Soviets or the Palestinians with this evidence of their meddling in the internal affairs of Western Europe, employing terrorism.
Indeed, the Soviet involvement has been admitted and even boasted of by PLO spokesmen. In 1979, Zehdi Labib Terzi, the PLO representative at the UN, said publicly: "The Soviet Union, and all the rest of the socialist countries, just like the rest of the world, almost, they give us the full support--diplomatic, moral, educational, and also they open their military academies to some of our freedom fighters." Muhammed ash-Sha'ir, the PLO's representative in Moscow, boasted that hundreds of PLO officers had been graduated from Soviet military academies. His statement was distributed by the PLO news agency on February 17, 1981.
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The Captured PLO Documents
The findings of Sterling, Romerstein and others about the Soviet-bloc support of the terrorist movement received strong confirmation from the documents captured in Lebanon by the Israeli forces during the early days of the recent war. According to The Washington Inquirer, which obtained copies of the captured documents from the Israeli Embassy, they showed that PLO officers tended to receive at least one training course in the Soviet Union, while others went to training camps in Hungary and other Soviet-bloc countries. The Israelis found certificates awarded by the Soviet Ministry of Defense to these trainees. Some of the documents recounted disciplinary problems the Soviets had encountered with the trainees.
The files and records of the PLO's "September Fallen/ Castle Brigade" show that training took place in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, East Germany, Communist China, Algeria, Libya and South Yemen. The discovery of Cuban and Yugoslav sabotage and terrorism manuals indicates that some PLO mem bers were also trained in those countries.
The documents showed that the training was not limited to Palestinians and not directed simply at their efforts to create trouble for Israel. For example, one of the captured manuals informed terrorists attacking American air bases that one kilogram of explosives is enough for targets such as pilots' living quarters, fuel and oil tanks and ammunition dumps.
A Spanish sabotage manual was found. It stressed the importance of bombing transportation and power facilities. This has been the tactic employed by the guerrillas in El Salvador, whose leaders are probably graduates of a training course using the same manual. This book tells how to set up roadblocks and how to destroy telephone communications, trains, fuel storage tanks and electric power lines, transformers and plants. Instructions are also given on the destruction of buses and trucks and the derailment of trains.
The Israelis also found a camp where Western European terrorists were trained. It was the PLO camp, Shatila, near Beirut. A 45-day course was given there in weapons, demolition, intelligence, tactics and karate. The trainees included members of the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Italian Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, the Turkish Liberation Army and the IRA. A captured document showed that the foreign trainees at a camp near Tyre included Turks, Haitians, Salvadorans and South Africans. Documents also showed Libya to be supporting a new subversive movement to overthrow the governments of Niger and Mali in western Africa. This is called the Movement for the Liberation of the Tuark People.
Foreign Terrorists Discovered
The Israelis found that the PLO forces arrayed against them in Lebanon included hundreds of foreigners who were either in Lebanon for terrorist training or who were serving in the PLO forces. Newsweek was one of the few publications to even allude to this. In discussing the exodus of the PLO from Beirut, it mentioned that about 1000 of those leaving were foreigners, not Palestinians.
Professor Abraham Miller, editor of the publication Terrorism, the Media and the Law, states that the Israelis discovered hundreds of non-Palestinian terrorists. He said, "They consist of members of the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Irish Republican Army.
Along with these are Basque separatists, Argentinian Marxists and an assortment of would-be killers from Niger, Mall, Sudan, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, Libya, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Palestinians who have been trained at Soviet bases at Simveropol have returned to the Middle East to impart their terrorist skills to eager students from across the globe. The curriculum at Simveropol also contains strong doses of Marxism-Leninism in the unlikely event that the student terrorist did not come to the Soviet Union with sufficient ideological commitment."
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(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
Personally, I think they are committing the same error as during the 80s when western intelligence agencies and the media (with avid ”support” from left-wing writers) debunked stories that indicated a terrorist network supported by the the Soviet Union and her allies. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon 1982 and revelations subsequent to the fall of the Soviet empire has shown that the ”alarmists” were correct in much of their analysis. Although USSR maybe never directed the terrorist actions it definitely supplied the organisations with training, weapons, and money, and turned a blind eye when these were used in terrorist actions.
It is interesting to note the position of the intelligence agencies, who debunked the role of the Soviets during the 70s and 80s (even in opposition to CIA-director William Casey), and the sudden reversal of intelligence sources regarding the Prague Atta-Iraqi connection.
Could it be that intelligence bureaucracies in general are very adverse to conflicts - partly because their possibility to affect the political agenda is usually diminished during war, and secondly because their predictions and results are being put to a definite test?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/867403/posts
Excerpt:
4. Spain, Italy and the Balkans
The closeness of Spain and Portugal to North Africa make them important targets for illegal migrants seeking entry into the European Union. Spain accuses the Moroccan police of cooperating with migrant traffickers who pay corrupt officials to turn a blind eye. Spanish authorities now speak of an invasion. [ 66 ] Moroccan criminal networks in Spain are involved in money-laundering, and trafficking in drugs and human beings.
Increasingly, Spain faces the problem of young North African and Arab immigrants using its territory as a meeting place for staging terrorist attacks elsewhere. Spain is considered a safe haven for terrorists where the risks of police interference are minimal. Spanish police estimate that about two hundred Islamic extremists with ties to eighteen terrorist groups entered Spain in 2000. [ 67 ] While French security and intelligence services have gathered detailed information on Islamist terrorist networks for more than two decades, the Spanish services are still poorly equipped to face a problem that is relatively new to them. For years, their focus has been on the homegrown terrorism of the Basque separatist movement ETA.
Spanish authorities now fear that the Islamist and Basque radicals have formed an alliance of sorts. Some ETA terrorists visited the same Middle Eastern training camps as a number of Islamic extremists. Representatives from ETA and Osama Bin Laden reportedly met in Brussels, but there were frictions after the Islamic fundamentalists refused to continue the meeting in the presence of a Basque woman who preferred to stay. Spanish sources claim that Mohammed Atta, the suicide pilot from Hamburg who was the first to fly into the World Trade Center in New York, also tried to forge links between al-Qaeda and ETA terrorists. [ 68] Just before Christmas 1999, ETA planned an attack on the Picasso Tower in Madrid. The American architect of the Picasso Tower was Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan; but it is not clear whether ETA got the idea from Muslim extremists. [ 69 ] What is known is that al-Qaeda cells in Europe, the United States and Canada planned terrorist attacks around Christmas 1999 and the subsequent Millennium celebrations.
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Refs
66. "Spanje en Marokko Ruziën Over Illegalen," NRC Handelsblad, 6 September 2001, p. 5; Mario Ribiero, "Espanha: A Invasao," Focus (Lisbon), 26 August 2001, p. 106-107.
67. Steven Adolf, "'Taliban van Baskenland' Onder Druk Door Antiterreur," NRC Handelsblad, 1 October 2001, p. 5.
68. ibid.
69. Reuters, 9 November 2001.
One thing that's important to keep in mind when talking about Islamic terror groups is- they're not all al Qaeda. I notice a tendency lately to label them all as al Qaeda but this is not accurate. Al Qaeda might not trust ETA enough to work with them, but this isn't to say that other Muslim groups share that same aversion. I could envision a Muslim terror group helping out ETA and at the same time having ties to al Qaeda. This wouldn't link ETA directly to al Qaeda even though they were directly tied to other Muslim groups.
Just throwing it out there.
I don't know much about the Socialist Workers' Party in Spain, but there is of course the background of Soviet-PLO-ETA links mentioned above in this thread, and I think there's good evidence of links between socialist/communist groups and the Islamists in other countries in Europe--here's a good link on that:
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 16, 2004
George Galloway, the maverick British parliamentarian who was expelled from the Labour Party after his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq led to charges that he incited Iraqis to fight against British troops, was there. Tony Benn, another former Labour MP and prominent defender of Socialism, also made the trip. So did Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General (for Lyndon Johnson) and a high-profile advocate for the impeachment of George W. Bush, the freeing of Leonard Peltier, and a host of other fashionable Leftist causes. At the 2003 Cairo Conference held in mid-December by The International Campaign Against U.S. & Zionist Occupations, these high-profile antiwar advocates had a chance to rub elbows with their newest ideological bedfellows: radical Muslims who openly advocate the restoration of the caliphate, the politico-religious ruler of a unified Muslim world, and the establishment of an Islamic world order under the rule of Islamic law, the Sharia.
That such an alliance was an actual goal of the Conference was hinted at by Salma Yacoob, an activist with the Muslim Association of Britain as well as chair of the Birmingham chapter of the Stop the War Coalition. In Cairo, she told the assembled dignitaries that “it is because we are potentially so strong together that our enemies try to divide us.” “Us” in this case would be the amalgamation of Islamists (that is, Muslims who see Islamic law as the only rightful way to order society), secular socialists, and Arab nationalists.
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Ben Bella waxed sentimental about his old friend and comrade Che Guevara: “Che was a courageous fighter who had to struggle unremittingly with a body wracked by asthma. Once, when I climbed with him to the Chrea Heights overlooking the town of Blida, I saw him suffer an attack that turned him green in the face. I first met him in autumn 1962 on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis and the blockade decreed by the US. I was due to attend the September session of the UN in New York at the first Algerian flag-raising ceremony.”
But since he met Che, Ben Bella has changed. Imprisoned for years after he was deposed in Algeria, he read the only book allowed in prison: the Qur’an. “And if,” says Al-Ahram, “over the years Ben Bella has held tenaciously to his leftist, progressive ideals, in later years an infusion of Islam — what he terms the spiritual element sadly lacking in doctrinaire Marxism — has seeped into his own brand of socialism.”
With Galloway, Benn, and Clark publicly linked to Ben Bella, Hudaybi, and Yacoob, it is difficult not to conclude that the seepage is going both ways. Ben Bella himself asked the Conference to make sure that it would. After denouncing “Bush and the insane clique surrounding him” and castigating the Washington-led “globalization movement,” he recommended that the Conference “actively participate in incorporating the Arab world more and more” into the resistance to that movement. In other words, the aging Islamist called upon the Conference attendees to infuse the global antiwar movement with more of an Islamic character.
The Cairo Conference demonstrated that Socialist antiwar activists don’t mind sharing a podium with radical Muslims who want to establish Sharia states in Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, the peace movement has betrayed a taste for totalitarianism and brutality before. Today’s radical Muslim terrorists are worthy heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and all the rest who filled the Gulag for the sake of peace. Evidently nowadays as long as the struggle against “imperialist aggression” is won, a few amputations and stonings along the way will be just fine.
The Venona Secrets:
Exposing Soviet Espionage
and America's Traitors
by Herbert Romerstein
with Eric BreindelThe Spike
by Arnaud De Borchgrave
and Robert MossThe Terror Network
by Claire Sterling
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