Terrorism: The Soviets’ Dagger in a Smile
Written on July 31, 2004
While reading through Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Hit Team by George Jonas, (soon to be a major motion picture) I came across something very interesting considering our current state of affairs in the world.
Bottom line: “modern” terrorism, from the past thirty years or so, is a direct result of Soviet attempts to undermine the West.
Of course, Russia has been fighting terrorism itself within the last ten years. But then, it’s no longer the Soviet Union, hell-bent on destroying the West. However, the tactics still exist and are taught on campuses across the United States and other countries. Russia has also learned a lesson that Saudi Arabia learned after fomenting terror through wahhabism, and that the U.S. has started to learn after propping up dictatorships around the world: that evil owes allegiance to nothing but itself, and it will gladly turn on it’s “master” as soon as it sees the benefit.
As you read, see if you notice any feelings of déjà vu — does the media and government’s willingness to turn a blind eye to much of what goes on underneath the visible “face” of terrorism sound familiar?
I’ve excerpted the relevant paragraphs (pp. 120-123), and included the footnotes as well.
In this respect they [the Israeli hit-team, operating autonomously as a "sleeper cell"] were not unlike the seemingly spontaneous bands of armed anarchists that had sprung up, from Uruguay to West Germany, in the wake of the great drug-culture-anti-Vietnam-War-environmentalist-feminist-New-Left movements of the turbulent sixties. Such terrorists were working for a country, too: the Soviet Union.3 But in 1972 few people made this association.
There were numerous reasons why most liberal commentators and politicians in the Western democracies refused to inquire into the possibility of the Soviet connection until the end of the seventies. First, the sixties generated an immense and, in some instances, not undeserved sympathy for many of the causes and ideas espoused by the terrorists. Though the overwhelming majority of the Western public would have had no sympathy for terrorist methods or “tactics” — meaning murder, robbery, hijackings and kidnappings — many people easily saw violent fanatics as somewhat unstable, immature individuals spontaneously carried by a commendable Zeitgeist to unfortunate extremes.
Second, the Soviet Union always tended to condemn, or at least failed to applaud, most forms of terrorism in its official pronouncements. Speaking in the United Nations Assembly, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko found it “impossible to condone acts of terrorism by certain Palestinian elements leading to the tragic events in Munich.” Experts in Sovietology could point, with some justification, to the traditional gulf between anarchists and orthodox Communists, the latter regarding the former as “petit-bourgeois romantics” who would “objectively” only hinder the “victory of the proletariat.” In fact, some terrorist groups would occasionally go public themselves in expressing their opposition to “Soviet imperialism” as well as to “Western colonialism” — though with regard to their anti-Soviet feelings they were always very careful not to back up their words with action.5
Third, the quickly mushrooming terrorist groups in Europe, in the Americas, in the Third World and in the Middle East presented such a chaotic, incoherent jumble of confused, contradictory philosophies that it was difficult to think of them as the manifestations of any single policy or design. Some were religious fanatics; some ultranationalists; some Marxists or quasi-Marxists of all shades; some simply “antiauthoritarian” or “anti-imperalist” — though never actively objecting to the considerable authoritarianism or imperialism of the Communist bloc. Even the groups calling themselves “Communist” subscribed to ideas that inside the Soviet Union would have been promptly labeled “left-deviationist” and landed them in a psychiatric hospital or worse. Moreover, they took their ideological differences very seriously and spent nearly as much time ostracizing, shooting and blowing each other up as they spent terrorizing the people and governments of the West.
The Soviet bloc and, in the early days, the Chinese Communist forces that launched, trained, armed and partially financed terrorists were not interested in the day-to-day details of their activities. No one inquired into their orthodox Communist credentials. They were exempt from having to toe the party line. The terrorists’ function, in the eyes of the Soviet organs of state security, was to disrupt and destabilize the Western democracies, and it was a matter of indifference to the Kremlin by what means and on the basis of what ideas they achieved it. The only thing that mattered was their terminal militancy — and the degree to which they could provoke democratic governments to respond to them in an equally intemperate fashion. They were there to invite, to actually create, the repression against which they were ostensibly fighting; and whether they based their acts of violence on ideals of religion, national liberation, or social or racial justice was quite immaterial to the KGB.6 It was also immaterial whether their causes were merely bizarre or did, in fact, contain a measure of justice or a grain of truth.
The terrorists themselves — certainly in the lower echelons, but sometimes even in the higher ones — were often not aware of the extent to which they were being used as instruments of Soviet policy. Or, ironically enough, they might be lulled into an illusion that they were using the Soviet Union for their own ends. The genius of this approach lay in the fact that the Soviets could do fundamental harm to liberal democracies — indeed, in countries like Turkey or post-Franco Spain, prevent or retard the growth of democratic government altogether — while washing their official hands of any involvement. The same hands in which they were holding out the olive branch of détente.
And here, perhaps, was the final reason behind the West’s refusal to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s role in international terrorism throughout the seventies, even after many of the facts had become public knowledge.7 In an age of nuclear weapons, to many statesmen it seemed wiser not to rock the boat for little matters. Terrorism wasn’t such a problem, really; the odd diplomat, business leader, journalist or airline passenger not such a high price to pay to avoid endangering the thaw in East-West relations or the Helsinki Accords. Especially since the Soviet Union seemed courteous and diplomatic enough to achieve much of its support of terrorism through proxies: many of the instructors were Cuban or Palestinian; many of the weapons were manufactured in and shipped from East Germany; many of the briefings were held in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, rather than in Moscow. The reason was not simply, as many otherwise well-informed people believed, to keep the Soviet Union at arm’s length from the wet business of blood in the streets. The Kremlin did not particularly intend to deceive the public, let alone the government leaders or intelligence services of the West — terror isn’t terror unless its source is crystal clear — but merely to enable them to close their eyes if they so chose. It was an excellent test of their will. The perfect way to add insult to injury, to demoralize and humiliate Western leaders, to make one ambassador lick the hand that shot the other, until the great democracies lost all confidence in their own values and strength.
The Soviets did not, of course, invent the ills and tensions of the world. They merely identified and exploited them. They would leave no scab unpicked. They would allow no wound to heal, if they could make it fester. If there was a conflict, they’d turn it into a war; if a cause emerged — legitimate or not — they’d wait for a fanatic to surface and take an extreme position in it, then supply him with weapons. If none emerged, they might create some. The KGB calculated, accurately enough, that if it supplied and trained a sufficient number of violent extremists it could let them loose without any detailed instructions or supervision. Havoc was certain to follow
I do not mean that from the early 1960s to this day every person who smoked pot, opposed the Vietnam War, protested pollution, demanded equal pay for women, tried to preserve endangered species, and so on was at the same time, consciously or unconsciously, furthering the foreign-policy interests of the soviet Union. Rather, that (a) every one of these movements has served as a staging area for tiny violent minorities to disrupt Western societies or change their nature by provoking repressive measures — the ancient Communist tactic — and (b) substantially larger minorities within these movements joined them in the belief that their pet peeves, from linear thought to the killing of the whales, were plots by or problems peculiar to the free-enterprise system.
This created a climate in the West, especially between 1965 and 1975, wherein every Western policy had to be carried out with reference to the special interests and beliefs of these groups, even when doing so was evidentially injurious to the larger interests of Western societies as a whole. In talking about the consequences of the efforts of only one of these groups, the environmentalists, Paul Johnson, former editor of The New Stateman, has this to say in his book Economics of Society (New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 101: “The precise economic effects, in terms of human misery and death, of the ecolobby’s coup will never be known…. The only gainer was the archetypal totalitarian state, the Soviet Union, which saw its own prestige rise, and its effective military and political power enhanced, as the wealth of the West fell and its self-confidence evaporated.”
“It has always been very striking to me,” notes Harvard history professor Richard Pipes, “that these terrorist groups, among whom there are many anarchists who detest the Soviet Union as much as they do the Western capitalist countries, have almost never struck at Soviet objectives. This is to me added evidence that the Russians exercise a very considerable controlling influence over these movements.” (The Jonathan Institute’s report, p. 14, italics in the original.)
Few things show more clearly Soviet Russia’s disinterest in ideology when it comes to a chance to destabilize the West and its allies than its support of the various neofascist “black” terrorist groups, either directly or through proxies, throughout the world.
… “Public knowledge” in this sense meant only that the information was becoming available and some of it would be printed from time to time, mainly in scholarly and specialized publications.
Mass-market publications, with hardly any exceptions, wouldn’t touch the subject until the late seventies; and editors — as I know from personal experience — might accuse a writer of “bias” or “Cold War mentality” for submitting documented accounts of Russia’s role in international terrorism. Soviet Russia’s role in terrorism had been surrounded by what author-journalist Rober Moss termed at the 1979 Jerusalem Conference “a conspiracy of silence.”