Comintern to Momintern

Yet, there was another protagonist in the Cold War, one no longer around to blame and, therefore, by a process of inverted logic, seen as blameless. What role did the Soviet Union play in grandfathering Islamist terror?

It suits many intellectuals — wading in the swirling waters of anti-Americanism — to not ask the question. Yet, every now and then, disconcerting evidence shows up.

The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World provides clues as to the links between the Soviet Union and the vaguely left-wing fellow travellers who, eventually, became 21st century jihadis. It helps trace the growth curve from Comintern to, well, Momintern.

While the section on the Middle East in The Mitrokhin Archive II is instructive, it is not complete. Vasili Mitrokhin was, after all, just one man. To piece together a bigger picture, one has to turn to other accounts. Gaping holes still remain, but a trend emerges.

On page 2 itself, Christopher Andrew — co-author of both volumes of The Mitrokhin Archive — provides a tantalising sampler. He refers to the Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened in Baku in 1920 by Grigori Zinoviev, Comintern chairman: ‘‘Delegates excitedly waved swords, daggers and revolvers in the air when Zinoviev called on them to wage a jihad against imperialism and capitalism.’’

At the Baku conference — aimed to win the Bolsheviks allies from among the debris of the Ottoman Empire — Zinoviev used the terms ‘‘class war’’ and ‘‘jihad’’ synonymously. Jihad was presented as a legitimate political weapon against the West. The Comintern deserves Al Qaeda’s thanks.

A half-century later, the Soviet Union was waging what it claimed was an ideological conflict: the Cold War. In reality, it was driven by power and primordialism.

As the Mitrokhin Archive II points out, the KGB’s Middle Eastern foreign policy was, of course, aimed at neutralising the ‘‘Main Adversary’’ (America) but also guided by a high degree of anti-Semitism, an attribute inherited from the Tsarist ruling classes.

East German spymaster Markus Wolf ‘‘found the KGB… ‘fixated on Israel as an enemy’’’, the book says. It was fixation as paranoia. In 1982, the KGB ‘‘held a… conference in Leningrad devoted to ‘The main tendencies of the subversive activity of Zionist centres abroad and Jewish nationalists within the country’’’. It concluded: ‘‘Virtually no major negative incidents took place in the socialist countries of Europe without involvement of Zionists.’’ Hitler couldn’t have put it better.

The KGB decided ‘‘Zionists in league with Israel and ‘imperialist intelligence services’, especially the CIA’’ were out to destroy the Soviet Union. In response, it spent the 1970s and 1980s showering weapons on first generation Palestinian terror practitioners.

Chief among these was Wadi Haddad, deputy leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and, later, of its breakaway, Baghdad-based Special Operations Group.

As Mitrokhin records, on at least two occasions Haddad was given impressive arms shipments by the KGB. Transfers took place mid-sea, off the coast of South Yemen, a Soviet client state.

Haddad — ‘‘recruited by the KGB as Agent Natsionalist’’ — seemed to have pre-alerted the KGB to the hijacking of four New York-bound planes in September 1970. The planes were flown to Jordan, and the passengers exchanged for imprisoned terrorists.

The ‘‘KBG was almost certainly given advance notice’’, the book says, of the dramatic kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. That was the work of Haddad’s assistant, Illich Ramirez Sanchez or ‘‘Carlos the Jackal’’, the ‘‘spoiled son of a millionaire Venezuelan communist’’ and alumnus of Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University.

‘‘Moscow showed rather less interest in the PLO,’’ the Mitrokhin papers say, ‘‘… that (Yasser) Arafat had friendly relations with the deviant communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, strengthened Moscow’s suspicion of him.’’

Set this against ‘‘Yasser Arafat: The KGB’s Man’’, an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in September 2003. Written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Romanian foreign intelligence chief, it said: ‘‘In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat… high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services’ priority list, including mine. Bucharest’s role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this… Washington… believe(d) that Nicolae Ceausescu was… an ‘independent’ communist with a ‘moderate’ streak.’’

Pacepa relates how the KGB virtually ‘‘invented’’ Arafat, gave him ‘‘an ideology and an image’’, destroyed his birth records in Cairo to allow him to claim he was Jerusalem born, ‘‘trained him at a… special-ops school east of Moscow’’: ‘‘The KGB… also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him — the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.’’

Who was al-Husseini? As mufti of Jerusalem, he masterminded anti-Jewish violence in the 1930s. Later, he travelled to Germany, met Hitler and visited Auschwitz. He raised a Bosnian Muslim Nazi army, finding mention at Nuremberg as ‘‘one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry’’.

He was also great-uncle of Yasser Arafat — helping complete that triad of doom: Nazism, communism and jihad.