THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 121, July 11, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
HAMMER, SICKLE, & CRESCENT: A BOOK REVIEW
By Dr. Barry Rubin
A HISTORY OF THE THIRD WORLD WAR: THE COLD WAR & THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE EAST -- THE ROLE OF THE KGB IN
THE SOVIET UNION'S ENDEAVOR TO GAIN INFLUENCE IN & CONTROL OF THE MIDDLE EAST & USE IT TO UNDERMINE &
CONQUER THE U.S.A. & THE WEST -- HOW & WHY THE KGB'S EFFORTS ENDED LARGELY IN FAILURE -- IN WHAT WAY DID
THE EFFORTS SUCCEED?
FULL STORY:
One of the worst mistakes ever made by the KGB, the Soviet security agency, was to punish one of its agents, Vasili
Mitrokhin, for a critical remark about the regime in 1972 by demoting him to archivist. In that position, Mitrokhin copied large
numbers of documents and hid them at his country house. As the Soviet Union was crumbling, he offered the cache to the
British, in exchange for his family's rescue from the country and removal to safe haven, which he got.
In cooperation with Christopher Andrew, Britain's preeminent historian of intelligence, Mitrokhin authored The Sword
and the Shield, a history of Soviet espionage against the West. It was perhaps the best single book ever written on the
subject. Now comes the promised sequel, dealing with the KGB and the Third World, and it does not disappoint. The book
-- The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili
Mitrokhin (New York: Basic Books, 2005. 677 pages. $29.95.) -- has dramatic new details, sometimes the kind of data that
changes our view of history on every part of the world, showing how pervasive Soviet influence and espionage was during
the Cold War.
Especially interesting are the 120 pages dealing with the Middle East and 34 pages on Afghanistan and Islam in the USSR.
The USSR viewed the Middle East as its "back yard" and devoted a lot of effort in an ultimately failed effort to gain influence
there. It is easy to forget that, not so long ago, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and South Yemen were brimming with Soviet advisors,
money, and weapons.
The great Soviet hope in the Middle East was its relations with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In addition to
reading Egyptian codes — the Soviets broke most Arab codes through cryptography or burglaries against their Moscow
embassies — the Soviets recruited key agents, including Sami Sharaf, Nasser's Chief Intelligence Advisor. On Nasser's 1958
visit to Moscow (where the KGB, not the Soviet Foreign Ministry, guided him) he was very effectively flattered. During a
performance of Swan Lake he attended, for example, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev told Nasser that the black
swan represented U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Moscow supported Nasser's regime by every means. Soviet agent Kim Philby, then a journalist, explained to his British
readers that Nasser had turned Egypt into a "cooperative socialist democracy." The Soviets wrongly saw the Egyptian
army as strong, so Israel's massive victory in 1967 took them by surprise, leaving a grudging admiration for Israel, anger at
the Arabs for making Soviet weapons look useless, and a total overhaul in Soviet intelligence for the region.
Just after that war, a weakened Nasser granted more concessions to the Soviets, but his successor, Anwar Sadat, soon
turned toward the United States. Although the Soviets spied effectively on his secret communications with the Americans,
they chose not to support actively pro-Moscow Egyptians plotting a coup against Sadat, and so, were powerless to stop
him. The KGB restricted itself to forging documents to persuade Sadat that the Americans were tricking him and portraying
Egypt's leader in non-Egyptian Arab media as the dupe of Jewish bankers, a CIA agent, a sexual deviant, a drug addict, and
mentally ill. Sadat so infuriated KGB officials, some advocated his assassination. Moscow was never directly involved in
such an effort, but knew that its contacts in Syrian intelligence and the Palestine Liberation Organization were so involved,
In 1981, however, the Islamists beat the Syrians and PLO to Sadat's assassination.
In Iran, the Soviets, with little influence after the 1953 pro-Shah coup, focused on undermining U.S.-Iran relations. Their
forgeries, pretending to be U.S. documents ridiculing or planning to overthrow the Shah, sometimes even fooled Iran's
monarch. Elaborate plans were made for sabotage inside Iran, but the defection of a key KGB officer involved in these
schemes ensured their cancellation. The Soviets hoped the Iranian revolution would turn in a Leftist direction, but wrongly
estimated the Shah was too strong to be toppled and, like others, discounted any chance of an Islamist revolution
Although the Soviets had few intelligence assets in Islamist Iran, they continued disinformation efforts there, feeding forged
documents — at times through Yasir Arafat — about U.S. and Israeli plots to overthrow or assassinate Khomeini. On one
occasion, a tough anti-Soviet Iranian foreign minister was fired and, along with seventy others, shot, largely due to phony
coup plans cooked up by the KGB. But when a Soviet intelligence officer in Tehran defected to the West, the CIA passed
information to Tehran, allowing it to expel Soviet spies and arrest 200 secret Communists on charges of spying for Moscow.
Especially fascinating is the discussion of Soviet relations with Saddam Hussein, whose Stalin-worship was well known in
Moscow. The KGB organized special, secret trips for Saddam to the late Soviet dictator's hangouts. But Saddam shared with
Stalin an abiding suspicion of everyone, including the Soviets; he also mistrusted the Iraqi Communists, many of whom he
executed. By 1982, however, the Iran-Iraq war pushed Saddam and the Soviets together in trying to ensure that Iran did not
win. The Soviets supplied Scud missiles, which Iraq fired at Iranian cities. While Moscow opposed Saddam's 1990 invasion
of Kuwait, Soviet military experts showed him satellite pictures indicating accurately how the United States was going to
attack him on the ground. Saddam viewed the material as a phony attempt to intimidate him and ignored the warning.
The KGB's favorite Arab dictatorship was the political regime in Syria, where both cooperation and infiltration of agents to
key posts flourished. Even closer ideologically, though further culturally, was South Yemen. "We wanted to prove," said
the Soviet Ambassador to that country, "that a small underdeveloped Arab country [could rapidly advance] toward the
bright future, provided it was armed with the slogans of scientific socialism." It didn't work.
The Soviets were also deeply involved in backing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and terrorism, though fear of
discovery made them delegate many of these activities to European satellite states or through Arab regimes. One of Andrew
and Mitrokhin's most important revelations is that Wadi Haddad, Deputy Leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) until his natural death in 1978, was a Soviet agent. Haddad's philosophy was summed up in his statement:
"To kill a Jew far from the battlefield has more effect than killing hundreds of Jews in battle." The Soviets also gave the PFLP
weapons — all manufactured in other countries to conceal their supplier. A number of PFLP operations, including
kidnappings and assassinations of American citizens as well as attacks on Israel, were specifically approved in advance by
Soviet leaders. The KGB had advance notice of all the main PFLP terrorist attacks.
Another revelation of major importance was the identity of the KGB's most important agent in the PLO, Hani al-Hasan, a
confidante of Yasir Arafat for four decades and, at the time of Arafat's death in 2004, his National Security Advisor. His code
name was GIDAR. Moscow was suspicious of Arafat for several reasons, including his ideology, propensity to lie, and close
ties with Romanian intelligence (which the KGB distrusted). Arafat met with the KGB and was boosted diplomatically by the
Soviets, but the low quality of the trainees presented by the PLO — internal documents accused half of them of alcoholism,
passing counterfeit money, and sexual perversion — made intelligence cooperation more difficult. So disillusioned were the
Soviets of dealing with Arafat, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asked in 1988, according to an aide, "What's the point
in my meeting with him?"
The World Was Going Our Way provides a detailed account of the KGB's strenuous efforts to place agents in Israel
among Soviet-bloc Jewish emigrants, starting in the late 1940s. After some initial successes, it appears the Soviet regime was
so riddled with anti-Semitism (which repeatedly shows up in internal reports) and ideology that it simply could never
understand what Israel was about. By 1953, all Jews had been purged from the KGB and, forty years later, that ban still held.
Soviet contempt for Israel was critical in such intelligence failures as the prediction that Israel would never be able to defeat
Arab armies. Especially ironic is the fact that many emigrating Jews promised to be Soviet agents — perhaps in order to get
out of the Soviet Union — and then, in the words of a KGB official, "forgot their pledges as soon as they crossed the Soviet
border."
A major feature of KGB policy was its obsession with "Zionist subversion," an obsession which was so extreme that it, the
authors write, "came close to, and at times arguably crossed, the threshold of paranoid delusion." A 1982 KGB conference
concluded that all the Soviet bloc's problems were traceable to Zionists. One can only conclude that the overall Soviet
campaign against Israel, Jews, and Zionism bears a striking resemblance to the thinking and behavior of the Czarist secret
police or even, at times, to the kinds of analyses prevalent in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
In the end, of course, Soviet efforts ended in failure. It backed the losing side, could not get regional dictators to do its
bidding, and faced an environment unfriendly to its ideology. Yet, the KGB's efforts succeeded in a way not generally
appreciated today. Many of its fabricated claims and arguments about the United States and Israel did become widely
accepted, not only in the Arab world, but even in many Western media and intellectual circles. The power of radical
ideologies, the widespread suspicion of the West, and the general hatred of America and Israel in the Middle East today is
the Soviet Union's posthumous revenge.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Communism: Longterm Enemy
Russia & Other Former Soviet Republics
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
Egypt, Arabs, & the Middle East
The Middle East & the Problem of Iran
The Middle East & the Problem of Iraq
Page Two
Page One
The Problem of Rogue States:
Iraq as a Case History
National Strategy for Victory in Iraq
The Middle East & the Problem of Syria
The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Jews & Anti-Semitism
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC)
in Herizliya, Israel, and is Editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, which is published by the GLORIA
Center. Dr. Rubin is also Director of Research of the IDC's Lauder School, Editor of Turkish Studies, Deputy Director of
the BESA Center for Strategic Studies, and a senior fellow at the IDC's International Center for Counterterrorist Policy. Dr.
Rubin's most recent book is The Transformation of Palestinian Politics: From Revolution to State-Building (Harvard
University Press, 1999). Currently, he is writing a biography of Yasir Arafat for St. Martin's Press and a book on the
contemporary Middle East, The Tragedy of the Middle East, for Cambridge University Press. In addition, he is editing a
reader --Anti-Americanism, Terrorism, and the Middle East -- for Oxford University Press.
The foregoing book review by Dr Barry Rubin was originally published on the Internet website maintained by the
Middle East Forum.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
July 11, 2006
Return to Top of Page
Go to the WEBSITE INDEX
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Public Issues & Political Controversies
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
Most Recent Articles
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Volume VIII, 2006
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Subject Matter Highlights
Return to POLITICAL EDUCATION Homepage
CONTACT & ACCESS INFORMATION
This is not a commercial website. The sole purpose of the website is to share with interested persons information regarding civics,
civic and social education, political science, government, politics, law, constitutional law and history, public policy, and political
philosophy and history, as well as current and recent political developments, public issues, and political controversies.
POLITICAL EDUCATION, CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS
POLITICS, SOCIETY, & THE SOVEREIGN STATE
Website of Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr.
Government, Politics, Public Policy, Legal Issues, Constitutional Law, Government & the Economy, Cultural Values, Foreign Affairs,
International Relations, Military Defense & National Security, Geopolitics, Terrorism & Homeland Security, American National Interests,
Political Systems & Processes, Political Institutions, Political Ideologies, & Political Philosophy
INDEX FOR THE ENTIRE WEBSITE
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic,
Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues