By Richard Sale
Dec. 14, 1987

WASHINGTON (UPI)—Soviet infiltration of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, is the most serious blow to Israeli intelligence since the 1970s and U.S. intelligence also was breached as a result, U.S. sources reveal.

Mossad has been penetrated by “highly placed” Soviet moles and a full-scale internal counterintelligence investigation is under way, the intelligence source said.

A Justice Department source said U.S. counterintelligence agents became aware of the Israeli-Soviet espionage pipeline when data stolen by Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. Navy analyst convicted of spying for Israel, was “traced to the Eastern bloc.”

Intelligence sources said data reaching the Soviets via this route included sensitive U.S. weapons technology and strategic information about the defense forces of Turkey, Pakistan, and moderate Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.

U.S. intelligence analysts said the Pollard data was traded to the Soviets in return for promises to increase emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

One analyst said Israel’s “right-wing” Jews are involved with spying for the Soviets, and called it “ironic”, noting that left-wing elements were responsible for similar scandals in the past.

A senior U.S. official said morale in Mossad “had plummeted” but refused to comment on whether the breach had damaged U.S.-Israeli intelligence ties.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli government spokesman denied knowledge of the security breach.

“I know nothing about all that,” said Avi Pazner, spokesman for the prime minister’s office. “It seems to be utter fantasy.”

A State Department spokesman also declined to comment. But an administration official said the Soviet penetration of Mossad was discussed at meetings of CIA, FBI, and other U.S. counterintelligence specialists about the Pollard case.

“One of the guys was commenting that if Pollard had stolen stuff, at least it was going to a U.S. ally, but a CIA guy spoke up and said that if Mossad was involved it meant that copies of everything were going to (the KGB’s) Moscow center,” the source said.

Pollard began serving a life sentence early this year in what U.S. officials have called one of the worst intelligence disasters in U.S. history.

Asked to describe the Israeli-Soviet spies, an administration intelligence source said: “They are highly placed agents in the top at very significant levels.”

Israel has launched a full-scale investigation into the Soviet infiltration, disguising it as “a probe into financial corruption” of some Mossad agents, an administration source said.

The source emphasized that “counterintelligence investigations always begin with the painstaking study of financial vouchers,” inquiries aimed at determining whether an agent has received large, unexplained payments or lived an unusually high lifestyle. Another source said most double agents “are caught by the study of documents.”

Israel apparently was first used as a base for Soviet agents in the early 1960s, when Professor Kurt Sitte, a nuclear physicist at the Institute of Technology of Haifa, was exposed as a Soviet agent.

Sitte, a specialist in cosmic radiation working with the U.S. Air Force, was convicted in 1961.

A subsequent case was uncovered the follow year. Dr. Israel Beer, a former aide to the chief of staff of the Israeli army, was arrested after he became liaison officer on intelligence to then Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion.

Aided by a tip from the British Secret Service MI5, beer was arrested on charges he passed data to the Soviets.

In the 1970s, more trouble came from left-wing Sabras, or native-born Israelis, who had ideological sympathies with the Soviet Union. One case involved a former Israeli paratrooper who spied for Soviet-backed Syria.

U.S. intelligence analysts said the latest penetration by Soviet agents occurred in the early 1980s under the administration of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.

The sources said they were aware of “reports” of meetings between Israeli and Soviet officials on Cyprus, a well-known base for Soviet espionage operations against Israel.

Administration officials confirmed that the island nation’s capital, Nicosia, is an important KGB base and a meeting place for Soviet agents operating in Middle Eastern countries such as Israel.

A U.S. intelligence analyst said he was not surprised that the Soviets had placed agents in the Sharon government because Sharon “surrounded himself with people who were extraordinarily vulnerable to penetration.”

He declined to elaborate.

The Mossad was founded in 1937 in England to handle large-scale and then illegal emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine, then under British control.

By 1942, a secret agent training site was set up at Mikveh, Israel, a cultural school outside of Tel Aviv. Courses included cryptography, map-reading, lock-picking, and other intelligence skills.

After Israel was created in 1948, counterintelligence was handled by the Shin Beth, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI.

Israeli government sources say Mossad has about 2,000 employees, of which, 500 are officers. A CIA report, found during the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran, said, “Israel’s intelligence and security services are among the best in the world.”

By EIR
Jan. 17, 1986 Anno Domini

In our editorial last week, we promised our readers a “tumultuous New Year,” and the developments of the past week certainly bear that out—but not in the way that your newspaper headlines would suggest. A great sound and fury has arisen over how the United States should respond to the terrorist outrages of the closing days of 1985. But the United States should not respond directly to the provocation purportedly carried out by Libya. Something more interesting is occurring behind the scenes, for which the Libya fracas is a diversion.

Is there Libyan terrorism? You bet there is. Is it really Libya’s? Don’t bet on it.

To understand what is going on out of the public purview, two crucial factors must be added to the pic­ture: 1) the Israeli secret intelligence service, the Mos­sad, especially the Sharon wing, and 2) U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz’s promise to the Russians during the Geneva summit, that the United States would do nothing which would upset Soviet calculations prior to the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February.

Now look at Libya: Everyone who knows anything about the Middle East, knows that the terrorism which is called Libya’s, is not only led by the East bloc but is to a large extent promoted by the. Israeli Mossad.Officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization, includ­ing Yasser Arafat, have repeatedly stressed in January that the so-called Abu Nidal organization has killed more Palestinians than it has Israelis.

Libyan terrorism and the Mossad are very similar beasts, descended from the same parent, the oligarchi­cal conspiracy of Soviet and Western operatives known as “The Trust.”

Few realize that the Israeli Mossad is commitd to enforcing Shultz’s promise to the Russians, that the United States will do nothing to rock the boat until Moscow gives the go-ahead. The Mossad is acting as a de facto guarantor of Soviet interests in the Western hemisphere. It has deep hooks into the U.S. intelligence community, as the recent espionage scandal involving Jonathan Jay Pollard demonstrated. Pollard was not simply an Israeli agent; he was a “false flag” spy for the Soviet KGB, working through a Moscow-linked net­work of Israelis grouped around former defense minister Ariel Sharon and longtime agent of “The Trust” Armand Hammer. Some in U.S. intelligence circles broke the Pollard affair, in an effort to crack the Soviet­ Mossad infiltration of American policymaking. And indeed, one aim of the Sharon-Qaddafi “Abu Nidal” offensive was to divert attention from the still poten­tially explosive Pollard affair.

To understand why the enemies of the United States wish to elicit a knee-jerk U.S. reaction against Libyan terror, one must take into account the fact that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger decided, after the Geneva summit, that the United States should continue provid­ing for its own defense, despite Shultz’s assurances to the Russians to the contrary.

Weinberger sent a secret report to President Rea­gan, urging him to break with the unsigned SALT II treaty, in response to repeated Soviet violations of arms­ control agreements. Further, he disclosed in a public speech that the Soviets have deployed a minimum of 45 of the new SS-25 ICBMs, in violation of the SALT accords.

Both the Israeli Mossad and Shultz were anxious to plunge the United States headlong into military action against Libya—which, under current circumstances, would only deliver the entire Mediterranean into Soviet hands. Why? We are not about to publicize certain information too sensitive to be revealed, but we can offer the following perception to our readers:

1986 will indeed be the year of tumultuous strategic crises. The Russians and their assets in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe, intend to blind and de­ fang American defences during this year. The Israeli Mossad and its assets—in the Arab world and outside of it—are committed to assisting the Soviets to carry out their 1986 perspective.

The United States will have to fight this unholy alliance between the Soviet Third Rome and the Mos­sad.

In late 1982, Israeli intelligence sources reported to EIR that then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon made a secret trip to Greek Cyprus to meet with two ranking officials of the Soviet GRU, the military intelligence service. The subject of those secret discussions was an Israeli-Soviet quid pro quo to drive the United States out of the Middle East. In exchange for Israeli complicity in a series of anti-American covert diplomatic and low-intensity military operations, the Soviet Union would “guarantee” Israeli control over an expanded piece of eastern Mediterranean turf, fulfilling the “Greater Israel” designs of the faction associated with Sharon; and would gradually allow for the emigration of a large number of Russian and Eastern European Jews to colonize the West Bank of the Jordan River, thus de facto consolidating Israelis 1967 land grab.

This “Greater Israel” scheme prefigures a parallel emergence of a “Greater Syria,” constituting the second satrap of the future Soviet domination of the eastern Mediterranean. The dismantling of Lebanon and the virtual extermination of the Palestinian population in successive genocidal campaigns by the Israeli Defense Force, the Syrian Army, the Syrian-backed Abu Musa radical Palestinian front, and the Amal Shi’ites of Lebanon—also agents of the Alawite Brotherhood ruling Syria—demonstrated on the field of battle the potential for Hobbesian coexistence between “Greater” Syria and “Greater” Israel.

While no published sources have corroborated the particulars of the reported Sharon-GRU session and the strategic deal consolidated there, subsequent events have clearly demonstrated that Israel is no longer America’s “leading ally” in the Middle East, despite continuing howls to this effect from U.S. State Department, Eastern Establishment, and Zionist Lobby voices.

Three factors, representing a dramatic change in the direction and control over Israeli politico-military policy, provide the backdrop to the emerging Tel Aviv-Moscow-Damascus pact:

1. The demographic shift within the Israeli population. Over 50 per cent of the Israeli population is now Sephardic, Middle Eastern-born. The shift from a Western European, Judeo-Christian cultural matrix to an Oriental Semitic cultural matrix has been identified by recent Israeli writers as a repudiation of Western values and a re-emergence of a Jewish “kabbalistic” brand of fundamentalism. This shift has been aggravated by the fact that over one-third of the Israeli citizenry, predominantly Ashkenazi pre- and postwar European émigrés, have left Israel and returned to the United States of Western Europe, thus drawing out of Israel some of the leading scientific and technological strata of the population. A radical, fundamentalist peasant caste has thus emerged in recent years as a prominent political force, providing the social base for Ariel Sharon’s drive for power under the slogan “Arik, Arik, King of Israel.”

This “Oriental” shift has been augmented by the emergence of a Russian-Jewish dominated New Right movement in Israel, heavily penetrated by the KGB. This New Right movement is in a prominent position within the Jewish Underground, or, Temple Mount movement [Chabad], which has revived a Khomeiniite brand of Judaism preaching the rebuilding of the Third Temple of Solomon. The other predominant grouping within the Temple Mount conspiracy is a powerful and wealthy community of Syrian-born Jews from the Turkish border region of Aleppo, who reportedly maintain deep but quiet ties to the Alawite Assad leadership of Syria, also Aleppo-based.

2. The collapse of the Israeli economy. Whereas, Israel’s inflation rate was 20 per cent in 1975, it is now an astounding 180 per cent, with interest rates on certain categories of loans over 210 per cent. While exports of citrus and other real economic products have collapsed and overall exports stagnated, official Israeli arms exports have increased sixteenfold over the last decade. Official exports of arms and diamonds in 1983 accounted for 60-70 per cent of Israel’s total exports. The unrecorded smuggling of drugs, diamonds, and weapons has massively increased, placing Israel in a leading position within the overall worldwide “unofficial economy”—i.e., the arms-for-drugs black market.

Within this arms-for-dope bazaar, Israel has entered into documented barter dealings with Khomeini’s Iran, providing spare parts for U.S. equipment originally sold to Iran during the reign of the late Shah, in clear and brazen violating of U.S. law. Through Lebanese channels centered around the Chouf Mountains-based Chamoun clan, the Sharon faction additionally entered into co-operative business ventures, including massive West Bank land scams, with Bulgarian foreign trade bank Litex. The latter arrangement was consummated in an October 1982 meeting at the Chamoun family Chouf mountain retreat at approximately the same time that Sharon was cavorting with the GRU on Cyprus.

The singular focus on building Israel’s arms industry was expressed in clear anti-American terms in the 1981 Meridor Memorandum, drafted by Ya-acov Meridor, a member of the former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s cabinet. The memorandum was ostensibly part of the U.S.-Israeli letters of understanding: “We shall say to the Americans: ‘Don’t compete with us in Taiwan…South Africa…or the Caribbean, or in other areas where we can sell weapons directly…. Let us do it. Sell the ammunition using a proxy, Israel will be your proxy.'”

From its current status as the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, Israel’s defense sector has mapped out an ambitious program to place Israel in the number three spot over the next several years. At the heart of this drive has been an extensive lobbying effort into the Reagan administration and the U.S. Congress, to force the release of previously classified stealth and other technologies to Israel for the production of the Lavie jet, a joint Israel-Republic of South Africa production venture. This would give Israel the additional delivery system capabilities, as well, for the rapid development of an independent intermediate-range nuclear capability.

On repeated occasions, this particular Israel-South Africa connection has been caught funneling state-of-the-art U.S. computer technologies to the Soviet Union. [Operation Talpiot].

3. The Lebanon invasion of 1982 and its aftermath. In June 1982, Ariel Sharon launched the Israeli Defense Force invasion of Lebanon on the pretext of assaulting Palestinian terrorist bases behind the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. The action marked a decisive breach in U.S.-Israeli relations that accelerated Sharon’s openings in Moscow and Damascus. Sharon launched the operation on the basis of personal assurances from the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, that the United States would fully support the Israeli invasion. When the United States—already at that moment caught in the ringer of the Malvinas War—harshly rebuked the Israeli move and President Reagan took the unprecedented step of firing Hail, Sharon wrote off the United States as an “unreliable ally,” and took his business to Moscow and Damascus, where more “practical” minds supposedly prevailed.

When every effort from inside Israel to dislodge the butcher Sharon from power failed, a deep cultural pessimism took hold in the country that merely accelerated the radical fundamentalist drive to impose a Sharon dictatorship.

Beginning in 1984, a more open phase of diplomatic dealings with Moscow began, through the personal “shuttle diplomacy” of Edgar Bronfman and Armand Hammer. Both men made a series of trips to Moscow during the Andropov and Chernenko periods, to negotiate a broad-based Moscow-Tel Aviv re-approchment involving Jewish emigration and anticipated official recognition of Israel by the Soviet Union. According to Canadian sources, this was paralleled by an increasingly public role of the Bronfman family, particularly Charles Bronfman, as the semi-official channel between the Canadian and East German governments. Privately, Canadian intelligence sources have told EIR that this Bronfman-East Germany channel is directly into Gen. Marcus (“Misha”) Wolf, the number two man in the East German Ministry of State Security (MfS). The son of a German-Jewish Communist Party official who fled to Russia during the Hitler period, Wolf has been identified as the single most powerful figure in the MfS and a close personal associate and protégé of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov.

The Sharon Plan to destroy Lebanon, and divide the spoils between Syria and Israel, slaughter the Palestinian population there, transfer the dirty-money operations previously based in Beirut into the Israeli banking system, and convert the West Bank into a Russian émigré-populated real estate boondoggle, was, in fact, a corollary to the Kissinger Doctrine elaborated by the former Secretary of State at a July 23-24, 1982 secret meeting at the Bohemian Grove in California. In that address, Kissinger called for the United States to strategically withdraw from 75 per cent of its global commitments and assume a more modest role within a concordat of Western nations modeled on the Holy Roman Empire of the post Treaty of Vienna period.

Convinced by the Reagan administration’s failure to fully support the invasion of Lebanon, that the United States must be punished by humiliating setbacks within the eastern Mediterranean, the Sharon group in Israel provided consistent aid and comfort to the Shi’ite terrorist offensive against the United States, beginning with the February 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut that wiped out the entire U.S. CIA station for Lebanon.

The Tel Aviv-Damascus Hobbesian deal with Moscow’s blessing was consummated during April-June 1985 through the following sequence of events that culminated in the TWA 847 hijacking.

• In early April 1985, Israeli forces entered Southern Lebanon and rounded up over 700 Shi-ites, trucking them across the Israeli border into a detention camp. The mass hostage-taking was aimed by the Sharon group, now strongly allied with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, at forcing Amal leader Nabih Berri to reach a security pact with Israel assuring the permanent elimination of Palestinians from southern Lebanon. On April 5, the Reagan administration denounced the Israeli move as a violation of the Geneva Convention and demanded the unconditional release of the “hostages”.
• On May 14, a top Israeli intelligence official met with the head of Amal intelligence, a known Syrian intelligence asset, in southern Lebanon, soliciting a negotiating package that would lead to the relase of the Shi’ite hostages inside Israel. The terms proposed by the Israeli official reportedly called for an Amal action against the United States that would provide Israel with an “excuse” for releasing the 700 Lebanese Shi’ites.
• On May 17, the Mossad leaked a story in the Washington Post blaming the CIA for a March 8 car bombing in Beirut that killed 80 Shi’ites. Despite the fact that the Lebanese secret unit that carried out the car bomb attack was acting under direct Mossad orders, Israel’s “proxy” status for U.S. actions inside Lebanon, in effect since the humiliating American withdrawal from Lebanese territory in 1984, served as blackmail leverage against the Reagan administration’s revealing the facts of the case. The Washington Post story was widely circulated in the Shi’ite press inside Lebanon, building a revenge climate against “CIA terrorists”.
• On May 20, a second secret meeting in southern Lebanon between the Mossad official and other ranking members of the Amal military command took place. Allegedly, this meeting spelled out a detailed arrangement between the Amal and the Israelis, involving policing responsibilities for the border zone with Israel, the release of the Shi’ites, and the staging of the TWA hijacking. The secret accord was ratified first by the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon before the plan went operational in early June with the Athens hijacking.

The conclusion: The TWA hostage incident marked the consolidation of a process begun with the 1982 Lebanon invasion, which fundamentally realigned the eastern Mediterranean into a Damascus-Tel Aviv-Moscow controlled zone, in which, barring a dramatic shift in policy from Washington, the United States is no longer a prominent player.

Count Bennigsen and the ‘Islamic Card’

When terror by Islamic fundamentalist groups, against innocent citizens from the United States and other countries, escalates with new hijackings and murders, one would hardly expect to hear the old argument of the 1970s voiced in Washington, that Islamic fundamentalism should be welcomed as a counterthrust to communism in Central Asia.

But professor Alexandre Bennigsen, late of the University of Chicago and now based at the Sorbonne in Paris, is still in action. He makes the rounds on Capitol Hill. He gets a forum in the U.S. Information Agency’s Problems of Communism to vent his enthusiastic hope for the spread of Islamic revolt (“Mullahs, Mujahidin, and Soviet Muslims,” Problems of Communism, Nov.-Dec. 1984). This scheme, that the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in West Asia would inspire turmoil in Soviet Central Asia and trepidation in the Kremlin, was the stuff of Bennigsen’s frequent congressional testimony and academic dissertations, which fueled the doomed “arc of crisis” policy under the Carter administration. The continuing popularity of Bennigsen, the author of The Islamic Threat to the Soviet Union, demonstrates the dangerous persistence in Washington—among professed conservatives as well as around the State Department—of fascination with the “crumbling of the Soviet Empire,” even as the Russians count their gains in areas near and far from their borders.

In the 1970s, Carter’s national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski proclaimed that Islamic fundamentalism would be a bulwark against Communist insurgencies [Brzezinski’s controlled opposition narrative that helps Soviet aims] along an “arc of crisis,” stretching from the southern borders of the Soviet Union, through the Near East and into North Africa. In Iran, the keystone of the arc, the Carter administration abetted the overthrow of the Shah by the mullarchy of the insane Ayatollah Khomeini. The Islamic revolution, the hope was voiced, would ultimately sweep into Soviet Central Asia, whose inhabitants would rise against their Russian overlords simultaneously with the peoples of Eastern Europe. The USSR would crack open like a walnut.

The results in the late 1970s, when this view was policy, were somewhat different. The Soviet Union achieved such a striking increase of power in the region, that Brzezinski subsequently suggested, in a June 1983 speech at Harvard University, that the United States might as well abandon the Middle East, along with Western Europe, and search for allies in the Pacific Basin.

The so-called Rejection Front of radical Arab states under Soviet tutelage, was consolidated out of the rage engendered by the Camp David pact. In this alignment, Libya and Syria were joined by Iran—after the Khomeini revolution brought down the Shah. Khomeini sits astride the Persian Gulf oil routes, scarcely veiling his threats to call in Satan Number 2 (the USSR), if Satan Number 1 crosses him; and the Soviets have invested heavily in both infrastructure and political assets in Iran. Syria is armed to the teeth with Soviet weapons. What is left of Lebanon teeters on the bring of becoming an “Islamic state” under the domination of Soviet-armed Syria, with added benefit of Khomeini’s “moral guidance” for the one million Shi’ite Lebanese. Saudi Arabia is being told by Moscow that the time has come for a Soviet-Saudi diplomatic thaw, under the threat of a Khomeini-proclaimed “holy war” to be triggered by terrorist assaults on the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Soviet troops are in Afghanistan. Soviet-backed ethnic and religious insurgencies threaten to break Pakistan into pieces.

The national security of the United States and of the targeted nations of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Indian Ocean littoral demands, that the widely shared fantasies of the Jesuit-trained Brzezinski [he’s not a Catholic] and ideologues like Bennigsen be put aside, and the truth admitted: Moscow has mastered the “Muslim card”, and turned the arc of crisis into a Soviet arc of opportunity.

The Soviets have their own program for “Islamic culture” and, through East Germany, an alliance with Hitler’s old Nazi networks in the Middle East to spread terrorism. In an August 1980 article, the Moscow Institute of Orientology director, Academician Yevgenii Primakov, gloated that policy-makers in the West had no grasp of religious factors in the Middle East, since they mistakenly viewed Islamic uprisings as a short-lived “explosion of fanaticism”, while underestimating the “anti-imperialist direction of the growing movement for Islamic solidarity”—that is, the Soviet ability to turn it to advantage.

Geidar Aliyev and the Tashkent nexus

The master of the Soviets’ “Islamic card” is Geidar Ali-Reza ogly Aliyev, the career KGB officer of Shi’ite Muslim origin, promoted in 1982 to be First Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union and a full member of the Politburo. Before coming to Moscow at that time, Aliyev operated for 15 years out of Soviet Azerbaijan, first as its KGB chief and then as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.

He was located in Baku, the Caspian Sea oil town that is the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. It is second only to Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, as a military command centre for the USSR’s southern flank—what now comes under High Command South, commanded by General of the Army Yuri Maksimov, a member of the Politburo of the Uzbekistan Communist Party since 1981. In both the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, the two foci of the Soviet Muslim population, the local party machine and the Islamic establishment are integrated under the political-military command.

In wartime, their special capabilities come into play. For instance, before the December 1970 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of Soviet Izbek and Tajik cadre were infiltrated across the border into the areas of Afghanistan where the population is Uzbek and Tajik, to carry out spetsnaz sabotage activities in advance of the invasion. More recently, Iranian sources have observed the transit of persons from Iran’s northeastern province of Turkmenistan, on Iran’s border with Afghanistan, into the Soviet Union; after military training in the USSR, they slip back into Iran.

Soviet and COMINTERN officials, from the early 1920s on, conceived of Tashkent as a jumping-off point for power throughout south Asia, just as certain Slavophile-linked geopoliticians—like the Buryat Mongol mystic, arms merchant and court intriguer Badmayev—had counseled the late nineteenth century Tsars to seize the Himalayas, thence to take British India. Leon Trotsky, in August 1919, declared that “the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab, and Bengal”. In May 1919, the newspaper Zhyzn natsionalnostei (Life of the Nationalities), published by the Central Bureau of the Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East, editorialized, “Without active assistance from the outside by the fresh untapped forces of Russia’s Muslims, it (the revolution in Asia) can once again fall into a lethargic sleep of spineless inertness and apathy. Let Britain, which has always been afraid of the spectre of a Cossack lance on the peaks of the Himalayas, now see this historical lance in the hands of Russia’s Muslim-proletarian coming to the aid of his brothers in Persia, India, and Afghanistan”.

Such extreme—or rather, frank—statements are today termed by oh-so-scholarly Soviet specialists, evidence of “leftist, adventuristic tendencies.” The Tashkent-based Communist University for Toilers of the East was repeatedly purged. But the views of the “Islamo-Marxists” forged Soviet policy and capabilities in the region. By the late 1920s, the COMINTERN’s Third World operations were reshaped to emphasize the building of individual communist parties, but the role of the Azerbaijani Communist Party, with its heritage from the Islamo-Marxist Nariman Narimanov, stayed strong. The party’s approach, later perfected by Aliyev, was to exploit indigenous belief structures, but to tame them away from disruptive excesses and tool them into a means for the outward expansion of influence. Azerbaijan supplied organizers and administrators to Soviet Central Asia proper, making Baku a point from which Soviet influence radiated into the Islamic world. The Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi communist parties were organized from Baku; the Communist Party of Indian, from Tashkent.

The Soviet state and cultural establishment, meanwhile, built up the image of Tashkent as a developing-sector boomtown and crossroads of Asia, by staging major events there. The late Uzbek party chief, Sharaf Rashidov, hosted many events like the 1983 Seventh Conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association. In 1966, Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin propelled Tashkent into world headlines when he invited the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to come there for reconciliation talks after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. Not long after that, the Soviets readied another diplomatic coup for Tashkent, but did not succeed in bringing it off. The late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat revealed that the Soviets had invited him to come negotiate with Israel after the 1967 war, and asked, “I wonder what would be the position of the Soviet Union if the accord we signed at Camp David had been signed at Tashkent?”

The Islamic establishment

Alongside the overt and covert activities of the state, the four Spiritual Boards of the Soviet Muslim establishment, revived during World War II on the base of a hierarchy first set up by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, have developed diplomatic prowess paralleling that of the Russian Orthodox Church/Moscow Patirarchate.

The organization of Soviet Islam today proceeds from the 1943 concordat signed after discussions between Stalin and the Mufti of Ufa, Abdurrahman Rasulayev, which revived the Central Muslim Spiritual Board that first functioned in the eighteenth century. There are four boards, or Spiritual Administrations, each headed by a Mufti or Sheikh, which cover: 1. Central Asia and Kazakhstan (Tashkent); 2. Transcaucasus (Baku, Azerbaijan(; 3. European USSR and Siberia (Ufa, Bashkir ASSR); and 4, North Caucasus (Makhachkla, Daghestan ASSR).

The Muslim boards were encouraged to expand in the 1960s, when the Soviets upgraded the social sciences and all manner of cultivation of what they call “cultural factors”.

In 1968, the Tashkent board began to publish the quarterly Muslims of the Soviet East in English, French, Persian, Arabic, and Uzbek, to propagandize to Mideast readers what a great life their Muslim brothers in the Soviet Union enjoy. The same year, Soviet Muslims first went abroad, and a Soviet, and a Soviet mullah on the annual Hajj to Mecca became an established custom. These travels allow propaganda interchange with Muslim leaders from all over the world.

Soviet mullahs are trained at one of two schools in Central Asia. Primary is the Bukhara madrasah, to which Soviet Muslims come from all over the USSR. Bukhara has a “work-study” program so that the budding of mullahs can teach at nearby mosques while getting their degrees. The best students go on to the Imam al-Bukhari Islamic Institute of Tashkent, or take further training in Damascus or Cairo.

The propaganda thrust from Tashkent, Baku, Ufa, and the Caucasus is by no means limited to showcasing the material advantages of Soviet Muslims. Muslims of the Soviet East participates in some very precisely targeted operations, such as the Jerusalem Temple Mount scenario for sparking religious war by a Jewish and Christian fundamentalist threat to the holy shrines of Islam in Jerusalem. On April 16, 1982, mullahs throughout the USSR preached on the threat to these Islamic holy places, arising from “brigands’ attempts to undermine the scared mosque which is being allegedly perpetrated with a view to finding Solomon’s temple.”

The fraud of Bennigsen

Before Zbigniew Brzezinski ever heard about Soviet Muslims, Alexandre Bennigsen was the authority on them. He shaped the field of Soviet Central Asia studies, training dozens of specialists at the Sorbonne and at Chicago. One Central Asia specialist, who has followed the spread of Bennigsen’s gospel on the potential for Soviet Muslim revolt, observes: “Bennigsen has had an absolutely horrendous effect on American strategic estimates (in that area of the world). I can’t tell you how many times he has traveled to Washington to testify before Senate committees and meet with people.”

The Muslim population of upwards of 44 million, living within the USSR, makes it the first largest Islamic country in the world. Contrary to Bennigsen’s myths, the interesting question is not whether at some point in 40 or 50 years those Muslims will threaten Russian rule. An overriding strategic question will be answered, in this decade, long before Muslims demography transforms the Soviet Union: Will Moscow destroy U.S. power worldwide and preside over its ultimate empire? As for Soviet Muslims, will they or won’t they serve Soviet imperial aims during this crisis?

Bennigsen systematically blacks out this strategic reality. At a March 1983 conference on Soviet Central Asia, the professor expounded his fixed theme in typical fashion: “The question of ‘identity’ among Soviet Muslims is of critical importance. Without trying to be overly dramatic, the ultimate cohesion of the USSR could be at stake.”

Bennigsen does acknowledge that Soviet Muslims have served as a foreign policy asset, stating that Soviet Islam’s goal of appearing as part of world Islam desirous of contacts abroad—for the sake of “its own survival and protection—conveniently parallels Moscow’s desire to appear to the Third World Muslim nations as ‘one of them’.” But in a 1983 book co-authored with his daughter, Marie Broxup, Bennigsen asserted that Soviet Muslims had become drastically less effective in foreign operations since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “The period of co-operation between the Soviet Islamic establishment and Moscow…seems to have come to an end with the invasion of Afghanistan.” After EIR exposed this as a systematic cover-up of the deployments by the Soviet Muslim Boards, Bennigsen attempted to clean up his record. “Without doubt,” he said in the recent Problems of Communism article, “the official Soviet Islamic establishment is once again entrusted with an important high-level diplomatic mission. Moscow’s aim in sponsoring the official Islamic establishment is both transparent and highly successful…. The message they bring to their co-religionists abroad may not be very different from official Soviet propaganda…but it is accepted with a certain sympathy because it is presented by authentic Islamic scholars…. Thanks to the activity of these representatives, Moscow managed to neutralize to a certain degree the disastrous propaganda image of the Afghan genocide.”

Bennigsen admits all that but refuses to abandon his main line: “One might well ask how long the Soviets can play the sophisticated but dangerous game of supporting Islam abroad, while trying to destroy it at home.” The answer may be: As long as anybody in the United States is foolish enough to follow the advice of Bennigsen, who hails the “Islamic Revolution” of the fanatics in Iran, even as they commit more atrocities.

Related:

New York—Moscow—Tel Aviv Triangle

Soviet Islam

How Israel and Russia forged unlikely partnership in Syria

World Jewish Congress confirmed New York-Moscow-Tel Aviv triangle in 1978

By Criton Zoakos and Mark Burdman
January 24, 1986 Anno Domini
EIR Feature

A powerful faction inside the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence organization, has deployed, in coordination with the Russian KGB, a formidable terror and assas­sination capability against the United States. The “Jonathan Pollard Espionage Affair” of “Dirty Rafi” Raphael Eytan, Ariel Sharon’s cohort, is merely the tip of the iceberg. As the accompanying report details, both Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Lyndon H. LaRouche are among, the known largets of this Mossad operation-of that component of the Mossad which draws its inspiration from the old Irgun, and receives its orders from the Ariel Sharon-David Kimche-Rafi Eytan cabal.

The credulous among our readers may find this Russian KGB-Irgunist Mossad alignment something of a surprise. But it is no surprise either to students of Russian grand strategy, or to those who know their history of Zionism.

Not only the historian, but also the average contemporary intelligence officer is well aware of this Russian influence over the Irgun’s offspring in the Mossad. For example, the current issue of the London-published Middle East International magazine carried a story, inspired by the scandal of “false flag” Israeli-Soviet spy Pollard, recounting how the present President of,lsrael, Chaim Herzog, was once expelled from the United States for espionage. ,The item is noteworthy for the discussions it provoked among intelligence professionals. One of them remarked: “In return-ror the Soviet Union’s release of Soviet Jews for emigration, the Israelis have been passing on intelligence materials to Moscow on a quid-pro-quo basis. This has been going on for decades, and it certainly began well before the 1967 war. . . . There has been a pattern of release of Soviet Jews coinciding with the Soviets’ acquisition of militarily sensitive Western technologies.”

However, trading manpower for technology, is the least interesting area of coopera.tion between the Mossad Irgunists and the Russian KGB. The respective strategic perspectives of each of the two partners, which draw them into this collaboration against the United States, is of much greater significance.

The specifics for the present Russian-Israeli collaboration were hammered out in August 1981, during a top-secret meeting in Limassol, Cyprus, between then-Defense Minis­ter Ariel Sharon and senior officers of the Russian secret services. The talks involved general understandings respect­ ing the two governments’ longer-term strategic roles in world affairs.

In the present World strategic crisis, Russia, in its drive to establish itself as a “Third and Final Rome,” a sole world imperial arbiter by 1988, is willing to permit Israel to play the role of arbiter in Mediterranean affairs once played by Venice, provided that such a role facilitates Russian ambi­tions. By the same token, the leading Israeli strategists, Ariel Sharon, David Kimche, and the “considerable interests” be­ hind them, are willing to accommodate Russia’s “Third and Final Rome” ambitions, provided that they facilitate their own prospects of transforming Israel into the “New Venice.”

These mutual accommodations have often been dis­cussed, since at least August of 1981, between Ariel Sharon and his representatives, and senior representatives of the Russian intelligence services. More important than the de­tails of the Sharon-Russian understandings, are those ill­ concealed “considerable interests” which, over the decades, have sponsored both Sharon’s career and the network of influence which has promoted him, the old lrgun apparatus.

These “considerable interests” could, for convenience, be dubbed “The Odessa Complex,” named after the Russian port-city which originally gave birth to the darker side of the Zionist movement during the latter ‘part of the 19th century, when it was the self-assigned task of the Imperial Okhrana to create Zionism. At the top of the “Odessa Complex,” one finds the leading Jewish financial families of the Ottoman Empire, the Dwecks of Aleppo and the Recanati of Salonica, operating under the supervision of the Luzzattos of Venice. No major established financial family of Odessa itself is identified since the city of Odessa had been founded a mere one century earlier, on advice given to Empress Catherine the Great from her Venetian advisers.

From the 1881 Russian pogroms onward, these families organized a large-scale emigration of Russian Jews to Pal­estine, which was then under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The first large-scale settlement of Jews in Palestine, the first “Aliyah,” was organized, at the Russian port-city of Odessa, by these above-named Jewish financial families in the Ottoman Empire and Venice, running the famous “Odes­sa Committee,” the Zionist travel bureau. Over 90 per cent of the Jews who then settled in Ottoman Palestine were from Rus­sia, traveling through Odessa. In fact, the Ottoman govern­ment authorities of the period considered Zionism to be just another pseudo-nationalist movement, organized by Russian imperialists toward the purpose of subverting and disman­tling the Ottoman Empire. This evaluation of the Ottoman authorities of the time was not too wide of the mark.

The simple facts of the case at the time were three: First, as the Ottoman authorities saw it, virtually all of the Jewish settlers into Palestine were Russian, boarding ships from Odessa; second, virtually all of the visible leaders of the young Zionist movement were Russian Jews, most of them born and raised in Odessa; third, the leadership of the Russian secret service, the Okhrana-whose founder, Count Nicho­las Ignatiev, once served as Russian ambassador to Istan­bul—was actively and visibly supporting, promoting, and financing ZionisIp.The Ottoman administration’s immedi­ately prior experience of Russian Middle East strategic ob­jectives, that is, immediately prior to the first great upsurge of Zionist “Aliyah” of 1880-1900, was the Crimean War of 1854-56, which had grown out of Russia’s claim to protect all Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul, from its standpoint, had every reason to believe that “Zionism” was just another Russian imperial ploy to subvert the Ottoman Empire. However, since the defense and national security of that Empire had been transferred, by means of the Berlin Treaty of 1878, to Great Britain, and specifically to the Luzzatto-influenced British prime minister of Venetian ancestry Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), Istanbul had no choice but acquiesce in the settlement in Palestine of the, Russian Jews of ‘the first “Aliyah.”

It happens to be the case that the founder of Russian Zionism, Leo Pinsker, spent all his life in Odessa. Later, many other Zionist leaders, including Vladimir Jabotinskii, the founder of the Irgun, were born and raised in Odessa. In general, Zionism, as one of the nationalist movements of the 19th century, was created exclusively in Russia and had appeal only among Russian Jews, who, contrary to their co­ religionists in Western Europe, could see no possibility of assimilating themselves in the surrounding brutality of Rus­sian Orthodoxy. When Count Nicholas Ignatiev, the legend­ ary political organizer of the Pan-Slavist movement, became Russia’s interior minister and founded the Okhrana, he con­sidered it his first priority to unleash the dreaded pogroms of 1881-82, which became the driving force for the growth of Zionism as a popular movement. Only after these pogroms did Russian Jews begin to heed the call of the handful of Okhrana-financed Odessa Zionist organizers to go and emigrate to Palestine.

Later Russian interior ministers and Okhrana chiefs con­tinued Ignatiev’s Jewish policies, which eventually became the engrained habit of the Russian state.These policies were cynically expressed by Konstantin Pobedonostsev in the fol­lowing epigrammatic way: “One-third of the Jews will die out, one-third will leave the country, one-third will be assim­ilated and melt into the surrounding population.”

Pobedonostsev, of course, was the great official popular­izer and promoter of Fyodor Dostoevskii, the father of Russian anti-Semitism and, as documents show, of official Nazi anti-Semitism as well.

Another interior minister of the turn of the century, von Plehve, once said to Theodore Herzl, the great theoretician of Zionism: “You are preaching to a convert….we would very much like to see the creation of an independent Jewish state capable of absorbing several millions Jews.”

When the aforementioned von Plehve was interior min­ister, the chief of the Okhrana was the notorious Sergei Vas­ ilievich Zubatov.This Zubatov is known for organizing the world’s most famous secret-service-controlled labor movement, which has come dowrt in history as “Zubatov Trade Unionism.” He should become equally famous for founding “Zubatov Zionism.” In this respect, it should be noted that the first Zionist organization Which the fire-eating founder of the Irgun, VladimirJabotinsky, ever joined, was controlled, and financed by Sergei Zubatov.

The story in summary is as follows: From 1900 on, Zubatov began to systematically encourage Zionism and do all in his power ot ensure the success of the first legal Zionist congress to take place in Russia, the 1902 Minsk Congres. He said, at the time: “Inside Jewry, such a great internal ferment is taking place, a reformation (for us not only harmless, but, owing to the circumstances of the time, also advantageous)…. It is necessary to support Zionism and, in general, to play upon nationalistic aspirations.” He hired one Manya Velbushevuch, a Jewish women who had earlier been arrested for subversive activities, as his agent. In 1900, she sent a message to Zubatov: “Congratulate me with a great victory I did not expect so soon. Now all the Zionists are our assistants. It only remains to discover how to make use of their services.” She received praise for her work from Minister of the Interior von Plehve. Vilbushevich, ca.1905, went to Paris, after having made a trip to Palestine, and raised money there from various people, including Edmond de Rothschild, for Jewish “self-defense” groups. Ultimately, Vladimir Jabotinskii, the founder of the Irgun, whom David Ben-Gurion called “Vladimir Hitler,” joined one of these Zionist groups, controlled and financed by the Okhrana’s Sergei Zubatov and his agents.

Today: Odessa and ‘The Trust’
Libya’s economy, now subject to economic warfare by the Reagan administration, is, to a large extent, in the hands of the “founding families” of Zionism, Luzzatto, Recanati, Dweck, and the junior partners whom they co-opted, at the tum of the century, in Odessa.The umbrella “management committee ” for Libya’s finances is a shady, quasi-formal grouping which has existed for the best part of this century, under the nickname “The Trust.” Three Odessa-born individ­ uals played a prominent role in shaping it in its modem form: Julius Hammer, the father of Occidental Petroleum’s Ar­mand Hammer; Alexander Helphand (Parvus); and Sidney Reilly.All played a prominent role in the 1917 Russian Revolution and in the reorganization of the Russian economy from the time of Lenin’s “New Economic Policy ” to the conclusion of Stalin’s First Five-Year-Plan-but this is an­ other story.

Most of Libya’s oil—which is the Libyan economy—is managed by three well-known heirs of “The Trust,” namely Armand Hammer, Max Fisher, and Edgar Bronfman (see accompanying article). Two of the three, Hammer and Bronfman, are playing a very prominent role, almost contin­uously since the August 1981 secret meetings between Shar­on and the KGB/GRU in Cyprus, in arranging and managing the new Russian-Israeli relationship. In the deep background, behind the names ‘Hammer, Fischer, and Bronfman, hide discretely and securely the old Venetian/Ottoman banking families: Luzzatto of Venice, Recanati of Salonica. Dweck of. Aleppo. whose role in the founding of the Zionist move­ment—and the state of Israel—is more important, though less glamorous, than that of Baron de Rothschild.

One example: Israel has bought petroleum from’Libya for many years now. The transaction is, reportedly, managed by the Venetian Luzzattos, through the mediation of a Re­canati front-man, with the oil produced by Hammer. The Recanati agent in question is a Greek shipowner by the name of John, or Giovanni, Latsis, whose corporate headquarters are in New York and who spends half his time in Italy.The chairman of the board of Latsis’s New York company is a Greek Orthodox priest, Father Basil, who is also a member of the board of directors of the Recanati family bank, the Israel Discount Bank, founded by Leon Recanati, who emi­ grated toPalestine in 1935 from his native Salonica. ‘

This is only a tiny example of what ”The Trust” is en­ gaged in, in terins of international economic and financial transactions. Hammer’s larger role, including the activities of his “Golden Mercury” organization in Luzzatto’s Venice, is perhaps slightly more indicative of the broader role of “The Trust,” inclusive of its dominant Anglo-American compo­nent, in managing a significant part of the world’s great affairs, especially in the domain of what is called “East-West relations.”

To stick narrowly to the subject at hand, the present Russian-Israeli relationship, we can simply observe that there is an unbroken continuity in the interrelationship between Great Russian Imperial grand strategy and Zionist grand strategy, in large part mediated by the broader-based “Trust,” a continuity which pre-dates the Russian Revolution, the two world wars, and the founding of the state of Israel. That continuity goes back to the coordinated way in which the 18th-century Venetian Luzzattos persuaded the 18th-centu­ry, Venice-educated Orloff brothers, to found the city of Odessa; how the 19th-century Luzzattos, Recanatis, and Dwecks persuaded the 19th-century Ignatievs, Plehves, and Zubatovs to force Russian Jews out by means of terror and pogroms—and thus to launch the Zionist movement.

Grand strategies
When Israel was founded, in 1948, it was hardly Ameri­ca’s “staunchest ally” in the Middle East.The young Andrei Gromyko’s vote at the United Nations played a decisive role in overcoming British objections to Israeli nationhood. The Haganah, which secured Israeli independence by combatting Arab opposition, was primarily dependent on Soviet and Czechoslovak weapons shipments. It was also the Odessa­-originating Irgun, which organized Arab opposition and the panicked flight of the Palestinians, by means of the Deir Yassin massacre, carried out with Soviet and Czechoslovak weapons.

The “pro-Western” character of the state of Israel began taking shape under very peculiar circumstances, yet to be clarified, during the Suez crisis of 1956. It will be recalled that that crisis began when Israeli paratroopers were dropped at the MitIa Pass in the Sinai, in order to give occasion to nearby British and French naval forces to intervene and try to recapture the Suez Canal from tHe Egyptians. The opera­tion had been timed to divert world attention from the fact that, at that same time, Ambassador Yuri Andropov was crushing the anti-Russian revolution in Hungary.

It will also be recalled that this titning of the Suez crisis­—so convenient for the Russians—took place shortly after the famous “de-Stalinization” congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which the Israeli Mossad graciously circulated to the West copies of Nikita Khrushchev’s historic “secret speech,” which indeed remained secret for several months afterward, only in the Soviet Union. The fact that the Mos­sad, or someone inside the Mossad, had access to Khrush­chev’s secret de-Stalinization speech, is important. With it, the post-Stalin Russian leadership bad signaled to the world that it was now ready, after Stalin’s demise, to resume its old business with “The Trust.”

None of this, of course, is to argue that Zionist leaders view themselves as Russian assets, though many of them certainly are, and though Ariel Shaton and Armand Hammer most especially are. The point is that the much-touted “sur­vivor” mentality so much valued among militant Zionists, has been, historically, grafted onto them by official Russian state imperial policy for over a century now, long before the “Bettelheim syndrome” was studied by Great Britain’s Tav­istock Clinic.

To better understand Arid Sharon’s and his braintruster David Kimche’s current pro-Russian, anti-American policy, one must proceed from the fact that Soviet grand strategy is seen, in Moscow, as the concluding chapter of a longstanding Russian chauvinist imperial commitment to establish Mos­cow as the “Third and Final Rome,” the center of a sole, ecumenical empire, modeled after the Byzantine Empire and its predecessor, Imperial Rome. Most of 19th-century Rus­sian policy, from the Crimean War onward, was determined by this growing impulse of the “Third Rome” perspective, which, among its features, included the “drive for warm­ water ports,” which stands as a euphemism for taking over the Middle East, and the brutal, cynical inducement to force East European Jews to embrace Zionism as their only re­maining choice for survival and self-respect.

During 1986, General Secretary Gorbachov’s govern­ment intends to remove all U.S. military presence from the Mediterranean Sea and, as a result, turn this vital artery which carries 75 per cent of Western Europe’s trade, into a Russian lake, from the standpoint of preponderate naval power. Also dur­ing 1986, Moscow intends, by means of military blackmail and appropriate arms-control proposals, to decouple the de­fense of Western Europe from that of the United States. Toward these two objectives, Moscow has assigned Israel one very important role: Israel is to ensure that no political forces friendly to the United States remain in positions of power and influence either in the Arab world, or anywhere else in the Mediterranean basin. This is the significance of last winter’s aerial bombardment of Tunisia, of the Achille Lauro crisis and its aftermath, and of the current, Mossad- triggered Libyan crisis.

From their perspective, Sharon’s Irgunist friends, ga­memaster David Kimche (the secret author of Sharon’s “Mediterranean strategy”), and the old “Trust” interests in the Zionist orbit, Recanati, Dwecks, Luzzattos, see in this vast redistribution of power in the Mediterranean and the Near East, their golden opportunity to establish themselves as the “New Venice.” Their game, in large part, depends on rapidly eliminating the last remnants of pro-U.S.A. loyalists in the region, so as to present Israel as the “sole” asset the United States will depend upon. For the weeks ahead, there is an additional twist in Sharon’s perspective: Sharon and his friends are now committed to accelerating this process of knocking the United States out of the picture before the Rus­sian gameplan has consolidated its positions, so as to make Moscow also depend, at least in part, on Israeli policies. Defense Secretary Weinberger’s continuing refusal to in­volve the United States in a set-up, losing military adventure against Qaddafi, is, at this time, the principal obstacle to Sharon’s present, accelerated gameplan.