Comintern to Momintern

Admittedly, there is some truth to the case against America. The history of US foreign policy is not perfect and the legacy of its 8216;8216;mistakes8217;8217; is still with us.

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 8212; wading in the swirling waters of anti-Americanism 8212; 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 8212; co-author of both volumes of The Mitrokhin Archive 8212; 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: 8216;8216;Delegates excitedly waved swords, daggers and revolvers in the air when Zinoviev called on them to wage a jihad against imperialism and capitalism.8217;8217;

At the Baku conference 8212; aimed to win the Bolsheviks allies from among the debris of the Ottoman Empire 8212; Zinoviev used the terms 8216;8216;class war8217;8217; and 8216;8216;jihad8217;8217; synonymously. Jihad was presented as a legitimate political weapon against the West. The Comintern deserves Al Qaeda8217;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 KGB8217;s Middle Eastern foreign policy was, of course, aimed at neutralising the 8216;8216;Main Adversary8217;8217; America but also guided by a high degree of anti-Semitism, an attribute inherited from the Tsarist ruling classes.

East German spymaster Markus Wolf 8216;8216;found the KGB8230; 8216;fixated on Israel as an enemy8217;8217;8217;, the book says. It was fixation as paranoia. In 1982, the KGB 8216;8216;held a8230; conference in Leningrad devoted to 8216;The main tendencies of the subversive activity of Zionist centres abroad and Jewish nationalists within the country8217;8217;8217;. It concluded: 8216;8216;Virtually no major negative incidents took place in the socialist countries of Europe without involvement of Zionists.8217;8217; Hitler couldn8217;t have put it better.

The KGB decided 8216;8216;Zionists in league with Israel and 8216;imperialist intelligence services8217;, especially the CIA8217;8217; 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 8212; 8216;8216;recruited by the KGB as Agent Natsionalist8217;8217; 8212; 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 8216;8216;KBG was almost certainly given advance notice8217;8217;, the book says, of the dramatic kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. That was the work of Haddad8217;s assistant, Illich Ramirez Sanchez or 8216;8216;Carlos the Jackal8217;8217;, the 8216;8216;spoiled son of a millionaire Venezuelan communist8217;8217; and alumnus of Moscow8217;s Patrice Lumumba University.

8216;8216;Moscow showed rather less interest in the PLO,8217;8217; the Mitrokhin papers say, 8216;8216;8230; that Yasser Arafat had friendly relations with the deviant communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, strengthened Moscow8217;s suspicion of him.8217;8217;

Set this against 8216;8216;Yasser Arafat: The KGB8217;s Man8217;8217;, an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in September 2003. Written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Romanian foreign intelligence chief, it said: 8216;8216;In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat8230; high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services8217; priority list, including mine. Bucharest8217;s role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this8230; Washington8230; believed that Nicolae Ceausescu was8230; an 8216;independent8217; communist with a 8216;moderate8217; streak.8217;8217;

Pacepa relates how the KGB virtually 8216;8216;invented8217;8217; Arafat, gave him 8216;8216;an ideology and an image8217;8217;, destroyed his birth records in Cairo to allow him to claim he was Jerusalem born, 8216;8216;trained him at a8230; special-ops school east of Moscow8217;8217;: 8216;8216;The KGB8230; also selected a 8216;personal hero8217; for him 8212; the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini.8217;8217;

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 8216;8216;one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry8217;8217;.

He was also great-uncle of Yasser Arafat 8212; helping complete that triad of doom: Nazism, communism and jihad.