The real terror paymasters: the KGB has long sponsored the Muslim fundamentalist groups that have now become a global terror network carrying out the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Muhammad's name

New American, The, Sept 3, 2007 by William F. Jasper

In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions.

In the quote above, Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, head of the DIE, the KGB's little sister in communist Romania, reveals a conversation he had with chairman Andropov, the Soviet leader. "We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world," Andropov told Pacepa, "and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe."

Gen. Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978, recounted this story in an August 24, 2006 article for National Review entitled "Russian Footprints." "According to Andropov," said Pacepa, "the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch."

Gen. Pacepa explained how this was put into operation:

   In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service, the [Romanian] DIE
   --along with other East European sister services--to scour the
   country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic
   ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist
   operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our "sphere
   of influence." Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred
   for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for
   Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left
   Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such
   undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough
   estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc
   intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence
   into the Islamic world.

Likewise, Anatoliy Golitsyn, one of the most important KGB defectors to come to the West, noted in his 1995 book, The Perestroika Deception, "Under concealed Russian guidance, the Muslims of the former Soviet Union ... will seek to cooperate and ally themselves with Muslims in Iran and the Arab states while Russia maintains its open policy of cooperation and partnership with the West. In this way China openly and Russia secretly will jointly attempt to swing the balance of power in their favor in the highly strategic, oil-producing Arab/Iranian areas of the Middle East."

A July 1997 article by Associated Press writer Anthony Shadid provides one measure of the impact of this Soviet KGB (and ongoing Russian FSB) strategy. The AP story, "Marxism Makes Way for Islam," profiles a number of influential Marxist-Muslim intellectuals. It begins with the observation that "on the bookshelf of Adel Hussein sits an odd collection for one of Egypt's leading Islamic thinkers." Titles like Socialist Integration, On Communism, and Planning in the U.S.S.R. by leading Marxists, notes Mr. Shadid, "speak more of class struggle than the hand of God."

Like a surprising number of others across the Arab and Muslim world, Adel Hussein "is a one-time Marxist and nonbeliever who has turned to Islam, part of a new intellectual generation reshaping the religion." "I benefited from Marx in both theory and practice," Hussein told Shadid, "but now, Islam is my starting point and my framework." That doesn't mean he's abandoned Marx, however. "Hussein, for instance, says his goals have not changed," Shadid reported. "But he now sees Islam, through its ability to persuade and to mobilize, as the best tool." In other words, Islam for Hussein is a means to an end, and the end is a Marxist world.

Adel Hussein, says AP's Shadid, is representative of a significant number of today's influential imams and mullahs. "In a jarring twist, they are the same thinkers who a generation ago drew the ire of religious Muslims because their Marxist disavowal of God was seen as the biggest threat to Islam," Shadid reported. "Today, they are often the public face of Islam--writing in leading Arabic newspapers, speaking at conferences and on television talk shows, enjoying the support of many younger, more political Muslims interested in their attempts to rethink Islam's relationship to democracy, minorities and the West."

Evidence for the existence of an ongoing Soviet/Russian strategic plan to foment and use Islamic extremism is very extensive and goes far to explain the inordinate hatred of Muslim fundamentalists for America and the West. Not only is al-Qaeda aligned with the Kremlin (see the article on page 10), so are the other major "Islamist" terror groups including PLO/ al-Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah (see the sidebar below). Of course, none of those groups would amount to much if not for the immense assistance they receive from Iran and Syria, regimes that were primary client-state terror sponsors for the Soviets and continue in that role for Russia under Putin.