While calling the killings at the Paris-based magazine Charlie Hebdo “horrible and condemnable”, Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar helpfully pointed out the Islamist attack was “obvious backlash” to the “war on terror” triggered by the United States after September 11, 2001. Characteristic of his politics, he also brought in Israel and the Palestinian grievance.
Mr Aiyar’s logic is not new. In the years after 9/11 it has become conventional wisdom to blame the US and the West for the international jihadist mess. There is a long list of charges against America for provoking Muslim passions. Washington D.C., is accused of recklessly intervening in Islamic countries, backing Israel, patronising democracy-phobic sheikhdoms, and arming the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s.
Admittedly, there is some truth to the case against America. The history of US foreign policy is not perfect and the legacy of its “mistakes” is still with us. Most recently, an early incarnation of the Islamic State (IS) benefited from indirect American support because it took on the pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria. In time the IS acquired a monstrous autonomy.
Having said that 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 seeding Islamist terror? Wading in the swirling waters of anti-Americanism, it suits many intellectuals to not ask the question. Yet, what does the evidence say?
Mr Aiyar’s extenuation of the murders in Paris took this writer back to 2005 and the release of The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World. In India, the book made news because of revelations that senior Congress and Communist politicians were on the KGB payroll. There was much more to the Archive. It provided clues as to the links between the Soviet Union and the vaguely left-wing fellow travellers who eventually became 21st century jihadists. It helped trace the growth curve from Comintern to, well, Momintern.
On page 2 itself, Christopher Andrew — co-author of both volumes of The Mitrokhin Archive — provided a tantalising sampler. He referred to the Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened in Baku in 1920 by Grigory 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.”
The Baku conference sought to win the Bolsheviks allies from among the debris of the Ottoman Empire. Here Zinoviev used the terms “class war” and “jihad” synonymously. It was the first time this was done. Jihad was presented as a legitimate political weapon against the West. This anticipated the current alliance between the New Left and Islamism, evident in Europe and now increasingly in India as well.
A half-century after Baku, 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 emphasised, the KGB’s Middle Eastern foreign policy was not just aimed at neutralising the “Main Adversary” (America) but also guided by a high degree of anti-Semitism, an attribute inherited from Czarist Russia.
East German spymaster Markus Wolf “found the KGB… ‘fixated on Israel as an enemy’”. 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 then of its breakaway, the Baghdad-based Special Operations Group.
As Mitrokhin recorded, 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” — 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 said, 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.
As per the Mitrokhin papers, “Moscow showed rather less interest” in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). “That (Yasser) Arafat had friendly relations with the deviant communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, strengthened Moscow’s suspicion of him.” So was Arafat the good, upright Palestinian, stalwart of the Non-Aligned Movement, who refused to take sides in the Cold War and cosy up to Moscow?
Do consider “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 related 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 jihadism.
Mr Aiyar doesn’t care to remember this history. As it happens, it was instrumental in the incubation of modern Islamism.
The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com
