February 07, 2011
U.S.-Egypt Relations Under Attack
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
We all want to see democracy succeed in Egypt, but there is good reason to believe that the current political crisis in that country is geared toward breaking Egypt's close ties with the United Sates, not toward installing democracy there. From my vantage point, I see this crisis as an updated version of the Kremlin's highly secret Cold War effort to turn the Islamic world into an enemy of the United States. In my other life as a top figure in the KGB intelligence community, I was involved in that effort, as I have described elsewhere ("Russian Footprints," National Review Online, August 24, 2006[1]).
It is noteworthy that the current Middle East rebellion is taking place only in Islamic countries that are pro-American and that the people demanding democracy there are burning the flag of the country symbolizing democracy for most of the world -- the United States. It is remarkable that these "mass uprisings" were so secretly planned that the entire U.S. intelligence community was taken completely by surprise -- President Obama admonished National Intelligence Director James Clapper for his "failure to predict the outbreak of these demonstrations" [2].
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As I no longer live in the bear's lair, I do not have hard proof to document that the Kremlin has a hand in the current events in Egypt. I do know, however, that few things were more important for the leaders of the KGB community when I was one of them than kicking the United States out of the Middle East and helping Moscow to take control of the Arab oil reserves. The Kremlin wanted so desperately to achieve these goals that it even created an anti-American Palestinian leader out of whole cloth.
The KGB community went to great lengths to transform an Egyptian-born Marxist, Mohammed Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar, into a Palestinian-born Yasser Arafat. It took us years to credibly falsify his birth certificate and other IDs, to build him a new past, and to train him at the KGB Balashikha special-operations training school east of Moscow [6]. It took us more years and the help of former Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, another Soviet puppet [7], to catapult the newly-created Arafat into his position as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (also created and financed by the KGB). It is no wonder that in 1970, when Nasser died, the whole leadership of the Soviet bloc attended his funeral. During those early years, Egypt was literally being run by Soviet advisers -- the KGB and the Red Army alone had some 18,000 advisers assigned there.