Ronen Bergman/Ynetnews: The KGB’s Middle East Files: The fight against Zionism and world Jewry

But the highlight of this activity was an attempt to drive a wedge between the Jews and the blacks in America. On July 25, 1971, Anatoli Kireev, who was in charge of operations in the US, ordered the KGB branch in New York to launch Operation Pandora. As part of the operation, a series of explosive devices were planted in African-American neighborhoods in New York and in one “black” college. After their detonation—which did not cause significant damage—the KGB’s operatives claimed responsibility on behalf of the JDL. Pamphlets distributed in “black” areas described the “crimes” allegedly committed by the JDL and called for revenge. In addition, the KGB handed out pamphlets on behalf of the Party of National Rebirth, a group of alleged white nationalists, calling on Americans to save America from the Jews.

Some say that the KGB’s operations against the JDL were the last straw as far as Kahane was concerned and the pressure put on him and his movement by the FBI became too much for him. So in September 1971 he left the US and immigrated to Israel.

  “The way the KGB saw it,” says Yaakov Kedmi, “getting involved with the JDL and the black community in order to create bloody conflicts was a very natural thing. The truth is that the Jews helped the black leadership in the US immensely.

“The JDL acted against the USSR. As far as the Soviets were concerned, it was like killing two birds with one stone—both taking revenge on the JDL and making it responsible for the attacks on the blacks, and severing the ties between the Jews and the blacks in order to encourage the black revolt against the main government in Washington,” Kedmi adds.

 Delaying Jews’ emigration
According to the Mitrokhin documents, in 1975 the KGB branch in New York was deeply involved in helping Russian and Arab diplomats gather votes for the UN General Assembly resolution that determined that “Zionism is racism.” In 1976, Andropov initiated a series of secret measures, which the KGB would lead among the global diplomatic community, to push for the appointment of a special committee to investigate Zionism, similar to the UN committee against apartheid. The Arab states, led by then-Syrian President Hafez Assad, eventually decided not to promote the committee. From the mid-1970s, the USSR toughened its policy on Jewish emigration to Israel. There were several reasons for the stricter policy: First of all, Andropov grew stronger and began serving as a full member of the politburo.

Secondly, in 1975, the American Congress approved an amendment to the US-USSR trade act (the Jackson–Vanik amendment), which stipulated improvements in the USSR’s policy on human rights issues as a condition for a possible easing of American-imposed trade restrictions on the USSR. Suspicious as always, KGS officials were certain that world Jewry was behind the amendment, and so the Soviet Union’s human rights policy didn’t change and restrictions on Jews weren’t eased.

A third reason was the Soviet Jews’ struggle to immigrate to Israel, which also included subversive operations by Jewish elements against the Soviets and the Americans using immigration permits to taunt the USSR.

“The KGB realized that there was one key element behind this international campaign (to help Jews leave the USSR and immigrate to Israel)—the Nativ liaison bureau,” says Kedmi, who started as Nativ’s operations office and later became the head of the organization.

 What did you do to make them so angry?
“Who did we not approach and who did we not turn against them—from famous writers to intellectuals, politicians, ambassadors, and actors. They were surprised to learn that a leader in one of the Central American countries, who was actually one of the Communist leaders in that country, had shamelessly pressured the Soviet ambassador to allow the Jews to leave. They suddenly discovered a strong organization using their exact same methods against them, and it drove them crazy.”

Andropov’s response was indeed powerful. Part of the KGB’s work plan for 1976 was dedicated to a series of operations aimed at creating a conflict between Jewish government opponents who had left the USSR and other opponents, mainly Ukrainians who had left during World War II. A special effort was dedicated to the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) organization, one of the main anti-Communist movements, in a bid to create a rift between the veteran members, who were mostly non-Jews, and convince them that the Jewish members were attempting to expel them.

According to the Mitrokhin documents, considerable efforts were made in 1977 to defame Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, allegedly on behalf of former Soviet Jews, after he had issued a series of harsh declarations against the Kremlin’s policy.

 In 1978, following a decision by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to take “measures to expose the reactionary essence of world Zionism and the anti-Soviet Zionist activity,” the KGB and the association of Soviet jurists prepared “the white paper of Zionism”—a horrible lampoon including serious lies.

Through the KGB’s secret channels, the book was distributed in 32 countries, handed to the leaderships of the Communist parties in the US, Canada and other countries, and distributed among parliament members, ministers and social activists from different countries, as well as representatives of international organizations, libraries and higher education institutions.

The book includes, for example, the story of a former Soviet citizen named Abramov. On April 24, 1978, all shook up, she knocked on the doors of the Soviet embassy in Vienna and said that she had immigrated to Israel two years earlier with her son Oleg. Like the “absolute majority” of new immigrants from the USSR, the Abramov family also sought to return to the old homeland. It turned out, however, as Abramov testified, that “agents of a special security service, specializing in keeping the immigrants in Israel, pressured us day and night.”

Her son Oleg eventually received a passport, but was murdered a week before the flight back home. “They wanted to murder me and my daughter as well,” she said. “A day before we left, we were badly beaten by them. At midnight, we escaped to the airport so that no one would see us. In the morning, we flew to Vienna.”Soviet Jewry’s battle against state authorities, and the buzz it created thanks to Jewish organizations, did not leave the USSR government indifferent. It knew very well that the country’s image suffered a serious blow in the global public opinion.

KGB officials were convinced that this problematic reality, like almost every other problem, could be changed through “active measures” that would improve the USSR’s image as a country that actually treats its Jewish community well. The organization launched a series of operations, with the biggest one being against Lord Baron Immanuel Jakobovits, the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and one of the most important intellectuals and leaders of British Jewry of all times, in addition to his immense contribution in the fields of ethics, morals and medicine.

 Jakobovits fought a lot for Soviet Jews and demanded that the country’s authorities “not just ‘let my people go’ but ‘let my people live’”—in other words, that they significantly improve Soviet Jewry’s religious and human rights.

 The rabbi had asked numerous times for permission to come and see for himself how the Jews were living beyond the Iron Curtain, and he was surely surprised when the approval finally came in November 1975. This unusual development, which was perceived as a good sign as to the USSR government’s attitude towards Jews, was even reported by the Jerusalem Post with a big headline. No one imagined that behind the charitable move was a sophisticated KGB plan, and that the rabbi had become the target of an “active measures” operation against him.

 The KGB put together a group of agents and operatives—the Mitrokhin documents detail the names and code names of 11 of them—who would be the ones to meet the rabbi and present him with an utterly distorted picture of the Jews’ situation.

 “Primarily, it’s important to get information about the plans of Rabbi Jakobovits and his delegation,” the Operation Order read.

 In order to do so, the rabbi and his secretary were placed under close surveillance, and one of the undercover operatives even befriended him. The Jews that met with the rabbi were strictly filtered by the KGB. Some were active agents and some were associated with the government one way or another. The agents presented the delegation with the achievements of Jewish writers and cultural figures in developing Jewish culture and art in the USSR.

 KGB agents with senior positions in the religious Jewish community were ordered to present community life in a positive light, “to talk about celebrating holidays and observing Shabbat at the synagogue, and to show the delegation a film about the birthday celebration for Rabbi Levin, the former rabbi of the Moscow synagogue.”

There were other meetings with Jews who reported how good their life was and how they had no intention, even if they were given the option, of emigrating from the USSR.  To further bolster the positive impression, the authorities “accepted” the rabbi’s request and allowed him to meet with Christian clerics, who were also KGB agents and who supported the accounts about the freedom of ritual and religion he had heard earlier.

The operation was deemed a great success. The rabbi returned from the USSR, and although he had also held meetings with oppositionists and aliyah activists, the propaganda planted in his head deeply affected him. In interviews to the media, he said that the situation in the USSR was not that bad, that no more than 100,000 Jews wanted to leave, and that the focus should be less on the refuseniks’ struggles and more on improving the community’s situation in general. Even years after his visit, when he wrote his memoirs, he refused to acknowledge the fact that he had fallen victim to a sophisticated KGB trick.

 Jews under surveillance
According to the Mitrokhin documents, however, not everyone in the Soviet leadership considered Zionism a great danger, or a danger at all. There were those in the politburo who argued that Andropov’s obsession “is making us look stupid.”In September 1978, when Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko visited the White House, he was surprised to be reprimanded by President Jimmy Carter over a person whose name he was unfamiliar with—Anatoly Sharansky. He later changed his name to Natan Sharansky and went on to become a minister in the Israeli government and in 2009 was appointed the Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency.

 Andropov had ordered to arrest Sharansky and was personally involved in hunting him down. The persecution continued until Sharansky was tried for treason, espionage and incitement and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

After his meeting with the American president, in a conversation with Soviet ambassador in Washington Anatoli Dobrynin, Gromyko referred to Andropov’s obsession with Sharansky as “absurd.”

But as far as Andropov was concerned, it was not absurd at all. In May 1979, he approved a special plan of operation against the international efforts in support of Sharansky. Andropov was especially concerned by a moratorium pledge for the protection of Yuri Orlov (a human rights activist and scientist in Russia) and Sharansky, which was signed by 2,400 American scientists and experts calling on American and Western scientists not to cooperate with Soviet counterparts until the two were released.

The Operation Order, which can be found in the Mitrokhin archive, is long and complicated, and includes dozens of operation sections, such as defaming the moratorium’s organizers in the Western press; bribing American scientists to withdraw their support; creating a film named “Lie and Hate,” which would present Sharansky as a CIA agent; and distributing a proclamation on behalf of scientists, politicians and social activists from West Germany, Italy and other European countries, which would condemn the boycott of scientists and defend the scientific ties between the West and the USSR.

In the first half of the 1980s, the refusenik movement—the most prominent aliyah activists—and the aliyah movement from the USSR reached their lowest point. KGB head Andropov and his successors happily informed the politburo—in a report which was partially correct at the time—that they had managed to suppress those movements, and that the Jews who were still active were under continuous surveillance by the agency and were unable to operate. Andropov reported, for example, in May 1981, that the KGB had managed to uncover plans for and prevent a meeting in a forest near Moscow both to commemorate the Holocaust and to protest authorities’ refusal to grant Jews exit permits.

Since the early 1980s, as Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev grew physically and mentally weaker, Andropov’s influence grew stronger. He was appointed to replace him upon his death in 1982, and served as the premier of the Soviet Union until 1984.

During that period, the country’s relations with the US reached an unprecedented low and the tensions were the highest since the Cuban missile crisis. These tensions led to US President Ronald Reagan’s famous speech, in which he referred to the USSR as the “evil empire,” and increased the friction between the countries to the point of the threat of war. These tensions greatly affected the KGB, which saw the situation as another product of the Zionist plot—which dominates the American leadership’s state of mind—to undermine the stability of the Soviet bloc. As a result, the KGB expanded its activity against Zionism.

According to the Mitrokhin documents, on December 25, 1981, the party ordered to “improve the intelligence activity against the subversion of the world’s Zionist centers.”

Several months later, the heads of all arms of the KGB met in Leningrad for a conference on Zionism. The conference’s speeches stressed the “extensive subversive activity of the Zionist centers around the world and their infiltration into decision-making centers in different countries,” and claimed that “the Zionist organizations are affecting some countries’ foreign policy and aggravating conflicts around the world.” The conference further stressed that “there is not a single negative incident in socialist countries that Zionists are not involved in.”

The Jews in the USSR, they argued, “are more inclined to betray the country, to wage a battle against the Soviet regime, to immigrate to a different country, to collect intelligence on the USSR and to hand it over to enemies.”

Following the conference, in the summer of 1982, they issued a “work plan for fighting Zionism” until 1986. Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was appointed head of the KGB in 1988, also stressed that “Zionism is the main threat to the USSR and to the Soviet bloc.”

The KGB’s work plans for the two following years were written in a similar manner. The KGB heads saw the Freemasonry movement as “part of the global Jewish conspiracy” as well, asserting that “the American industrial-military network is still dominated by Jews.”

According to the Mitrokhin documents, protocols of the first meetings chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev as the USSR leader in 1985 suggest that anti-Semitism did not skip his generation either. When the KGB presented its work plan against human rights activist Andrei Sakharov and claimed that he was “one-hundred percent” influenced by his Jewish wife, Yelena Bonner, Gorbachev said, probably jokingly: “Well, that’s what Zionism does to a person.”

Nevertheless, it was Gorbachev who released Sakharov from the house arrest he had been placed under, and later even opened the gates of the USSR for free Jewish emigration, which led to the arrival of about one million immigrants in Israel in the 1990s.

 Research and translation from Russian by Will Styles, Alexander Tabachnik, Yana Sofovich and Yael Sass.

***The writer would like to extend his gratitude and appreciation to Prof. Christopher Andrew and Dr. Peter Martland of Cambridge University.