Putin praised Yaser Arafat.

Romanian intelligence chief Ion Mihai Pacepa in The Wall Street Journal Online back in
2003 clarified Arafat’s Russian connections. Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking
intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of
"Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-
Americanism.

As Romania’s former spy chief, Pacepa has read Arafat’s KGB file. He says that Arafat
was a KGB agent. According to Pacepa, Arafat “is a career terrorist, trained, armed and
bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.”

In his Wall Street Journal column, Pacepa described Moscow’s plan to make Arafat the
national leader of the Palestinians. And this was what Arafat has become and went on
to conduct the greatest terror offensive of them all -- against Israel.

Former Romanian intelligence chief Ion Mihai Pacepa describes Arafat as

“an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign

intelligence.” Arafat was trained at the Balashikha special-ops school in Russia.
Pacepa also relates how “the KGB destroyed the official records of
Arafat’s birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying
that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by
birth.”

Perhaps Putin can do the same for Obama.

Putin was/is KGB to the bone.

The KGB's Man

By ION MIHAI PACEPA

The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB106419296113226300-H9jeoNjlaZ2nJ2oZnyIaaeBm4.html

The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to
peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career
terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for
decades.

Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian

intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every
month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed
with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has
been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the
sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300
million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

***

"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him
at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red
flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they
all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to
the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba.
Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full
flower on 9/11.

In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks 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. We'd already had great
success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning
American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz
Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.

KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee
gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy
Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat
into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood.
Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of
conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.

Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an
Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB
had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-
1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the
official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying
that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.

The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract
called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the
Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The
KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days
played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication
and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front
organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World
Federation of Trade Unions.

Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists
in our international front organizations. High-minded idealism held no mass-appeal in
the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a
"personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited
Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even
more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to
be walking in his footsteps.

Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day
Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler
Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB
asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of
the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by
the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later
claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism"
was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion,"
and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always
regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.

The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good
at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat
improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence,
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror
operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a
brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In
March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to
behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with
terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told
him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both
Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the
olive branch.

In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President

Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding
government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was
a great success for us. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police
state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken
on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu
brought home a joint communiqué in which the American president stated that his
friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."

***

Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get
his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his -- all because he continued to play the
role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a
government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to
Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the
Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.

On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking
him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of
the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current
administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion.
Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian
Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.

Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the
former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a
book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.