Like the 38 other unsuspecting passengers and crew members who boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark on September 11th, Jeremy Glick had no way of foreseeing the intense and deadly drama that was about to unfold. After suicide-hijackers commandeered the San Francisco-bound Boeing 757, passengers aboard the doomed jetliner planned a desperate counterattack and placed calls to their loved ones. Among those who phoned home was Jeremy Glick, one of the citizen heroes of Flight 93 who are believed to have taken on the terrorists, causing the fuel-laden jet to crash into a rural Pennsylvania field, instead of Washington, D.C., or some other populated target.
Glick, 31, and the father of a three-month-old daughter, told his wife, Lyzbeth, that he and others planned to rush the hijackers, who had by that time already stabbed one passenger to death. Mrs. Glick said that Jeremy told her that the knife-wielding hijackers, who claimed to have a bomb, were “three Arab-looking men with red headbands.”
Red headbands? Those are the trademark of the Islamic Jihad terrorists, who are backed by Iran and Russia. Like many of the so-called “Muslim extremist” groups, they are more “red” (Marxist-Leninist) than “green” (Islamic fundamentalist). The red headbands are but one of many clues screaming out to warn us that the Black Tuesday terror attack was not merely the work of twisted religious zealots, but of state sponsors using terrorist groups as proxy instruments of war to advance the ongoing world Communist revolution.
Incredibly, it is some of those very same state sponsors who are being heralded as our newfound “allies”: Russia, China, Iran, and Syria. What’s more, the same policy elites who have partnered us with these terror regimes in the name of fighting terrorism are pushing a similar course of reconciliation toward other unrepentant terror states such as Libya, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea.
Connections Coming to Light
Many connections have already surfaced tying the deadliest terror attack in history to Saddam Hussein, one of Moscow’s chief clients and longstanding surrogates in the Middle East. On October 26th government officials of the Czech Republic confirmed that Mohamed Atta, a central figure in the suicide attack on the World Trade Center, had met at least once in Prague with Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani. Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian “student” in Germany, is believed to have been one of the terrorist cell leaders aboard American Airlines Flight 11, one of the planes that was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center.
The Atta-Iraq-Czech connection is especially noteworthy on at least two levels. First, in providing evidence of likely Iraqi involvement in the crime, it also necessarily implicates Russia. Saddam Hussein is dependent upon Russia for military hardware and expertise and would not undertake a move so radical as perpetrating the Black Tuesday assault without Moscow’s blessing. As Christopher Story, editor and publisher of the authoritative Soviet Analyst, has noted, it should be recalled that Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was carried out “under the direction and guidance of a huge contingent of Soviet ‘advisers’ headed by General Makashev.” However, Story continued, the Soviets then astonished observers “by suddenly reversing themselves and appearing to condone the American-led Gulf War response, and standing on the sidelines.” “They are doing exactly the same today,” Story observed, in the wake of September 11th, “falling all over themselves to express unqualified abhorrence of terrorism in all its forms, notwithstanding that it is the Kremlin which … has masterminded the scourge of global terrorism.”
Russia’s support for the terrorism scourge has increased since Black Tuesday. On September 30th Kyodo News of Japan reported: “Iraq and Russia have signed a package deal covering more than 70 projects to be implemented by Russian firms at a cost of about $40 billion, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported Sunday.” Those projects, no doubt, will include continued Russian assistance for Saddam’s CBN (Chemical, Biological, Nuclear) weapons programs and missile delivery systems.
On another level, Mohamed Atta’s Prague rendezvous points to the continuation of the longstanding Soviet-Czech terror apparatus. During the 1960s, Prague became a major center of terrorist training, supply, and coordination, under direction of Czech intelligence, which was completely subservient to the Soviet KGB. Soviet Analyst has noted that Prague is “the headquarters of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) in Central Europe,” and that the Czech Interior Ministry and the intelligence services “continue secretly to report to their ‘superiors’ in Moscow.” Moreover, the Czechs “have continued to manufacture the deadly terrorist explosive, Semtex, which has been sold in large quantities to the IRA,” and have failed to demonstrate that their Soviet-built chemical and biological weapons labs and stores have been destroyed.
The Real Terrorists
To judge from the policies and statements out of Washington and reports from the major media, it would appear that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq are the only regimes deemed to be active sponsors of terrorism. And Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, according to the same sources, is the principal, global terrorist threat, leading a large, shadowy, coalition army of fanatic “Islamic fundamentalists.” These are dangerously false premises, however, and they will bring deadly, calamitous results, if they are allowed to continue to guide U.S. policies.
However “politically incorrect” they may appear, these are the geo-political realities of the international terrorist threat that we face:
• The global network of terrorists posing as “Islamic fundamentalists” is, in many cases, led by Marxist-Leninists directed from Moscow and Beijing through Havana, Tehran, Damascus, Tripoli, Baghdad, and the Palestine Authority.
• The current wave of terrorism is a new phase in the ongoing world revolution unleashed with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. In Marxist-Leninist terminology, we have entered a new “period of escalating violence” in the “war of national liberation.”
• Now, as in earlier periods, Russia and China continue to support the international terrorist network, though they make considerable efforts to disguise their involvement by operating through surrogate countries.
• Russia and China have been providing not only conventional arms to the international terror networks, but also the materials, technology, and expertise for weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, and nuclear — to their surrogate state sponsors of terror. Most particularly: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and Cuba.
Communism — Not Islam
Based on an ideology of militant atheism, Communism holds all religion to be an “opiate” that drugs and subdues the proletariat — that is, the working class. In practice, Communism has always resulted in oppression, persecution, and slaughter of religious believers, including Muslims. Indeed, the main persecution of Muslims today continues to be found in Communist China and in the so-called independent — but still Communist-dominated — republics of the “former” Soviet Union. Both in principle and practice, Islam and Communism should be mortal enemies. This, however, has not prevented the Communists from penetrating, influencing, and taking control of many Muslim organizations and Islamic countries, as they have done, in similar manner, to Christian countries and Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches.
Using the most ruthless of measures, Lenin’s Bolsheviks established control over the Islamic peoples of the old czarist empire, but they found it difficult to export their atheist creed elsewhere amongst the Muslim populations. In his authoritative survey, World Communism, published in 1939, historian Franz Borkenau records what happened when the Turkish Communists returned home following the 1920 Communist “congress of the oppressed peoples of the East” in Baku: “They were stoned by the population in every village they passed through, finally arrested, tortured, and thrown into the sea.”
Likewise, noted Borkenau, “the communist parties of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt never prospered. The movement in those countries was essentially religious and racial and in both respects the communists could not compete with the local priesthood and the local feudals.” Thus the Comintern (Communist International) pragmatically oriented its program in the Muslim countries to “anti-colonialism” and “anti-imperialism” and “allied itself with all anti-French and anti-English forces, of whatever social description.” Within two decades after Borkenau wrote those lines, the communists had succeeded in penetrating those same countries and movements.
While pursuing the gradualist penetration approach, Lenin also put his fledgling Bolshevik regime into the international terrorism business. In 1920, Lenin himself ordered the creation of a camp at Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, to train foreign revolutionaries, especially guerrillas from India, who were assigned to conduct a terrorist bombing campaign against the British.
In 1922, Lenin’s agents met in Rome with Abdul Hamid Sa’id, leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Nasrat ul-Hakh, to plan the assassinations of British leaders. Subsequently, Soviet Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin promised the Egyptians “anything you may require toward the attainment of your object.”
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic nation, proved to be the place where the Leninists would experience one of their first and most spectacular successes in taking control of a Muslim country from within. Known as the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia was targeted by the Comintern because of its natural resources and strategic position in the world’s sea lanes. Nikolai Bukharin, who was with Lenin one of the original Bolsheviks and later a president of the Comintern, saw Indonesia as “a bridge from Asia to Australia.”
Members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) set out at once to worm their way into the Islamic League, Indonesia’s largest party, and other Islamic groups. A detailed account of this subversive effort is provided in Van der Vlugt’s excellent history, Asia Aflame, published in 1953. “For practical reasons,” wrote Indonesian PKI founder Tan Malakka, “the Communist should pretend to believe in the purity and sanctity of religion.” By pretending to be pious Muslims, the Communists thoroughly infiltrated the Islamic organizations and mosques. As early as 1923, Malakka reported to Moscow that the PKI controlled 20 Islamic League sections claiming 100,000 members, 30,000 of whom “we can count on. The PKI itself claimed 1,140 hard-core members. An appreciation of just how advanced the PKI penetration and recruitment was can be gained from a comparison to the rolls of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party, which could claim only 900 members at that time.
By 1946 the PKI, with help from Moscow, was able to put one of its own in power. Achmed Sukarno was a known Communist, but he was presented to the Indonesian people and the world as a “democrat,” “nationalist,” and “Muslim.” President Sukarno’s record became steadily more unmistakable, but he did not unequivocally admit to being a Communist until 1962, when he went to Russia to receive the Order of Lenin. “Thus, I am a Communist of the highest order,” he gushed on receiving this supreme Soviet accolade.
Over the next two decades, with help from Soviet and Chinese agents, Sukarno aggressively implemented the Communist program, including the promotion of terrorism against his own people. In 1965, as Sukarno moved to spring his major “Red Terror” coup to wipe out all political opposition, the anti-Communist Muslim and Christian officers in the military launched a counter-coup that toppled Sukarno’s regime. Over the past 36 years, though, Communists have continued to infiltrate and build their influence in all institutions, including the mosques and Islamic organizations.
During the same period that some of Moscow’s most ruthless and deceitful agents were busy bringing Sukarno to power in Indonesia, other equally brutal and cunning agents were paving the way for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in Egypt. Like Sukarno, Nasser did not wear his Communist colors openly. He even made statements and implemented measures calculated to make it appear that he was an anti-Communist. For Nasser, deceit was a necessary tactic in his struggle to maintain a grip on the reins of power. He couldn’t risk offending Egypt’s many anti-Communist Muslims. Following the Leninist program, he directed Egyptians along the Marxist path under the banner of “anti-colonialism” and “anti-Zionism.”
Although the Soviet Union voted for and strongly supported the establishment of the state of Israel, it soon after reversed course, in order to exploit and incite anti-Israel sentiments among the Arabic and Islamic countries. Moscow was fully aware that the Muslim countries comprised a strategic belt across the globe and were the key to the oil, minerals, and sea routes so vitally important to the nations of the West. Kremlin strategists also realized that millions of Muslims driven by a radicalized Islam could serve as surrogate shock troops to destabilize the West.
In 1954, Nasser’s Egypt provided the base for the Soviet war against the French in North Africa, with Algeria being the principal target. Ahmed Ben Bella and his so-called National Liberation Front (FLN), completely a Communist, Soviet-sponsored operation, provided a prototype for terrorist guerrilla groups of the 1960s and ’70s. The FLN carried out an eight-year campaign of terror against the Muslim population of Algeria, employing the most hideous means of torture and mutilation, to bring Ben Bella to power.
The Same Old PLO
Nasser’s Soviet puppet state also provided the birthplace and headquarters for one of the most durable and successful terrorist groups of all time: the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah (Arabic for “Conquest”), the dominant arm of the PLO, was formed under Nasser’s sponsorship in 1956. Officially, the PLO and its military arm, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), were formed at the Arab-Cairo Summit in 1964.
The PLO soon began sending hundreds of recruits to terrorist training camps in the Soviet Union as well as East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Cuba. Arafat’s Fatah/PLO thugs, in turn, have trained and aided the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, the ANC in South Africa, Khomeini’s revolutionaries in Iran, Idi Amin’s butchers in Uganda, and virtually every terrorist outfit in the world. In 1974, the Soviet Union invited Arafat to open a PLO office in Moscow, which he was only too happy to do.
Arafat quickly became so dependent on the Soviets, East Germans, Romanians, Bulgarians, and Albanians that he rarely made any serious move without first getting counsel from his Communist superiors. For years, his chief contact in the Soviet Union was Vladimir Buljakov, head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department. It is also no secret that during the PLO’s Lebanon sojourn Arafat met regularly, sometimes daily, with Soviet “Ambassador” Alexander Soldatov, a high-level KGB agent who had been expelled from Britain for espionage. General Ion Pacepa, head of the Romanian DIE, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist secret police, revealed after his defection to the West that Arafat had intimate ties to the DIE. In fact, in his 1987 book Red Horizons, Pacepa explained that Arafat’s best friend and head of PLO intelligence, Hani Hassan, was actually a DIE agent and that the PLO’s Beirut telephone monitoring center (built by the KGB) was wired directly to the Soviet Embassy.
In a 1980 speech in Beirut, Abu Iyad, Arafat’s deputy, declared: “We, the members of the Communist Party and of the National Movement, are fighting together in the same foxhole….” In a 1982 speech to a Soviet delegation visiting Beirut, Arafat himself stated: “we look to you, comrade, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and the socialist bloc, full of hope, as friend to friend … in considering the question of liberation and progress in the world.” So slavishly pro-Soviet was Arafat that he actually commended the Soviets for their invasion of Islamic Afghanistan!
Arafat’s defenders insist that that was the old Yasser, before he converted to a peacemaker and signed the Oslo Declaration of Principles and the Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. These defenders point to the PLO arrests of, and running gun battles with, Hamas and Hezbollah radicals as proof of his peacemaker bona fides. But this has proven to be as phony as the very same deceptions used by Communists like Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, Romulo Betancourt in Venezuela, and dozens of other Communists who at various times found it expedient to temporarily change their stripes.
As numerous reports have amply proven, most of Arafat’s “arrests” have been for show, much like scenes from Casablanca, in which the police inspector played by actor Claude Rains tells his men to “round up the usual suspects.” The Hamas and Hezbollah “suspects” are invariably released to go about their murderous business. The arrest of Mousa Abu Marzook, the alleged “mastermind” of Hamas, and his wife in New York at JFK Airport in October 1995 added further confirmation that the supposed PLO-Hamas conflict is in fact a sham. Among the trove of documents seized was an address book secreted in Mrs. Abu Marzook’s brassiere. The book contained the addresses and telephone numbers of numerous terrorists, including PLO leaders George Habash, Ahmed Jibril and Yasser Arafat, who was listed under his nom de guerre, “Abu-Omar.”
Arafat and other PLO leaders have been caught numerous times giving speeches to their followers in which they have explicitly confirmed that the PLO is unswervingly carrying forth its 1974 “Phased Plan.” That plan called for a new moderate image for the mainline PLO, which would focus on winning political legitimacy and negotiating territorial concessions for a Palestinian state, while continuing the “armed struggle” through separate, clandestine branches.
Arafat and the PLO have continued to work closely with the most radical “Islamic fundamentalists,” as evidenced by the annual terrorist conference sponsored last April by Iran. Delegates to the conference included Syrian vice president Muhammad Zahir Mosahareqa, Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Khalid Mash’al of Hamas, and Ramadan Shalah of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At that Teheran summit, notes Reuven Paz of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, “Palestinian participants included Palestinian Authority (PA) minister in charge of Jerusalem affairs Faisal Husseini and Palestinian National Council head Salim Za’ noun (Abu Adib), one of the founding generation of Fatah and for many years the main link between Yasir Arafat and Islamic fundamentalist circles.”
Khomeini and Qaddafi
Arafat’s PLO played a very crucial role for the Soviet Union in toppling the pro-Western, pro-U.S. Shah of Iran and installing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary regime in his place. The PLO and Tehran have been tightly connected ever since, in spite of occasional spats or appearances to the contrary. Khomeini, backed by the Soviets and the PLO, launched a whole new global wave of Marxist-Leninist revolution disguised as Islamic fundamentalism.
Assisting in this Red-Green revolution is Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi. Like Khomeini, he has issued his own Green Book (modeled after Mao Zedong’s “little Red Book”) blending Koranic edicts with Communist slogans and his own peculiar rantings. In 1970, Qaddafi was honored and delighted to meet with his idol, Chairman Mao, and he has had no problem ever since in allying his regime with the infidels in Beijing and Moscow. “Marxism is closer to Moslems than Christianity and Judaism,” he stated in a 1978 New York Times interview. “It is the Christians and Jews who commit genocide. It is the atheists who call for peace and the cause of liberty.”
Qaddafi has reached beyond Africa and the Middle East to Communist revolutionaries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In recent years he has been helping “Muslim” terrorist groups in Malaysia and Indonesia. Similarly, in the Philippines, he has been aiding the Moro Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyef terrorists who have been part of the Osama bin Laden network.
In Afghanistan, the Russians and Communist Chinese have successfully placed their agents in many of the competing mujahideen groups and have won control of others through funding. The Taliban has been supported by Beijing, while the Northern Alliance opposition is largely made up of groups controlled by Moscow. The mujahideen commanders who are genuinely Muslim and anti-Communist have been targeted for assassination. The Taliban murder of the legendary Abdul Haq on October 26th was the latest in a long line of liquidations by Russian-backed and Chinese-backed Afghan groups.
In the summer of 1979, Dr. Hans Josef Horchem of West Germany’s anti-terrorist Office for the Defense of the Constitution, declared that “the KGB is engineering international terrorism. The facts can be proven, documented, and are well known to the international Western intelligence community.” A little over one year later, during his confirmation hearings in January of 1981, Secretary of State Designate Alexander Haig told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Soviets were, at that time, “training, funding, manning, and equipping the so-called forces of liberation or terrorist forces throughout the world.”
What has changed since that time is Russia’s emphasis on, and sophistication in promoting, global revolution and terrorism through assets posing as Islamic fundamentalists. An even more important, and far more dangerous, change is not only the complete unwillingness of U.S. officials to recognize, expose, condemn, and oppose this deadly charade, but their eager readiness to embrace these proven enemies as allies. These treasonous policies and suicidal tendencies must be reversed; our very survival depends on it.
