The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism

...I side with the Haig-Allen-Sterling thesis and against the CIA for one simple reason: The ideological foundations of Soviet foreign policy demand the use of terror as an accessory before and after the "inevitable" triumph of Soviet imperialism, a.k.a...

...To conceptualize the role of the Soviet Union in global terrorism is to come face to face with a model symbiotic relationship, in which the two parties use each other tor their own ends but also share an underlying common goal...

...General Shlomo Gazit, in 1979 Is rael's chief of intelligence, stated that a thousand Arab terrorists had been trained in fifty different Soviet-bloc military schools...

...Thus, while the final word on the strict letter of the Haig-Allen-Sterling thesis would resemble the old Italian adage "Sinone vero, e ben trovato" -even if it isn't true, it could be- when the thesis is shifted from Soviet direction of terrorism to active Soviet aid for terrorists, Claire Sterling's book is its proof: o General Jan Sejna, military counsellor to the Czech Communist Party central committee for over twenty years, defected to the United States with a batch of documents which revealed that early in 1964, the Soviet Politburo decided to increase spending on terrorism abroad by 1,000 percent...

...Ideology is predicated on an insistence on final answers and a preclusion of discussion...

...As a result, ac cording to Sterling, the Palestinians today are "the most formidable pro fessional guerrilla army on earth...

...Secretary of State Haig, himself a target of terrorist attack when he was NATO supreme commander, announced at his first press conference on January 28 that the Soviet Union's "conscious policy" is directed to "the training, funding and equipping of international terrorism.'' And Richard V. Allen, National Security Adviser, claimed in late March that there is "ample evidence" that the USSR actively supports terrorism...

...Even so well-informed an analyst as Samuel T. Francis, now a member of Senator John East's staff, has written that there is not "sufficient evidence to prove that the Soviets directly or formally control, let alone coordinate or direct, many terrorist groups or activities...

...On the one hand, Lenin was fearful of the "spontaneity of terrorism," that is, terrorism unavoidably free from Bolshevik control (although one must admit that the necessary corollary is that premeditated Soviet action will be undeterred and even aided by the vagaries of international terrorism, as in Lenin's favorite Napoleonic maxim, "on s'engage . . . puis on voit...

...During the winter of 1978, each day saw at least seven Soviet-bloc ships unloading in Syrian and Lebanese ports, and five or six Antonov trans ports landing in Damascus...

...In the meantime, the debate goes on...

...Special guerrilla training schools were founded in satellite countries for "selected terrorists from all over the world...

...But writing of terrorists, Lenin said that revolutionary strategy demands "temporary alliances even with unreliable people...

...The Reagan administration would appear to concur...

...What they do is supply the infrastructure of terror: the money, the guns, the training, the background information, the communications, the propaganda that will inspire individual terrorist groups...

...Claire Sterling, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Michael Ledeen, and William Colby testified...

...Every component of the Palestinian resistance has been trained and armed by the Soviets...

...The evidence adduced by Sterling urges on us that view most clearly expressed by Dr...

...not a single party could exist without such alliances...

...But as noted above, the contention that the Soviets are not involved in international terrorism is the subject of a lively debate, so lively in fact that Francis himself is his own best disputant: "there is [however] massive evidence to show that Soviet support for terrorism is virtually essential for the scale and intensity of terrorist operations, for instigating a gradual public acceptance of terrorism as a 'legitimate' means of struggle and of public disavowal of those policies and institutions that alone can provide an effective counter-terrorist program...

...some forty of these schools are in the Soviet Union itself...

...Whether this evidence would stand up in a courtroom with Brezhnev in the dock protected by an "innocent-until-proven-guilty" shield is another matter...

...After his arrest in Spring 1980, Patricio Peci, an Italian Red Brigades commander, spoke of the training Red Brigaders received in Czechoslo vakia through the 1970s, and of the weapons received from Czechoslovak ia by way of Hungary and Austria...

...Soviets and terrorists also share a common means: The willingness to politicize violence...

...John Barron's book KGB describes how a Russian agent, Viktor Sakharov, after defecting to the West, told of KGB terrorist activity in the Arab oil sheikdoms and in Turkey...

...chairman of a House subOn April 24, the newly organized Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism held a rather inconclusive one-day hearing chaired by Senator Jeremiah Denton...

...The most suggestive evidence of Soviet complicity in international ter rorism is the fact that no terrorist group of any persuasion has ever at tacked Soviet diplomats, embassies, airline offices, or other property in the West, hijacked Soviet airplanes, or assassinated leaders or members of Communist parties in the West...

...a distinction which helps explain why it is so difficult to pin responsibility for world terrorism conclusively on the Soviets: Politburo realpolitik sees not terrorism but terrorists as the vehicle by which to achieve the overthrow of the Western democracies...

...I really don't understand what the CIA is up to with its draft report...

...Rep...

...The Palestinians have become the Soviet Union's "chosen instrument" in passing on training, armaments, and strategy to apprentices from other countries...

...Most recently, Judith Miller, a New York Times correspondent with high-level sources in the Reagan administration, reported (March 28, 1981) that a CIA draft report "had concluded that there is insufficient evidence to substantiate administration charges that the Soviet Union is directly helping foment international terrorism...

...Terrorists certainly fill the bill of "unreliable people...

...Don Edwards (D., Calif...

...And the Soviet Union provides for terrorists the means whereby their dreams may be realized...

...This is the very story told by Bismarck a century ago: ' 'We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity...

...as such, it is almost the logical contradictory of politics itself, which is animated by discussion and questioning and which can only thrive in nonideological systems-those committed to freedom and democracy...

...The question is a lively one and the subject of an intense Washington debate.* Claire Sterling, in her important book, says the Russians are behind terrorist activities, that Western intelligence agencies know it but, for various reasons, are witholding the truth from their publics...

...Terrorism provides for the Soviet Union a means of undermining the power of the Western democracies...

...world revolution...

...Arnold Beichman 's essay on terrorism, "A War Without End, " appeared in the April 1978 issue of The American Spectator...

...But the most powerful danger posed to the West, whose liberalism is founded on the depoliticization of violence and the preclusion of ideologies of final design, comes from the common goal possessed by the Soviets and their terrorist confreres, a goal which will persist no matter how useful they are to each other...

...Sterling agrees with the Haig-Allen position and so do I. A veteran foreign correspondent based in Italy, and steeped in prolonged investigations of her own and those of other specialists, Sterling has gathered evidence sufficient to show that without the Soviet Union and satellites like Cuba, Czechoslavakia, and East Germany, international terrorism would be containable...

...committee studying terrorism, has warned that we must resist demands to "surrender our liberties or our commitment to justice because of the alleged plottings of the Russians...

...Ray S. Cline, formerly CIA Deputy Director: It's important to realize that when you say the Soviet Union supports terrorism, you do not mean that they direct and command each terrorist activity...

...And within these ideological foundations, there is an important distinction to be made...