KGB - Support to Terrorists
KGB active measures included support for terrorists and insurgents. By theend of the Cold War, there was little direct, public evidence that Soviet citizens had planned or orchestrated terrorist acts by groups from Western Europe or the Middle East, but there was much indirect evidence to show that the Soviet Union did support international terrorism. The Soviet Union maintained close relationships with a number of governments and organizations that were direct supporters of terrorist groups.
The KGB also was heavily involved in the support of "wars of national liberation" in the Third World. Together with satellite intelligence services, the KGB helped to organize military training and political indoctrination of leftist guerrillas, as well as providing arms and advisers. The manipulation of wars of national liberation enabled the Soviet Union to influence the political future of the countries in question and to make their new governments more responsive to Soviet objectives. The Soviet regime concentrated mainly on African countries until the late 1970s but then extended its support for "national liberation movements" to Central America, where it regularly employed the services of Cuba.
The Soviet Union sold large quantities of arms to Libya and Syria, for example, and also maintained a close alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), providing it with arms, monetary assistance, and paramilitary training. Moscow's surrogate, Cuba, played a central role in Latin American terrorism by providing groups with training, arms, and sanctuary, and the Soviet Union's East European satellite states often served as middlemen or subcontractors for channeling aid to terrorist groups. Although the KGB, with some exceptions, avoided direct involvement with terrorist operations, it played an important role in diverting aid to these groups and providing the Soviet leadership with intelligence reports on their activities.
The Soviets discreetly encouraged terrorism as a form of Active Measures. At a school where KGB personnel formerly trained, near the village of Balashikha, east of Moscow, officers of Department V, responsible for sabotage and assassination, brought in contingents of 100 or so young people each year from the Middle East, Africa and Europe. They returned to their homelands without specific missions, the KGB calculating that the Soviet Union benefits from any mayhem committed in the Third World. But a few were recruited to be KGB agents within the terrorist movements back home. And the best and most ideologically reliable were recruited to serve the KGB independently.
The involvement of the Soviet Union in Italian subversion, political violence, and terrorism was believed to take place in most instances through proxies selected from among its East European satellites. over which the Soviet Union exercises various forms of dominance and direction, and nonsatellite countries otherwise linked to it, such as Cuba and Libya.
There were, nevertheless, specific cases of direct Soviet involvement. According to declassified Interior Ministry records from the 1948-50 period, one Victor Pavlov of the Soviet Embassy in Rome was the Cominform's delegate responsible for the paramilitary activities of sectors of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Thereafter. as late as 1963, the USSR arranged for the arming of Italian Soviet-philes through Austrian Communist Party channels. On May 29, 1972, SID - the Italian intelligence service of the time - sent a memorandum to the government recommeding the expulsion of 22 Soviet agents responsible for espionage and subversion, including links with Feltrinelli and groups of the extreme left. This recommendation was not approved presumably because of other political considerations. Excerpts from what appears to be that memorandum were subsequently acquired by the press and published as part of a collection of documents on terrorism.
The Soviet agents' activities included: " ... liaison for the support of, and joint action with, the PCI and extra parliamentary movements of the extreme left; special operational liaison with Feltrinelli's subversive organization and, subsequently, with the Red Brigades ... training of activists in Cuba and Moscow."
The same memorandum reports that at least until 1971, the training received in Moscow included a bloc of instructions on firearms, explosives, and guerrilla warfare. Finally, Italian diplomat and Russian linguist Renzo Rota, who analyzed the communiques issued by the BR during the Moro captivity, concluded that the political phraseology and linguistic improprieties contained therein could be indicative of Soviet Russian authorship.
Italian Interior Ministry records refer to Italian work brigades organized in Yugoslavia for the training of PCI militants who went on from there to fight in Greece under the Communist guerrilla leader Marcos Bafeiades. Overall operational control over recruitment was exercised clandestinely by Soviet Colonel Dukonovski, stationed in Milan. Yugoslavia's involvement was obviously short lived, since that country broke away from the Soviet fold in 1948.
From the 1940s, the role of Czechoslovakia as a Soviet proxy for Italian operations appears to be the most pervasive. Czechoslovakia initially served as a safehaven for Communist partisans and members of the PCI's Red Strike Force who had to flee Italy because of political and common crimes committed through 1949. One of them, Francesco Moranino, was employed by Radio Prague's Italian broadcast. This practice was repeated in the early 1970s when wanted terrorists Augusto Viel of the October XXII Circle and Alberto Franceschini and Fabrizio Pelli of the BR were given asylum. Pelli was also employed by Radio Prague. Moreover, all three clandestinely returned to Italy to resume the armed struggle until finally captured and jailed.
Besides safehaven, Czechoslavakia provided Italian leftist extremists with training. Senator Eugenio Reale, a former Communist who headed the PCI's administrative secretariat, disclosed the existence of Czech training camps organized in that country as far back as the 1950s with the assistance of the fugitives. Subsequent training sites are reportedly located in Doupov, Karlovy Vary, Smokovec, Bratislava, Lidice, and Leda.
It is an interesting commentary that Czechoslovakia has been specifically named by two very diverse figures: General Miceli, the head of Italy's former intelligence service (SID), who was later a member of Parliament on the Italian Social Movement Party slate and therefore of presumably conservative orientation, and Christian Democratic member of Parliament and former Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, whose government in 1976-78 enjoyed the unprecedented and un repeated parliamentary support of the Italian Communist Party, which has always denied Soviet bloc involvement in Italian subversion.
Until the beginning of the 1980's, no evidence had surfaced of Bulgarian clandestine operations in Italy other than espionage. The "Bulgarian Connection," as the media refer to this development, was currently the object of intelligence, police, and judicial investigations regarding that country's involvement in Italian terrorism of the left and transnational terrorist activities in Italy.
Significantly, Defense Minister Lelio Lagorio reported to Parliament that SISMI (the present Italian military intelligence service) monitors "all radio signals transmitted by the Bulgarian security services." A major anomaly was noted "during the days of the abduction, captivity, and liberation of General Dozier". He further stated that ". . . on the day of Dozier's liberation, there was a most aingular transmission, totally exceptional, repeated several times. Counterespionage believes that such type of transmission evidences a direct contact between the intelligence headquarters and an individual and a specific agent in Italy."
The explicit anti-U.S. and anti-NATO sentiment of the European terrorist left provided a fertile ground for Soviet bloc exploitation.
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