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The Soviet Union and some communist states have sponsored international terrorism on numerous occasions, especially during the Cold War. [1] NATO and the Italian, German and British governments saw violence in the form of "communist fighting organizations" as a serious threat. [2]
While he denounced the terrorism which was employed by the Socialist Revolutionaries, Vladimir Lenin advocated the use of state terrorism since the earliest days of his political activities. At the third congress of the RSDLP in 1905, while he was discussing the revolution in Russia, he argued that mass terror needed to be used in order to prevent anti-revolutionary mutinies. [3] Lenin had been influenced by the writings of radical revolutionary Sergey Nechayev and his manifesto which called for Jacobin style terror, saying that every communist revolutionary should read him. [4] Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and first director of the Cheka secret police is quoted as saying "We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession?" [5]
According to Soviet defector Grigori Besedovsky, the NKVD was directly coordinating a number of bombings in Poland as early as in the 1920s. The largest bombing, against Warsaw Citadel on 13 October 1923, destroyed a large military ammunition storage facility, killing 28 and wounding 89 Polish soldiers. Another bombing on 23 May 1923 at Warsaw University killed a number of people, including professor Roman Orzęcki. Further bombings happened in Częstochowa, Kraków and Białystok. [6]
Soviet secret services have been described by GRU defectors Viktor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev as "the primary instructors of terrorists worldwide." [7] [8] [9] The terrorism was seen by Soviet leadership as the only way to reduce the imbalance between USSR military and economical power against the Western world. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: "In today's world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon." [10] He also claimed that "airplane hijacking is my own invention" and that in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed PLO. [10]
After defeat of Soviet-controlled Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day war, Soviet Union started a widespread undercover campaign against Israel, involving propaganda as well as direct military support (funding, arms, training) to terrorist groups declaring Israel as their enemy. Additionally, the USSR took the decision to increase anti-Israeli sentiment by disseminating anti-Zionist propaganda and even referencing previous anti-Semitic tropes from Western culture, such as the Jewish-Freemason conspiracy theories. [11] The overall goal of the campaign was to spread the idea that the state of Israel was an oppressive, imperialist state which was built on unjust terms, a feeling expressed in the Soviet-crafted UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. Meanwhile, the cause of the Palestinian people who had suffered mass displacement and deportation with the establishment of the state of Israel and the subsequent wars in the region was promoted and the USSR gave active support to certain Palestinian rebel groups whose primary method of struggle is characterised as terrorism, such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
The leader of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, established close collaboration with the Romanian Securitate service and the Soviet KGB in the beginning of the 1970s. [12] The secret training of PLO guerrillas was provided by the KGB. [13] However, the main KGB activities and arms shipments were channeled through Wadie Haddad of the DFLP organization, who usually stayed in a KGB dacha (BARVIKHA-1) during his visits to the Soviet Union. Led by Carlos the Jackal, a group of PFLP fighters accomplished a spectacular raid on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries office in Vienna in 1975. Advance notice of this operation "was almost certainly" given to the KGB. [12] Faisal al-Shammeri credits Soviet special services with sponsoring international terrorist organizations that emerged in Libya in 70-80's, Palestine Liberation Organization, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as continuation of these policies after the fall of the USSR. [14]
The Red Army Faction in Germany was supported by the Stasi, East Germany's security service. [15] [16] In 1978 part of the RAF group (Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Peter Boock, Rolf Wagner, Sieglinde Hoffmann) was hiding in a Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) safe house in the Mazury district in Poland, where they escaped through Yugoslavia. During the stay, they were training together with Arab operatives and also hiding from German police during an intensive search for the group's members in West Germany. [17] Carlos the Jackal and other prominent terrorists, such as Abu Nidal, Abu Daoud and Abu Abbas, enjoyed protection at SB safe houses in Poland, especially in the 1980s. Communist Poland was also used as a transit country for money and weapon transfers for these organisations. [18] [19] [20] [21]
A number of notable operations have been conducted by the KGB to support international terrorists with weapons on the orders from the Soviet Communist Party, including:
Large-scale sabotage operations may have been prepared by the KGB and GRU in case of war against the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, as alleged by intelligence historian Christopher Andrew in Mitrokhin Archive [24] and in books by former GRU and SVR officers Victor Suvorov [9] [25] and Stanislav Lunev, and Kouzminov. [26] Among the planned operations were the following:
According to Lunev, a probable scenario in the event of war would be poisoning of the Potomac River with chemical or biological weapons, "targeting the residents of Washington, D.C." [7] He also noted that it is "likely" that GRU operatives have placed already "poison supplies near the tributaries to major US reservoirs." [33] This information was confirmed by Alexander Kouzminov, who was responsible for transporting dangerous pathogens from around the world for the Soviet program of biological weapons in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. He described a variety of biological terrorist acts that would be carried out on the order of the Russian President in the event of hostilities, including poisoning public drinking-water supplies and food processing plants. [34] At the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union "was the only country in the world that could start and win a global biological war, something we had already established that the West was not ready for," according to Kouzminov.
State terrorism is terrorism that a state conducts against another state or against its own citizens.
Spetsnaz are special forces in many post-Soviet states. Historically, this term referred to the Soviet Union's Spetsnaz GRU, special operations units of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff (GRU). Today it refers to special forces branches and task forces subordinate to ministries including defence, internal affairs, or emergency situations in countries that have inherited their special purpose units from the now-defunct Soviet security agencies.
The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, formerly the Main Intelligence Directorate, and still commonly known by its previous abbreviation GRU, is the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The GRU controls the military intelligence service and maintains its own special forces units.
State-sponsored terrorism is terrorist violence carried out with the active support of national governments provided to violent non-state actors. States can sponsor terrorist groups in several ways, including but not limited to funding terrorist organizations, providing training, supplying weapons, providing other logistical and intelligence assistance, and hosting groups within their borders. Because of the pejorative nature of the word, the identification of particular examples are often subject to political dispute and different definitions of terrorism.
The Russian Federation is known to possess or have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons. It is one of the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation or FIS RF is Russia's external intelligence agency, focusing mainly on civilian affairs. The SVR RF succeeded the First Chief Directorate (PGU) of the KGB in December 1991. The SVR has its headquarters in the Yasenevo District of Moscow with its director reporting directly to the President of the Russian Federation.
A suitcase nuclear device is a tactical nuclear weapon that is portable enough that it could use a suitcase as its delivery method.
Active measures is a term used to describe political warfare conducted by the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The term, which dates back to the 1920s, includes operations such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage and assassination, based on foreign policy objectives of the Soviet and Russian governments. Active measures have continued to be used by the administration of Vladimir Putin.
The First Main Directorateof the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers was the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities by providing for the training and management of covert agents, intelligence collection administration, and the acquisition of foreign and domestic political, scientific and technical intelligence for the Soviet Union.
As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals, as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb. Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies.
The Mitrokhin Archive refers to a collection of handwritten notes about secret KGB operations spanning the period between the 1930s and 1980s made by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin which he shared with the British intelligence in the early 1990s. Mitrokhin, who had worked at KGB headquarters in Moscow from 1956 to 1985, first offered his material to the US' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Latvia, but they rejected it as possible fakes. After that, he turned to the UK's MI6, which arranged his defection from Russia.
Molniya was an explosive device used to booby trap certain buried or otherwise concealed containers used by the KGB to cache items, such as shortwave radio receivers, cryptographic materials, and allegedly even suitcase nuclear devices. A sequence of specific actions had to be taken in the correct order to render the device safe prior to moving or opening the container, or the device would automatically detonate. This detonation was designed to be lethal to anyone in its immediate proximity, as well as being sufficient to destroy all materials in the cache.
Stanislav Lunev is a former Soviet military officer, as of 1992 the highest-ranking GRU officer to defect from Russia to the United States.
The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera, was a covert research-and-development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the laboratory manufactured and tested poisons, and was reportedly reactivated by the Russian government in the late 1990s.
Atomic demolition munitions (ADMs), colloquially known as nuclear land mines, are small nuclear explosive devices. ADMs were developed for both military and civilian purposes. As weapons, they were designed to be exploded in the forward battle area, in order to block or channel enemy forces. Non-militarily, they were designed for demolition, mining or earthmoving. Apart from testing, however, they have never been used for either purpose.
Spetsnaz GRU, formally known as Special Forces of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, is the special forces (spetsnaz) of the GRU, the foreign military intelligence agency of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
During the Cold War (1947–1991), when the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in an arms race, the Soviet Union promoted its foreign policy through the World Peace Council and other front organizations. Some writers have claimed that it also influenced non-aligned peace groups in the West.
The Committee for State Security was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
Russian espionage in the United States has occurred since at least the Cold War, and likely well before. According to the United States government, by 2007 it had reached Cold War levels.
Main Intelligence Directorate, abbreviated GRU, was the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces until 1991. For a few months it was also the foreign military intelligence agency of the newly established Russian Federation until 7 May 1992 when it was dissolved and the Russian GRU took over its activities.
At its height, communism was the major threat to world peace, and by far the major source of international terrorism: that is, communist-inspired and/or communist-supported terrorism. Its hold on terrorist movements was not universal, however ...
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