Two links with some explanatory notes but no analytical commentary. Draw your own conclusions about who won the Cold War.
MailOnline (UK): "EXCLUSIVE: New book reveals how KGB operation seeded Muslim countries with anti-American, anti-Jewish propaganda during the 1970s, laying the groundwork for Islamist terrorism against U.S. and Israel"
The highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West claims in a new book that anti-American Islamic terrorism had its roots in a secret 1970s-era KGB plot to harm but the United States and Israel by seeding Muslim countries with carefully targeted propaganda.
Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief for 15 years before he became the Soviet premier, sent hundreds of agents and thousands of copies of propaganda literature to Muslim countries.
'By 1972,' according to the book, 'Andropov's disinformation machinery was working around the clock to persuade the Islamic world that Israel and the United States intended to transform the rest of the world into a Zionist fiefdom.'
'According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which the KGB community could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.'
Those claims come from former Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Mihail Pacepa and University of Mississippi law professor Ronald Rychlak.Yuri Andropov was the USSR's second-longest-serving KGB chief. The KGB, acronym for the Russian title, "Committee for State Security," was the USSR's main arm for fomenting disinformation and Soviet propaganda in the rest of the world, with particular emphasis on the United States and western Europe.
Andopov served as a member of the central committee of Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) beginning in 1961. He was selected to be general secretary of the CPSU in 1982, the country's position of supreme governing authority, previously held by such communist worthies as Leonid Brezhnev, Nikita Khrushchev and Josef Stalin. Andropov died of total renal failure after only 15 months as general secretary, making his tenure from 12 November 1982 until 9 February 1984.
Bear that brief window of time in mind as you watch this video of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who was a KGB propagandist. Bezmenov defected to the Canadians in 1970 after having served under Andropov. The video below was converted from a film interview with him done just before Andropov's death.
Read all the first article and watch all the video, then draw your own conclusions.
A transcript of the video is here.
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