Joseph D. Douglass Jr.
Monday, March 11, 2002

The 'Deception Plan'

To better understand what is happening, it is useful to return briefly to the modernization of the KGB under Andropov, a topic introduced in the first part of this article.

Probably the most important part of this modernization, in understanding the Soviet approach, is the accompanying deception plan that was designed to mislead the West in its interpretation of what was happening.

The goal of this deception was to hide the modernization and the updated KGB professionalism by carefully promoting the image that KGB was operating in a "business as usual" mode – that is, as a bunch of KGB "thugs."

Gen. Sejna used to emphasize over and over in his explanations of how Communism works: "Never was there a decision taken that there was not a deception plan designed to facilitate its implementation." Deception is as much a part of the Russian culture as freedom is a part of the American culture.

In breaking loose the Russian Mafia from the KGB during the rebirthing process, there would have been a deception plan designed to mislead people as to what was happening and why.

The image of the Russian Mafia that emerged out of the settling dust of the "dissolution" of the Soviet empire is as it was planned to be, misleading.

The best deceptions are those designed around an element of truth. In this case, an obvious approach would have been for the Soviets to modernize their organized crime operations so that these operations would appear to be independent operations.

The real character could have been masked by enabling, even orchestrating, the growth of an independent Mafia that reflected the characteristics of the Mafia as understood in the West.

The core of the modernized organized crime operation likely would have been the modernized core of the elite strategic intelligence directorate that has been very effectively hidden from the West, as witnessed by its absence in both KGB and GRU organizational charts in related studies, both unclassified and classified.

The strategic intelligence directorate becomes, in effect, a super-secret part of the KGB that is unknown even to most KGB officials. Its mission is to run those extremely important foreign operations that are the core of Russia's continuing attack on the industrialized countries: terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime are within this core set of operations.

Hands Off Our 'Ally" Russia

Unfortunately, at this precise time the U.S. intelligence services were told to shut down their operations and treat our former enemies the same as we treated our European allies.

Part of CIA director Tenet's problem may be simply the lack of information about the various "entities" that were most visible in support of terrorism.

This problem is compounded, however, by the fact that the CIA, as an institution, in support of politically correct foreign policy, had expended more energy trying to sweep intelligence on Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime under the rug than it had expended in trying to understand and expose what was going on.

Thus, there were serious systemic problems inherent in the CIA's institutional understanding.

Exacerbating this already extant problem, there appeared in 1989 a further internal incentive not to hold to a belief that the Soviets were sponsoring terrorist operations and running organized crime and drug trafficking.

President G.H.W. Bush announced the beginning of joint FBI-CIA-KGB efforts to counter terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking, along with the establishment of FBI and CIA offices in Moscow to coordinate and cooperate with the KGB!

Unfortunately, it is hard to come up with any reason for thinking the Soviet/Russian intelligence services were changing or had changed.

The Russians certainly did not stop their missile development, or stop work on underground command center complexes, or stop their illegal biological and chemical weapons development, or curtail their foreign intelligence operations, which actually was expanding with the dominant presence of the KGB in the Kremlin.

Certainly they denied everything. They always have.

Russian Ties to al-Qaeda

Thus, what is happening? Did al-Qaeda terrorists really execute the 9-11 attack by themselves, or did they have some help?

Several former intelligence professionals in the weeks following 9-11 scoffed at the idea that this was just a Muslim extremist operation. Some competent foreign intelligence service had to be involved, they wrote.

There have also been reports that critical information was funneled through the Russian Lourdes intelligence facility in Cuba to the terrorists. If anything, cooperation between Cuba and the various terrorist Muslim states in the Middle East increased in 2001.

Additionally, as pointed out by Yossef Bodansky ("Bin Laden," Prima, 1999), since the mid-1990s bin Laden has been using the Russian Mafia (i.e., KGB entities) for the covert movement of funds to support terrorist operations and to acquire terrorist arms, explosives and related materials.

Soviet intelligence links to the emerging Islamist terrorist groups were evident in the early 1980s (though not as blatant as the PLO-Soviet links of the late 1960s and 1970s), and those links are still active.

Numerous links from bin Laden and company to former high-level Russian officials in 2000-2001 have now been reported in the news media. None of this should be a surprise.

As stated in the first part of this article, the Soviets had long-standing penetrations into the Muslim community around the world and had used the Muslims as surrogate terrorists since the 1920s. At every step in the evolution of bin Laden's terrorist network, as reported in Bodansky's "Bin Laden,” Soviet/Russian links are in evidence.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Of serious concern today is the possibility of a terrorist group or nation acquiring a nuclear weapon or device. The focus of a more moderate concern in the 1990s was Russia.

It was not until people really became worried after the anthrax episode following 9-11 that the CIA suddenly produced a declassified portion of a study in which it states that there is no information of any nuclear weapon having been stolen from Russia or sold to the terrorists by some Russian organized crime "entity."

(Whether this information is true or designed to mislead the American people, as appears to have been the case in the crash of TWA 800 and the Oklahoma City bombing incident, is anyone's guess.)

Likely, CIA director Tenet used the term "entity" to project the image of non-state involvement. The idea of a Russian non-state entity seems to have been introduced following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an artificiality used to raise and characterize the proliferation problem as rogue individuals and "criminals" taking advantage of the sorry economic plight of those people who were safeguarding the various stockpiles.

This scenario (deception?) was promoted by both sides to demonstrate our "working together" and to justify the movement of billions of U.S. dollars to Russia to help it thwart such activities.

But those U.S. voices involved in crying wolf failed to understand that such criminal "entities" have played an integral role in Soviet covert operations since the 1920s, as indicated earlier, and as such were thoroughly penetrated and carefully watched by the KGB.

Moreover, the organized crime entities that were suddenly given free rein when the Soviet Union became Russia more likely than not were merely adjunct KGB covering crime operations (that is, selected components of the traditional Russian underground mixed in with a number of KGB-run branches).

What is especially evident in the newly emergent organized crime and especially Russian banking operations is the clear and dominant presence of both current and former KGB officials. (See, for example, Yevgenia Albats, "The State Within a State," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.)

But again, insofar as U.S. intelligence collection in the former Soviet Union was cut back to the bone, we are left mainly with information the Russians want us to have about what happened in Russia during and following its rebirth.

In this respect, extensive efforts have been expended to promote the Russian Mafia as an organized crime operation that the Russians disliked as much as other nations did. They said the Mafia was simply there and they were unable to control it any better than other nations were able to.

This argument depends for its credibility upon the continued silence (including poor memories) about the massive KGB-GRU state intelligence operations in organized crime, narcotics trafficking and terrorism that was initiated 35 years earlier at mid-century, and a traditionally inadequate Western understanding of Russian deception, which more than anything else remains guided by Lenin's directions to Dzerzhinsky: "Tell them what they want to believe."

Significance of the Anthrax Attack

To understand why this lack of understanding or assisted self-deception is so dangerous, consider the anthrax episode that followed on the heels of the 9-11 attacks. The main thrust of the investigation is now evidently focused on the possibility of an internal lone U.S. individual with the appropriate skills, such as a disgruntled university microbiology teacher.

The working assumption now is that the episode was independent of 9-11 – that is, a mere coincidence of simultaneous timing.

Possible, but highly improbable. More disturbing is the evident lack of any attention directed toward the suspects with the greatest expertise and both technical and operational capabilities: Russia, Cuba and China.

While coming close on the heels of 9-11, the anthrax operation by design was operationally very different. In the case of 9-11, notwithstanding the explosion and fire that pretty much destroyed the plane and all those aboard, there was still almost instant identification of the culprits and responsible organization.

In contrast, in the anthrax case, there has been no suggestion of a single scrap of evidence to have come out of the anthrax investigation, and there was no explosion or fire to burn everything and everyone up. The anthrax operation has all the earmarks – no trail – associated with skilled intelligence professionals.

The anthrax episode demonstrated the ability of an unidentified hostile force to manufacture a significant quantity of very special anthrax spores and distribute them in a manner guaranteeing that the U.S. government would not be able to suppress the information on what had happened.

The actual ability to cause horrendous damage was demonstrated without causing more than a few deaths – this was the message. In a sense, the reality of this ability is far more serious than the 9-11 attack, yet there are no clues and it almost seems that the episode is being allowed to die a natural death.

The Real 'Terrorist' Threat

The implications of the anthrax episode point toward an existing, present terrorist threat of truly frightening magnitude and possible consequences.

The United States and, by extension, Europe are in a situation in which our main enemies' regimes (of over 80 years in the case of the former Soviet Union republics, 50 years in the case of China and 40 years in the case of Cuba) are pretty much as they were before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

All the former Soviet republics and most of the former satellites are run by former Communists. They are, in all but name, Communist regimes, and most still have control lines that run to Moscow.

They remain closely connected with terrorist groups and rogue nations, and thus have the capability of supporting or running catastrophic sabotage operations using weapons of mass destruction.

These would have enormous social, economic, and political consequences – all to the benefit of the hostile regimes, beginning with those in Russia, China, Cuba and the various totalitarian Islamist states.

What this means is that a skilled, professional intelligence service, with relative ease, should be able to execute an attack on the United States, or any of our allies, with weapons of mass destruction and get away without detection.

Operationally, the 9-11 attacks were far more difficult to manage and execute, but the consequences of a serious attack using weapons of mass destruction (particularly a suitcase nuclear warhead) likely would be far more devastating, without the attack being recognized as a state-directed attack.

This intelligence service could use a terrorist group as a surrogate or execute the operation so that it had all the accouterments of a terrorist operation.

Is it any wonder that CIA director Tenet had such a difficult time responding to Sen. Bayh's question?

Drugs, Russia and Terrorism

By presidential decree we are in a war on terrorism and those who harbor or support terrorists. We have been told it will be a long and difficult war that may never end, which sounds distressingly like the war-on-drugs rhetoric.

There has been no explanation of who or what is within the ranks of those who "harbor and support the terrorists," other than the terrorists' financial support networks. While use of the label "state-supported" was made politically incorrect in the Clinton administration, no one of note has claimed that today's terrorists are either independent or self-sufficient.

As Bodansky repeatedly points out in his book, "Bin Laden," significant terrorist operations, including those orchestrated by bin Laden, are still state-supported, with bin Laden providing the states with "plausible deniability."

His support includes both active and passive support, material as well as moral support, East and West support, Muslim and non-Muslim state support. What if, as Sen. Bayh questions, Russia and China are not only involved, but involved in a big way?

Has anyone stopped to draw a complete picture of the very possible ramifications of the war on terrorism, including the various hidden entities, for President Bush and his War Cabinet?

My guess is that the answer to this last question is no, not that the information is unavailable, but that those in the intelligence bureaucracy are not about to volunteer institutionally sensitive information and, more likely than not, no one is asking.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Al-Qaeda
Bioterrorism
Bush Administration
Castro/Cuba
China/Taiwan
Russia
War on Terrorism

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