by: 
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
Of all the scandals currently plaguing the Obama administration, the unprecedented and Soviet-esque politicization of the IRS has aroused the greatest popular outrage, because many people have felt the IRS arrogance on their own skin.
However, far more significant is the cover-up of the barbaric assassination of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his subordinates inside our diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, carried out on the symbolic date of Sept. 11.
Why do I say that? In my former life as a Soviet bloc spy chief, I spent years observing from a unique vantage point how one kind of evil quickly leads to another much greater evil. I believe Benghazi is the scandal of the Obama presidency.
To over-simplify: By misrepresenting that carefully prepared act of war against the U.S. as a case of “spontaneous violence,” this administration proved it is neither willing nor able to defend our country and our lives against foreign terrorism, which – and here’s the critical part – is now very close to having nuclear weapons to hurl at us.
Former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey just published an article in the Wall Street Journal documenting how the U.S. has become so vulnerable to international terrorism that even the ridiculous government of North Korea could now detonate a small nuclear weapon above the American homeland.
“North Korea needs only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the U.S.,” wrote Woolsey, along with co-author Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. “The Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other U.S. government studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse.”
This one explosion – something North Korea is actually capable of causing – would constitute an EMP attack that would, in the words of our former CIA chief, “collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends on it – communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water – necessary to sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.”
Another well-informed analysis, just published in the Weekly Standard, confirms that by mid-2014, the fanatically anti-American terrorist government of Iran will likely be able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade plutonium too rapidly for the U.S. to stop it militarily. When an insane and metastatic regime – one obsessed with destruction of (first) the “Little Satan,” Israel, and (later) the “Great Satan,” America – has a nuclear arsenal, we will be living in a very different and dark world indeed.
Back when I was national security adviser to the president of communist Romania, one of my top tasks, ironically, was preventing terrorism. Of course, prevention was much easier in such a ruthless dictatorship where the political police enjoyed unlimited power. Nevertheless, recent experience proves prevention works perfectly well in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation reported back in 2008 that some 40 different terrorist attacks had been foiled since Sept. 11, 2001.
Unfortunately, in 2009, for reasons about which we can only speculate, the Obama administration jettisoned the “war on terror” from its vocabulary, re-classified a successful terror attack on the American homeland (Fort Hood) as “workplace violence” and abandoned many of the measures adopted after 9/11 to prevent future terrorism. As Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen noted: “On his second day in office Obama shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. … In a speech at the National Archives, Obama eviscerated the men and women of the CIA, accusing them of ‘torture’ and declaring that their work ‘did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts – they undermined them.’”
Fast-forward to 2012, when “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” became one of the Obama re-election campaign’s most resonant slogans. Its message: Terrorism and al-Qaida are vanquished, so re-elect me. Had the administration admitted that Ambassador Stevens and his three subordinates had been killed by terrorists two months before the election, Obama’s most effective campaign slogan would very publicly have been exposed for the farce it truly was.
As everyone knows, for weeks the administration – including President Obama himself at the U.N. – bizarrely blamed all the Benghazi mayhem, death and destruction on a little-viewed Islam parody on YouTube.
After the Boston Marathon bombing – resulting in the four-day paralysis of a major U.S. city, three murdered Americans and over 200 wounded, many grievously – President Obama, under congressional pressure, addressed the danger of terrorism in an hour-long speech on May 23. It was a good speech, as speeches go, except that he didn’t even mention the real threat facing our country today – the looming peril of nuclear terrorism – and instead it vulgarized the future terrorist danger. “Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” the president proclaimed. All we need to really do is close down Guantanamo and make a slight change in how we deploy drones.
With due respect, I must contradict President Obama. Today’s anti-American terrorism was not born in the United States. It was conceived 48 years ago at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and has been carried out by Islamo-fascists armed with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails – and that includes the terrorists who murdered Ambassador Stevens.
Unfortunately, I witnessed the birth of anti-American terrorism. Years ago I used to listen to Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, when he was the Soviet Union’s foreign espionage chief, pontificating that our chief weapon against our “main enemy [the United States]” should now be terrorism, since nuclear arms had made conventional military force obsolete.
I knew Sakharovsky well – he had been the Soviets’ chief intelligence adviser to Romania for five years. He did not look like a brute, but terrorism was his favorite solution to a political problem; during his years in Romania, he had instigated the killing of some 50,000 anti-communists. Afterwards, Sakharovsky served an unprecedented 16 years as head of the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence service (1956-1972), during which time he spread anti-American terrorism around the world.
In 1969, Sakharovsky transformed airplane hijacking – the terrorists’ weapon of choice on Sept. 11, 2001 – into international terrorism. In 1971, he launched Operation Tayfun (Russian for “typhoon”), aimed at transforming the world’s old hatred for the Nazis into a hatred for America, the new “occupation power.” Sakharovsky even established a “socialist division of labor” aimed at creating and arming anti-American terrorist organizations all over the world – which he called “freedom fighters.”
I have explained all this expansively in a new book on “Disinformation” in its many guises, co-authored with professor Ronald Rychlak. Let me here just briefly state that the success of Sakharovsky’s terrorist operations encouraged his boss, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, to – as he used to put it – “turn the whole Arab world into an explosive enemy of America” by resorting to anti-Semitism, that weapon of the emotions successfully wielded by various dictators over the years.
Andropov’s disinformation machinery, which at that time numbered over 1 million people (and is minutely described in our book), went to great lengths to persuade the Islamic world that the U.S. was a war-mongering Zionist country financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” – Andropov’s derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress.
The goal of that immense disinformation operation was to make the Islamic world fear that the U.S. would transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. Andropov’s ploy worked. Consider the 1979 Islamic takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the catastrophic 9/11 attacks.
Andropov’s success made him the first KGB officer to sit on the Kremlin throne and to have his KGB office transformed into a shrine.
While Andropov and his Soviet Union are gone, a new generation of Russians is struggling to give that feudal country a new identity. But the hatred for the U.S. introduced into the Islamic world by Andropov’s KGB is still alive and metastasizing.
In my other life, at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, my Romanian foreign intelligence service, the DIE, managed extensive intelligence networks in the Islamic world, and I came to know that part of the world quite well. Its people did not hate America. Millions of them are even today waiting in line to be accepted in the U.S. because they admire America. There are only a relative few fanatical Islamo-fascist leaders who so hate this great country of freedom that they dream of seeing it destroyed.
Those fanatical Islamic leaders’ sustained hatred for the United States and the specter that they will achieve nuclear power shows, in my view, that it is high time for the leaders of our Congress and our Democratic and Republican parties to forget President Obama’s pretty speeches and to start building a united policy for winning the war against the plague of terrorism.
Along with unearthing the total truth about Benghazi, it is important that we take steps to prevent new terrorist disasters. Competition may be the engine of American progress, but unity in time of war is what made America the leader of the world.
I do not know what the new U.S. anti-terrorist policy should be. No single person in our country really knows. I do, however, know how anti-American terrorism was generated, and I strongly suggest our current administration and Congress take a serious look at President Truman’s National Security Council Report 68 (NSC 68/1950), which set forth the strategy of containment and became our main weapon in the Cold War.
That 58-page document did not blame the Cold War on YouTube videos. It described the challenges facing the U.S. in cataclysmic terms.
“The issues that face us are momentous,” the document states, “involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” Therefore, it prescribed a two-pronged political strategy: 1) superior military power, and 2) a “Campaign of Truth,” defined as “a struggle, above all else, for the minds of men.” Truman argued that the propaganda used by the “forces of imperialistic communism” could be overcome only by the “plain, simple, unvarnished truth.” The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (soon to become Radio Liberty) became part of Truman’s “Campaign of Truth.”
This same two-pronged strategy – total military superiority and a robust campaign of utter truth – enabled America to prevail against communism, and is equally essential if we are to get the upper hand in a world threatening the unthinkable of nuclear terrorism.
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa Of all the scandals currently plaguing the Obama administration, the unprecedented and Soviet-esque politicization of the IRS has aroused the greatest popular outrage, because many people have felt the IRS arrogance on their own skin.
However, far more significant is the cover-up of the barbaric assassination of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his subordinates inside our diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, carried out on the symbolic date of Sept. 11.
Why do I say that? In my former life as a Soviet bloc spy chief, I spent years observing from a unique vantage point how one kind of evil quickly leads to another much greater evil. I believe Benghazi is the scandal of the Obama presidency.
To over-simplify: By misrepresenting that carefully prepared act of war against the U.S. as a case of “spontaneous violence,” this administration proved it is neither willing nor able to defend our country and our lives against foreign terrorism, which – and here’s the critical part – is now very close to having nuclear weapons to hurl at us.
Former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey just published an article in the Wall Street Journal documenting how the U.S. has become so vulnerable to international terrorism that even the ridiculous government of North Korea could now detonate a small nuclear weapon above the American homeland.
“North Korea needs only one ICBM capable of delivering a single nuclear warhead in order to pose an existential threat to the U.S.,” wrote Woolsey, along with co-author Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. “The Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission and several other U.S. government studies have established that detonating a nuclear weapon high above any part of the U.S. mainland would generate a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse.”
This one explosion – something North Korea is actually capable of causing – would constitute an EMP attack that would, in the words of our former CIA chief, “collapse the electric grid and other infrastructure that depends on it – communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water – necessary to sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans.”
Another well-informed analysis, just published in the Weekly Standard, confirms that by mid-2014, the fanatically anti-American terrorist government of Iran will likely be able to enrich uranium to weapons-grade plutonium too rapidly for the U.S. to stop it militarily. When an insane and metastatic regime – one obsessed with destruction of (first) the “Little Satan,” Israel, and (later) the “Great Satan,” America – has a nuclear arsenal, we will be living in a very different and dark world indeed.
Back when I was national security adviser to the president of communist Romania, one of my top tasks, ironically, was preventing terrorism. Of course, prevention was much easier in such a ruthless dictatorship where the political police enjoyed unlimited power. Nevertheless, recent experience proves prevention works perfectly well in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation reported back in 2008 that some 40 different terrorist attacks had been foiled since Sept. 11, 2001.
Unfortunately, in 2009, for reasons about which we can only speculate, the Obama administration jettisoned the “war on terror” from its vocabulary, re-classified a successful terror attack on the American homeland (Fort Hood) as “workplace violence” and abandoned many of the measures adopted after 9/11 to prevent future terrorism. As Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen noted: “On his second day in office Obama shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. … In a speech at the National Archives, Obama eviscerated the men and women of the CIA, accusing them of ‘torture’ and declaring that their work ‘did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts – they undermined them.’”
Fast-forward to 2012, when “bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” became one of the Obama re-election campaign’s most resonant slogans. Its message: Terrorism and al-Qaida are vanquished, so re-elect me. Had the administration admitted that Ambassador Stevens and his three subordinates had been killed by terrorists two months before the election, Obama’s most effective campaign slogan would very publicly have been exposed for the farce it truly was.
As everyone knows, for weeks the administration – including President Obama himself at the U.N. – bizarrely blamed all the Benghazi mayhem, death and destruction on a little-viewed Islam parody on YouTube.
After the Boston Marathon bombing – resulting in the four-day paralysis of a major U.S. city, three murdered Americans and over 200 wounded, many grievously – President Obama, under congressional pressure, addressed the danger of terrorism in an hour-long speech on May 23. It was a good speech, as speeches go, except that he didn’t even mention the real threat facing our country today – the looming peril of nuclear terrorism – and instead it vulgarized the future terrorist danger. “Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” the president proclaimed. All we need to really do is close down Guantanamo and make a slight change in how we deploy drones.
With due respect, I must contradict President Obama. Today’s anti-American terrorism was not born in the United States. It was conceived 48 years ago at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and has been carried out by Islamo-fascists armed with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails – and that includes the terrorists who murdered Ambassador Stevens.
Unfortunately, I witnessed the birth of anti-American terrorism. Years ago I used to listen to Gen. Aleksandr Sakharovsky, when he was the Soviet Union’s foreign espionage chief, pontificating that our chief weapon against our “main enemy [the United States]” should now be terrorism, since nuclear arms had made conventional military force obsolete.
I knew Sakharovsky well – he had been the Soviets’ chief intelligence adviser to Romania for five years. He did not look like a brute, but terrorism was his favorite solution to a political problem; during his years in Romania, he had instigated the killing of some 50,000 anti-communists. Afterwards, Sakharovsky served an unprecedented 16 years as head of the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence service (1956-1972), during which time he spread anti-American terrorism around the world.
In 1969, Sakharovsky transformed airplane hijacking – the terrorists’ weapon of choice on Sept. 11, 2001 – into international terrorism. In 1971, he launched Operation Tayfun (Russian for “typhoon”), aimed at transforming the world’s old hatred for the Nazis into a hatred for America, the new “occupation power.” Sakharovsky even established a “socialist division of labor” aimed at creating and arming anti-American terrorist organizations all over the world – which he called “freedom fighters.”
I have explained all this expansively in a new book on “Disinformation” in its many guises, co-authored with professor Ronald Rychlak. Let me here just briefly state that the success of Sakharovsky’s terrorist operations encouraged his boss, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, to – as he used to put it – “turn the whole Arab world into an explosive enemy of America” by resorting to anti-Semitism, that weapon of the emotions successfully wielded by various dictators over the years.
Andropov’s disinformation machinery, which at that time numbered over 1 million people (and is minutely described in our book), went to great lengths to persuade the Islamic world that the U.S. was a war-mongering Zionist country financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” – Andropov’s derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress.
The goal of that immense disinformation operation was to make the Islamic world fear that the U.S. would transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. Andropov’s ploy worked. Consider the 1979 Islamic takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the catastrophic 9/11 attacks.
Andropov’s success made him the first KGB officer to sit on the Kremlin throne and to have his KGB office transformed into a shrine.
While Andropov and his Soviet Union are gone, a new generation of Russians is struggling to give that feudal country a new identity. But the hatred for the U.S. introduced into the Islamic world by Andropov’s KGB is still alive and metastasizing.
In my other life, at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, my Romanian foreign intelligence service, the DIE, managed extensive intelligence networks in the Islamic world, and I came to know that part of the world quite well. Its people did not hate America. Millions of them are even today waiting in line to be accepted in the U.S. because they admire America. There are only a relative few fanatical Islamo-fascist leaders who so hate this great country of freedom that they dream of seeing it destroyed.
Those fanatical Islamic leaders’ sustained hatred for the United States and the specter that they will achieve nuclear power shows, in my view, that it is high time for the leaders of our Congress and our Democratic and Republican parties to forget President Obama’s pretty speeches and to start building a united policy for winning the war against the plague of terrorism.
Along with unearthing the total truth about Benghazi, it is important that we take steps to prevent new terrorist disasters. Competition may be the engine of American progress, but unity in time of war is what made America the leader of the world.
I do not know what the new U.S. anti-terrorist policy should be. No single person in our country really knows. I do, however, know how anti-American terrorism was generated, and I strongly suggest our current administration and Congress take a serious look at President Truman’s National Security Council Report 68 (NSC 68/1950), which set forth the strategy of containment and became our main weapon in the Cold War.
That 58-page document did not blame the Cold War on YouTube videos. It described the challenges facing the U.S. in cataclysmic terms.
“The issues that face us are momentous,” the document states, “involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself.” Therefore, it prescribed a two-pronged political strategy: 1) superior military power, and 2) a “Campaign of Truth,” defined as “a struggle, above all else, for the minds of men.” Truman argued that the propaganda used by the “forces of imperialistic communism” could be overcome only by the “plain, simple, unvarnished truth.” The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (soon to become Radio Liberty) became part of Truman’s “Campaign of Truth.”
This same two-pronged strategy – total military superiority and a robust campaign of utter truth – enabled America to prevail against communism, and is equally essential if we are to get the upper hand in a world threatening the unthinkable of nuclear terrorism.
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