Epicenter 2.0

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  So watch closely, for such efforts will only intensify as the time of Ezekiel’s vision comes to fulfillment.

  CHAPTER TEN: FUTURE HEADLINE

  GLOBAL TENSIONS SOAR AS RUSSIA TARGETS ISRAEL

  In the spring of 2006, I came across a headline on an Internet news site that read “Russia Would Never Harm Israel: Olmert.” Curious, I clicked onto the link and found a story from Agence France-Presse, which began, “Israeli leader Ehud Olmert said he had been assured by President Vladimir Putin that Russia would ‘never do anything to harm Israel’ despite his invitation to Hamas for talks in Moscow.212

  “‘President Putin told me that he had previously given a commitment to Ariel Sharon that Russia would never do anything to harm the state of Israel and that that commitment applies to me as it did to Ariel Sharon,’” Olmert explained. The Israeli prime minister’s official Web site later noted that “Russian President Putin emphasized several times [in his call with Olmert] that Russia would not take any step directed against Israeli interests and would not harm Israel’s security.”213

  If only we could take such assurances to the bank. Unfortunately, we cannot.

  While it may be tempting to believe that the Russian Bear is dead and buried and poses no threat to Israel, the U.S., or anyone else, Ezekiel makes it clear that the Bear is only hibernating and will soon be back with a vengeance.

  Ezekiel 38:8 says that in the latter years Russia “will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel” (NASB). Ezekiel 38:12 says Russia will target Israel, the epicenter, the people who live “at the center of the world” (NASB). Ezekiel 38:14 says Russia will target “My people Israel” (NASB). Ezekiel 38:18 says Russia “comes against the land of Israel” (NASB). Ezekiel 39:2 says Russia will come “against the mountains of Israel” (NASB). Ezekiel 38:10 makes crystal clear that the Russian dictator in charge of this operation will be executing “an evil plan” (NASB).

  Despite such specificity, however, there will be those who misunderstand the nature and threat of this “evil plan” and thus will be at risk of being blindsided by it.

  “THE FINAL THRUST SOUTH”

  While Putin has not yet tipped his hand about any specific designs on Israel, there are men around Putin who have. One such leader is the current deputy speaker of the State Duma, one of the highest-ranking political leaders in the Russian government and a strategic ally of Putin.

  Consider excerpts from a book written by this Russian leader in 1993, in which he details his plans for expanding the Russian empire to the south—toward and ultimately through Israel:

  The operation should be carried out using the code-name “Final Thrust to the South.” Our army will carry out this task. It will be a means for the nation as a whole to survive and a way to restore the Russian army. . . . Russia reaching the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea is a task that will be the salvation of the Russian nation. . . . Russia will grow rich.

  The Arabs and Europeans . . . have a vested interest in seeing to it Russia establishes her new borders. . . . Only in this way can they escape the Israeli trap.

  Can’t Russia, mustn’t Russia, make just one move, one little move southward? . . . The Germans want this. . . . The world will understand that if Russia needs it that means it’s good.

  The Russian army needs this. It will let our boys flex their muscles instead of sitting around the barracks, worn out by hazing, in the depths of Russia, not knowing who and where the enemy is and what moral and physical preparations they should make.

  Only America would not be pleased, but she won’t interfere. The alternative to this development of this situation is too grave for her if she interferes.

  This is . . . Russia’s fate, and without it Russia is doomed to stop growing and die. . . . Russia has been given a great historical mission. Therefore it must act decisively.

  Let Russia make its final “thrust” to the south. I can see the Russian soldiers gathering for the final expedition southward. I can see Russian commanders in Russian division and army headquarters, mapping out the route for the military formations and the endpoints of those routes. I see aircraft gathered in air bases around the southern regions of Russia. I see submarines surfacing . . . and amphibious assault ships near the shore . . . and armored infantry vehicles are on the move and great masses of tanks are rolling through. Russia will finally make her last military expedition.214

  The author of this book, titled The Final Thrust South, is Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky, the bombastic, often ridiculed, but influential ultranationalist founder of the woefully misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). In 1994, when few intelligence analysts in Moscow or Washington took him seriously, Zhirinovsky triggered a political earthquake when his LDPR won a quarter of the seats in the Russian parliament, just a year after laying out this Fascist and imperialist vision of Russia’s future.

  A 1994 Time magazine cover story titled “Rising Czar?” noted:

  Zhirinovsky is no ordinary politician. [He] has slugged fellow lawmakers in the halls of parliament, hobnobbed with ex-Nazi storm troopers in Austria and posed, au naturel, for photographers while cavorting in a steam bath in Serbia. He has been kicked out of or denied access to nearly half a dozen European countries. He has threatened to restore Russia’s imperial borders, annex Alaska, invade Turkey, repartition Poland, give Germany “another Chernobyl,” turn Kazakhstan into a “scorched desert,” and employ large fans to blow radioactive waste across the Baltics. To Western eyes, the incendiary rhetoric and exuberant loutishness of this barnstorming Bonaparte have marked him as something of a buffoon. But to many Russians, Zhirinovsky offers a kind of touchstone for their deepest yearnings and frustrations.215

  Indeed he does, and that is his danger. As Heritage Foundation Russia expert Ariel Cohen wrote in 1994, “It is tempting to dismiss Zhirinovsky’s outrageous book as political polemic. But a failed Austrian painter and former army corporal was similarly ignored when he published his own tract: Mein Kampf. The tendency to dismiss Zhirinovsky as a buffoon and to assume that his supporters did not know what they were voting for may be a naïve, even dangerous, response to his election and his position as de facto opposition leader gives him influence that cannot be ignored.”216

  THE MAN BEHIND THE MAN

  When I last visited Moscow, I sought a meeting with Zhirinovsky. In The Ezekiel Option, after all, I was writing about a Fascist, anti-Semitic ultranationalist who rises to power in Moscow, becomes a czar, and leads the Russian army south to the Mediterranean. Why not meet such a person in real life?

  Zhirinovsky’s personal support among Russians had slipped since he had landed on the cover of Time. In the December 2003 elections, the LDPR received only 11.6 percent of the vote and 38 seats in the Duma. But he was still a player. Zhirinovsky and his colleagues represented the third-biggest political force in the country, behind Putin’s United Russia Party (222 seats) and the Communist Party (53 seats).217 What’s more, several Russia experts I trust suggested that the LDPR’s drop in the polls had nothing to do with Russians becoming less nationalist but with Putin becoming more so. Why vote for “Mad Vlad,” they argued, when Putin was the real deal—a tough-as-nails leader, a czar in the making, without any of Zhirinovsky’s rhetorical baggage? The more authoritarian Putin has become, they explained, the more votes he has siphoned off of the nationalist and ultranationalist parties into his own camp.

  “Actually, the guy you want to see,” one of my Russian friends told me, “is not Zhirinovsky himself. I mean, he’s fun to talk to. You’d get some great quotes. But the guy you really want to talk to is the man behind the man, Zhirinovsky’s brain.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Alexei Mitrofanov,” he said. “He’s the number two guy in the LDPR. For years he was the chairman of the Geopolitical Committee of the Duma, roughly the equivalent of the [U.S.] House Foreign Relations Committee.
He’s Zhirinovsky’s chief strategist. But far more importantly, he’s a guy who is quietly, carefully helping shape Putin’s direction, and thus Russia’s.”

  My father and I met Mitrofanov for coffee at the Hotel National, across the street from Red Square and the Kremlin, on Wednesday, September 1, 2004. We had never met a Fascist before, and certainly not one with real political power. We didn’t even know what Mitrofanov looked like and weren’t quite sure what to expect. But soon a large, plump man not much older than myself (he was born in 1962, I in 1967) arrived with several bodyguards who took up positions by the doors of the restaurant.

  In manner, he was the complete opposite of Zhirinovsky—well educated, soft-spoken, almost shy—and was clearly intent on putting a “kinder, gentler” face on his boss’s vicious brand of politics. But it soon became readily apparent that this was indeed “Zhirinovksy’s brain.” They think exactly alike.

  “We are pragmatic people,” Mitrofanov began, speaking of himself and his party. “But Russia is in danger of collapsing within ten years. . . . Gorbachev made foolish decisions. He lost the whole empire for nothing. But it just proves that if the leader will be weak, Russia will be ruined. . . . Russians want a strong dictator.”218

  “What about Putin?” I asked. “Is he a czar?”

  “Putin is a nationalist, a pragmatic nationalist,” Mitrofanov replied. “I had many private conversations with him before he became president and I know that he is close to our party in his heart. . . . But he is not a strong leader. He has too many limitations.”

  Well, that was a twist, I thought, someone who thinks Putin isn’t czarlike enough. “What about your boss? Is he the next czar?”

  “Zhirinovsky wants to be like Stalin,” he said, “like Lenin. He wants to have power and make Russia number one in the world again.”

  “Does he have a chance at succeeding Putin?”

  “I think yes,” Mitrofanov explained. “Not in the next elections, in 2008. But in 2012, I think Zhirinovsky will be the president of Russia. He will be sixty-six. He will have been in politics for twenty years. People will know his name, his brand, like Marlboro, like Coca-Cola. . . . Besides, Zhirinovsky will be very quiet [until then]. He is changing.”

  “Changing how?” I asked.

  “Changing his style and his ideas, gaining experience. . . . He is the man Russia needs.”

  “What would he do as president, in foreign policy, for example?”

  “He would build a coalition,” Mitrofanov replied without hesitation. “Russia must control four countries in order to have quiet borders—Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he added, “And Turkey.”

  “Why these?”

  “Zhirinovsky wants to rebuild the Byzantine Empire,” he said matter-of-factly.

  I just stared at him, trying to process what he was saying and why he was being so open about his party’s ambitions. The Byzantine Empire? I thought. That would include a lot more land than just those five countries. It would include Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt . . . and Israel.

  “We need it,” Mitrofanov explained, “or we will have instability.”

  “Doesn’t such a position run the risk of having the LDPR be accused of being anti-Semitic and anti-Israel?”

  “Russia is very quiet towards the Jews today,” he said. “There’s no anti-Semitism here. Not like in Europe. . . . I know people in the Russian military—very nationalistic people—who have ideas that Jewish people have ruined Russia, and they have an idea to attack Israel. Colonel [Pavel] Chernov of the FSB, for example. He believes we should say to the Muslim world, ‘We have the power, the land, and the nuclear weapons. You have one billion people, living bombs. Let’s work together.’ He said Russia must be Muslim, not Orthodox Christian. . . . He wanted to push Jews out of all leadership positions in Russia.”

  “What’s Chernov doing now?” I asked.

  “He used to be in the LDPR,” Mitrofanov freely admitted. “He played an important part in the party for a while. He was number two, in fact, until Zhirinovsky fired him. He drank too much. Fired off a machine gun. But he had lots of supporters.”

  I looked at my father, and he looked back at me. He didn’t say anything then; nor did I. But we were thinking the same thing. We were sitting with a man who believed that an ex-FSB officer’s offense was getting drunk and blowing off some steam, not his desire to form a nuclear alliance with Iran and the rest of the Muslim world to blow up Israel. And as evil as that was, this was no crank we’d met at the Moscow circus. Mitrofanov is a respected member of the Russian parliament. He was a senior advisor to the deputy speaker of that parliament. And he had no hesitation to tell two Americans that he and his party want Russia to build an empire and launch the “final thrust south.”

  We thanked him for his time, paid our bill, and left as quickly as we could.

  1982: THE THREAT FROM THE NORTH

  Since the times of Czar Peter the Great, Russian leaders have had designs on central Asia and the Near East, and for nearly half of the twentieth century, Moscow armed Israel’s enemies and encouraged them to attack and destroy the Jewish state. But now a fuller and more disturbing picture is emerging. Previously classified White House, CIA, and State Department documents, as well as interviews with top U.S. and Israeli leaders and historians, reveal that Moscow has on more than one occasion planned direct Russian invasions of Israel.

  In the summer of 1982, for example, then–Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin went public with a story that prior to that time had been known only to the upper echelons of Israeli and U.S. intelligence. The Israeli Defense Forces, he explained, had uncovered a secret but massive cache of Soviet weaponry in deep underground cellars and tunnels in Lebanon that had caught him and his top advisors completely off guard. The weapons appeared to have been pre-positioned by Moscow for the launching of a full-scale invasion of Israel and the oil-rich nations of the Middle East.

  Begin said Israel had found “ten times more Russian weapons than were previously reported.” The haul, he told reporters, included 4,000 tons of ammunition, 144 armored vehicles and tanks, 12,500 pieces of small arms, 515 heavy weapons, 359 sophisticated communications devices, and 795 “optical instruments” (including night-vision goggles and field glasses). It was enough, Begin believed, to equip at least five Russian combat brigades and required, according to one report, “a fleet of 10-ton trucks, working day and night for six weeks, to haul them back to Israel.”219

  “I can now tell you,” the Israeli prime minister continued, “that only yesterday . . . we found other arms depots containing fully ten times as many weapons as we had found before, enough to equip not five brigades, but five or six divisions. We shall need literally hundreds of trucks to evacuate these weapons from Lebanon, where we shall undoubtedly find more arms.”

  Begin said that Israeli intelligence had badly underestimated the Russian threat from the north. Israel certainly knew the Soviets were arming Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization for their terrorist attacks against Israel. That was why Israel had invaded Lebanon in the first place. But Begin conceded that neither he nor his colleagues had any idea of the extent to which Moscow was preparing for a massive future ground assault against the Jewish state.

  “Something happened which nobody knew,” Begin admitted. “In fact, the evidence at hand points to a conspiracy, that pre-positioning by the Soviet Union of such massive quantities of arms—and I mean modern, highly sophisticated weapons—could only be in preparation for some indeterminate future date to overrun Israel, then Jordan, and then Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf States. Otherwise, there is no explanation for the quantities of weapons we have found. The [Palestinians] couldn’t have used them, having neither the necessary manpower nor the skills.”

  The Washington Post reported the story of the Soviet arms cache on July 7, 1982. But the implications of such an important discovery got lost amid a series of other earthshaking events in the Mi
ddle East. Just one month earlier, an Israeli air strike had destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor and thus Iraq’s entire nuclear-weapons development program. And just two months after the discovery of the Soviet arms, members of the Maronite Phalange militia massacred hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children in Lebanese refugee camps known as Sabra and Shatila.

  The Osirak bombing and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, along with the international outcry over whether Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon was responsible for letting the massacres happen, dominated worldwide headlines for months. Sharon eventually resigned his post as defense minister. Begin found himself and his entire government on defense in the global public-relations wars. And the Soviets’ plans and preparations for invading Israel and the rest of the Middle East were lost to a world that either never heard the story, did not remember, or did not care.

  When I interviewed Caspar Weinberger, who was the U.S. defense secretary in 1982, he both remembered and confirmed Menachem Begin’s story for me. He also admitted that the discovery of the Soviet arms cache “was perhaps larger than most people [in Washington] would have expected.” Weinberger conceded that he and others in the Pentagon were surprised by the “size, scope, and speed”—and secrecy—of the Soviet pre-positioning in the Middle East, given how carefully the U.S. was watching the Soviet military.

  But Weinberger said he was not surprised that the Soviets had been preparing for an invasion of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf region. To the contrary, these were precisely the concerns that were driving the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet policy at the time.

  “We [in the Reagan White House and the Pentagon] were all concerned about growing Soviet influence and growing Soviet attempts to increase their stature in the whole Mideast,” Weinberger told me. “And the fact that here was confirmation of this by this discovery of a very large stash of weapons was continually disturbing, but not surprising. . . . The fact that they [the Soviets] were building up their weapons and planning to use various Mideast spots as bases for military action was not a surprise—it was the size, scope, and speed with which it was being carried out that was further reason, we thought, why their motives had to be watched quite carefully.”220