Operation Dragon

by R. James Woolsey

  In 1948, when the Romanian socialist nomenklatura nationalized the oil industry, that country was the second-greatest oil exporter in Europe. Thirty years later, Romania was a heavy importer of oil, gasoline was rationed, the temperature in public places had to be kept under 63 degrees, and all shops had to close no later than 5:30 p.m. to save energy.

  Once the second-largest oil and grain exporter in Europe, Romania was starving in those days. One of the most astonishing failures of Russian-style socialism was also the regularity with which its political triumphs produced economic ruin. Whether in transforming that country from the world’s greatest grain exporter at the time of the 1917 revolution into the world’s greatest grain importer, or in devastating Ethiopia’s economy to the point that its famine stirred the compassion of the entire world, Russian-style socialism invariably destroyed the national economy wherever it came to power.

  In 2011, the new “democratic” Russia unleashed another weapon of mass destruction: anti-Americanism. On October 6, 2011, in a broadcast in English, a pro-Russian Cuban radio station that calls itself “A Friendly Voice Around the World” announced that the Workers World Party (a Marxist organization financed by Moscow) had decided to join the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations “against the capitalist system and in favor of a socialist future.” Radio Havana also reported that a Workers World Party conference to be held on October 8 and 9 in the Bronx in New York City would debate, “from a Marxist perspective,” America’s current “economic crisis.” “Long live the revolution! Long live socialism!” Others in Chicago and Philadelphia marched with communist flags. In L.A., a speaker advocated violence, as in the French revolution, which “made fundamental transformations, but it was bloody.” He supported bloody revolution in the U.S., too, because “Ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means … Long live revolution. Long live socialism.” Marxism is on the march again, and it has not even bothered to change its old clothes. Others in Chicago and Philadelphia marched with communist flags.

  Anti-Semitism has raised its head too. “I think the Zionist Jews who are running these banks and our Federal Reserve … need to be run out of this country,” declared one Los Angeles occupier. “Jewish money controls American politics,” a New York occupier complained. Still others yelled that “Jews control Wall Street.”7 These are the identical slogans spread by Gen. Pacepa’s DIE around the world during the Cold War, when Moscow went out of its way to portray the United States as an “imperial Zionist country” financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion” (the KGB’s favorite epithet for the U.S. Congress) in order to transform the world into a Jewish fiefdom.

  On November 7, 2017, the new “democratic” Russia celebrated one hundred years since armed Bolsheviks had installed communism in Russia. For the rest of the world, however, that day marked the beginning of one of the worst mass-killing eras in history. According to a recent estimate by the prestigious Hudson Institute, “the victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918–22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937–38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the gulags, labor colonies and special settlements.8

  EPILOGUE

  In today’s era of nuclear and bacteriological weapons, regular armies are becoming less and less relevant. KGB General Aleksander Sakharovsky, who spent an unprecedented fourteen years as the Soviet Union’s spy chief, used to preach that because “nuclear technology has made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.” The United States never will be a terrorist country. Therefore, our leaders in the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress are now debating how the United States can most effectively defeat the current nuclear threats to our country. That is all well and good, but few politicians seem to be paying enough attention to the power of intelligence, now a neglected weapon that at one time proved decisive in helping us win the Cold War without firing a shot.

  In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war. Today’s history books correctly give credit to President Kennedy for averting that disaster. Readers thrill to tales of the U-2 spy planes that secretly overflew Cuba collecting vital information to counter Khrushchev’s ambition to control the U.S. through nuclear missiles aimed at it. Lost in the euphoria over our victory, however, is the crucial role of the initial intelligence source, a courageous Soviet military intelligence officer named Oleg Penkovsky (the author of The Penkovsky Papers, (Collins, 1965). It was he who gave our intelligence community the tip that the Soviets were secretly installing nuclear weapons in Cuba, and it was his intelligence that enabled the United States to decode the images of the Soviet rockets that Khrushchev wanted to install secretly in Cuba, which our U-2 planes were then able to record. Unfortunately, Penkovsky was caught and executed by the KGB. His sacrifice, however, helped us avoid a nuclear war.

  After the transformation of Russia into the first intelligence dictatorship in history and the birth of Islamic terrorism, our intelligence community did its best to persuade other enemy spy chiefs to join our intelligence community. A small ripple of intelligence defections followed, but in the 1980s the U.S. Congress prohibited the CIA from helping defectors—most of them resettled under protective identity—to publish in the United States. The result? To the best of our knowledge, no other enemy spy chief has followed in General Pacepa’s path in the last forty years.

  In our view, this prohibition —unique in the Western world—has been devastating for the United States. Some three thousand Americans were killed on September 11, 2001, because we did not have a defector, or a source in place that hoped to end his life as American citizen, at the top of al-Qaeda to tell us what its terrorist leaders were plotting. Over four thousand Americans died in Iraq because we did not have a top Iraqi source to tell us that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons.

  Another two thousand American soldiers have so far died in Afghanistan, where the CIA’s officers had to go disguised as civilian tourists on horseback in order to familiarize themselves with that virtually unknown terrorist country.1 Russia’s overnight occupation of Crimea also took our White House by surprise.

  After 9/11, new public investigations raked our intelligence community over the coals. They did not focus on why we had no intelligence sources at the top of the Islamic terrorist organizations or on measures to correct that anomaly. Nor did they focus on how to increase the trust in our foreign intelligence community, although trust is the most valuable asset of any foreign intelligence service, no matter its nationality or political flavor. The 9/11 Commission devoted hundreds of pages to publicly blaming our intelligence community for not having identified the nineteen terrorists before they hijacked the airplanes, although terrorists entering the U.S. may be as elusive as needles in a haystack. Some 80 million passengers flew to the U.S. that year alone, on 823,757 commercial and 139,650 private flights; 330 million people crossed the Canadian and Mexican borders during that same year by car, train, and truck; and another 18 million entered the country by sea.2

  Evidently, none of the members of Congress who authored the 585 pages of The 9/11 Commission Report, formally named Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was familiar with the crucial role played by agents and defectors in foreign intelligence operations.

  We hope that the president of the United States will correct that. We also hope he will take the CIA out of the daily news. A belled cat doesn’t catch any mice.

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  AMBASSADOR R. JAMES WOOLSEY

  R. James Woolsey Jr. is a lawyer and diplomat who was director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton.

  He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford (Phi Beta Kappa), his master’s degree from Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and his law degree from Yale, wher
e he was founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President and prominently active in the anti–Vietnam War movement.

  He was a captain in the U.S. Army and a program analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, then held a variety of government positions in the 1970s and 1980s, including National Security Council staff and adviser with the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and general counsel to the Committee on Armed Services for the U.S. Senate.

  He was undersecretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979 and was involved in treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union for five years in the 1980s. He was ambassador and U.S. representative for negotiations on conventional armed forces in Europe from 1989–91.

  His career also has included time as a professional lawyer and venture capitalist.

  LT. GENERAL ION MIHAI PACEPA

  Lt. Gen. (ret.) Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official from an enemy country ever to have been granted political asylum in the United States. His defection made him the most hunted American citizen alive. Romania’s tyrant, Nicolae Ceausescu, created a super-secret intelligence unit staffed with a thousand officers charged to kill Pacepa and set a $2 million bounty on his head. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat set other multi-million-dollar rewards.

  In 1982, Ceausescu also hired the infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal to kill Pacepa and to blow up with explosives the headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Munich, which was broadcasting Pacepa’s revelations. At that time Carlos was famous for attacking the French embassy in the Hague, capturing the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, and firing rocket-propelled grenades the Orly Airport near Paris.

  In mid-September 1980, the leaders of Hungarian foreign intelligence, which provided shelter in Budapest to Carlos, asked Moscow’s approval for Pacepa’s assassination. A few days later, Moscow informed them that the Soviet Politburo approved Pacepa’s assassination.

  On October 11, 1980, Carlos and his girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, moved to Bucharest, where they lived in a villa owned by the Romanian political police, the Securitate. The next day the Romanian foreign intelligence service opened bank account # 47 11 210 350 2 at the Romanian Bank for Foreign Trade under the names “Michael Mallios” and “Anna Luise Toto-Kramer.” They spent a month of training in Romania.

  Carlos was unable to find Pacepa, but on February 21, 1981, he exploded a plastic bomb at RFE headquarters in Munich, injuring eight RFE employees. Five Romanian diplomats assigned to West Germany were expelled because of their involvement in this bloody operation. In a public speech, French president Francois Mitterrand called Romania’s foreign intelligence service “a band of assassins” and postponed a scheduled official visit to Bucharest.

  In 1994, Carlos was captured in Khartoum, Sudan, by the French counterintelligence service, the DST, with which Pacepa had cooperated after he defected. Carlos was sentenced to life in prison. He is currently incarcerated in Clairvaux Prison in France.

  In May 2015, Pacepa’s book Disinformation, coauthored with Professor Ronald Rychlak, was included among the best ten political books ever written, next to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In 2019, when Romania celebrated thirty years since the execution of Ceausescu, Pacepa’s book Red Horizons was republished there as The Golden Book of the War Against Communism.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1 The Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of two U.S. facilities specializing in classified work on nuclear weapons design, recently published a never before seen pictorial report on those cities titled “History of Russian Nuclear Weapons Program” (http://fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/lanl-history.pdf)

  2 “Putin: Soviet collapse a genuine tragedy,” Associated Press, April 25, 2005, posted as http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7632057/ns/world_news/t/putin-soviet-collapse-genuine-tragedy/#.VXsOqLNlzzY.

  3 (Translation: literally “appetite comes in eating,” or to prod someone into eating when they don’t feel like it.)

  4 Doug Mainwaring, “We are all Tea Partiers now,” The Washington Times, September 30, 2010, p.1.

  5 “American capitalism gone with a whimper,” Pravda, April 27, 2004.

  CHAPTER ONE – SOCIALIST RUSSIA: AN “ILLEGAL” INTELLIGENCE TYRANNY

  1 https://spectator.org/39264_hiding-behind-us-law/

  2 The History of Espionage, chapter entitled “Günther Guillaume, Soviet Spy in West Germany,” internet version, http://members.nbci.com/1spy.

  3 In Soviet intelligence terminology, the term “illegal officer” designated an intelligence officer who was assigned under nonofficial cover, often—but not always—in alias.

  4 http://revcom.us/socialistconstitution/

  CHAPTER TWO – UNDERCOVER FEUDALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  1 Mike Christopulos, “Russian Orthodox priest Father Arseny shone with Christ’s light in Soviet prison camp,” The Sword, vol. 1:36, August 2014.

  2 Astolphe, marquis de Custine, Journey For Our Time, edited and translatedby Phyllis Penn Kohler. (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1987), 161, 152.

  3 Quoted in Edward Hallet Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923 (London: MacMillan, 1953), Vol. III, p. 14.

  4 John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (New York: Crown, 1993), p. 24.

  5 This letter was seen by the author in 1992 at an exhibit entitled “Revelations from the Russian Archives,” which was displayed at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  6 George Legget, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. (Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 114, as quoted in Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 44.

  7 Quoted in Ronald W. Clark, Lenin. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 472, 474.

  8 On my visits to the Lubyanka, I was never taken to the KGB officers’ club. The existence of the Dzerzhinsky memorial figure is confirmed in Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 42–43, which adds that it was thrown out toward the end of Stalin’s reign but that then under Khrushchev a huge statue of him was erected outside KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square.

  9 Jean Mackenzie, “Anti-Semitism is resurfacing in Russia,” Boston Globe, November 8, 1998, as published on the internet at www.fsumonitor.com/stories/11098mak.shtml

  10 William Korey, “Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism,” The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as published on http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/studies2.html.

  11 The Okhrana was founded in 1881 by Alexander III. It replaced the Department of State Police, which failed to save the life of his father, Tsar Alexander II.

  12 In 1894, French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a wealthy Alsatian Jew, was falsely sentenced for espionage by an anti-Semitic court and deported to Devil’s Island. Émile Zola, a leading supporter of Dreyfus, promptly published J’accuse, reproving the judges for their anti-Semitism. Zola was tried for libel but escaped to England. The violent partisanship over this case dominated French life for more than a decade.

  13 Philip Grave, “The Protocols: A Literary Forgery,” The Times, London, August 16, 17, and 18, 1921, as published in www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?documents/protocols/protocols.zion.

  CHAPTER THREE – SOCIALIST ANTI-SEMITISM

  1 Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, Nicolas Werth, Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer (ed., tr.) and Jonathan Murphy (tr.), The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1997).

  2 “U.S. Department of State Annual Report on International Religious Freedom for 1999: Russia,” September 9, 1999, internet edition.

  3 Text of the U.S. Senate letter, including signatures listed alphabetically, published on the internet at http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Histroy?Human%20Rights/98sens.html.

  4 Steve Rosenberg, “Anti-Semitism alarms Russian Jews,” BBC News, Moscow, as posted on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/427183.stm.

  5 Amiram Barkat and Gideon Alon, “Survey: Anti_Semitism rises in Russia, schrinks in Europe,” Haaretz, January 27, 2006.<
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  6 John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 548.

  7 Dekanozov can be seen next to Stalin in the official picture of the Soviet May Day parade published in Pravda on May 3, 1940.

  8 Departamentul de Informatii Externe, Romania’s espionage service.

  CHAPTER FOUR – STEALING AMERICA’S NUCLEAR BOMB

  1 This interpretation now appears in many places, most notably in John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vasiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 39–58.

  2 Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Washington: Regnery, 1952, reissued), 271–280.

  3 Chambers, Witness, 281–282.

  4 Chambers, Witness, 445–446.

  5 Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 183.

  6 Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, Spies, 46, 57.

  7 Haynes, Klehr, and Vasiliev, Spies, 58.

  8 Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—a Soviet Spymaster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994).

  9 Unless noted otherwise, the information in this chapter regarding Oppenheimer’s connection with Soviet foreign intelligence is taken from Pavel Sudoplatov’s Special Tasks. Specific quotes are footnoted.