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Secret KGB documents reveal just how deeply involved the Soviet Union was in the spilling of Israeli blood. The Russian spy agency provided Palestinian terror organizations with funds, training and arms, running agents like ‘Krotov’ – aka Mahmoud Abbas, ‘Aref’ – or Yasser Arafat, and ‘Nationalist,’ who was behind several plane hijackings long before 9/11.

Ronen Bergman|Published:  11.04.16 , 07:38 

The Soviet navy’s reconnaissance ship Kursograf was speeding through the waves on a moonless night in March 1970, making its way to the rendezvous point. Two weeks earlier, Marshal Dmitry Ustinov, at the time a senior defense official and later the Minister of Defense of the USSR, ordered the ship to leave its patrol assignment in the Pacific Ocean and quickly make its way to the military port of Vladivostok to collect several crates of cargo and one passenger. Then, the ship was to sail to the Gulf of Aden in Yemen and await further instructions. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter
The covert operation was codenamed «Vostok» (east in Russian). The ship’s crew was ordered not to ask any questions, not to open the cargo crates, and most definitely not to try to talk to the mysterious man who came on board. His name was Sergey Grankin and he was a major in Department V, a top secret unit of the KGB which is responsible for contact with «liberation organizations» across the world. Grankin, then 35 years old, was working on behalf, and under the close supervision, of the Soviet intelligence services’ omnipotent boss—KGB chairman Yuri Andropov. As the ship was nearing Aden, the captain received the coordinates for the late-night rendezvous at the heart of the gulf, somewhere on the way between Yemen and Somalia. Around 9pm, the ship slowed down and its lights went out. All of a sudden, a far-away flashing light appeared which seemed to be coming nearer and nearer still. It was a rotating red signal lamp placed on the mast of a civilian cargo ship. The two vessels exchanged a series of previously-agreed-upon signals, following which the ship unloaded the cargo crates onto rubber boats that made their way to the civilian ship. After several trips back and forth, Grankin made his way to the second vessel as well. Upon boarding the civilian cargo vessel, Grankin began opening several of the crates. Despite the complete darkness surrounding him, peeking from the crates he could see guns, machine guns, RPG launchers, grenades, sniper rifles and the crowning glory—landmines and roadside charges with remote detonators, the height of technology at the time. Soviet navy’s reconnaissance ship Kursograf Grankin turned to a Middle Eastern-looking man who was standing on the deck not far from him and appeared to be the boss on the ship, and warmly shook his hand. The man was known in the KGB as «Nationalist,» but his real name had already gained notoriety throughout the West: It was Wadi Haddad, the head of operations at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). At the time, he was one of the most infamous and dangerous terrorists in the world, and was later believed to be at the top of the Israeli Mossad’s hit list for over a decade. The massive arms shipment, which included sophisticated weapons the Russians hadn’t even provided the members of the Warsaw Pact, was to be used by Haddad for a series of terror attacks, assassinations and abductions all over the world. Half a year after that late-night meeting at sea, on September 6, 1970, PFLP terrorists armed with the weapons from these crates hijacked four jet airliners bound for New York City and one bound for London. The hijacking of one of the planes, El Al flight 219 from Amsterdam, was foiled thanks to undercover Shin Bet air marshals who shot terrorist Patrick Argüello dead and managed to subdue and arrest his partner Leila Khaled. Two other hijackers were prevented from boarding that flight, and instead hijacked Pan Am Flight 93. The four planes were flown to Jordan, where they were forced to land at Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip near Zarka, formerly a British Royal Air Force base.
Two of the planes the PFLP hijacked to Dawson’s Field in November 1970 Thirty-one years before the 9/11 terror attacks, Haddad had already managed to carry out an attack that included the simultaneous hijacking of several jet airliners. This attack was one of the triggers of Jordan’s big confrontation against terror organizations—known as «Black September»—and changed the course of history in the Middle East. Later, the Russian weapons were used to murder Americans in Lebanon and Israelis in Europe and to blow up oil reservoirs. They were also used in an attempt to sink an Israeli tanker in the Red Sea and were meant to be used in a planned large-scale attack on the Israel Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan. Several of the guns from those crates were also used by the hijackers of an Air France plane to Entebbe in June 1976. This shipment was yet another link in the long chain of deep cooperation between the Eastern Bloc’s intelligence services, led by the KGB, and Palestinian terror organizations. Classified KGB documents reveal that the Soviet spy agency aided Haddad and his men by providing them with training, funding and arms, as well as help in the preparations for specific attacks. In other instances, the KGB itself initiated attacks that were carried out by Haddad and his men. And Haddad’s terror organization was not the only one operated by Moscow. *** Chapter one of «The KGB’s Middle East Files,» a special series of articles which brings to light information mined from some 6,000 KGB documents smuggled to the West in the early 1990s, recounted the story of how Vasili Mitrokhin used his senior position at the spy agency’s archive to copy the top secret documents—with the Soviets being none the wiser. Vasili Mitrokhin These documents helped expose some 1,000 KGB agents across the world and uncover countless covert spy operations. In addition, two books were published about them by Prof. Christopher Andrew in cooperation with Mitrokhin himself. Nevertheless, only part of the information they contain actually made it to Israel. In fact, much in this vast trove of information about the KGB’s operations in the Jewish state remains secret. The Mitrokhin documents have recently been moved to Churchill College in Cambridge. Over the past six months, we’ve been working on sifting through them, translating them, and cross-referencing the material with other available information and sources.