Ukraine released hundreds of KGB documents in 2008. The archives revealed the Soviet Union’s 1930s widespread starvation crimes against humanity.
They also showed how Russian intelligence agents forged reports and witness testimony against Ukrainian liberation rebels. They falsely accused Ukrainian nationalists of atrocities.
A phony crime was the mass slaughter of Jews. The dossier revealed KGB testimony falsification in terrible detail.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, chief of the Ukrainian security agency, travelled to Tel Aviv to transfer the papers to Mossad and the Israel minister of Public Security.
Ukraine refugees
Two Jews entering eastern Poland a day after Russia invaded Ukraine (WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images).)
The collection showed that Russian intelligence has exploited antisemitism as a political tool for 100 years. The Tsarist intelligence service created and sold the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1900.
Znamya, a Russian tabloid, invented the Protocols, the most notorious antisemitic document of contemporary times. The Times revealed the piece as a fabrication in 1921, but Soviet psychological warfare agents specializing in antisemitism propagated it until 1958.
The KGB smeared Western politicians with the “Jewish conspiracy” throughout the Cold War.
Democrat Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a fierce Kremlin opponent, faced the Kremlin during the 1976 US presidential campaign.
The Senator led the “Jewish lobby” advocating for free Soviet Jewish emigration to Israel, which the KGB deemed an adversary. He was disgraced for supporting anti-Soviet dissidents and increasing defense spending.
The Senator considered the USSR wicked. “The Kremlin’s basic goal remains unchanged—a Moscow-dominated world,” he stated.
Pay the devil. Communist leaders are smart. They master conquering.
They read Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Mein Kampf. Soviets benefited from aggressors’ blunders. Unlike Hitler, they may take years or decades to succeed.”
Jackson believed ties could only improve if Moscow permitted Russian Jews to flee. Jackson “kept escalating his demands” to obtain the Democratic candidacy, according to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin.
The KGB must intervene. Boris Solomatin, a New Yorker, said, “Jackson’s strong point is the fact he has never been involved in any sort of political or personal scandal. Presidential candidates’ personal integrity is especially important post-Watergate.
Find stains on the Senator’s history and exploit them to discredit him.”
KGB agents frantically sought kompromat on the Senator. Only his sexuality led.
Jackson married at 49, and his KGB file states that his colleagues were “amazed” since he was a “confirmed bachelor”. The Senator shared an apartment with a male boyhood friend, but the KGB found no further proof of his homosexuality.
Senator Jackson married late and was heterosexual. KGB was unfazed. They falsified a paper to “expose” him as homosexual in May 1976.
The KGB faked an FBI letter dated June 20, 1940, stating that Jackson was gay. The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters received fake photocopies.
Being homosexual in conservative politics was contentious, thus the goal was to undermine his prospects of being the candidate.
Senator Jackson died in 1983. “I don’t think it had any real political impact,” former foreign policy advisor Richard Perle said of the slander. Journalists ignored the bogus documents on their desks. The episode showed the KGB’s extremes.
Before Carter became president, the KGB sought kompromat on prominent government personnel. They targeted National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a fierce anti-Soviet.
Two weeks before the Presidential inauguration, Andropov authorized an operation to gather “compromising information” on Brzezinski.
KGB operatives had to unearth anything unfavorable about him. Brzezinski hid his Jewishness? Was he cheating on Candice Bergen?
Was his staff relationship compromising? KGB struggled by 1978. It fabricated papers claiming Brzezinski was covertly antisemitic to undermine his White House status.
In August 1978, the KGB created a paper by an Israeli Zionist organization calling the National Security Advisor “a secret antisemite”.
The report found sensitive personal information that would discredit him. The smart, frugal former Harvard professor outclassed the KGB. This “intelligence report” was placed through an American diplomat’s Jerusalem vehicle window.
Two anonymous Brzezinski pamphlets were disseminated across NYC a week later. US Jewish Defence League brochures were created and distributed.
One included a portrait of the National Security Advisor with enormous headlines reading, “Brzezinski is antisemite, has been bought out by Arabs and trades in Jews.” Brzezinski, a Polish-born antisemite, is unwelcome here.”
The second leaflet included the Jewish Defence League insignia. “Can the antisemite Brzezinski be non-partisan in mapping out US foreign policy?” it asked. No follows.
“We urge you not to accept the antisemite Brzezinski as a representative of the American people who are true friends of democrats the world over, including Israel,” reads the flyer.
This pamphlet horrified New York Jews and was submitted to the White House. The National Security Council questioned Jewish Defence League leader Rabbi Israel Miller if these materials were legitimate on August 31, 1978.
Miller denounced them within hours. They were crude KGB forgeries. “Another phoney KGB document” is written on the file in the Congress archives.
The KGB’s phony document campaign against the National Security Advisor failed.
The covert plan was to disseminate false accusations like a virus to undermine Brzezinski, regardless of success.
According to former KGB operative Oleg Kalugin, who lived in the US in the 1980s, antisemitism remained a priority throughout the Cold War.
“We wrote antisemitic letters to American Jewish leaders to show that America was inhospitable,” he claimed. My KGB colleagues hired American operatives to paint swastikas on New York and Washington synagogues. Our New York station hired desecration of Jewish cemeteries.
“I beamed back reports of these misdeeds to Moscow who no doubt was thankful they had been born in a socialist paradise and not a hotbed of racial tension.”
KGB disinformation and fraud from the Cold War persist. Putin’s Ukraine conflict uses these clandestine activities. The KGB’s pernicious participation in Russia’s illegitimate wars continues to plague the west.
Oneworld released Mark Hollingsworth’s “Agents of Influence—How the KGB Subverted Western Democracies” this week.