Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Saturday, Aug. 10, 2002

"The Russian government has put under a 70-year seal all of its archives documenting its KGB support and Communist Party support for these international terrorist organizations" that now threaten American lives, according to Dr. J. Michael Waller, Annenberg Professor of International Communications at the Institute of World Politics (IWP).

"From what I personally saw of the archives which did become public or became available [during a brief window before the Russians slammed the door for 70 years], the Soviet politburo micromanaged all this support down to the exact number and types of weapons that the Soviets would send indirectly to terrorist groups,” Waller told NewsMax.com.

The analyst discussed his findings Thursday night at a gathering of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and in a follow-up interview Friday with NewsMax.

Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin have hit it off well. So well, in fact, that there’s talk that if the U.S. goes to war with Iraq and Middle East countries cut off our oil supply, Russian oil will keep us going. Waller believes that is a dangerous gamble.

The Cold War archives the Russians are hiding from the world "also include a lot of personal data of international terrorists at large, some of whom are believed to be working with al-Qaeda.” But the Russians "want to keep secret past Soviet involvement in terrorism.”

Waller warns U.S. policy makers to bear in mind that "the Soviets created the terror networks that ultimately became the Islamic terrorist networks that we’re fighting today.”

Moscow's PLO 'Franchise for Terrorism'

He traces those dots to 1967, right after the Six-Day War in the Middle East. Then, Moscow developed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from a number of divided splinter groups into one unified organization under Yasser Arafat, which has plagued U.S. Middle East relations ever since.

"The PLO then became the main franchise for international terrorism,” Waller said. It attracted terrorists from "the American hemisphere, Europe, Africa, Asia to training camps in Lebanon and other places where the PLO operated for training [and] networking.

"This was all done as the core of the international terrorist network under Soviet sponsorship. And by the 1970s, as the Soviets were actually arming the PLO and providing weapons for surrogates to all sorts of international terrorist groups. They did this through their surrogate states like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Cuba, East Germany, Bulgaria and other countries.”

Not all of those countries were "necessarily communist. Some of them were Islamist.”

Some of the terrorist groups the U.S. worries about today – Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas – "were all splinter groups of the PLO and other Arab terrorist movements that had been created through the Soviet umbrella. These groups were not fighting for communism,” just for their own terrorist causes. "But they all have their roots in the Soviet terror network.”

And the link to al-Qaeda? It’s there, formed through alliances with groups created under the Soviet umbrella.

"Al-Qaeda, of course, was created by Osama bin Laden, but really, it was built sort of through a mergers and acquisition-type business arrangements where bin Laden formed his own group, but recruited from terrorist organizations like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and for various other attacks against Americans.”

Now, says the Soviet/terror specialist, "you see al-Qaeda making common cause with Hezbollah.”

Dr. Waller is a longtime expert on Soviet subversion and terrorism. He first burst on the national scene back in 1987 with an article in National Review titled "Congress’s Red Army.”

Useful Idiots

In it, he documented the radical left-wing connections of prominent left-wing American lawmakers who were doing the bidding of communist front organizations in fighting then-President Ronald Reagan’s determination to prevent the spread of Soviet and Cuban influence throughout Central America.

For many, this was the first meaningful update of subversion in this country since the abolition a few years before of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. And its progress came as a shock even to some of the most hard-bitten veterans of the counter-subversive wars.

Thursday night, Waller connected dots between old-line communist organizations and Islamist terror groups.

Lawyers for Stalin

"The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1936 under Stalin as the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party [so described on page 1 of a Sept. 21, 1950 report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities],” Waller said.

"It led all of the legal support campaign for party members, and up through the 1950s, the Soviets used the Communist Party as its main instrument of espionage. It would not recruit spies in the United States unless they were ideological card-carrying party members.”

According to the IWP analyst, this is why it was "a big deal” to be a member of the Communist Party. Communism was not just another "political belief,” but was a vehicle for espionage against the United States. "Their belief wasn’t the problem.”

Today’s terrorist connection?

Florida Connection

Waller says Kit Gage, identified by the NLG in a telephoned inquiry from NewsMax.com as the organization’s executive vice president, is also executive director of a coalition with "this curious new partner” as chairman: Sami Al-Arian, a professor from University of South Florida. Al-Arian "happens to be the main fundraiser in the United States for Hamas and for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

Al-Arian was outed last fall by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News Channel's "O’Reilly Factor,” Waller pointed out. Waller noted also that the Florida professor was the subject of a recent New York Times article saying the FBI has been investigating him for seven years "as being a main fund-raiser for terrorism in the United States,” rather than merely "a simple professor,” as he had claimed to O’Reilly.

The coalition includes Maoist terrorists from Peru, the Irish Republican Army, "whole remnants of the Weather Underground, the May 19th communist organization, terrorists from Puerto Rico, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad,” as well as "some old '60s hangovers like the Black Liberation Army, and some Republic of New Africa people.”

According to Waller, "These are the clients of this coalition. The coalition exists now to continue to make it legal to raise money for terrorism, and to run political and legal support campaigns for terrorism. It’s basically to get the FBI and the authorities off these people’s back.

"It’s a small group, but it’s active. And it’s just one symptom of the merger between the Marxist left in the United States and the Islamist Jihadists.” Waller also discussed other examples.

Dr. Lee Edwards, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said Dr. Waller’s findings would soon be published. They clearly outline the merger between the Islamist Jihadist networks with the Soviet terrorist networks here in 2002.

"And so,” concluded Edwards, "perhaps, through our friends on the Hill – Democrats and Republicans – we can put some pressure on Mr. Putin and the Russians to release those files in the fight against terrorism.”

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Middle East

Russia

War on Terrorism

A product that might interest you:
"Let Freedom Ring" - Sean Hannity reveals how to triumph over the left