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Abbas was KGB Agent in Syria in 1980s, Archive Reveals

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas worked as a KGB agent in Syria during the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 reported, citing a newly uncovered Soviet-era archive document.

The document reportedly shows that Abbas worked in 1983 for Damascus’ KGB station chief, Mikhail Bogdanov, who is currently a top Russian diplomat in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Bogdanov unsuccessfully attempted to arrange a meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow to discuss peace negotiations.

It is not certain if Abbas, who received a doctorate from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, served as a KGB agent either before or after his time in Damascus.

Abbas’ alleged role was uncovered by researchers Isabela Ginor and Gideon Remez, who found a reference to Abbas (code-named Krotov or “mole”) in the papers of famed KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin. The authenticity of the document was confirmed by University of Cambridge’s Churchill Archives Centre.

Photo: Israel's Channel 1

In response, Fatah official Nabil Shaath asserted that Abbas was not an “agent of the KGB or any other intelligence agency.” Shaath claimed that the report was an excuse for Netanyahu to avoid the Moscow meeting with Abbas.

In How Holocaust Denial Shaped Mahmoud Abbas’ Worldview, which was published in the May 2016 issue of The Tower Magazine, Edy Cohen wrote that while studying in Moscow, Abbas absorbed “Soviet anti-Jewish propaganda” and incorporated it into his PhD thesis, which questioned historical details of the Holocaust.

This anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial comes from the top. Although it is either unknown or denied in the West, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is profoundly fascinated by Nazi propaganda and has employed it in his own writings, particularly in his doctoral dissertation on the subject of the Holocaust, “The Other Face: The Secret Connections Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement,” which he wrote in Moscow in 1982. Two years later, Abbas published a book based on his dissertation. It is written in Arabic and, tellingly, has never been translated into any other language.

There is a reason for this: The book is inspired by and based on the work of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. While he was a fugitive in Argentina, Eichmann formulated and disseminated Nazi propaganda according to which the Holocaust was a Jewish-Nazi conspiracy that sacrificed Jewish lives in order to create a Jewish state in Palestine. In his book, Abbas adopts this worldview wholesale….

[Photo: Foreign and Commonwealth Office / Flickr ]