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Informing Science - Operation SIG.pdf (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.2 (file not included in this release) WHAT IS OPERATION SIG?
Operation SIG is the KGB operation to sow worldwide disapproval for the US and Israel. SIG is the Russian acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Jewish (or Zionist) Government.” The operation started shortly after 1967, when the drive for Arab unity collapsed along with the economies of the armies that attacked Israel (Shlaim, 2003). Wikipedia’s anonymous entry on Soviet terrorism lists the operation’s start as a few years later. We quote it below for completeness. “After defeat of Soviet-controlled Arab states in the 1967 Six-Day war, the Soviet Union started a widespread undercover campaign against Israel, involving propaganda as well as direct military support (funding, arms, training) to terrorist groups declaring Israel as their enemy. Additionally, the USSR took the decision to increase anti-Israeli sentiment by disseminating anti-Zionist propaganda and even referencing previous anti-Semitic tropes from Western culture … The overall goal of the campaign was to spread the idea that the state of Israel was an oppressive, imperialist state which was built on unjust terms operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972 to turn the Arab world against Israel and the United States” (“Terrorism and the Soviet Union,” n.d.). Hazan (2017) writes, “At its core, the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign of 1967-1988 was a campaign of propaganda and disinformation. It built and weaponized narratives based on made-up or twisted facts. It distorted history. It employed classic propaganda tools such as deception, guilt by association, and repetition to inculcate the key messages. It shamelessly played on people’s sentiments, and it used both Soviet Jews and Muslims as instruments of propaganda.”
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.3 (file not included in this release)
KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky said: “In today’s world when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon” (Pacepa, 2006.
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In 2018, the US indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for interfering in its 2016 elections
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.4 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.4 (file not included in this release)
Thomas (2004) uses the term reflexive control to refer to interfering with the decision-making process of those whom you wish to control: “specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action” and “to ‘control’ the ‘reflex’ of the opponent by creating a certain model of behavior in the system it seeks to control. The most fundamental way to do this is to locate the weak link in the system and exploit it through moral arguments, psychological tactics, or appeals to specific leaders’ character” (p. 237).
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.4 (file not included in this release)
Thomas writes that as early as 1904, Russia used as tools of war maskirovka (deception) and misinformation, including creating a Higher School of Maskirovka (College of Deception) to develop and advance such concepts.
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.4 (file not included in this release)
Joseph Stalin even coined the term “disinformation” (дезинформация)
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KGB creates Operation SIG with the purpose “to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel” (Pacepa, 2006)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.6 (file not included in this release)
In 1948, as Israel declared independence, the armies of five Arab nations attacked the new nation. The USSR’s Joseph Stalin, hopeful that Israel’s socialist roots would lead it to join the Communist bloc, instructed a country it controlled, Czechoslovakia, to provide Israel with the arms needed for defense. However, upon later learning of Stalin’s murder of 20 million people, Israeli society rejected communism. As a result, Moscow shifted its support to Arab dictatorships (Gordis, 2019, pp. 214- 215). Arab nations became increasingly dependent on Moscow’s weapons and military training. The KGB recruited Arab agents to head up a guerilla army and propaganda campaign. In 1967, when the armies of Soviet-supported Arab countries failed to conquer Israel, this Operation SIG became Moscow’s primary means for advancing chaos in the Middle East against the Israeli democracy.
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.6 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.6 (file not included in this release)
One tactic to disinform is to blame all wrong on some adversary, a monstrous bogey man. For Operation SIG campaign against the Jewish State, the KGB chose the Jews as the bogeymen. Arab antisemitism was already rampant when the KGB created Operation SIG. Preexisting Muslim antisemitism provided a fertile field to plant fake stories and disinformation about Jews and Israel.
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According to Pacepa, KGB chairman Yury Andropov told him, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.” Pacepa recounted that by the time he left Romania in 1978, the Soviets “had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world… In addition, they spread throughout the Islamic world an Arabic translation of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy.”
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.7 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.7 (file not included in this release)
Before the KGB created the PLO, and before the establishment of Israel as a nation/state of the Jews (with both Arab and Jewish citizens), the goal of the neighboring Arab nations was to absorb the land of Israel under Arab/Muslim control. The aspiration was to ethnically cleanse the region of its Jews and creating a Greater Jordan, or a Greater Syria, or expanding Egyptian and Syrian occupation of the area as part of a pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic empire (e.g., “Hamas Official Mahmoud AlZahhar,” 2017).
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.8 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.8 (file not included in this release)
Pacepa (2006) stated that the KGB drafted the Palestinian National Charter and handpicked the 422 members of the PLO council that approved it. Andropov told Pacepa, “We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel” (Pacepa, 2006). Likewise, both the Palestine National Covenant and Palestinian Constitution were drafted in Moscow (Pacepa, as cited in J. Bergman, 2016).
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According to Pacepa (2003), the KGB singled out Yasser Arafat to help it in its campaign of disinformation. The KGB trained Arafat at “its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader” (Pacepa, 2003). In a February 1972 discussion with KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, Andropov told Pacepa that the KGB would mold Arafat’s Marxist ideals into a rabid anti-Zionist. Pacepa (2003) wrote, “In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American ‘imperial-Zionism’… It appealed to him [Arafat] so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, ‘imperial-Zionism’ was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred [emphasis ours]. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.”
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.9 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.9 (file not included in this release)
Mahmood Abbas. Following Arafat’s death, control of the PLO passed to another KGB operative, Mahmoud Abbas. The Mitrokhin documents note that the KGB began to recruit Abbas around 1979 when he arrived in Moscow for graduate studies. While there, he wrote as his dissertation The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, a conspiracy theory about the Holocaust that included accusations that the Jews helped Hitler (R. Bergman, 2016). He continues to espouse this conspiracy theory. In 2018 he said in Arabic that the while Holocaust did happen, it was caused not by antisemites but rather by the Jews. His speech added that Jews did not seek to create Israel and that Jews have no connection to the Land of Israel (“Abbas says Jews’ behavior, not anti-Semitism, caused the Holocaust,” 2018).
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The same is true for Arafat’s second in command and, upon Arafat’s death, his successor, Abbas. “Billions of euros in European aid sent to the Palestinians may have been misspent, squandered or lost to corruption,” according to a damning report by the European Court of Auditors, the Luxembourg-based watchdog (Pancevski, 2013)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.11 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.11 (file not included in this release)
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Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.12 (file not included in this release)
Informing Science - Operation SIG, p.12 (file not included in this release)
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