Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Russian President Vladimir Putin might have more in common than an interest in Middle East peace talks. According to a newly discovered Soviet document, Abbas might have once worked for the KGB, too.
The possibility, trumpeted on Wednesday night by the Israeli media and just as quickly dismissed by Palestinian officials, emerged from a document in a British archive listing Soviet agents from 1983.
A reference to Abbas is tantalizing, but cryptic, just two lines identifying him by the code name “Mole.” At the end of his entry are two words: “KGB agent.”
The suggestion that Abbas might have been on Moscow’s roster more than three decades ago might have been just a historical curiosity, but for the fact that it comes at the same time that Putin has been trying to organize new talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A Russian envoy was in Jerusalem this week to meet with Netanyahu, but the Israeli and Palestinian leaders remain at odds and no direct talks appear imminent.
“We thought it was important now in the context of the Russian attempt to arrange a summit between Abbas and Netanyahu, particularly because of Abbas’ joint KGB past with Putin,” said Gideon Remez, one of two researchers at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who found and disclosed the Soviet document to Israel’s Channel 1.
At the end of the Soviet era, Putin was a KGB lieutenant colonel.
Remez’s research partner, Isabella Ginor, said Abbas’ past was relevant because of Russia’s possible continuing influence on him.
“We don’t know what happened later on and if Abu Mazen went on with his service or work for the Soviets,” she said, using another name for Abbas. “But now that he is head of the Palestinian Authority, this can be a lever on him.”
Palestinian officials scoffed at the report of Abbas’ possible ties to the Soviet spy agency, calling it a brazen effort to undermine him at a time when he is struggling with dissent at home and seeking support abroad.
Gal Berger of Israel Radio said Palestinian officials laughed at the report.
“There’s a clear trend of attempting to damage Abu Mazen by various elements, including Israel,” Mohammed al-Madani, a Central Committee member of Abbas’ Fatah party, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “This is another attempt to slander him.”
Palestinian officials said that there would have been no need for Abbas to be a Soviet agent because the Palestine Liberation Organization at the time was openly working with Moscow.
Abbas led a Palestinian-Soviet friendship foundation, making him the de facto liaison to Moscow, they said.
The document naming Abbas was among thousands of pages of files spirited out of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and turned over to British intelligence by a former KGB archivist, Vasily Mitrokhin.
Disillusioned by Soviet repression, Mitrokhin spent years painstakingly copying secret documents by hand, creating a treasure trove for Western analysts and historians that became known as the Mitrokhin archive.
The documents, the subject of at least two books, are now stored at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the UK and were opened to the public two years ago.
Remez and Ginor said they came across the paper naming Abbas while researching Soviet involvement in the Middle East.
Under a title listing KGB workers in 1983, the document names “Abbas, Mahmoud,” born 1935 in Palestine, as an agent in Damascus. It calls him “Krotov,” a variant of the word mole. Abbas was indeed born in 1935 in what was then known as Palestine, but after the creation of the State of Israel, in 1948, his family fled to Damascus, Syria, where he was raised and educated.
However, the document is as notable for what it does not say. It says nothing about how or when Abbas was recruited, what he did for the KGB, whether he was paid or how long he remained an agent.
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