SOVIET DOCUMENTS ‘SHOW MAHMOUD ABBAS WAS A KGB AGENT’: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wed. 7 Sep. 2016, citing information included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR. The famed Mitrokhin records, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983. The documents - obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez - show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East, was stationed in Damascus. Bogdanov was caught in a diplomatic tussle earlier this week after trying to broker a summit between Abbas and PM Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, who both claimed a willingness to meet while decrying the other for allegedly refusing. Mitrokhin was a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992.

The archivist’s notes on the KGB are considered among the most complete information available on Soviet intelligence operations. He claimed that the KGB recruited the then head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Wadi Haddad, as an agent in the 1970s. His writings also revealed that Haddad was given Soviet assistance in funding and arming the PFLP. According to an Eastern Soviet bloc intelligence agent who defected to the USA in the 1970s, the PLO, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the PFLP all received help from the KGB. (Times of Israel)