SIG: The Soviet operation to promote “a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews”

Anti-Semitism is a scourge that has been perversely used by several dictatorships to manipulate the masses.

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Tsarist, Nazi, and Soviet antisemitism

Russian Tsarism actively promoted antisemitism. The most famous antisemitic libel, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," was created by the Okhrana, the Tsarist political police, in 1903. Later, this libel was used by Nazism to promote antisemitism on an unprecedented scale, culminating in the extermination of six million Jews, which is undoubtedly the most heinous episode of antisemitism in history. Much less known is the operation of the Soviet communist dictatorship to promote hatred against Jews on a large scale in the Islamic world by resorting to exactly that libel that had already been used by the Nazis for the same purpose.

SIG, an operation launched in 1972 by the KGB to promote anti-Semitism

On August 24, 2006, 20 years ago today, Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who had been acting head of the Romanian communist dictatorship's foreign intelligence service (the Directorate of Foreign Information, DIE) and who in 1978 became the highest-ranking intelligence officer to defect from the Soviet bloc, signed an article published in the National Review, in which he revealed the following:

"In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. 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. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.

According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.

Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.".

Pacepa explained that the KGB (the main intelligence organization of the USSR) gave this operation the code name "SIG," from the Russian expression "Zionistskiye Gosudarstva" (Zionist Governments). Pacepa added:

"SIG was a large party/state operation. We created joint ventures to build hospitals, houses, and roads in these countries, and there we sent thousands of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors. All had the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world."

The Soviet bloc sent 4,000 agents of influence to promote that campaign

The former Romanian intelligence officer noted that the Soviet KGB ordered the DIE to seek out individuals belonging to Islamic ethnic groups for use in "disinformation and terrorism operations", infiltrating them into Muslim countries within their sphere of influence (such as Libya, Lebanon, and Syria):

"Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world."

The KGB used the same anti-Semitic libel as the Nazis to promote hatred of Jews

This operation to promote anti-Semitism used the same Russian pamphlet that had already been used by the Nazis in the anti-Semitic campaign that led to the Holocaust, as Pacepa pointed out:

"In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with 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. We also disseminated a KGB-fabricated “documentary” paper in Arabic alleging that Israel and its main supporter, the United States, were Zionist countries dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.

We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles. It is hard to say what exactly are the lasting effects of operation SIG. But the cumulative effect of disseminating hundreds of thousands of Protocols in the Islamic world and portraying Israel and the United States as Islam’s deadly enemies was surely not constructive."

A disinformation campaign whose effects persist to this day

This largely explains the rampant antisemitism that exists on the far left and within Islamism. It is, in part, the effect of a campaign orchestrated by the KGB, supported by the rest of the Soviet bloc's intelligence community, and employing vast resources. The far right already had considerable experience in promoting antisemitism, and is now promoting it in conjunction with the far left and Islamism, once again with Moscow's support.

Pacepa warned in 2014 about Putin and his disinformation operations

Six years before his death, on November 8, 2014, Mihai Pacepa warned about what was happening again in Russia in another article published by the National Review: "Soviet Communism is dead as form of government. But the Kremlin’s science of dezinformatsyia is on the rise again, and few people are paying attention." Pacepa explained what happened in Russia after Vladimir Putin, whom he described as a "former KGB officer," came to power: "Capitalizing on the fact that Putin had spent many years in Germany, the Kremlin’s disinformation machinery started portraying him as a Europeanized leader." The former Romanian intelligence officer added:

"During the old Cold War, Russia was a country where the KGB was a state within a state. Now the KGB, rechristened FSB, is the Russian state. In 2003, according to a study published in the well-known Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and republished by the Center for the Future of Russia, over 6,000 former officers of the KGB were running the “democratic” Russia’s federal and local governments, transforming that country into the first intelligence dictatorship in history. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin’s Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens."

Pacepa warned about what was happening in Russia twelve years ago: "After the Soviet revolution, the Kremlin did indeed transform the once rich and friendly Russia into an epitome of disinformation: a country that is not what it pretends to be, run by leaders who are not who they claim they are. President Putin has continued that disinformation tradition." Unfortunately, few listened to him, and now we are seeing the consequences. One of them is the active promotion of hatred towards Jews by the Kremlin's propaganda networks in Western countries, including slander against the State of Israel such as the one that accuses it of committing a "genocide" in Gaza, a lie promoted on a large scale by the extreme left and its Islamist allies and which the anti-Semitic and pro-Russian far right is actively supporting.

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Image: Grok / Elentir.