Palestinian leader Abbas was KGB spy in 1980s: Israeli researchers

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was a KGB agent in the 1980s, according to a report broadcast on Israeli television.

The Thomas Fessy in Jerusalem of the BBC notes the record will not say Mr Abbas would have been recruited, whether he was paid, and how long he might have worked for the KGB although the biographical details are correct. The story was reported by Channel 1’s foreign news desk editor Oren Nahari. Among the documents was a list from 1938 that included the names of Palestinian sources and agents in Damascus. The researches reportedly reveal that Abbas had the code name Krotov or “mole”. Gideon Remez, a researcher at the Truman Institute of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explained that the connection was found among the documents smuggled out of Russian Federation in 1991 by Mitrokhin.

“The list is titled “People cultivated by KGB in Damascus in 1983, ” Dr”.

In the documents, the report says, just few lines refer to the now octogenarian Palestinian leader: His codename was “Krotov” or Mole and he worked with the Soviet secret police and security agency in Damascus circa 1983.

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Mohammed al-Madani, a member of the Fatah’s central committee told the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the report was merely an effort to discredit Abbas.

Mr Abbas was born in what was then British mandate Palestine, but his family fled to Syria during the 1948 war triggered by the creation of the state of Israel.

The Palestinian government denied that Abbas, who received a PhD in Moscow in 1982, had been a Soviet spy, and it accused Israel of “waging a smear campaign” aimed at derailing efforts to revive peace negotiations that collapsed in 2014.

Bogdanov was caught in a diplomatic tussle earlier this week after trying to broker a summit between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, who both claimed a willingness to meet while decrying the other for allegedly refusing.

Bogdanov was in the area this week for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials.

Israel has signalled that it is ready to re-engage in the latest peace talks, with a spokesman for Netanyahu saying the Israeli prime minister would be ready “anywhere, any time, for direct peace talks with no preconditions”, according to the Times. His official CV online shows that he was in Syria between 1983 and 1989.

Abbas claimed earlier this week that a meeting with Netanyahu had been set for tomorrow, but he said that an aide to the Israeli premier proposed delaying it and it was called off.

Palestinian officials said the PLO was working with Moscow in the early 1980s.

Palestinian officials scoffed at the report of Abbas’s 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 overseas. However, Palestinian leaders have previously called for the release of prisoners, a deadline for the end of the occupation of the West Bank and a halt to Israeli settlement building as conditions for talks.