Jerusalem – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a KGB agent in Damascus in 1983, Channel 1 reported Wednesday night, based on documents provided by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.
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According to Channel 1’s Oren Nahari, Abbas’s name appears on a list of KGB agents that was obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez from Hebrew University’s Truman Institute. Nahari reported that the part of the archives containing Abbas’ name was made public a few months ago.
According to the report, Abbas’ code name was Krotov, or “mole.” Nahari said it was not known whether Abbas was an agent before or after the date listed in the document.
In 1983, the Soviet Union’s ambassador in Damascus was Mikhail Bogdanov, who is currently Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special Mideast envoy. Bogdanov was in Israel and the Palestinian Authority this week promoting the idea of a summit between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow.
Abbas was born in Safed, and he and his family fled to Syria before the 1948 War of Independence. He earned a BA in law from Damascus University and later went to Oriental College in Moscow where he received a Ph.D. in History.
His 1982 dissertation, “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” blames the Zionists for collaborating with the Nazis and puts the number of Jews killed at one million.
Mitrokhin, who died in 2004, defected to the west in 1991 with reams of copied documents and handwritten notes from the KGB archives, which he helped move from 1972-1984 to a new location.