Al-Qaeda and the KGB

At Rivoluzione Italiana, Italian senator Paolo Guzzanti has published the complete text of a recent interview he held with Oleg Gordievsky. In it, Gordievsky discusses the links between Romano Prodi and the Soviet KGB which exercised an important influence on political events in Italy during the early 1980s. He goes on to consider the international political backwash of subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, which included the widespread training in Russia of anti-Western terrorists and intelligence agents. These training programmes continued long after the fall of the Soviet regime, and are still a significant factor in the security problems faced by the West today. From the end of the interview [my tr.]:

… the training continued in all sectors and in all geographic areas and was divided between official schools within Moscow and secret schools outside Moscow. Those who were trained there were ultimately not only western Communists like the Italians, but also all the Palestinian groups and those Arab terrorists who later became the heads of Al-Qaeda. Not to mention the people who came from Angola, from Mozambique, South Africa, Nicaragua, Cuba and Chile. They all followed courses of three types: military, espionage and counterespionage. The course in espionage and counterespionage were conducted in secret schools outside Moscow. So it is obvious that they were all, Italians included, trained not to defend themselves from nonexistent coups d’état, but in order to prepare pro-Soviet regimes, especially in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America - but not only there.”

You made a reference to Al-Qaeda. Can you say more about that?

“We say that the KGB made a selection of persons to train coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the countries of the Middle East, from Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia: they became all the future cadres of Al-Qaeda. Indeed, colonel Alexander Litvinenko has made acute analyses and important revelations on precisely this point: while whoever trained these people did not perhaps expect September 11, they were perfectly aware that they had created and oiled mechanisms for the production of terror which could therefore have taken the terror against the West, as they had been taught.”

Litvinenko said in the interview for Novosti Ukraina on December 28 2005 that the famous Captain Talik - for slandering whom Mario Scaramella is now in jail - was connected with Al-Qaeda. Do you know anything about that?

“I can only say that there is always a tie between experts of Soviet terrorism and Al-Qaeda, but I am not in a position to say what role this specific man had.”