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Soviet weapons were crucial in converting the Palestine Liberation Organization into a force capable of harassing and challenging Israel. Since the Soviet Union officially recognized the P.L.O. in 1974, the number of Palestinian commandos trained in the Soviet Union has swelled to more than 1,000, perhaps to 3,000. The P.L.O., in turn, has trained terrorists from many countries in a network of camps in Syria, Lebanon, South Yemen, even outposts as far away as the Indian Ocean island of Socotra.
There is circumstantial evidence linking the Soviet Union to West European terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy and the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany. When members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army went on a hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison in the spring of 1981, for example, British intelligence agents noticed that senior KGB officials held a number of meetings with Provo leaders in Dublin. Says a top Western intelligence expert: "The Soviets back groups and people who are certifiably terrorist, but they do it with their fingers crossed and with their hands over their ears, if not their eyes. Backing a terrorist is a little like shooting craps, and the Soviets don't like to gamble."
During Andropov's tenure at Dzerzhinsky Square, the KGB stepped up efforts to influence world events in the Soviet Union's favor through propaganda and disinformation, so-called active measures. Some of the KGB's more polished agents abroad have apparently been instructed in recent years to cultivate officials of their host governments and drop tantalizingly frank tidbits of information during cocktail-party chatter. Says former West German Counterespionage Officer Hans Josef Horchem: "They come right up to a man, knowing that he knows they are KGB, and with a wink of the eye, they calmly ask him about exactly what it is they want to know. It is disarming because the other fellow is thinking, 'If he is being so open about it, maybe what I know is not so secret after all.' "
The question of Soviet influence becomes difficult to call when counterespionage officials try to uncover KGB links to the antinuclear movement in the U.S. and Western Europe. By CIA reckoning, the Soviets spend roughly $3 billion to $4 billion each year on overt and covert propaganda activities. According to a State Department official, as much as $600 million may have been spent so far on the peace offensive. Using national Communist parties or recognized Communist-front organizations like the World Peace Council, the Kremlin has been able to channel funds to a host of new antiwar organizations that would, in many cases, reject the financial help if they knew the source. Western intelligence experts believe that the mass movement in opposition to new NATO missiles in Europe probably was not Soviet-inspired, but they fear that the Kremlin's active measures have given the movement greater momentum.
In testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last year, the FBI's