Lieutenant Raymond E. Foster (Los Angeles Police Department, retired), writing for Hi-Tech Criminal Justice, notes that “as of August 14, 2005, world-wide, there have been 554 terrorist attacks targeting police officers. These attacks resulted in 2,546 injuries and 1,327 fatalities.”
Item: “Al Qaeda suicide attack hits police center in Algeria,” August 19, 2008
Item: “Pakistan ambush kills four police officials,” July 19, 2009
Item: “Ten killed, including seven police, in Iraq violence,” July 20, 2009
Item: “Terrorists in Iraq target police: 350 killed in year,” March 26, 2004
Item: “Child, senior police officer killed in Mosul attacks,” July 6, 2009
Item: “Blast hits Islamabad police station, 2 killed, 3 wounded,” June 7, 2009
From Malaysia to Turkey, and Colombia to Pakistan, the trend seems to be spiking upward. According to the press reports, many, if not most, of the attacks on police mentioned above are the work of “Islamic extremists.” However, the current round of terrorist attacks on law enforcement bears an unmistakable resemblance to previous orchestrated campaigns of “escalating violence” by Soviet-directed Marxist-Leninist terror groups. The more astute counterterrorism analysts have noted virtually all of the significant “Islamic” terrorist groups carrying out these attacks — al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Taliban, Lashkar e-Taiba, Abu Sayyef, etc. — were formed by, and/or are led by, chiefs who are “former” communists. These same “militant Islamicists” maintain open cordial relations with the Kremlin “infidels” and more secret back-channel relations with the Russian KGB-FSB and GRU, through whom they receive not only arms, munitions, and explosives, but also training and intelligence.
Communists as Jihadists
As Finnish counterterrorism expert Antero Leitzinger has noted in his enlightening study The Roots of Islamic Terrorism, “Afghan communists have a broad history of ‘turning coats,’ or to be more accurate, of growing beards and adopting the title ‘Mullah’ attached to a pseudonym.” The most important Taliban leaders — Abdurrashid Dostum, Shahnawaz Tanai, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar — are longtime, career communists and KGB operatives. Their attacks on the Afghani and Pakistani police have been taken from the communist game plan, as put forth in the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (quoted above), authored by Brazilian Communist Party member Carlos Marighella.
Since its publication 40 years ago, this text has been translated into many languages and published in many editions. It has become a standard handbook of terrorists (including so-called Islamic terrorists) worldwide, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The Mini-Manual focuses a considerable portion of its attention on instructing would-be terrorist cadres on the importance of targeting the police and how to go about attacking them in the most efficient manner.
Marighella tells his Mini-Manual readers, for instance, that among the “vulnerable targets for assaults” are commissaries and police stations, jails, and military and police vehicles. His students of mayhem are taught the importance of ambushing police:
Ambushes are attacks typified by surprise when the enemy is trapped across a road or when he makes a police net surrounding a house or an estate. A false message can bring the enemy to the spot where he falls into the trap.
The principle object of the ambush tactic is to capture enemy arms and punish him with death.
“The roads followed by the police vehicles must be mined at key points along the way and at forced stopping points,” instructs Marighella. “When the mines explode, the vehicles will fly into the air. The police will be caught in the trap and will suffer losses or will be victims of ambush.”
The Mini-Manual also provides instruction to the urban guerrilla on the fine art of using mass demonstrations as a cover for terrorist activities. It advises, for example:
Street tactics have revealed a new type of urban guerrilla, the urban guerrilla who participates in mass demonstrations. This is the type we designate as the urban guerrilla demonstrator, who joins the ranks and participates in popular marches with specific and definite aims.
These aims consist in hurling stones and projectiles of every type, using gasoline to start fires, using the police as a target for their fire arms, capturing police arms, kidnapping agents of the enemy and provocateurs, shooting with careful aim at the henchmen torturers and the police chiefs.
The manual also urges the riot-makers to place snipers on roof tops for shooting police who are trying to maintain crowd control, and instructs on “throwing bottles, bricks, paperweights, and other projectiles from the tops of apartment and office buildings against the police.”
Global Game Plan
We can observe these instructions being followed in attacks on law enforcement from Karachi to Kabul, Istanbul to Baghdad, Paris to Los Angeles. Why the concentrated focus on aggression toward the police? In a free society, the police are indispensable agents for protection of the rule of law; both for protection of the citizen against aggression by criminal elements, and even more importantly for protection of the citizen against aggression and abuse by government officials. In the totalitarian society that the terrorists hope to create — whether modeled on Iran, Cuba, Russia, or post-Soviet Kazakhstan — the police are purely instruments of oppression for the central government, whose power is unrestrained by constitutional checks and balances. Although the urban guerrilla and his street demonstration accomplices vociferously denounce what they claim is oppression and brutality, their true aim is to escalate violence to a level that will provoke the government and the police to suspend civil liberties, invoke emergency powers, and dismantle the constitutional structures that protect against the concentration of power.
Marighella is explicit that the urban guerrilla is not interested in any peaceful reforms; his only interest is to drive the situation to the crisis point where:
The government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life in the city unbearable…. The armed forces, the navy and the air force are mobilized to undertake routine police functions….
Rejecting the “so-called political solution,” the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act.
Although his name is affixed to this devilish playbook, Marighella was not the originator of the scheme. Claire Sterling noted in her important 1980 book The Terror Network: “An intimate of Castro’s and assiduous visitor to Cuba, Marighella was an apparatchik in Brazil’s pro-Moscow Communist Party for forty years.” It was Castro’s DGI (supervised by the Soviet KGB) that helped Marighella codify in the Mini-Manual a program that the Soviets had already been using with deadly efficiency for decades. Constitutional scholar and former Salt Lake City Police Chief W. Cleon Skousen observed in his 1966 book The Communist Attack on U.S. Police that a key event that would serve as an archetype for the global attack on police actually took place shortly after World War II, in 1948 — a little over 20 years before the Mini-Manual was published.
The Bogota Archetype
The event was the Pan-American Conference in Bogota, Colombia, featuring leaders of all nations of the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet embassy was the nerve center of massive preparations aimed at turning the conference into a violent and deadly maelstrom. One of the nine hand-picked communist leaders who instigated the riots and mayhem in Bogota on April 9 was the then-virtually unknown Cuban “student” Fidel Castro. On a signal, the assassination of Colombian politician George Gaitan, the communist urban guerrillas generated their street mobs and led them into a rapid escalation of violence that overwhelmed the police.
Dr. Skousen, who served with the FBI for 16 years and was for many years the editorial director of the independent police journal Law and Order, wrote:
The Communists had a crew sweep through the city ahead of the mob, smashing off locks and opening stores and warehouses. After the mob had looted the buildings, another crew went through spraying gasoline on floors and walls. The last stage was to have trained arsonists methodically burn these structures which ultimately destroyed the center of the city. Colleges, churches, stores and other public buildings were burned. Altogether, 136 major buildings were destroyed…. After the battles between the police and the mobs had subsided, more than 1,000 corpses were left lying in the streets. Hundreds more had been carried off in the night.
A decade and a half later, the same program would be used to reduce American cities to smoldering ruin. And the communist program for targeting police outlined by Marighella would be instituted with a vengeance. The Weather Underground (WU), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the Puerto Rican Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) were some of the most active terrorists carrying out the plan.
The Obama presidential campaign unintentionally thrust two of the most notorious Weather Underground terrorists of the 1960s, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, back into the spotlight. Evidence points to them as the murderers of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian McDonnell on February 16, 1970. Larry Grathwol, a former FBI undercover informant inside the WU, says that Ayers admitted to him that Dohrn had planted the bomb for him. Ayers and Dohrn, who are friends and supporters of President Barack Obama from his Chicago “community activist” days, have never repented of their revolutionary activities, and in fact, Ayers is still actively involved with the communist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
The cases of communist “Islamic” cop killers Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) and Mumia Abu-Jamal (formerly Wesley Cook) are also examples of the Mini-Manual put into action. During the 1960s, H. Rap Brown gained fame as the fiery orator and minister of justice of the Black Panther Party. Brown engaged in a shootout with police in New York in 1971, for which he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to prison for five years. While in prison, he supposedly converted to Islam, and when he was released in 1976 had become “Imam” Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. However, when two sheriff’s deputies attempted to serve him with an arrest warrant in 2000 (for possession of a stolen vehicle, impersonating an officer, and other charges), he shot them both, killing Deputy Ricky Kinchon and wounding Deputy Aldranon English.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the international darling of the socialist-communist Left and the Islamic Left, is serving a life sentence for the 1981 ambush and execution-murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Like Brown/Al-Amin, Cook/Abu-Jamal studied the communist rants of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.” And like Brown, he converted to Islam while in prison. Both men still show far more Mao and Marx than Mohamed in their ideological tirades.
So too does another notorious relic from the 1970s, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the infamous communist terrorist better known as “Carlos” or “The Jackal.” In 1997, he was tried and found guilty of the 1975 murder of two French police officers in Paris. He converted to Islam in prison, but his 2003 book Revolutionary Islam is a screed for Islamo-Leninism, a fusion of communism and Islam.
It is important to recognize, however, that these cases and many others illustrate not the conversion of communists to Islam, but the adaptation of Islam by communists to serve communist purposes. “Today’s international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East,” says General Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of Communist Romania’s secret police, the DIE. “I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general.”
In an August 2006 National Review Online column, Pacepa, who had overseen much of the Middle Eastern terrorism for the Kremlin, made these startling statements:
General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania’s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia’s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
Between 1968 and 1978, when I broke with Communism, the security forces of Romania alone sent two cargo planes full of military goodies every week to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon. Since the fall of Communism the East German Stasi archives have revealed that, in 1983 alone, its foreign intelligence service sent $1,877,600 worth of AK-47 ammunition to Lebanon. According to Vaclav Havel, Communist Czechoslovakia shipped 1,000 tons of the odorless explosive Semtex-H (which can’t be detected by sniffer dogs) to Islamic terrorists — enough for 150 years.
In the mid-1970s, says Pacepa, the KGB ordered his service, the DIE — along with other East European sister services — to scour their countries for trusted Communist Party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the Islamic countries of their spheres of influence. “Before I left Romania for good, in 1978,” Pacepa states, “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.”
Adding to General Pacepa’s revelations are the more recent exposés by KGB-FSB defectors Alexander Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin, who similarly point to Vladimir Putin and the Lubyanka as the sources of the global wave of terrorism. They and others have noted that Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, is a Russian FSB operative. In an interview following the deadly suicide bomb attacks in London in July 2005, Litvinenko stated:
I know only one organization that has made terrorism the main tool of solving political problems. It is the Russian special services.… At the special department of the KGB they trained terrorists from practically every country in the world…. The bloodiest terrorists in the world were or are agents of the KGB-FSB…. I can definitely say that the center of global terrorism is not in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or the Chechen Republic. The terrorist infection is spread worldwide from Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin cabinet. And until the Russian special services are outlawed, dispersed and condemned, the terrorism will never stop: bombs will blow up and blood will be shed…. Yuri Andropov, Vladimir Putin, Nikolay Patrushev and others — these people are the main terrorists…. And until we condemn them … global terrorism will continue.
And, we might add, we can expect the police forces of the non-communist nations to bear the brunt of the global attack. Incredibly, the United States government — through the Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, administrations — continues to treat Russia as an “ally” in the fight against terrorism, ignoring the extensive evidence that Putin and company are orchestrating the terror offensive. It is the same terrorist offensive of the 1960s and ’70s, but in a new phase, under a new guise; instead of the “anti-colonialism” and “national independence” movements the communists used as covers in that earlier period, they have adopted and co-opted Islam to serve their purpose.
