Yeltsin Aide Says Terrorists Got Soviet Help

MOSCOW — The Soviet Union bankrolled terrorism on a wide scale, including giving arms and munitions to Palestinian extremists to kill Americans and Israelis and to sabotage world trade in diamonds and oil, an adviser to President Boris N. Yeltsin said Monday.

Claiming to have the “smoking gun” proving the Communist Kremlin’s long-suspected, but never documented, ties with international terror, Sergei M. Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s legal counselor, said that impounded Soviet Communist Party documents clearly show that the party covertly aided “several dozen” foreign countries and organizations, among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Shakhrai made the revelation on the eve of a hearing by the Russian Constitutional Court, which convenes today to determine whether Yeltsin overstepped his powers last year by halting Communist Party activities and then banning the once-omnipotent force in Soviet life altogether.

In remarks only a little less sensational for those who follow the twists of current Russian politics, Shakhrai said his previously announced decision to quit as Yeltsin’s legal counselor is because of irreconcilable disagreements in Yeltsin’s entourage. And he warned that a current “vacuum of state power” could spur the president’s opponents to attempt a putsch.

“The danger is that the Russian situation is close to that of Weimar Germany,” Shakhrai said, direly evoking the social, political and economic chaos that led to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

During recent months, leaked or declassified documents from seized party archives have shown how Soviet Communists shamelessly appropriated government funds to finance their comrades abroad--including a $15-million payment reportedly made to the Communist Party U.S.A.

But Shakhrai’s statements at a news conference were the most unequivocal yet to sketch the ties between Moscow and foreign terrorists.

Since the demise of the East-West divide, tight connections have already been proven between some former Soviet satellites such as East Germany and acts of terrorism directed against Western democracies.

Shakhrai offered only one detailed example of the Kremlin’s involvement, but it concerned one of the most extreme of the Palestinian groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by physician George Habash. The PFLP has vehemently opposed any peace settlement with Israel.

Reading to reporters from a document taken from the Soviet Communist Party’s so-called “Special File,” dated May 16, 1975, Shakhrai said that two days earlier the KGB had, on orders from the party Central Committee, handed over “foreign-made arms and ammunition” to leaders of the Popular Front’s External Operations Service.

The non-Soviet origin of the weapons would have meant they could not be traced to Moscow. Also, the party document, stamped “top secret,” left no doubts that the Soviets expected the arms to be used for political violence.

The “chief goal” of the deal, the document quoted by Shakhrai said, was “the continuation by special means of the oil war; actions against American and Israel personnel in third countries; sabotage and terrorism; sabotage against the ‘diamond trust,’ ” he read.

“All these are in the Central Committee’s documents, and everything will be published when the time comes,” Shakhrai said, waving the document at reporters.

“Unfortunately, we have lots and lots of such documents,” he added.

He refused to give journalists additional examples but indicated that the Irish Republican Army may have been another recipient of Soviet funds.

What use the PFLP, a Marxist group, made of the arms and ammunition provided by the KGB was not immediately clear. But theoretically, they could have been used in one of the group’s most spectacular operations: the June, 1976, hijacking of an Air France jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda.

At the time it aided the PFLP, the Communist Party, led by General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, was still officially espousing a policy of detente with the West. In his role as party leader, Brezhnev would ordinarily have chaired sessions of the Central Committee.

By trying to disrupt the international trade in petroleum, the Kremlin may have hoped to hamstring the West economically and win higher prices for its own oil exports. Similarly, the Soviet Union was a large producer of diamonds.

“In principle, the money for terrorist organizations was transferred through the same channel as assistance to foreign Communist parties,” Shakhrai said.

“In general, a phone call from the Politburo (the top party organ) was enough for the Foreign Trade Bank to allocate a certain sum of money,” he said. “A KGB officer would collect it and write a receipt, all of which can now be found in the special Politburo folder.”

Despite his resignation, which Shakhrai said Yeltsin accepted during a face-to-face meeting Monday, the stocky, mustachioed jurist will be among those who plead Yeltsin’s cause before the Constitutional Court, appearing, he said, as a private citizen empowered by Yeltsin to act as his agent.

The trial should provide an unprecedented examination of the activities of the Communist Party since it seized power in Russia in 1917. Yeltsin was quoted Monday by the Russian Itar-Tass news agency as saying that society now demands to know the “whole truth” about the party and its responsibility for dragging Soviet society into the “deepest of economic and moral-political crises.”

The presidential press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, even claimed that evidence uncovered of the party’s misdeeds shows that its “methods and ideology” were no less criminal than the acts of the Nazi Party that were bared at the Nuremberg trials.

Foes of Yeltsin see his decrees throttling and finally snuffing out the Communist Party as flagrant evidence of the president’s creeping dictatorship.

But in explaining his resignation, Shakhrai said the real problem in Russia is a lack of sufficient executive power and a surfeit of rival strategies, advice and personalities that often lead Yeltsin to make ultimately contradictory decisions or cause paralysis.

This power vacuum could lead to a “national-patriotic putsch,” Shakhrai said, sounding much as former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze did when he warned former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the looming danger of an anti-reform dictatorship.