by Ion Mihai Pacepa April 23, 2015 4:00 PM
History often repeats itself, and if you have lived two lives, as I have
done, you have a good chance of seeing the reenactment with your own
eyes.
Liberation theology, of which not much has been heard for two decades,
is back in the news. But what is not being mentioned is its origins. It
was not invented by Latin American Catholics. It was developed by the
KGB. The man who is now the head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
Patriarch Kirill, secretly worked for the KGB under the code name
“Mikhailov” and spent four decades promoting liberation theology, which
we at the top of the Eastern European intelligence community nicknamed
Christianized Marxism.
Liberation theology has been generally understood to be a marriage of
Marxism and Christianity. What has not been understood is that it was
not the product of Christians who pursued Communism, but of Communists
who pursued Christians. I described the birth of liberation theology in
my book Disinformation, co-authored with Professor Ronald Rychlak. Its
genesis was part of a highly classified Party/State Disinformation
Program, formally approved in 1960 by KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin
and Politburo member Aleksei Kirichenko, then the second in the party
hierarchy after Nikita Khrushchev.
In 1971, the KGB sent Kirill — who had just been elevated to the rank of
archimandrite — to Geneva as emissary of the Russian Orthodox Church to
the World Council of Churches. The WCC was, and still is, the largest
international religious organization after the Vatican, representing
some 550 million Christians of various denominations in 120 countries.
Kirill/Mikhailov’s main task was to involve the WCC in spreading the new
liberation theology throughout Latin America. In 1975, the KGB was able
to infiltrate Kirill into the Central Committee of the WCC — a position
he held until he was “elected” patriarch of Russia, in 2009. Not long
after he joined the Central Committee, Kirill reported to the KGB: “Now
the agenda of the WCC is also our agenda.”
During Kirill’s years at the helm of the WCC, liberation theology put
down deep roots in Latin America — where the map now has significant
patches of red. Russian military ships and bombers are back in Cuba for
the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and Russia has also
newly sent ships and bombers to Venezuela.
Pope John Paul II, who knew the Communist playbook well, was not taken
in by the Soviets’ liberation theology. In 1983, his friend and trusted
colleague Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), who at that time
was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith,
discarded as Marxist the liberation-theology idea that class struggle is
fundamental to history. The cardinal called liberation theology a
“singular heresy” and blasted it as a “fundamental threat” to the
Church.
Of course, it was and remains a threat — one deliberately designed to
undermine the Church and destabilize the West by subordinating religion
to an atheist political ideology for its geopolitical gain.
Now names — like Oscar Romero and Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann – not heard
since the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still en vogue, are again
making international news. And here we are. The promoters of a
KGB-inspired religious ideology, which once embraced violent Marxist
revolution, are now denying its link to Marxism and to the KGB.
Each society reflects its own past. Down through the ages, everyone who
has sat on the Kremlin throne — autocratic tsar, Communist leader, or
democratically elected president — has been preoccupied with controlling
all expressions of religion that might impinge on his political
ambitions. When Ivan IV — the Terrible — had himself crowned in 1547 as
Russia’s first tsar, he also made himself head of the Russian Orthodox
Church. Tsarism and Communism may have been swallowed up by the sands of
time, but the Kremlin continues this tradition.
Throughout its history, Russia has been a samoderzhaviye, a traditional
Russian form of totalitarian autocracy in which a feudal lord rules the
country and the church with the help of his political police force. The
latter, whenever it had a sticky image problem, simply changed its name —
from Okhrana to Cheka, to GPU, to OGPU, to NKVD, to NKGB, to MGB, to
MVD, to KGB — and pretended it was a brand new organization.
Many deceased KGB officers must have been chortling in their graves on
New Year’s Eve, 1999, when their old boss, Vladimir Putin, at one time
my KGB counterpart, enthroned himself in the Kremlin. During the Cold
War, the KGB was a state within a state. Now the KGB — rechristened FSB —
is the state itself. According to a study published in the Russian
newspaper Novaya Gazeta, by 2003, some 6,000 former KGB officers were
running Russia’s federal and local governments. The respected British
newspaper the Guardian reports that President Putin has secretly
accumulated over $40 billion, becoming Europe’s richest man.
In Russia, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.
This brings us back to Kirill/Mikhailov. In 2006 Archbishop Kirill’s
personal wealth was estimated at $4 billion by the Moscow News. No
wonder. In the mid-1990s, the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department for
External Church Relations, managed by Kirill, was granted the privilege
of duty-free importation of cigarettes as reward for his loyalty to the
KGB. It did not take long for him to become the largest supplier of
foreign cigarettes in Russia.
A few years ago, while Kirill was visiting Ukraine as the new Patriarch
of Russia, a newspaper published a photo in which the prelate could be
seen wearing a Breguet wristwatch, the price of which was estimated at
30,000 euros. The Russian newspaper Kommersant accused Kirill of abusing
the privilege of duty-free importation of cigarettes, and dubbed him
the “tobacco metropolitan.” Kirill denied having such a watch. He said
the photograph must have been altered by his enemies, and he posted the
“real” photograph on his official website. A careful study of this
“real” photograph, however, shows that the Breguet watch had been
airbrushed off his wrist, but its reflection is still clearly visible on
a table surface beneath his arm.
Mikhailov and his KGB, rechristened FSB, are now doing their best to
airbrush out the apron strings connecting them to liberation theology.
Let’s not allow them to succeed.
—
Lieutenant General (retired) Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking
Soviet-bloc official ever to defect to the West. His last book,
Disinformation, co-authored with Professor Ronald Rychlak and published
by WND, is currently being made into a Hollywood movie.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417383/secret-roots-liberation-theology
