Opening the Moscow Files

Russia’s Constitutional Court has set July 7 to begin hearings on whether President Boris Yeltsin acted legally when he banned the Communist Party last year and--momentously--whether the party itself always acted legally during the more than 70 years that it ruled the Soviet Union. A now firmly anti-Communist government is expected to present explosive evidence on the latter question showing that party activities often went beyond the law.

Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s chief legal adviser, has provided an intriguing preview. Citing a document dated May 16, 1975, that he says came from a top-secret “special file” on the party’s clandestine activities, Shakhrai says that the party-controlled KGB oversaw the transfer of weapons to a major terrorist organization for the specific purpose of carrying out “sabotage and terrorism” against American and Israeli personnel. Soviet authorities had always strongly denied that their country condoned or abetted terrorism.

The organization Shakhrai says received Soviet weaponry was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, based in Damascus, Syria, and described by the U.S. government as “one of the most violent Palestinian terrorist groups.” Shakhrai says “thousands” of such documents in the secret file underscore the links between the party and international terrorism.

Here, apparently, is the hard evidence--almost literally, the smoking gun--to buttress the circumstantial information that Western intelligence agencies have painstakingly gathered over many years. International terrorists are able to operate effectively only when they can count on training, false passports, safe transportation, hiding places and weapons provided in whole or in part by foreign patrons. The Soviet Union was one such patron. Syria, which has been lobbying Washington to be taken off the list of terrorism-sponsoring countries, remains another. The revelations the Russian court is likely to hear in July could be a breakthrough in the war against terrorism.