REPORT: According to the Mitrokhin archive which was smuggled out of the USSR, Palestinian Authority president then worked under KGB agent Mikhail Bodganov, who was at the time posted in Damascus, according to Israel’s TV1 News.

By i24news

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 News reported Wednesday evening, according to an archive smuggled out of the USSR.

Mahmud Abbas pictured in Brussels on June 22, 2016 – Photo: THIERRY CHARLIER/AFP

According to a document from the famous Mitrokhin archive, which was obtained by Israeli researchers and scholars Isabela Ginor and Gideon Remez, Abbas was code-named Krotov (mole) while he worked as a spy, the report said.

Abass was a KGB agent and worked under Mikhail Bodganov, who was at the time posted in Damascus and is now a top Russian diplomat in the Middle East, according to the exclusive report by the channel’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari,

Bogdanov, the man who Abbas was reported to have worked under, attempted earlier this week to broker a summit between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow.

It is not known at this stage whether Abbas, who studied at a Moscow university in the 1980s, was an agent before or after his time in Damascus.

Israeli researcher Gideon Remez spoke to i24news and clarified that even though Abbas may have been a KGB agent, this does not necessarily mean that he was a spy.

Remez explained that he and his counterparts obtained the Mitrokhin archive, which was released last year, by ordering the entire Middle Eastern file from Cambridge University.

Remez told i24news that this wasn’t in fact the original document and that Mitrokhin had summarized and copied out in his own handwriting the original document.

The Palestinian Authority quickly issued a statement denying the report, with Fatah official Nabil Shaath calling it a “smear campaign.”

“Those Israeli lies won’t cause Abbas to accept Israel as a Jewish state,” the PA said.

View original i24news publication at:
http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/124814-160907-palestinian-authority-s-abbas-was-russian-kgb-agent-in-syria-report