Menachem Begin, followed by Moshe Dayan and many other prominent Israeli
politicians and generals.
The US delegation to the conference was divided according to partisan lines, but was
generally united by sympathy for the ideas and outlook of the Bush-Cherne Team B. The
Democratic delegation was led by the late Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. This
group included civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, plus Norman Podhoretz and Midge
Decter of Commentary Magazine, two of the most militant and influential Zionist
neoconservatives. Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute was also on hand.
Although the group that arrived with Scoop Jackson were supposedly Democrats, most of
them would support Reagan-Bush in the November, 1980 election.
Then there was the GOP delegation, which was led by George Bush. Here were Bush
activist Ray Cline, Major General George Keegan, a stalwart supporter of Team B, and
Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, the leader of Team B. Here were Senator John
Danforth of Missouri and Brian Crozier, a "terrorism expert." Pseudo-intellectual
columnist George Will ("Will the Shill") was also on hand, as was Rome-based journalist
Claire Sterling, who had been active in covering up the role of Henry Kissinger in the
1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and who would later be blind to
indications of an Anglo-American role in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul
II.
International participation was also notable: Annie Kriegel and Jacques Soustelle of
France, Lord Alun Chalfont, Paul Johnson, and Robert Moss of the United Kingdom, and
many leading Israelis.
The keynote statement was made by Prime Minister Begin, who told the participants that
they should spread through the world the main idea of the conference, which was that all
terrorism in the world, whatever its origin, is controlled by the Soviet Union. Ray Cline
made a major presentation, developing his theory that terrorism should not be seen as a
spontaneous response to oppression by frustrated minorities, but rather only as the
preferred tool of Soviet bloc subversion. For Cline, the great watershed was an alleged
1969 decision by the Poliburo in Moscow to use the Palestine Liberation Organization as
the Kremlin's fifth column in the Middle East, and specifically to subsidize PLO terrorist
attacks with money, training, and communications provided by the KGB. For Cline, the
PLO, despite the fact that it enjoyed the support of the vast majority of Palestinians, was
merely a synthetic tool of Soviet intelligence. It was a very convenient argument for
Zionist hardliners.
Richard Pipes then drew on Russian history to illustrate the singular thesis that terrorism
was a product of Russian history, and of no other history. "The roots of Soviet terrorism,
indeed of modern terrorism," according to Pipes, "date back to 1879...It marks the
beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether
they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhof group, the Weathermen, Red
Brigades or PLO. I refer you to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small