In a startling new interview, a 3-star general and former head
of Communist Romania’s secret police who defected to the United States in 1978,
claims that the Theology of Liberation was the creation of the KGB, who
exported it to Latin America as a way of introducing Marxism into the
continent.
Ion Mihai Pacepa has been called “the Cold War’s most
important defector,” and after his defection, the Romanian government under
Nicolae Ceausescu placed two death sentences and a $2 million bounty on his
head. During the more than ten years that Pacepa worked with the CIA, he made
what the agency described as “an important and unique contribution to the
United States.”
He is reported in fact to have given the CIA “the best
intelligence ever obtained on communist intelligence networks and internal
security services.”
“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,” Pacepa said in a recent article. In his role as doctrinal
watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called liberation theology a “singular
heresy” and a “fundamental threat” to the Church.
Pacepa says that he learned details of the KGB involvement
with Liberation Theology from Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, Communist
Romania’s chief foreign intelligence adviser, who later became head of the
Soviet espionage service, the PGU.
In 1959, Sakharovsky went to Romania together with Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for what would become known as “Khrushchev’s six-day
vacation.” According to Pacepa, Khrushchev “wanted to go down in history as the
Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America.” He
chose Romania as his point of export, since it was the only Latin country in
the Soviet bloc and provided a logical liaison to Latin America because of the
similarity of language and culture.
Pacepa claims that the Theology of Liberation was not merely
infiltrated by the KGB, it was actually the brainchild of Soviet intelligence
services.
“The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented
name: Liberation Theology,” Pacepa said.
According to the General, during those years, the KGB had a
penchant for “liberation” movements, and a Theology of Liberation fit right in.
The National Liberation Army of Columbia (FARC), created by
the KGB with help from Fidel Castro; the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia,
created by the KGB with help from “Che” Guevara; and the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), created by the KGB with help from Yasser Arafat are just a
few additional “liberation” movements born at the Lubyanka — the headquarters
of the KGB.
Pacepa said that Liberation Theology was born of a 1960s
top-secret “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” approved by Aleksandr
Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko,
who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies.
The program mandated that “the KGB take secret control of
the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it
as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary
tool,” Pacepa said.
The Soviets were aware that the WCC was the largest
international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, he said, representing
some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.
According to Pacepa the KGB followed a step-by-step
procedure to bring Liberation Theology to Latin America, starting with the
establishment of an intermediate international religious organization called
the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), headquartered in Prague. Its main task
“was to bring the KGB-created Liberation Theology into the real world,” he
said.
“The new Christian Peace Conference was managed by the KGB
and was subordinated to the venerable World Peace Council, another KGB
creation, founded in 1949 and by then also headquartered in Prague,” he said.
In his work with the Soviet bloc intelligence community,
Pacepa managed the Romanian operations of the World Peace Council (WPC).
“Most of the WPC’s employees were undercover Soviet bloc
intelligence officers. The WPC’s two publications in French, Nouvelles
perspectives and Courier de la paix, were also managed by undercover KGB – and
Romanian DIE – intelligence officers,” he said.
Pacepa said that in 1968 “the KGB-created Christian Peace
Conference, supported by the world-wide World Peace Council, was able to
maneuver a group of leftist South American bishops into holding a Conference of
Latin American Bishops at Medellin, Colombia.”
Though the Conference’s official task was to seek solutions
to poverty, its “undeclared goal” was “to recognize a new religious movement
encouraging the poor to rebel against the ‘institutionalized violence of
poverty,’ and to recommend the new movement to the World Council of Churches
for official approval,” he said.
“The Medellin Conference achieved both goals. It also bought
the KGB-born name ‘Liberation Theology,’” he said.
Pacepa said that although he has good reason to suspect that
there was an organic connection between the KGB and some of the leading
promoters of Liberation Theology, he has no evidence to prove it.
“I recently glanced through Gutierrez’s book A Theology of
Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation (1971), and I had the feeling that it
was written at the Lubyanka,” he said.
“No wonder he is now credited with being the founder of
Liberation Theology,” he said.
Six years after Pacepa’s defection to the West, the Vatican
issued its first of two scathing critiques of Liberation Theology, under the
guidance of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
The stated purpose of the first “instruction” was to draw
attention “to the deviations, and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and
to Christian living, that are brought about by certain forms of liberation
theology which use, in an insufficiently critical manner, concepts borrowed
from various currents of Marxist thought.”
The Vatican instruction also warned that the theologies of
liberation generate “a disastrous confusion between the ‘poor’ of the Scripture
and the ‘proletariat’ of Marx.” In so doing, it said, “they pervert the
Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of
the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class
struggle.”
In Pacepa’s words, Liberation Theology was “deliberately
designed to undermine the Church and destabilize the West by subordinating
religion to an atheist political ideology for its geopolitical gain.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome
Highest Ranking Cold War Defector: The KGB Invented
‘Liberation Theology’ – Breitbart
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