Abbas denies he was Soviet agent

Israeli researchers say they have uncovered a document showing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet agent in the 1980s, but his office called it a smear campaign and pointed to suspicious timing.
The claim first emerged in a report by Israeli public television on Wednesday night citing two researchers studying documents from the so-called Mitrokhin papers stored in Britain at Cambridge University’s Churchill Archives Centre.
The researchers, Gideon Remez and Isabella Ginor of the Truman Institute at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said he was named as a KGB agent in Damascus in 1983 under the codename “Mole”.
Remez said Abbas was not simply labelled a “source or collaborator.”
“It says explicitly regarding Abbas that he was a KGB agent,” said Remez.
Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh told AFP it “falls under the framework of Israeli absurdities which we have got used to,” calling it a “smear campaign.”
He also alleged it was an attempt to derail a Russian peace initiative.
“It is clear Israel is troubled by the (Palestinians’) strategic relationship with Russia and by the clear and announced Russian position, which is to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis on an independent Palestinian state and the right of self-determination for our people,” Abu Rudeineh said.
Abbas was born in what was then British mandate Palestine, but his family fled to Syria during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.
In 1980, Abbas was selected to sit on the Palestine Liberation Organisation executive committee.
He had been in Moscow in 1982, where he studied for his doctorate, according to his online biography.
The Mitrokhin Archive, where the document was said to have been found, is based on files of the Soviet spy agency KGB that were smuggled to Britain.
Major Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive from 1972 until his retirement in 1984, and, disillusioned with domestic Soviet oppression, secretly copied information by hand, before defecting to Britain with it in 1992.
An Israeli specialist in Soviet history said the claim regarding Abbas was plausible.
“There were numerous contacts in the Middle East with the former Soviet Union,” said Yaacov Roi of the University of Tel Aviv.
“It is very plausible that the Soviets would have tried to use Abu Mazen (Abbas) at the KGB while he was a student.”
The report comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to organise a face-to-face meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Putin’s Middle East envoy Mikhail Bogdanov met with both Netanyahu and Palestinian officials this week. He also reportedly met Abbas in Jordan three weeks ago.
The television report recalled that Bogdanov was stationed in Damascus in 1983. His official CV online shows that he was in Syria between 1983 and 1989.

Palestinian court suspends local elections
A Palestinian court yesterday suspended municipal elections set for October 8 following disputes between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements over candidate lists, jeopardising the first vote since 2006 to involve both parties.
“The court decided in a meeting today to stop the elections planned for October 8,” Hisham al-Hatoo, head of the Palestinian high court in the Fatah-led West Bank, explained.
The Fatah website said a second hearing would be held on December 21, though it was not immediately clear whether the elections could then be rescheduled.
Islamist movement Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012, but it was due to participate this year.
A Hamas spokesman said it rejected the decision.  
“This is a political decision,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
The court issued yesterday’s ruling in response to a challenge by a lawyer, Nael al-Houh.
Houh said his appeal was based on the fact that the elections were not being held in Jerusalem and over concerns related to polling in the Gaza Strip.
In Gaza, a court run by Hamas cancelled lists of Fatah candidates in a number of municipalities for “violating the election law”, according to a judicial source and a spokesman for Fatah.