Special to WorldTribune.com

As a high-ranking official for the secret police in communist Romania, Ion Mihai Pacepa had a front row seat when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s “liberation” war came to Romania.

Liberation Theology was originated within the KGB and its goal was total control over the World Council of Churches (WCC), an international ecumenical organization that represented 550 million Christians in 120 countries. Liberation Theology would in theory be used to move millions of South American Christians into the revolutionary fold.

Pacepa, who defected to the U.S. in the 1970s, said he “learned the fine points of the KGB involvement with Liberation Theology from Soviet General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, communist Romania’s chief razvedka (foreign intelligence) adviser – and my de facto boss, until 1956, when he became head of the Soviet espionage service, the PGU.”

“During my years at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community I managed the Romanian operations of the World Peace Council (WPC). It was as purely KGB as it gets. Most of the WPC’s employees were undercover Soviet bloc intelligence officers,” Pacepa said.

“From Sakharovsky I learned, however, 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. The Conference’s official task was to ameliorate poverty. Its undeclared goal was to recognize a new religious movement encouraging the poor to rebel against the ‘institutionalized violence of poverty.’ ”

Khruschev’s gambit in Romania began in October 1959 in what Pacepa said would come to be called “Khrushchev’s six-day vacation.” At the time, Romania was the sole “Latin” nation in the Soviet bloc and Khrushchev eyed the country as a springboard to exporting communism to Central and South America.

Liberation Theology was born out of KGB leader Aleksandr Shelepin’s “Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program” and approved by Soviet Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies.

The KGB was into a number of “liberation” movements in the era, including the Fidel Castro-involved FARC (National Liberation Army of Colombia), the National Liberation Army of Bolivia that had Che Guevara’s backing and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

  Ex spy: ‘Liberation theology’ was ‘as purely KGB as it gets’, WorldTribune.com