Moscow’s Man at the United Nations
Izabella Tabarovsky
As the 81st session of the U.N. General Assembly begins, a look back at how the Soviets vetoed a Jewish diplomat and installed their pet Nazi as secretary-general
Austrian diplomat and politician Kurt Waldheim (1918-2007) pictured at a press conference in New York after being appointed as the new secretary-general of the United Nations, Dec. 21, 1971
Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images
It’s hard to imagine it today, but there was a moment during the Cold War when a Jew nearly headed the United Nations. It happened in 1971—the year of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to select the next secretary-general—and the man was the 47-year-old Finnish ambassador to the United Nations, Max Jakobson. The son of a Finnish Jewish father and a mother who had converted to Judaism, Jakobson began his career as a journalist, working for the BBC before joining Finland’s foreign service. He was widely regarded as “one of the ablest men” at the United Nations: an experienced diplomat “with a cool head and good nerves.” African states appreciated his firm anti-colonialist stance. He was an American and British favorite, and France’s only complaint against him was that he didn’t speak French. For much of that year, he was considered the front-runner.
His chief rival was 52-year-old Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s former foreign minister and now the country’s permanent representative at the United Nations. A chairman of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, he was typically mentioned alongside a slew of other long-shot candidates. Journalists had a hard time finding anything distinct to say about him: He told them his favorite hobby was work and that he believed the United Nations should be used as an instrument of peace. He was like so many other diplomats who filled the halls of the United Nations—a man with a “correct and colorless record.”
He also had the backing of the Soviet Union.
The 1971 secretary-general selection was the first since the 1967 Six-Day War, which marked a major defeat for the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Israel’s victory over the USSR’s Arab allies was a turning point in the Soviet attitude toward the Jewish state and Zionism. Moscow was always hostile, but after 1967, as Soviet Jews began to demand the right to emigrate, it painted Zionism as a threat to its interests everywhere. But that was also a period of rising Soviet influence inside the United Nations, as former colonies became member states in the 1960s; a position that the Soviets wanted to consolidate.
By November, Waldheim was neck and neck with Jakobson, as the USSR repeatedly vetoed the Finnish candidate in the Security Council. Two days before Christmas, the United Nations officially made its pick: The Austrian representative became its new head. When the initial shock subsided, many concluded that it was precisely Waldheim’s blandness that had won him the job. “Certainly the Soviet Union, which supported his candidacy, does not expect daring initiatives from this model of noncommittal neutrality,” quipped The New York Times. The pape r wasn’t wrong: Moscow had other plans for this secretary-general.
Max Jakobson, permanent representative of Finland to the United Nations, at a press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York, April 22, 1970 / UN Photo/Teddy Chen
Few stories better capture the moral bankruptcy of an institution born from the ruins of World War II and the Holocaust than the Soviet quid-pro-quo relationship with Waldheim as its head. Years after his decade as the United Nations’ chief ended, the world learned that Waldheim had lied about his wartime past. A little later, it would emerge that Moscow had likely known all along.
Waldheim always claimed that his service in the Wehrmacht was brief and had ended when he was wounded on the Eastern Front in late 1941, after which he returned home, pursued legal studies, and got married. In fact, he had returned to the front in 1942 and served out the rest of the war as an intelligence officer in the Balkans: first in Yugoslavia during brutal Nazi massacres and anti-partisan reprisals, then in Salonica during the deportations of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz. It also turned out that before the war, in Vienna, Waldheim was a member of the National Socialist German Students’ League and the Sturmabteilung—the infamous Brownshirts. A later commission concluded that he did not personally take part in the atrocities in the Balkans, but his lack of embarrassment at being exposed as a liar and his insistence that he had seen and known nothing beggared belief—all the more so because his immediate superior, Gen. Alexander Löhr, was a convicted war criminal executed by the Yugoslavs in 1947.
From the moment he moved into his office on the 38th floor of the Glass Building—the U.N. headquarters housing its administrative arm, the Secretariat—Waldheim proved unmistakably subservient to Moscow. With him at the helm, the Soviets expanded their intelligence footprint at the Secretariat, planting hundreds of additional KGB agents under diplomatic and bureaucratic covers. Under his watch, they completed a mission they had begun years earlier: turning the United Nations into a weapon in their long-running campaign to pit the world against Israel—America’s main ally in the Middle East—and Zionism, which, especially after 1967, the Soviets regarded as a major ideological threat. Observers took note of Waldheim’s spinelessness. By 1978, French intelligence had concluded that Waldheim was “an agent of influence under Soviet control.”
Once elected, Waldheim ‘readily agreed’ to Malik’s demand to fill professional posts in the Secretariat with 250 additional Soviet nationals.
For the Soviets, eventual revelations about Waldheim’s Nazi past were, in all likelihood, old news. For them, he had been a known quantity since 1947, when he spent a month in Moscow as part of the Austrian delegation negotiating the country’s sovereignty, as the World Jewish Congress’s Eli Rosenbaum—a former federal prosecutor who would later lead the Department of Justice’s Nazi-hunting unit and who revealed Waldheim’s Nazi past in 1986—detailed in his book Betrayal. Stalin’s intelligence services would have pored over every detail of his biography in search of compromising information, both as a matter of their invariable practice and because a Nazi past was a dream piece of leverage to have over upwardly mobile Europeans.
Decades later, former Yugoslav intelligence officers told The Washington Post that they had marked Waldheim as a potential recruit for Moscow in 1947, the same year he traveled there, while his former wartime commanding officer faced a firing squad in Yugoslavia. They were certain the Soviets had followed through—a suspicion indirectly reinforced two decades later, during the Prague Spring, when Waldheim, now Austria’s foreign minister, ordered the country’s Prague embassy to bar entry to Czechs who were being hunted by Soviet security forces. The ambassador disobeyed, but the gesture would not have gone unappreciated in Moscow.
It’s shocking enough to think that the United Nations was run for a decade—a full quarter of its existence—by a man with a Nazi past, who lied about it all his life, including while in office, where he liked to refer to himself as “the chief human rights officer of the planet Earth.” It’s even more disturbing to realize that this man may have been co-opted by the Soviets, serving as an instrument in their campaign against Israel, the United States, and Western democracies more broadly.
The “Zionism is racism” U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on Waldheim’s watch, was a massive ideological coup for Moscow, securing a U.N. imprimatur for a lie concocted by Soviet propagandists and active-measures specialists. Waldheim might not have played a direct role in its drafting or adoption, but by surrendering the United Nations to Moscow as a platform for political warfare against Israel and the West, he condemned it to a moral unraveling whose consequences we are still living with today. To grasp the scale and the method of this corruption, it helps to look at the nuts and bolts of the Soviet takeover of the U.N. Secretariat.
The most vivid account of how the Soviets weaponized the United Nations against the West comes from Arkady Shevchenko’s memoir, Breaking With Moscow. Shevchenko was the ultimate Soviet insider; he was a protégé of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and his big break came at the age of 29, when he accompanied Premier Nikita Khrushchev on his visit to the United Nations (a journey complete with 10 drunken days aboard the decrepit, storm-tossed passenger liner Baltika sailing from Kaliningrad to New York). In 1973, after several tours of duty at the United Nations, Moscow recommended him to Waldheim for the post of undersecretary-general for political and Security Council affairs. The appointment placed Shevchenko in a position second in power only to the secretary-general himself. Disillusioned with the corrupt and oppressive Soviet system, he began cooperating with American intelligence and in 1978 defected to the United States—the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat to do so up to that point.
Arkady Shevchenko / Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection (Library of Congress)
For Moscow, Shevchenko wrote, the United Nations was the “best watchtower on the West.” It was a great place to collect political and technical intelligence—but that was only part of the story. As Waldheim’s undersecretary, Shevchenko was responsible for using the Secretariat “to widen the scope of Soviet ideological and propaganda warfare” within the organization. That meant ensuring that nothing “detrimental to Soviet interests” ever appeared on the United Nations’ agenda or in its studies or reports.
The converse was true as well: He was to make sure that favorable information was included, whether it was true or not. His other duties included promoting KGB undercover agents to more influential posts, protecting them if the CIA or FBI got on to them, and “indoctrinating” non-Soviet staff into a pro-Soviet point of view. He was also tasked with working with newly independent, postcolonial member states to make sure they didn’t fall under the influence of Western “bourgeois ideology” but aligned themselves with Moscow and its “progressive ideas.”
The KGB had penetrated the United Nations long before Waldheim rose to the top. Shevchenko recalled that out of 28 men who worked in his section of the Soviet mission in 1968, 21 were KGB or GRU (military intelligence) officers. Other nations planted spies at the United Nations as well, he noted, “but the Soviet Union had the largest contingent and the most thorough penetration of the organization.”
What made the United Nations such a dream base of operations for the KGB was that, unlike embassy staff, Soviet nationals assigned to the United Nations could move freely around the United States, which is why expanding the Soviet intelligence footprint within the organization was a constant imperative. Undercover operatives were expected to cast a wide net, meeting with American “scholars, businessmen, journalists, scientists, all kinds of experts, military men.” Everyone was a target—even Soviet diplomats’ wives. “Recruitment was conducted through bribery and blackmail—mostly the former,” Shevchenko noted.
The KGB installed countless agents in influential positions across the Secretariat. One served as a trusted personal assistant to the secretary-general, often traveling to American universities in his U.N. capacity on KGB assignments. Another held the key strategic post of director of external relations, crafting United Nations’ communications strategy and press releases and mingling with American intellectuals and financiers at prestigious conferences. KGB officers in the personnel office scanned job applications for “exploitable weaknesses” and rerouted “promising” candidates to a senior KGB recruiter, also implanted at the United Nations, Shevchenko wrote. After 13 years on the job in New York, the recruiter was transferred “to an equally strategic personnel post in Geneva, overseeing hiring and promotion in the U.N.’s European headquarters.” Western protests failed to put an end to this.
In the offices of the Soviet delegation, Ambassador Yakov A. Malik, permanent representative of the USSR to the United Nations, records his broadcast for the famous U.N. Radio series ‘Price of Peace’ / UN Photo/MB
Among key Soviet staff with intelligence background was Yakov Malik, the long-serving, notoriously antisemitic Soviet ambassador, during whose tenure the “Zionism is racism” resolution was adopted. According to John Barron, author of the 1974 classic KGB, Malik had been co-opted while serving in Tokyo before the war and went on to direct Soviet clandestine operations abroad. He played a crucial role in indirectly “courting” Waldheim in the run-up to his election.
Once elected, Waldheim “readily agreed” to Malik’s demand to fill professional posts in the Secretariat with 250 additional Soviet nationals, Shevchenko reported. He also authorized procedural changes that eased the entrance of KGB agents into the organization. For example, he overturned skills-based local hiring for interpreters in the Russian section, Rosenbaum wrote, ensuring that only Soviet nationals staffed it and helping turn it into an “important Soviet espionage cell.” Shevchenko recalled seeing KGB agents in interpreters’ booths above the floor of the Security Council Chamber photographing files the diplomats brought with them to read during the sessions.
Most important, Waldheim went along with the Soviet political agenda. One Soviet Foreign Ministry memo disparaged him for manifesting “pro-Western convictions” and “flirting with the Americans,” as well as for keeping staff with “Western or pro-Western views” in key positions. (Clearly, nothing short of absolute submission to Moscow’s demands would suffice.) But it also noted, “On a number of questions, especially those having great political significance, Waldheim listens to our demands and advice.”
Was the turning of the United Nations into the world’s most prominent platform for demonizing Israel and Zionism one of those questions? No doubt, given how central the fight against “international Zionism” was for Moscow in those years. And Waldheim delivered. From the moment he entered office, one prominent U.N. forum after another adopted resolutions equating Zionism—like every standard piece of Soviet propaganda—with imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
It was under Waldheim, too, that Yasser Arafat was invited to the United Nations in 1974, just as Moscow was working to internationalize the Palestinian cause. That’s when the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman delivered his famous “olive branch and gun” speech, which methodically equated Zionism with—you guessed it—imperialism, colonialism, and racism close to a dozen times. Employing the ideological vocabulary that Moscow had standardized across the Soviet-aligned and postcolonial bloc, Arafat portrayed Israel as the twin of apartheid South Africa and the enemy of all the postcolonial nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Some passages in the speech—particularly those arguing that Zionists align with antisemites in seeking to solve the “Jewish problem” by removing Jews from their native countries—might as well have been lifted from Soviet domestic screeds designed to stanch the Jewish emigration movement. A cheerful photo with Waldheim sealed the occasion.
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One characteristic moment of the Soviets using the United Nations to target Israel came at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and is vividly depicted in Jeffrey Herf’s Undeclared Wars With Israel. As Israel was under attack, Malik, the Soviet ambassador, unleashed a diatribe against it in the Security Council, painting Israel, in Moscow propagandists’ usual style, as the aggressor. He claimed that the Israeli air force had wiped out “whole towns and population centers” in Syria, destroying 10 foreign embassies in Damascus and killing 30 staff of the Soviet Cultural Center there. He ranted about Zionist barbarians and called Israel’s behavior “beastly” and akin to Nazi Germany.
It was a lie made out of whole cloth. Its purpose was to divert attention from the Israeli victims to nonexistent Soviet ones, to blur the distinction between the real victims and the aggressors, and to erase whatever sympathy anyone in the chamber might have harbored for the Israelis. As Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Yosef Tekoa began to respond and point out the Soviet role in starting the war, Malik demonstratively walked out of the chamber to the applause of the other diplomats. Tekoa described the atmosphere in the Security Council that day as “pogromist.” On that day, as on many others, the Soviets modeled for the international community how to humiliate and ostracize Israelis at the United Nations—and how to deploy propaganda and spectacle to achieve a desired political effect.
Looking back, the adoption of the “Zionism is racism” resolution is arguably one of the Soviet Union’s most successful active-measures operations. A component of Soviet psychological warfare, active measures were aimed, in the words of KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, at “altering perceptions”: planting doubts about the host country’s democratic and capitalist system and undermining ideals, values, founding narratives, social norms, and national identity—and doing so through legitimate means, by exploiting its own institutions, press, and political and legal systems. The United Nations offered an unparalleled arena for it. Its scale, prestige, and moral authority guaranteed global resonance for any campaign carried out under its auspices.
Emerging from the Third Committee, whose mandate was human rights and humanitarian issues, the resolution acquired an extra veneer of false legitimacy and ethical gravitas. It became one of many examples of the Soviets’ cynical exploitation of the United Nations’ human-rights apparatus, turning it into a weapon that authoritarians could wield against democracies to advance their political agendas. In this broader context, too, Waldheim served as their enabler. In one emblematic incident, Rosenbaum noted, Waldheim personally ordered that the writings of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn—who, along with Jewish refusenik activists, had become a thorn in Moscow’s side—be removed from U.N. bookshops in Geneva.
Max Jakobson, the Finnish diplomat whose candidacy for secretary-general Moscow killed in the Security Council, was Waldheim’s opposite in every way. Independent-minded, honest, and a firm believer in the United Nations’ founding principles, he had no skeletons in the closet for Moscow to exploit. That alone had made his candidacy a nonstarter.
But there was one more issue that had made the Soviets veto him. The head of the KGB’s Helsinki office explained it to Finland’s President Urho Kekkonen with striking frankness when the latter asked what Moscow’s spooks had against his candidate: Jakobson was a Jew and spent too much time with “Zionists” in New York, I learned from Alpo Rusi, a distinguished Finnish diplomat who knew Jakobson personally. In Moscow’s eyes, every independent-minded Jew was a Zionist, and they couldn’t abide having one in a position of influence just as they sought to exploit the United Nations in their anti-West and anti-Israel campaign.
In addition to nixing his candidacy, Moscow launched a smear operation against him in Finland. At the United Nations, the Arab caucus announced it was “troubled” by Jakobson’s Jewish ancestry, and he was forced to answer humiliating questions about being “susceptible to foreign influence” (they didn’t mean Finnish) in a prospective leadership role. The shameless bigotry caused zero outrage.
Why didn’t the Americans go to bat for Jakobson? In Rosenbaum’s view, they might have fallen victim to a lack of imagination. In Washington’s eyes, the organization was useless and ineffectual, so it didn’t ultimately matter who headed it. What they failed to appreciate, he noted, was how “even a politically powerless head of an impotent international organization could provide important intelligence assistance” to America’s foreign adversaries.
One person who did grasp the broader implications of Soviet ideological subversion of the United Nations was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as the U.S. ambassador when the “Zionism is racism” resolution was adopted (and was privy to Shevchenko’s collaboration with U.S. intelligence). In a 1977 essay for Commentary titled “The Politics of Human Rights,” Moynihan explained how the Soviet-led process of isolating Israel at the United Nations was a proxy for “a more generalized effort to deprive the democratic nations of their legitimacy as democracies.” The anti-Zionist venom that the USSR and its client states normalized at the United Nations went hand in hand with the tactic of turning the tables on the democratic West in matters of human rights. “The charge could range from genocide to unemployment,” Moynihan wrote, “but it always followed the Orwellian principle: hit the democracies in the one area where they have the strongest case to make against the dictatorships.”
Waldheim’s term as secretary-general was when the seeds of that inversion of reality at the United Nations began to bear fruit.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary antisemitism and the author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute, and a Fellow with the Wilson Center and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. Follow her on Twitter @IzaTabaro.
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