Operation PANDORA

Operation PANDORA (Russian: операция Пандора) is the name used by Russian defector Vasili Mitrokhin for an alleged active measure by the KGB against the United States during the Cold War. The intention was supposedly to start a race war that would consume and self-destruct the United States. According to British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin in the publication of the Mitrokhin Archive:The KGB ordered the use of explosives to exacerbate racial tensions in New York City. On July 25, 1971, the head of the KGB's FCD First (North American) Department, Anatoli Tikhonovich Kireyev, instructed the New York residency to proceed with the operation. The KGB was to plant a delayed-action explosive package in "the Negro section of New York." Kireyev's preferred target was "one of the Negro colleges." After the explosion the residency was ordered to make anonymous telephone calls to two or three black organizations, claiming that the explosion was the work of the Jewish Defense League. Background Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who defected from the Soviet Union to the United Kingdom in 1992. As part of his defection, Mitrokhin helped smuggle vast quantities of confidential KGB information into the UK. This collection of documents was subsequently compiled and ultimately became known as the Mitrokhin Archive. Operation Operation Pandora was a covert Soviet plot to provoke a race war in the United States by stoking racial tensions and exacerbating existing conflicts between different racial and ethnic groups. The plan was initially conceived in the late 1960s by the KGB, the intelligence agency of the Soviet Union, as part of a broader effort to destabilize the United States and weaken its influence around the world. The plan involved a complex and long-term strategy of manipulating various groups and organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), black militant groups (Black Panthers), and the Jewish Defense League (JDL).