The New American has an interesting article on state sponsorship of terror. Amongst the interesting points is this mention of the so-called Andropov Paradigm:
Although Hafez al-Assad’s Baathist regime in Syria had a nine-year head start in the Soviet-sponsored terror business, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran would soon eclipse him. The overthrow of Shah Pahlavi by Soviet-backed street radicals and the Carter administration in 1979 was a seismic shift of epic magnitude. Iran was flipped, virtually overnight, from being the most pro-Western, most moderate Islamic power in the region, and a critical roadblock to Soviet regional hegemony, to a force for global revolution and terror. Khomeini’s militant fusion of Marx and Mohammed would resonate with millions of Muslims who could not accept the secular socialist tenets of the region’s other Soviet client-states: Syria, Libya, and Iraq. Khomeiniism was the perfect made-to-order fit for the Andropov Paradigm: the plan to craft and promote a radicalized, Leninist form of Islam to infect millions of Muslims worldwide with fanatical anti-American hatred. Yuri Andropov (head of the KGB,1967-1982, and head of the Soviet Union, 1982-1984) assured Romania’s spymaster, General Ion Mihai Pacepa, that “the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought…. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”
Ayatollah Khomeini fulfilled Andropov’s wildest dreams. Upon taking over in Iran, the Ayatollah affixed the label of “the Great Satan” to the United States. The Soviet Union was viciously persecuting the Muslims of neighboring Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (and would soon invade Afghanistan), but Khomeini insisted that Muslims see the United States, not the Soviet Union, as Satanic. When Russia later invaded Chechnya and slaughtered Muslims by the tens of thousands, Khomeini’s successors in Tehran gave tacit approval, thereby blunting expressions of outrage by other Islamic countries.
Further background can be found in this 2006 article by General Ion Mihai Pacepa.