When Terrorism Went Global: Plane Hijackings and Violence in the 1970s (437)

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0:41The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choicehotels.com. I did speak to people from the Red Army faction. I spent a long time talking to Leila Khalid, who was involved in some of the very early Palestinian hijackings and went on to become I'm a bit of an icon. Carlos is really interesting. I actually ended up having a weird correspondence with him in prison. This is Cold War Conversations. If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to Cold War history. Please make sure you follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss future episodes.

1:21In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage-taking. Among them was the young Leila Khaled, with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking Carlos the Jackal in shades and designer suits, and the radical leftists of the Bader-Meinhof gang. I speak with Jason Burke, the author of The Revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s. He takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these often deadly operations. I'm delighted to welcome Jason Burke to our Cold War conversation. What originally drew you to this subject?

2:06There are many things actually. It's quite a circuitous route but I was asked to write a book about extremist Islamist violence in the mid-2010s. So it's about 10 years ago now, I was asked to write a book about ISIS primarily at the height of that wave of violence then, because I've written previous books about Islamist militancy. And as I was looking at it, I had trouble writing the book, finding the book to write. And I ended up doing a kind of potted history of Islamic militancy. And that took me back to the 60s. and though I ended up dumping that draft I found myself in a really interesting place which was mid-1960s in the Middle East and a huge wave of radicalism and energy and ideas there a very interesting moment in the Cold War II and from that I just started looking at the period much more intensely.

3:17And that took me towards the 1970s and took me into areas of other radicalism, particularly left-wing violent extremism. And then I just started discovering the characters, people like Carlos of Jackal, Bader Meinhof gang, some of the Palestinians are really powerful and attractive characters that I thought I could make a book with. And all these events that I can, I'm too young to remember directly, but I can half remember them. I think I can, like the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Entebbe Raid of 76, the Iranian Revolution, all these epic events of great historical significance, but also just enormously colourful moments that were really ripe for revision or reinvestigating, relooking.

4:11I've found it not just fascinating but really important and a lot of new material that's been overlooked that isn't widely known and also a lot of the people who were involved are still alive and they're happy to talk which for a historian and a journalist as I am it's just a brilliant thing absolutely it is a a chunky tome I think it's safe to say I did ask your publicist whether I I can have a PDF version because I was struggling to carry it around when I was reading it. But you really do dig into that detail. And I think you being able to interview some of the participants as well gives it more depth than somebody looking at it from a distance.

4:56And you have a great set of characters in there, which I'd like to talk about when we get a bit further in. But from your research, what do you see as the triggers in this rise of radicalism? Why is it the 1970s that a lot of, particularly in Western Europe, these urban guerrilla movements start to form? the violence of the 70s is a consequence of the late 60s and that wave of protest in the west and one of the points i make is there's protests elsewhere too or at least a urge to remake the world if you like particularly among young people but in the west you have these to the iconic moments of the late 60s, driven by opposition to the Vietnam War, but in many ways driven by much deeper structural issues.

5:56They vary from country to country. Generational differences, a completely unreformed social structure, cultural structure since the Second World War, all sorts of other massive value gaps, if you like, cultural gaps, economic gaps too, that people want addressed, particularly young people. And those movements fade quite fast. There are lots of reasons for that. One is that they were never quite as broad as they looked from the pictures, if you like. They were often limited to educated, middle-class young people. They didn't have a big popular constituency. That's one reason. Other reason is that governments reacted in the West quite quickly.

6:42But out of those mass movements, you have, as you often do, a radical fringe who want to go further, particularly who were unhappy when that tide of protests had ebbed by the early 70s. And they look to carry on their campaign. And some of those look to do it through violence. And some of them look to use lethal violence and were prepared to actually kill. And in terms of numbers, you're talking about very few numbers of people. In West Germany, you have perhaps the most prominent movement in the early 70s. The Italian Red Brigades and related groups come through more strongly in the mid to late 70s.

7:32But even then, these groups, you're talking about a few hundred people, maybe a thousand or so, absolute maximum, often a few dozen who are really active. But as we know, terrorism is very effective at attracting attention and creating that spectacular sense of crisis. So those groups emerge in the West from the 60s protest movement and are very much an effort to continue that movement by other means. And you mentioned earlier the Black September attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics. Now, that was almost one of the first where there was television coverage of that, which sort of really brought it to major prominence, obviously around a big event like the Olympics as well.

8:33But can you describe how the motives for that attack and what its impact was? You're absolutely right to highlight the media aspect of that, because the explosion in television coverage, networks, TVs by this stage in pretty much every Western home, certainly in the US and the UK and most economically successful Western European countries, is really important. So the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972 is designed by its instigators to attract international attention. The people behind it are members of a group or really a coalition of groups called Black September. They are part of the Fatah movement, which itself is the main element, main component, or biggest component of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization.

9:49Fatah has been founded in the late 50s and is dedicated to what they would call the liberation of Palestine and what others would call the destruction of Israel. And they really gained prominence after 1967, the 1967 war, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and bits of the Ghalan Heights. And that war is seen as a signal to the Palestinian factions in the PLO that they need to take things into their own hands. They can't rely on Arab powers like Egypt or Syria to liberate Palestine, as they see it. And so they launch a terrorist campaign or a campaign using terrorist tactics.

10:44Long range attacks on airplanes, often carrying Western passengers, is one tactic. And another that they try in 72 is this attack on the Israeli delegation at the Munich Olympics. And it goes horribly wrong. All the Israelis and most of the attackers, actually not quite all the Israelis, a few escape, but all the Israelis who are taken hostage by the black seven-year attackers are killed in the process of rescue attempt that's botched by the Germans and most of the attackers. and if it achieves its purpose of getting global attention, that attention is very much two-edged as a weapon, if you like.

11:36There is an obvious horror and repulsion at the violence that has violated the truce of the Olympics, the sporting truce. Although in the Arab world, there is some support. So its background is in a mixture, as is so often, with these kind of activities, terrorist activities of the politics and the broader context, the history and quite recent technological developments. Yeah, I was 10 in 1972 and very indirectly, I remember the Black September attack because I was flying into Munich to go on holiday in Austria with my family. And we flew into Thurston Felbrok, which was the military airfield that he was using because the Munich airport wasn't enough to cope with all the traffic.

12:35and we flew in there and we flew out on the way back and I can't remember the exact dates but I think we flew out and then when we got home we saw the newspaper headlines about the botched hostage. Which was at the rescue. That's where it happened. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't the Munich International Airport. It was this small military base that they tried to... This rescue attempt that went horribly wrong. Exactly. So I say a very indirect link. I was almost there. I think one of the interesting aspects of the Palestinian and the other Middle Eastern organizations is their cooperation with people like, less so with the Red Army faction, but with another group within West Germany, the revolutionary cells.

13:31Yeah, this is really interesting. And actually, since the book's come out, most of the reaction has been fantastically positive. Some of the griping has been that I haven't covered groups like the IRA or ETA or the Red Brigades in sufficient detail. One answer to the book is 700 pages already. There's a limit. But the real answer is that those groups are all very important. And there are lots of others that you could point to at the time that I don't get involved in any detail, but they're not international. And what I was interested in is that first wave of transnational international terrorism, which is really something that starts in the 70s and we've been living with ever since.

14:14And those groups just simply weren't interested in that kind of operation at that kind of scale. And similarly, as you point out, the Red Army faction in Germany weren't particularly interested, although there's a moment where they did plan something with the Palestinians that didn't come off in the end because the Palestinians at that point decided that wasn't the sort of operation they wanted to do anymore because it was counterproductive in political terms. But the group that was much more involved were the Revolutionary Cells. And they're quite interesting in the sense that they're much more diffuse, much less centralized, much less hierarchical than the Red Army faction, the Wilder-Meinhof gang.

15:06and they had two main wings a domestic wing if you like and also an international wing and it's worth stressing that all these operatives at the time all the militants all the left wing wherever they were very much saw their armed struggle in inverted commas as an international one. So I came across and spoke to lots of people who, they may not have been directly involved in violence, but they were involved in all sorts of support operations for Angolan rebel groups, or the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, or others elsewhere in Africa, or certainly in Latin America. And they saw that very much as part of the struggle.

15:55Now, to take that further, you have with people like the revolutionary cells, an actual operational connection with one particular Palestinian group, actually, a breakaway from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was responsible for the most spectacular attacks during that period. And the best example of that is probably, or certainly the best known example of that is the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane, which was taken to Entebbe in Uganda. and the Israelis famously sent a special forces team all the way down there and successfully freed the 100 more or less Israeli hostages that were being held after the release of all the non-Israelis by the Palestinian group and the revolutionary cells.

16:53So that was the Germans and the Palestinians working together. There were other examples. But that really interested me. you had this connection of a global movement that was radical and left-wing largely. And at certain instances during the 70s, that came together and created moments of extreme violence. And how were these groups communicating with each other? with some difficulty actually that's one of the things that struck me writing the book is it's such a different world obviously they're no mobile phones they came 20 years later 30 years later really but they have to use landlines they have to use just hand written messages there are telegrams there are telexes there are ways of communicating but they're very cumbersome and it cuts both ways because it's difficult for the groups to coordinate they have to meet quite often and then they meet and they set up something for three months in the future and there's very little way of adjusting that or stopping it if they need to so you have operations going ahead that people have tried to stop and then you have other ones that just simply don't get off the ground because communications don't work but similarly it means that these groups can rely on both the incompetence and the inability of counter-terrorist forces.

18:35That's really obvious. So people go underground in big West German cities and just are lost to the authorities. They burn their passports or their ID documents. They don't use checks. They don't use a bank account and unless they're really unlucky or really stupid which some are they won't get caught so there's the infrastructure that we think about today whether it's communications or anything else just isn't there another example you can forge documents quite easily so if you've got a stack of blank passports which some of the groups got from people like the Yemeni authorities or other sympathetic regimes in the Middle East, a skilled forger would be pasting in a picture and change a name or two and add some fake stamps.

19:30And that would be fine. That would get you through almost any border in the world, particularly if it was a diplomatic passport. So the kind of technological difficulties were challenges for the counter-terrorists as well as the terrorists absolutely because one of the these early cooperations is the opec siege in 1975 which is also the sort of when carlos the jackal sort of makes the headlines ever wonder where Tropicana got its name? The tropics. And every time you enjoy a glass, you're not just drinking juice. You're taking a trip, stepping into sunshine and embarking on a flavorful journey into the tropics where ripe fruit is crafted into wildly delicious juice.

20:23And the best part, no passport required. Tropicana, give life some juice.

20:32Determined to make the rest of summer the best of summer? L.L. Bean has clothing and gear designed to do it all. Like sun-washed apparel that feels broken in from the start. Rainwear for every surprise rainstorm. Hand-sewn boat shoes. And of course, the iconic boat and tote. Made right here in Maine to carry all your summer essentials since 1944. L.L. Bean. Be an outsider. Visit llbean.com to learn more. Absolutely. And Karl is a really interesting figure. Because he becomes very famous, which is a very good indication of quite how important the media has become. He's very good at manipulating the media to create that celebrity and then exploiting that fame for his own ends.

21:22He's also interesting because he is between Middle Eastern groups, which are genuinely ideologically motivated, and left-wing groups in Europe, which have different agendas. He himself professes to be a pure Marxist-Leninist. He's not. He's a megalomaniac, a sociopath, a thoroughly unpleasant man in every way. who is simply interested in his own well-being or furthering his own pretty twisted idea of who he should be and how he should live. And he never gives up this kind of ridiculous, lavish lifestyle of five-star hotels and very highly paid female escorts and much else, cigars and fine wines and so forth.

22:18I actually ended up having a weird correspondence with him in prison. And most of what he sent me was press cuttings about himself and how famous he is. And when I actually asked him any difficult questions about any of his activities, there's absolutely no response. But Carlos is really interesting. He comes to prominence absolutely in December 75, when he leads a mixed group of West Germans from the revolutionary cells and Palestinians against the OPEC conference. So the oil ministers of the whole of the Middle East and a few others, Venezuela, for example, are gathered in Vienna to discuss pricing and so This is in the years of the great oil crises of the 70s.

23:15And he is commissioned by Gaddafi to lead this attack and to hold the ministers hostage and then to take them on a tour around the Middle East where he's supposed to release each one in their home countries. after making a speech about Palestinian rights and various other grievances against the US and so forth. And then he is meant to kill the representatives of Saudi Arabia and Iran, who are seen as beyond the pale, very much Gaddafi's enemies. So it's very much a kind of big geopolitical moment in some ways. As always, it goes wrong. Partly because Gaddafi decides to disappear in the middle of it when he's meant to be providing a new and bigger plane to the hostage-taking team.

24:26And it ends in a deal that is thrashed out in Algeria where the Iranians and the Saudis are supposed to pay about$10 million each. as a ransom. And it's very unclear what happens to the money, and there's lots of rumors that Carlos pocketed it, which is probably unlikely. It's more likely that at least the Iranians didn't pay. But they do a deal, and the Algerians smooth it all out, and the hostages are released. And Carlos, whose real name actually is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. I really call him Carlos. I don't in the book because I don't see why he should get a nom de guerre and no one else does.

25:14This is all part of his legend. So I just call him Ramirez Sanchez, which is his name. And so he then has to go back to the Palestinian group that he's working for at the time and explain what went wrong. And this is where his celebrity is really useful because everybody knows it's been a complete failure or certainly a partial failure. They take the hostages, they fly them to Algeria, but then the big tour never happens. And no one quite knows where all this money has gone either, this kind of$20 million. And it's widely suspected that he's pocketed it. and he gets away with it and he gets away with it basically by saying you can't shoot me i'm too famous he turns into a gun for hire doesn't he the the ideological side even if it was there fades away yeah he he's never interested in the ideology it's a excuse and he also uses it browbeat regimes particularly in eastern europe when he gets there to say to them how can you possibly think about expelling me i want to live in prague or i want to live in budapest particularly or even east berlin um and why won't you let me why are you so unsupportive i'm a socialist like you and always i fight imperialism as well and the only people who really buy that are the stasi initially interestingly everybody else is yeah okay really no you're not get on your way but then they can't kick him out so this all happens he becomes just a spool back a bit he becomes a gun for hire after the opec attack he then he carries on working for the popular front liberation of palestine breakaway group which is without getting into the kind of monty python alphabet super vet is the pflp-xo which is not the main pflp anyway so he stops working for them and he's expelled basically a bit later and he sets up on his own and it doesn't work at first he has to spend a couple of years in baghdad it doesn't work out too well but he ends up by early 79 he's in eastern europe and for the next four or five years he does pretty well there and he uses this the celebrity of who he is and more the infamy to browbeat eastern european governments into letting him stay so they're scared of him basically they don't want to use him and there's sometimes it's quite useful to have him around because he knows stuff and he knows people but on the whole he's much too high risk they check with the kgb in moscow whether they should be allowing him in or what or looking after him or helping him or kick him out the kgb say nothing as far as we can tell i don't have access to the archives but it's pretty clear from the other side that the stars for example are asking moscow what do we do with carlos and there's no response which is and also So Karnas is trying to get into the USSR several times.

28:38He's applying for visas and stuff. He never gets them. So it's quite clear that the Soviets are making a standard policy with these kind of people, which is keeping them at a real arm's length because they're very high risk. They can get you into all sorts of trouble. And anyway, doctrinally, they're adventurists. They don't follow standard Marxist dialectic procedures, if you like. They do the opposite. and they're very difficult to control. They can provoke crises. It can be a real problem. So the Eastern European regimes have got people, have got Carlos turning up off and on these false passports and they let him in by accident and then he doesn't leave.

29:16One of the things he says to them is, you must help me. I'm a fellow socialist fighter against imperialism, capitalism, the US, Zionism and everything else. The other thing he hints at quite heavily is it could get quite in a kind of mafia way it could get quite difficult for them if he got cross he's got capabilities that that that would be very unsavory in terms of the consequences for their embassies overseas for example and he's this is and they believe all of this partly because they're reading a lot of western reporting media reporting about how scary and powerful he is and So there are reports from Eastern European intelligence services saying his organization of international revolutionaries has got hundreds of operatives all over the world.

30:08Actually, they had about 10, but they believe this. So for about five years, he is based largely in Eastern Europe, and he does commissions for Gaddafi, for the Syrians, the Assad regime, for the Romanians as well. And he sells weapons, deals arms, and he traffics various other bits and pieces. There's a few other commissions. Makes substantial amounts of money. So when in 1981 President Anwar Sadat of Egypt is assassinated, he's heard on bugs by the Hungarian secret services swearing and shouting in disappointment and anger because he had been commissioned by the Libyans to do exactly the same thing.

31:03And he was going to be paid millions and millions that he really quite needed. and he'd actually prepared done quite a lot of prep for the operation for this assassination and now it was all off and he wouldn't get any of the money so that's the kind of gun for hire as you rightly put it he is by that stage he's completely mercenary and his final campaign of violence in Europe anyway is a simply personal effort to free his girlfriend, who has been detained as she tries to bomb an Arab embassy and newspaper office in Paris by the French authorities. And he launches what his own right-hand man calls a dirty personal war against the French.

31:53And that's, in the end, what forces the Eastern Europeans to kick him out. His girlfriend's Magdalena Copp, and she's a member of the Red Army faction, I think. Yeah, Magdalena Kopp is at pretty low level, to be fair. She's just one of hundreds, thousands of fringe radical associates of the real hardliners in Germany at the time. and more on the revolutionary self side than the Red Army faction side. But I got hold of all her interrogation protocols in German and translated them. And she's a weak and quite sad woman who was really manipulated by Carlos and her previous boyfriend, who was his right-hand man.

32:48And it's just, to me, one of those casualties really of the other collateral damage beyond the obvious civilians and victims of men like Carlos but they caused immense damage and one of the things I wanted to do with the book was to point this out and to get away from what has been quite a glamorization of people like Carlos and others actually like the Red Army Faction the Bard of Meinhof Gang so-called which I think is both wrong historically and unfair to their victims. Most of what they did, if not all of it, was pretty sordid, ineffective, and extremely destructive in terms of human life and economies, politics.

33:41and the broader consequences were in every way profoundly negative. Absolutely. Absolutely. In addition to Carlos, were there any other people that you had direct correspondence or interview like in former members of the Red Army faction? Yeah, I did speak to people from the Red Army faction. They were not very communicative, but they were useful. I was able to just ask them a few things about what they were believing at the time. I didn't get into anything operational. I spent a long time talking to Leila Khaled, who was involved in some of the very early Palestinian hijackings and went on to become a bit of an icon.

34:20I spent hours talking to her. I spent days talking to Iranian left-wing radicals, extremists at the time, who were deeply involved in the violent extremism that was the vanguard, if you like, of the opposition to the Shah. And in previous work I've done, I've spoken to lots of Islamic militants. And one of the stories I try and tell in parallel with that, the left wing extremists is that of the early Islamist militants in the Middle East. So I did end up speaking to a lot of people who had been involved either directly or tangentially with the violence of the time. Leila Khaled was, as you say, the press really picked up on her.

35:13What sort of insights did you gain from speaking with her? She was really interesting. One of the things with someone like Leila Khaled is you get the story that she wants to put out. As I say, she's a very intelligent, very experienced, highly committed woman, very articulate and very aware of the power of words and what narratives she wants to project and in many ways is still an activist as she was in the late 60s and early 70s so she was very keen to emphasize her own background and i was very happy to do that because it's important so we spent a lot of time talking about her childhood um how her family and when she was four was forced to out of haifa where they'd been living in 1948 in the war surrounding the foundation of Israel.

36:19And that was great to have that historical context. I think it's really important that when you're talking about terrorism or any kind of extremist violence, the history is integral to the account that you're giving. So that was useful. It was very good on the detail, a lot of the details that hadn't come out before on some of her attacks. So there were lots of interesting conversations that she'd had with people that I was interested in myself, getting her to talk about what they were discussing in the training camps, what their preoccupations were, how they viewed the world in the early 70s.

36:56It's very difficult to do that without actually talking to people then. On the other hand, she was still maintaining operational security on some things. So she told me how she'd found the weapons for one particular hijacking that they'd been parked in her hotel room cupboard and were there when she came back. They'd just been dropped off, supposedly. Now, I know that's not true. I know from other sources. I got hold of a Mossad intelligence report. It's about 70 pages long. It's really detailed into that particular hijacking that is fully reliable because I know where it's come from. and the weapons just didn't get to her that way.