Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Political limitations imposed in London frustrated many soldiers who griped, in the words of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff and a rabid Unionist, that “the Sinn Feins” are “at war with our men whilst our men are at peace with the Sinn Feins.”99 “If this country was Mesopotamia or Egypt,” General Macready, the British army commander in Ireland, wrote back wistfully, “I should have the greatest pleasure in the world in putting on the most extreme type of Martial Law, and have done with the thing, once and for all.”100

  But Lloyd George and other cabinet members knew that what War Minister Winston Churchill described as “iron repression”—a policy of “murder and counter-murder, terror and counter-terror”101—would not be accepted by the British public. Having just waged a war to liberate Belgium, the British were not willing to fight indefinitely to subjugate the small state next door—not when its people had expressed their preference for independence. Even Churchill, while defending “the integrity of the British Empire,” denouncing the IRA’s “murder conspiracy,” and refusing to condemn Black and Tan rampages, nevertheless ruled out “the kind of methods the Prussians adopted in Belgium”—or, one is tempted to add, that the British themselves sometimes adopted in Asia and Africa.102

  The one part of Ireland that the British government was determined to defend was the northern counties, where there was a substantial Protestant population. This was one of the sticking points of negotiations that began after a truce took effect on July 11, 1921. Eventually an Irish negotiating team that included Michael Collins took the best deal it could get. Under a treaty signed on December 6, 1921, the twenty-six southern counties would become the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of the British Empire like Canada, while the six counties of Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom. Bad as the exclusion of Northern Ireland was, to many republicans even more galling was a provision that Dáil members would have to swear to be “faithful to H.M. King George V.” A narrow majority of the Dáil endorsed the treaty, but half the IRA would not recognize the result and took up arms.

  As commander of the Free State Army, Collins led the fight against his former comrades in spite of his own “anguish.”103 He was killed in an ambush by the antitreaty IRA on August 22, 1922, while he was motoring with a small security detail through his native county Cork. The Big Fellow, who had eluded so many British manhunts, was not yet thirty-two when he fell at the hands of his own countrymen and former mates. Just a few weeks before, he had turned down his fiancée’s entreaties to be more careful: “I can’t help it and if I were to do anything else it wouldn’t be me,” he wrote her, “and I really couldn’t stand it.”104 When they heard of his death, a thousand antitreaty republicans in a Free State prison spontaneously kneeled to recite the rosary in tribute to a man who had been their leader before he became their enemy.105

  Notwithstanding Collins’s demise, the civil war ended in May 1923 with a resounding victory for the protreaty forces. They won because they had greater resources, including weapons provided by the British, because public opinion was on their side (in the 1923 elections only 27.4 percent of the voters supported antitreaty candidates)106—and because they were willing to be harsher than the British had been. As one historian notes, “Altogether, in just over six months the new Free State Government executed seventy-seven Republicans by shooting, more than three times the number executed by the British Government in the two and a half years of the ‘Anglo-Irish war.’ ”107 This confirms the lesson of the Vendée: namely, that a homegrown regime with popular sentiment on its side can afford to be harsher in dealing with insurgents than a foreign military force trying to stay where it is not wanted—especially if that force answers to an elected government that is sensitive to the vagaries of both global and local public opinion.

  To this day Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom, despite decades of terrorism by IRA die-hards. The more recent IRA campaign failed in no small part because the British in later years regained the intelligence edge they had lost in 1919–21, when, in the depths of despair, a senior British intelligence officer had lamented that “no Englishman can fully grasp the psychology of the Irish rebel character.”108 It was a different story in the 1980s. In those days, when the Provisional IRA tried to launch a Tet-style offensive employing weaponry supplied by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, high-ranking informants tipped off the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch. “The British knew the IRA was coming,” wrote Irish journalist Ed Moloney, “and they were ready.”109

  This disparity in outcomes between the IRA war of the 1920s and the one in the 1970s–1990s serves to underscore the overriding value in any insurgency of acquiring good intelligence, for both insurgents and counterinsurgents. It is even more important than in conventional conflicts, where sheer firepower can be employed to destroy large enemy formations even if the details of their movements and capabilities remain unknown. In a war against an “invisible army,” by contrast, accurate intelligence is needed to bring the enemy into the open—something that the British did not possess in the Irish War of Independence, any more than the federal army had in its post–Civil War conflict against the Ku Klux Klan, but that the police forces of various countries gradually acquired in their struggle against the anarchists.

  EVEN IF THE “Tan War” did not secure independence for the entire island, it was a remarkable achievement—the first successful revolt by a British colony since the American War of Independence. The cost: 4,000 killed or wounded, including 950 British soldiers and police.110 As always happens, noted one Black and Tan, “the real sufferer in this fratricidal war was the non-combatant,” civilians being targeted by both sides.111

  There was hardly a single battle in the conventional sense. Broadly speaking, IRA operations in the countryside were in the guerrilla mode, targeting police barracks and police patrols, while in the cities they operated more as terrorists, killing off-duty policemen or civil servants. The terrorist orientation was especially strong on the British mainland, where the IRA carried out a handful of operations. The most spectacular were the burning of seventeen Liverpool warehouses in November 1920 and the assassination in June 1922, long after a peace treaty had been signed, of Sir Henry Wilson, who had just stepped down as chief of the Imperial General Staff. Other terrorist operations—such as the attempted assassination in December 1919 of the British viceroy, Lord French—failed. Michael Collins entertained even more ambitious plans such as truck bombing the House of Commons, kidnapping its members, and shooting members of the cabinet but never tried to implement them.112 This was a wise decision given how badly attacks on the British mainland by a future generation of IRA terrorists would backfire. In 1979 the Provisional IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, and five years later attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the entire British cabinet by bombing the hotel where they were staying in Brighton. Those actions only redoubled Thatcher’s determination to defeat the IRA. Michael Collins had been astute enough to avoid such excesses. His reasonableness and restraint were his strengths. Unlike most other terrorist or guerrilla leaders, he knew when to stop fighting even if he had not yet achieved all of his aims.

  His experience shows that the most successful terrorist campaigns are waged for causes, usually nationalist, which have widespread acceptance among the population and are supported by political parties and regular or irregular military forces—just as the most successful guerrillas are supported by conventional military forces. By contrast a small number of terrorists acting on their own to implement a radical agenda has scant chance of success—as demonstrated not only by the anarchists but also by many subsequent terrorists such as the Red Army Faction and the Weathermen.

  Terrorists do better, moreover, if they fight a democratic nation with a free press whose coverage will help to magnify their attacks while restraining the official response. There is not much terrorism in totalitarian states, because
the secret police can ruthlessly snuff it out. The British government, on the other hand, could not even censor the press absent a declaration of war, which was lacking in Ireland. “We had a very bad Press,” complained one Auxie—a problem he blamed, naturally, not on his colleagues’ misconduct but on “floods of flabby sentimentalism by the Liberal Press.” But even the normally nationalistic Times of London was harshly critical of “lynch law,” writing in 1920 that “an Army already perilously undisciplined, and a police force avowedly beyond control have defiled, by heinous acts, the reputation of England.”

  Like many subsequent counterinsurgents, British soldiers in Ireland were “rankled most deeply” by their government’s “disinclination or inability” to counter what they saw as distorted reporting that exaggerated their misdeeds while minimizing those of the enemy. General Macready raged against the “blackguard Press” and at the “perfectly futile” way that “Press Propaganda” was run by the “frocks” at Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration. His protests made no difference. Losing the “battle of the narrative” made it impossible for the British forces to prevail against a paltry number of combatants.113

  36.

  THE TERRORIST MIND

  Sinners or Saints?

  WE HAVE SURVEYED a wide variety of terror groups, ranging chronologically from the Assassins of the Middle Ages to the IRA of the early twentieth century and in size from the Ku Klux Klan with its hundreds of thousands of members to John Brown and his band of twenty-one—coincidentally about the same size as the executive committee of the People’s Will. Some have been successful (the Assassins, KKK, and IRA); others, notably the anarchists, not so much. The Russian revolutionaries ultimately prevailed but their terrorism hardly overthrew the tsar by itself. At most it helped to undermine a regime whose collapse was brought about by military defeat in 1917.

  Nevertheless the example of the Russian terrorists proved influential as far away as Bengal, where there were outbursts of anti-British terrorism from 1906 to 1917 and again from 1930 to 1934.114 The Russian extremists also had many imitators in the Balkans, which after Russia itself emerged as the main theater of terrorist operations.

  The longest-lived of the Balkan groups was the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). Formed in 1893 to seek Macedonian independence or autonomy, it fought for nearly half a century, first against the Ottoman Empire, then against Yugoslavia and Greece. It assassinated the king of Yugoslavia, the prime minister of Bulgaria, and the foreign minister of France—without, however, achieving its goals.115 Equally frustrated was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnak Party), which took on both the Russian and the Ottoman empires in the hope of carving out an independent Armenian state. Its members staged the spectacular seizure of the Ottoman Central Bank in Istanbul in 1896 but only succeeded in triggering pogroms in the capital that killed thousands of Armenians, prefiguring the genocidal violence inflicted on Armenians between 1915 and 1923.116 Armenia did not achieve independence until 1991 and then not because of terrorism but simply because of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

  The Serbian Black Hand group was, as we shall see, more successful in achieving a union of the South Slavs in a Yugoslav state but only very indirectly and in ways that it did not intend through its tenuous relationship with the Young Bosnians who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, thereby triggering a war that ultimately brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Meanwhile, the Ustaša, a terrorist group with Italian sponsorship, managed to achieve its goal—an independent Croatian state—only because of a German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. As soon as the German armies rolled out, Croatia was swallowed up by Yugoslavia again, where it would remain for the next four decades.

  The terrorists of yesteryear pioneered most of the techniques employed by present-day extremists, from car bombings to suicide bombings. There were even a few instances of mass hostage taking, notably John Brown’s seizure of Harpers Ferry, which prefigured the airline hijackings and embassy takeovers of the 1970s.

  MOST OF THE academic literature stresses that there is no such thing as a “terrorist mentality” or a “typical terrorist.” Walter Laqueur writes, “That their members have been young is the only feature common to all terrorist movements.”117 But that has not stopped analysts, participants, and, above all, artists from trying to depict the terrorist mindset. The “golden age” of terrorism produced striking portraits of its practitioners, both pro and con.

  The most rapturous case in favor of terrorism was made by Sergei Kravchinski (a.k.a. Stepniak), a Russian Nihilist who killed the chief of the tsar’s secret police in 1878 and then fled to Switzerland and England. He published a memoir, Underground Russia, in which he attributed superhuman attributes to “the Terrorist,” a label that, unlike later practitioners, he embraced: “He is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero. . . . He has no other object than to overthrow this abhorred despotism, and to give to his country, what all civilized nations possess, political liberty.”118

  Contrast this idealized portrait with the villainous depictions drawn by two conservative novelists—Fyodor Dostoevsky and Joseph Conrad. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872) features a Nihilist known as Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, based on Sergei Nachaev. He is a “monster,” “a crook,” “a vile human louse” who murders one of his own followers and goads another to commit suicide. His goal, he tells a fellow revolutionary, is “getting everything destroyed: both the state and its morality. We alone will remain, having destined ourselves beforehand to assume power: we shall rally the smart ones to ourselves, and ride on the backs of the fools.”119

  In The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad offers an equally unflattering portrayal of “The Professor,” an anarchist who stalks the streets of London with a bomb in his pocket, ready to blow “to pieces” everything within sixty yards should a policeman try to arrest him. The Professor dreams of a world “where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination. . . . Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. . . . First the blind, then the deaf and the dumb, then the halt and the lame—and so on.”120

  Which of these depictions is the more accurate—the terrorist as saint or as sinner? Both are, of course, caricatures; actual human beings are seldom as virtuous or as vile. But Conrad and Dostoevsky were probably closer to the mark than Stepniak was.

  Terrorists are outcasts who are hunted by the authorities. They are far more likely to wind up dead or in a dungeon than to succeed in achieving their goals. It stands to reason that most who are drawn to such a life would have an ideological compulsion verging on fanaticism. This is less true of large, nationalist organizations such as the KKK or IRA, which draw in a diverse membership and, for better or worse, enjoy broad societal sanction. Their members often have a mental makeup similar to soldiers’—which many Ku Kluxers had been and which many Shinners would become. Truly marginal enterprises like the anarchist movement or the wilder fringes of the Russian revolutionary underground had fewer participants, and a larger proportion of them were criminal or cracked.

  These were men like Simon Ter-Petrossian (a.k.a. Kamo), Stalin’s chief henchman during his reign of terror in the Caucasus. He was finally caught in Germany and to prevent his extradition to Russia, writes Stalin’s biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore,

  Kamo started to act like a madman in a way that only someone who had truly cracked could. . . . He pulled the hairs out of his head; tried to hang himself but was cut down; slit his wrists but was resuscitated. . . . The doctors were still skeptical and decided to put him through a series of torments that would have broken anyone else. He was burned by a red-hot iron and needles were driven under his nails, but he withstood it all.121

  Or there was François-Claudius Koenigstein, alias Ravachol, a French anarchist who killed an elderly hermit to steal his money and broke into a recently deceased countess’s grave in search of more loot b
efore setting off several bombs around Paris in 1892. His name would become a byword for senseless political violence.122

  No doubt disreputable characters can be found in all human enterprises. Security forces fighting terrorism have included quite a few sadists who have happily tortured and executed prisoners. In the Irish War of Independence, Captain Jocelyn Hardy acquired a gruesome reputation. He was an Auxiliary known as “Hoppy” Hardy because he had lost a leg on the Western Front and walked with a limp. One IRA officer recalled that during his interrogation Hardy beat him to a bloody pulp, nearly strangled him, held a red-hot poker in front of his eyes, and then placed a pistol next to his head and threatened to execute him.

  But while relatively liberal armed forces like the British army may countenance some brutality, they will court-martial or dismiss the worst offenders—as happened with hundreds of Auxies and Tans in Ireland. (“Hoppy” Hardy was tried for murder but acquitted in a “verdict that,” writes one historian, “seemed seriously at variance with the disclosed facts.” He also escaped assassination by Mick Collins’s Squad, which made a “very special effort” to “eliminate” him.)123 By contrast, most terrorist organizations have been willing to make excuses for the Ravachols and Kamos, to justify any misdeed in the name of the larger struggle.

  It is hazardous to generalize about terrorists or any other diverse group, but striking is the extent to which the extremists of a century ago conform to the observations made by observers of modern terrorism. The economist Alan Krueger, for instance, concludes that “terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families.” So if poverty does not cause terrorism what does? He points to “the suppression of civil liberties and political rights,” explaining, “When nonviolent means of protest are curtailed, malcontents appear to be more likely to turn to terrorist tactics.”124 That certainly accounts for the prevalence of terrorism in tsarist Russia and even in colonial Ireland. Although Great Britain was a democracy, the Irish people, historically subjugated by the “Protestant Ascendancy,” had sharply curtailed choices at the ballot box—they could not vote for independence. Krueger’s findings suggest that in any war against terrorism—or, for that matter, against any insurgency—political reform can sometimes be the most important weapon. Indeed progressive welfare and labor legislation helped to quell terrorism in democracies such as France and the United States, while its absence fueled further revolt in Russia.