The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History
Page 11
Eventually, an autonomous women’s guerilla group, Rote Zora (named after a Pippi Longstocking-type character from a children’s book), would emerge from the Cells. Its first action was to bomb the Federal Doctors’ Association in Karlsruhe on April 29, 1977, as payback for the association’s opposition to abortion reform.
At the same time, unbeknownst to most observers, some RZ members had adopted an anti-imperialist perspective, not simply (like the RAF) in the sense of viewing the Third World liberation struggles as the global vanguard, but in the sense of literally fighting alongside the Third World guerilla. In practical terms, at first this meant working in joint commandos under the direction of the PFLP (EO). Sometimes referred to as the RZ’s “international wing,” and alternately as the International Revolutionary Group, this section may have comprised a very small number of militants, and yet as they could trace their history back to the Cells’ earliest days their importance should not be underestimated.
The first of the international wing’s actions occurred on December 24, 1975, with Hans-Joachim Klein and 2JM member Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann participating in a joint German-Palestinian commando under the command of the Venezuelan adventurer Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as “Carlos.” Klein had moved from being a Sponti street fighter to the RAF prisoner support scene and finally to the RZ following Holger Meins’s death in 1974. Given that he was the only RZ member to have participated in this action, and that he subsequently broke from the guerilla, some people do not consider the RZ’s international wing to have been involved. (As for Kröcher-Tiedemann, she was certainly acting independently of the 2JM in this operation.)
The so-called “December 21st Movement of the Arabic Revolution” delivered a bloody nose to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries as it met in Vienna. Sixty oil ministers from around the world were taken hostage, with both an Austrian police officer and a Libyan diplomat being killed in the process. In exchange for the ministers’ release, the guerilla demanded—and received—a $5 million ransom. They were flown to Algeria, and from there they returned to the underground.
The operation had been meant to punish OPEC for its recent decision to lift its embargo against Israel. Yet it was not considered a success: the plan had been for the guerilla to execute diplomats from Saudi Arabia and Iran, important American allies; instead, Carlos negotiated a ransom for their freedom. Many reports claim that he was excluded from the PFLP (EO) organization for this breach.
Not that this less bloody outcome assuaged the operation’s many critics: officials from the PLO accused Carlos of having orchestrated a “criminal act” designed to “undermine the nature of the Palestinian struggle,” claiming that the raid was such a disaster it could have been an imperialist false flag operation—which it wasn’t.64 Nevertheless, all of the guerillas had survived (though Klein had been seriously wounded), and so it was not an unmitigated failure.
The same could not be said for the next operation to include members of the RZ’s international wing.
On June 27, 1976, a joint commando made up of members of the PFLP (EO) and members of the RZ hijacked an Air France airliner traveling from Tel Aviv to Paris, diverting it to Entebbe, Uganda. The guerillas demanded the release of fifty-three political prisoners held by Israel, West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Kenya, including several from the RAF and the 2JM.
The hostage-taking was a drawn out affair, in part because so many governments were involved. After a week of holding all 260 passengers and crew, the guerillas arranged to release the non-Jewish passengers.65
On July 4, an Israeli commando raided the airport, killing all of the guerillas, as well as over forty Ugandan soldiers who were guarding the area. More than one hundred Jewish hostages were freed and quickly flown out of the country.
Entebbe was a fiasco, doing so much harm to the Palestinian cause that British diplomats at the time even considered the possibility that it might be a Mossad false flag attack—but it wasn’t.66 It was in reaction to Entebbe that the United States established its first counterterrorist military units.67 As for Israel, the Mossad was given the mission of assassinating PFLP (EO) head Waddi Haddad, which it accomplished in 1978.68
Many observers eventually concluded that the perceived singling out of Jews represented a political defeat far greater than any military failure. Certainly, Entebbe provides a stark example of the inability some leftists had in recognizing or rejecting antisemitism.
Initially, for most critics, the issue was not that Jews had been segre-gated—a fact which was dismissed by many as state propaganda—but that an airplane had been skyjacked. Karl-Heinz Dellwo, who at the time was a prisoner from the RAF, remembers feeling disbelief at the news, and was relieved to have a letter smuggled to him from Gudrun Ensslin in which she expressed the desire to publicly condemn the action, though she eventually decided to hold back out of respect for the two dead RZ guerillas.69 Helmut Pohl, too, would recall that, “We were critical of that action for a number of reasons: the selection of passengers with Israeli passports, the resolution of the action on the Three Continents instead of in the metropole, and most importantly, the tactic of hijacking a plane.”70
Within the 2JM, Entebbe merely aggravated what were already the beginnings of the tensions between the anti-imperialists and social revolutionaries.71 Nevertheless, there too, nobody felt that a public denunciation was appropriate. As Fritz Teufel would later explain:
In the aftermath of the Entebbe hijacking, we considered a public critique. I was opposed…. It is not easy to criticize comrades who risked and lost their lives in an effort to free their comrades. The brutality and military precision of the Israeli military and GSG-9 commando actions in Entebbe and Mogadishu and the deaths of the comrades involved initially set in motion a process that blocked us from considering the sense or lack thereof of these actions, a suspension of thought.72
Tragically, the lack of public criticism of Entebbe from the ranks of the armed combatants left the door ajar for future skyjackings, and as such for the debacle in Mogadishu.
As for the RZ’s international wing, in the years to come it would continue along its troubled trail, eventually becoming a franchise for Carlos and various foreign intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, unlike Mogadishu, where the RAF suffered a serious political defeat and was widely condemned, Entebbe did not result in any backlash against the “domestic” RZ. Partly, this was because none of the hostages were Germans, the airliner was not from a German company, and the action was not carried out on German soil and did not directly involve the West German state. For many leftists, it could all be viewed as somewhat distant, and despite the leading role played by two members of the RZ, it could be dismissed as having nothing to do with anything in West Germany.
So it was, that as the 1970s came to a close, all three of the FRG’s main guerilla groups had been faced with challenges to their identity and their sense of purpose. These challenges were not the same, though, and would be resolved in very different ways. Nonetheless, operating as they did in a world of shared illegality, their choices would not be made in isolation, but would rather build on each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and failures.
Nor did any of the guerilla groups exist in a bubble of isolated armed conflict—with the possible exception of the RZ’s international wing, all three organizations, anti-imperialists and social revolutionaries alike, remained entrenched in the broader political context, both domestically and internationally. As such, in order to understand the paths they would take, we must now turn our attention to the rise of militant resistance on what was at first a quintessentially aboveground, and certainly unexpected, terrain: the movement against nuclear energy.
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1. Tobias Wunschik, Baader-Meinhofs Kinder: Die zweite Generation der RAF (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 273.
2. Volker Speitel was arrested in 1977 and would end up providing all sorts of information—and tall stories—to the state prosecuto
rs. See page 252.
3. Monika Berberich, “Erfahrungen in der Gruppenarbeit mit Psychotherapeuten,” in Angelika Holderberg (ed.), Nach dem bewaffneten Kampf (Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2007), 137.
4. Wunschik (1997), 199-200.
5. Ibid., 294.
6. J.M. Bouguereau, “Recherchés pour l’affaire Schleyer arrêtés en Yougoslavie,” Libération, May 30, 1978.
7. R.K. Pruthi, An Encyclopaedic Survey of Global Terrorism in 21st Century (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 2002), 28-31
8. Spiegel, “Wen suchen wir denn eigentlich?” November 7, 1977. In the cases being discussed, Butz Peters has claimed that both Wisniewski and Wagner were identified because the aliases they used when traveling had already been cracked by the BKA. In the case of Wisniewski, at least, this was done by means of handwriting analysis of the customs cards he had filled out on a previous flight. Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: Die Geschichte der RAF (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004), 480-481.
9. The FRG was at this time an important rear base area for fascist Ustashe and other Croatian nationalist organizations, many of which engaged in armed attacks against Yugoslav consulates and diplomatic representatives. In 1976, this included the assassination of the Yugoslav consul in Frankfurt. See: Paul Hockenos, Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 63. The eight men in question, ranging in age from 29 to 62, were accused of carrying out several such attacks, including a skyjacking and multiple bombings, in their struggle against the Titoist state. A number of them were already in prison in the FRG. Spiegel, “Maghrebinische Lösung,” August 31, 1978.
10. Wunschik (1997), 294. See Appendix II: Boock’s Lies, pages 328–332.
11. Wunschik (1997), 297-299.
12. Ibid., 299-300; Dominique Linhardt, “Guerrilla Diffusa: Clandestinité, soupçon et provocation dans le conflit entre organisations révolutionnaires subversives et l’État ouest-allemand (années 1970),” Politix 2006/2, no. 74, 73-74.
13. United Press International, “General Police Kill Terrorist,” European Stars and Stripes, September 7, 1978.
14. Time, “Closing In On an Elusive Enemy,” October 9, 1978.
15. United Press International, “General Police Kill Terrorist.”
16. Wunschik (1997), 299.
17. United Press International, “Stoll’s Death Foiled a Plot, Officials Think,” European Stars and Stripes, September 12, 1978.
18. Grams would eventually be released, as there was not enough evidence for a conviction; he received compensation of 10 DM per day he had spent locked up. He would later join the RAF. Willi Winkler, Die Geschichte der RAF (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008), 397.
19. dpa, “‘Kontakte zu Terroristen’—Haftbefehl,” Hamburger Abendblatt, September 21, 1978; dpa, “Mutmaßlicher Terrorist festgenommen,” Hamburger Abendblatt, November, 17, 1978.
20. United Press International, “Baader-Meinhof Gang Member Dies of Wounds,” European Stars and Stripes, October 8, 1978. Wunschik (1997), 302-303.
21. During her trial Speitel would fight with the court guards and denounce presiding Judge Klaus Wagner as “a sack of filth, a hangman and an accomplice of U.S. capitalism.” Charged with murder and attempted murder, she insisted her only regret was that she had not made sure both cops were dead. Reuters, “Terrorist Dragged to court,” Winnipeg Free Press, October 4, 1979. She was sentenced to life in prison, but would be pardoned in 1989.
22. Wunschik (1997), 303-304.
23. A play on words, as the German term for “urban guerilla” is Stadtguerilla.
24. Werner Sauber, “Mit dem Rücken zur Wand?” January 1975. This text will be included along with other documents from the 2JM in a forthcoming documentary history to be copublished by Kersplebedeb and PM Press.
25. Rolf Pohle, Rolf Heißler, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, Verena Becker, and Ina Siepmann were flown out of Germany. The sixth prisoner, former RAF member Horst Mahler, refused the release. See Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 328-332.
26. Linhardt, 85-86.
27. Andreas Vogel, Grussaktion an alle politischen Gefangen, July 1984.
28. Associated Press, “Resignation of Berlin Justice Minister Sought,” Lawton (Oklahoma) Constitution, July 8, 1976.
29. Gabriele Rollnik and Daniel Dubbe, Keine Angst vor niemand (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2003), 63-64; Inge Viett, Nie war ich furchtloser (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1996), 160.
30. Rollnik and Dubbe, 63.
31. Ibid., 75-76.
32. Irene Bandhauer-Schöffmann, “Deutsche Terroristinnen in Österreich,” zeitgeschichte 2/37. Jahrgang 2010, 119-120.
33. Viett, 169-171.
34. Winkler, 374. Leaving aside Judge von Drenkmann, it appears that if one was going to be kidnapped, one was lucky to be kidnapped by the 2JM: Lorenz had similarly thanked his abductors in 1975, even going so far as to express the desire to meet with them again under better circumstances, perhaps at one of his garden parties. Moncourt and Smith Vol. 1, 329.
35. Roughly $3.1 million.
36. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 119-120; Rollnik and Dubbe, 76-77.
37. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 130.
38. Rollnik and Dubbe, 76-77.
39. Bandhauer-Schöffmann, 123-124.
40. While the media trumpeted this as a “major blow” to the RAF, the FRG’s minister of the interior, Werner Maihofer, downplayed the arrests, stating that “Christian Möller, 28, the driver, in no way belonged to the hard core of the RAF, and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann wasn’t a major figure, but was at least a ‘symbolic figure.’” In actual fact, she was not a RAF member at all, but had come out of the 2JM milieu. According to some accounts Möller was just a supporter who had been driving her into Switzerland that day. He eventually received an eleven-year sentence. Kröcher-Tiedemann, who had been freed from prison in the 1975 Lorenz hostage exchange, would serve two-thirds of her fifteen-year sentence before being extradited to the FRG in 1987, where she was brought to trial for her part in the 1975 OPEC raid (see below, pages 71–72). Due to a lack of evidence, however, she was acquitted in May 1990 and released from prison in 1991. She died of cancer on October 7, 1995, at the age of 44.
41. J.P. Bruneau, “Le Jura Suisse saisi par le spectre de la RAF,” Libération, June 13, 1978.
42. Viett, 19-50.
43. Ibid., 78.
44. Dahlkamp et al., “Operation Zauber.”
45. The 2JM had planted a bomb at the club on February 2, 1972, to protest the murder of thirteen unarmed demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland, three days earlier, in what became known as the Bogside Massacre, or simply Bloody Sunday. An elderly boat-maker found the 2JM’s bomb and attempted to disarm it—the device exploded, killing him.
46. Rollnik and Dubbe, 75; Klaus Viehmann, “Was nicht geschrieben steht,” 6.
47. Among the prisoners, Reinders, Teufel, and Fritzsch would be associated with the social revolutionaries, and Vogel, Meyer, and Kröcher-Tiedemann (in Switzerland) with the anti-imperialists. (Klöpper was at this time taking his distance from the guerilla.) On the street, Klaus Viehmann is the only known combatant who remained with the social revolutionaries, Inge Viett, Juliane Plambeck, Gabriele Rollnik, Gudrun Stürmer, and Angelika Goder all rallying to the antiimperialist camp.
48. Libération, “Berlin: un ‘terroriste’ délivré par un commando de cinq femmes,” May 26, 1978.
49. United Press International, “Terrorist Freed,” Pharos Tribune, May 28, 1978.
50. Libération “Berlin: un ‘terroriste’ délivré par un commando de cinq femmes.”
51. Associated Press, “Berlin’s Law Chief Is Forced to Resign,” European Stars and Stripes, July 6, 1978.
52. Viehmann (1997), 7.
53. Ralf Reinders and Ronald Fritzch, Die Bewegung 2. Juni (Berlin, Amsterdam: Edition ID-Archiv, 1995), 63.
54. Rollnik and Dubbe, 81.
55. Viehmann (1997), 7.
56. Winnipeg Free Press, “
Combatting Terrorism,” July 18, 1978.
57. Rollnik and Dubbe, 84. According to Willi Winkler, the four were located due to a tap on the phone they called in Bielefeld (Willi Winkler, Die Geschichte der RAF, 372).
58. Rollnik and Dubbe, 83-85. Also: Pruthi, 29.
59. Rollnik and Dubbe, 87.
60. Tobias Wunschik, “Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und der Terrorismus in Deutschland,” 2.
61. Schmeidel, 155-156.
62. Viett, 196-207.
63. Autonome Forum, “A Herstory of the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora—Armed Resistance in West Germany.”
64. Time, “Kidnaping in Vienna, Murder in Athens,” January 5, 1976.
65. To this day the point is debated in the radical left as to whether the guerillas’ intention was to single out Jews or Israelis. The editors are unable to fully examine the question of intent in this context, however the fact of the matter is that both Israeli and non-Israeli Jews were held back. Yossi Melmen, “Setting the record straight: Entebbe was not Auschwitz,” Haaretz July 8, 2011.
66. Fran Yeoman, “Diplomats Suspected Entebbe Hijacking Was an Israeli Plot to Discredit the PLO,” Times Online, June 1, 2007.
67. Marc A. Celmer, Terrorism, U.S. Strategy, and Reagan Policies (Contributions in Political Science) (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987), 66.
68. Graham H. Turbiville, Jr., Hunting Leadership Targets in Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorist Operations: Selected Perspectives and Experience (Hurlburt Field, Florida: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2007), 16.
69. Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Das Projektil sind wir (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2007), 142.
70. Helmut Pohl and Rolf Clemens Wagner, interviewed by junge Welt.