Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  Shoot-out at the synagogue

  Along with other radicals from the PLO, Nidal formed his own organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council. This was the group that later became known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). Nidal was uncompromising in his position: not only did he believe that peace negotiations between the Arabs and the Israelis should be immediately halted, he also believed that moderate Arab leaders should be attacked.

  During the 1980s, the ANO’s targets were wide ranging, taking place in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The ANO are believed to have been behind many assassinations, mass shootings and hijackings during this period. In June 1982, the organization made an assassination attempt on Shlomo Argov in London, prompting the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon. Three years later, it attacked El Al airport counters in Rome and Vienna, killing eighteen people and injuring over 100 more. That same year, a Pan Am Flight to Karachi was hijacked, killing twenty-two people. The following year, in 1986, there was a shoot-out at the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, killing twenty-two, believed to have been the work of the ANO.

  In the 1990s, the attacks continued, with the assassination of Abu Iyyad, PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s right-hand man and the assassination of Naeb Imran Maaytah, a top Jordanian diplomat. The ANO was also suspected of attacking a cruise ship, the City of Poros, which left nine people dead and almost 100 injured, and of planting a car bomb outside the Israeli embassy in Cyprus, killing three people.

  Sadistic purges

  As well as conducting these horrific attacks, the Abu Nidal Organization also began to act as a mercenary force for radical Arab governments, including Syria, Libya and Iraq. In return for this, these countries offered the terrorists a safe haven, allowing them to train soldiers at camps on their soil. However, in each case, when international pressure became extreme, the organization was banned from the country, in order to avoid problems such as sanctions and political ostracism from the West.

  Chillingly, news then began to spread of internal purges in the Abu Nidal Organization itself. It is thought that around 150 of the organization’s own members met their deaths as a result of torture and execution, in a series of bizarre trials for conspiracy. By this time, Nidal had begun to show signs of extreme paranoia, refusing to let any ANO members leave the organization, and suspecting them of being double agents. New recruits were required to write out their life story by hand, agreeing to be executed if any of the facts were found not to be true. When mistakes were made, members were tortured until a confession was extracted out of them. Escaped recruits told of terrible tortures, such as being buried alive, having their genitals placed in boiling oil and being killed by having a feeding tube forced into their mouths and a gun fired into their guts. According to reliable sources, mass purges also took place: in November 1987, 170 members were machine-gunned to death in a single night, while not long afterwards, 150 more were shot and buried in a mass grave.

  Master of cunning

  Not surprisingly, the effectiveness of the organization began to decline during the 1990s, but despite his declining mental health, Nidal was still a master of cunning, escaping capture for many years. During this time he conducted a massive banking scam, through the BCCI bank, trading under the name of a company called SAS Trade and Investment and using the name Shakar Farhan. The business was actually an arms dealing one, selling European and American-made guns, armoured cars, grenade launchers and other accoutrements of war to Middle Eastern clients. An astute businessman, Nidal always kept a large slice of the profits for himself.

  The final showdown

  At the end of the 1990s, Nidal was expelled from Libya, where he had set up his operation, because Colonel Gaddafi wanted to improve his relations with the West in the wake of the Lockerbie disaster. Nidal is rumoured to have been involved with the bombing of this aircraft as well as other terrorist attacks during this period. He went to live in Iraq, and was allowed to stay there, despite the fact that the Jordanian government wanted to extradite him. On August 19, 2002, he was reported to have died of gunshot wounds in a house owned by the Iraqi secret service in the well-to-do neighbourhood of al-Jadriya in Baghdad. Iraq’s chief security man alleged that Nidal had committed suicide, shooting himself through the mouth when security forces paid him a visit to accuse him of conspiracy to bring down the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Other sources suggest that it was the Iraqi secret service, known as the Mukhabarat, that shot Nidal. According to these reports, Nidal was assassinated by a hit squad of thirty officers in a surprise attack on his house, and died of multiple gunshot wounds. He was rushed to hospital, where he died after eight hours.

  Given the number of assassinations, mass shootings, hijackings and other terror attacks that Abu Nidal had masterminded since the 1970s – not to mention his numerous financial scams and arms dealing activities – it is extraordinary that he managed to evade capture for over three decades, during which time he became one of the most wanted international criminals of all time.

  Baader-Meinhof Gang

  The Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the Red Army Faction or Fraction, was a terrorist group that was active in Germany for almost thirty years, beginning in the 1970s. Its aim was to mount a left-wing campaign against what it saw as the repressive German state by organising a series of terror attacks. These included bombings of military, police and media targets, the kidnapping and murder of leading German politicians and businessmen, and hijackings. In all, the gang killed thirty-four people in their attacks, and injured many more.

  Arson attacks

  The campaign had its roots in the student protest movement of the 1960s, which began peacefully but became violent when students demonstrated against the visit of the Shah of Persia to West Berlin. During the demonstrations, a student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by police. His death became a rallying point for left-wing activists, who now decided to respond to what they saw as police brutality by burning down a number of department stores. The group included Andreaas Baader, Gudrin Ensslin, Horst Söhnlein and Thorwald Proll. They were arrested and, while on trial, their story was sympathetically covered by a journalist, Ulrike Meinhof.

  Next, to add fuel to the fire, the leading student activist of the day, Rudi Dutschke, was badly injured in a demonstration, further alienating the activists from the mainstream of German political life. They now became known as the Red Army Fraction, a name inspired by the Japanese Red Army, a left-wing paramilitary group in Japan. However, the press and the public informally referred to them as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Ulrike Meinhof never led the gang, but her close involvement with it and public support of the actions ensured that she became permanently associated with it.

  The main leaders of the gang were soon arrested and imprisoned, but the trouble was far from over. The prisoners were put into solitary confinement, and saw themselves as political martyrs, winning a great deal of support for their cause from the student population. The situation worsened when the prisoners went on hunger strike and had to be force fed. One of them, Holger Meins, died on November 9, 1974, causing a public outcry.

  Series of bombings

  Meanwhile, the terror attacks continued, perpetrated by a new generation of Red Army activists, who had taken over from the founders of the group. In 1972, the gang carried out a series of bombings. On May 11, they bombed a US barracks in Frankfurt, killing one person and injuring thirteen; the following day, they bombed a police station in Augsburg and a Criminal Investigations Agency in Munich, injuring five people. A few days later, the bombings started again, with the bombing of the car of a federal judge, whose wife was injured in the attack, and the bombing of the Axel Springer Verlag, a newspaper and magazine publisher, which caused seventeen injuries. Next, there was a more serious attack on the Military Intelligence Headquarters of the US army in Heidelberg, killing three people and injuring five. The following year, four people were killed when the West German embassy in Stockholm was taken over; two of these were members of the gang.


  Conspiracy theories

  In 1975, the Stammheim trial, named after a district in the city of Stuttgart, took place. This became one of the longest and most controversial criminal trials in Germany. Most of the culprits were convicted and imprisoned, but in May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her cell. On April 28, 1977, Raspe was found with a gunshot wound in his cell at Stammheim prison. He died soon after being taken to hospital. The same morning, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were found dead in their cells. Another prisoner, Irmgard Möller, was also found wounded, stabbed in the chest, but survived. An official enquiry concluded that the prisoners committed suicide; however, Red Army supporters were convinced that the deaths were suspicious, and many conspiracy theories arose as to how the activists had met their deaths.

  Meanwhile, despite the fact that the main leaders of the gang were now locked away or dead, the killings continued. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were a series of kidnaps, murders, hijackings and bombings. In 1977, the situation reached crisis point, in what became known as ‘German Autumn’. The head of a major German bank, Jürgen Ponto, was shot and killed in front of his house; one of the members of the gang who killed him was his own god-daughter, Susanne Albrecht. When they were arrested, tried and convicted of the crime, the backlash started, with a series of more ambitious attacks that terrorized the German public.

  ‘German Autumn’

  First, a Lufthansa aircraft was hijacked at Palma De Majorca. The hijacking came to an end in a commando-style operation that left three hijackers dead. Next, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the Chairman of the German Employers’ Organization was kidnapped and shot; three police officers and a driver were also killed during the kidnapping. Then Alexander Haig, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt. Clearly, the fact that the first generation of Red Army leaders were out of the picture had not ended the organization’s rule of terror; indeed, their imprisonment and subsequent death appeared to have incited more attacks, escalating the violence to an alarming degree.

  During the 1980s, there were more attacks, though by now they were more sporadic. On August 8, 1985, a Volkswagen minibus exploded in a car park at a military air base near Frankfurt. Two people were killed, and twenty injured. It later transpired that a soldier had been kidnapped and killed the night before the attack, and his ID card stolen to gain access to the base. The following year, a leading industrialist, Karl Heinz Beckurts and his driver were shot, and banker Alfred Herrhausen was the victim of a bomb attack. In 1993, another attack took place, when explosives were thrown at the construction site of a new prison, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage; thankfully, no one was killed in this attack.

  Thus it was that the Baader-Meinhof gang managed to mastermind a series of terror attacks over a period of three decades. In the wake of the attacks, there have been many questions as to why it was that such a violent group of generally well-educated, middle-class young people could take to crime in this way, and attract such a lot of support from their peers at universities and educational establishments across the country.

  The end of an era

  One theory is that young people in Germany in the 1970s felt extremely guilty about the events of World War II, in particular the Nazi regime, and were trying to absolve themselves in a negative way from that sense of guilt by attacking the establishment, in the shape of the police, the military, the government and the business and industrial leaders of the nation. It has also been pointed out that the The Baader-Meinhof Gang also represented a kind of ‘rock’ aesthetic, and that they appealed to young people because they dressed in a trendy way, with leather jackets and long hair. The presence of young women dressed as gangsters, in dark glasses and black clothes, was also a draw to young, impressionable students. Moreover, the gang consciously referenced such leaders as Che Guevara, not only in their style of dress, but in their actions. Many of the terror attacks they undertook were influenced by the theories of guerrilla warfare put forward by Guevara and others during the Cuban revolution.

  However, instead of fighting for justice in a poor, oppressed society such as that of Cuba, the Baader-Meinhof Gang were trying to lead a revolution in Germany, which by the late 1960s had become one of Europe’s richest nations. For this reason, among others, they failed to do more than mount a series of extremely damaging attacks on individuals – whether heads of banks, military figures or simply those who happened to be nearby at the time – earning themselves a reputation as cold-blooded killers rather than as revolutionaries or visionaries.

  Today, most commentators regard the influence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang as negligible. In general, the political left, which arose out of the student protests of the 1960s, has given rise to positive initiatives such as the anti-nuclear and green movements, both of which have increased in popularity since that time. By contrast, the extremism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, to the relief of most of the German people, appears to have reached a dead end. (Interestingly, one of its founding members, Horst Mahler, who was released from prison in the early 1980s, is now a leading neo-Nazi figure, having completely reversed his politics.) It is still remarkable, however, that the group managed to maintain a presence for so long in German society, terrorizing some of the most influential and powerful figures in the nation, and causing the government a series of extremely humiliating episodes.

  Osama bin Laden

  Today, Osama bin Laden is probably the most famous terrorist in the world, having been identified as the mastermind behind al-Qaeda, the organization that carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001. As well as this horrific attack, which killed almost 3,000 people in the biggest single terror offensive of all time, he and al-Qaeda are believed to have been behind a series of US embassy bombings, the Bali nightclub bombings, the USS Cole bombing and the Madrid bombings. Al-Qaeda is also thought to be responsible for terror attacks in the Jordanian capital Amman, and the Sinai peninsula of Egypt.

  Although bin Laden has now publicly claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks, to date the US security services do not have enough hard evidence to link him to the events and he has not been indicted for these. However, he has been indicted on the embassy bombings in Africa, and is currently on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Strenuous attempts have been made to capture him, but at present his whereabouts are unknown, although he is thought to be living in rural Afghanistan. There have also been several reports of his death, though these are unsubstantiated.

  Millionaire father

  The story of bin Laden is a strange one, and it still remains something of a mystery as to why this intelligent, well-educated man, who was born and raised in the lap of luxury, should have become one of the greatest mass murderers of our time. Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10, 1957. His father, Muhammed Awad bin Laden, was an extremely wealthy man, building palaces for the billionaire Saudi royal family and, in the process, amassing a huge fortune. As was the custom for men of wealth and position, Muhammed had many wives, who bore him, in total, fifty-five offspring. Osama was the son of Muhammed’s tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas, a Syrian-born woman. The marriage did not last long (Muhammed was married twenty-two times, though he only had four wives at a time, in accordance with Islamic law).

  Soon after Osama’s birth, his parents divorced, and his mother Hamida married Muhammed al-Attas, one of her former husband’s employees. The couple went on to have four children, and Osama became part of a new step-family. Raised as a devout Sunni Muslim, at school and university, Osama came under the influence of Islamic fundamentalist teachers who had been banned for their extremist views from other Arab countries. Some of these teachers preached a philosophy of anti-Western ‘jihad’, and Osama, as was later to become clear, was deeply influenced by their views.

  As a young man, bin Laden gained degrees in civil engineering, business and public administration and economics; he also became an expert in Islamic jurisprudence. He went on to m
arry several times, as was the custom, and is thought to have fathered between twelve and twenty children. As a result of his family’s business interests, and his own, he was an extremely wealthy man, and because of his fundamentalist views, began to support the mujahideen, a radical group of Muslim guerrillas fighting for control of Afghanistan after the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union in 1979. He co-ordinated his efforts with a former university teacher of his, Abdullah Azzam, who had moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, and was running a resistance campaign on the border with Afghanistan.

  Bank-rolling the mujahideen

  After bin Laden graduated from Jeddah University, he not only continued to bankroll Azzam’s operation, but also went to Peshawar himself to fight for the cause. Together, he and Azzam set up an organization called Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) whose aim was to channel arms, money and mujahideen soldiers into Afghanistan. In this way, bin Laden established an international network of covert activities and contacts that was to become the basis for his later anti-American terrorist activities. According to some sources, he was helped at this time by the CIA, who were keen to topple the Soviet regime in Afghanistan and were willing to make alliances with any group that also wished for its demise. As we now know, this strategy was to prove disastrous for the United States in later years.