The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (16 page)

Federal Minister of the Interior Gerhart Baum publicly boasted that the arrests were the work of a
Zielfahndung
squad—though there was also the story that a vacationing West German prison guard had recognized Meyer relaxing on the beach.
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According to Rollnik, it is also possible that Bulgarian intelligence had betrayed them to the FRG, as there was already a high level of cooperation between the two countries around drug trafficking. As the guerillas were making daily calls to West Berlin, there is also the theory that they were located through telephone surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.
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Regardless of how they were found, there is little mystery about the details of their capture. Sitting in a café, the four were suddenly swarmed by heavily armed assailants in civilian clothing; overpowered, they were whisked off to a nearby bungalow, where they were tied up and left lying on the floor for several hours. Once the guerillas realized that they were dealing with Germans, they demanded to speak to the Bulgarian authorities, which they were allowed to do, but to no avail: the Bulgarians were cooperating, and all requests for asylum fell on deaf ears. Chained hand and foot, in the middle of the night they were brought to the airport, where they were loaded onto a
Lufthansa
plane along with a couple of dozen more German police. The icing on the cake was a representative of the Bonn Security Group, who introduced himself with a mocking, “My name is Scheicher. Now, let's go home to the Reich!”
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Upon their return, Rollnik was placed in isolation in Cologne. It took a thirty-day hunger strike for her to be transferred to Berlin, where she was able to have some contact with Berberich and other political
prisoners. (In 1980, she, Berberich, Goder, and Stürmer would all be transferred to the new high-security wing at Moabit prison.)
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The arrests in Bulgaria, like those of the RAF fugitives in Yugoslavia, were said to augur a new era of East-West cooperation against “terrorism.” Indeed, it seems clear that sections of the East Bloc security apparatus were cooperating with the West. But the world of international espionage is a murky one where double- and triple-crosses are not uncommon and political factors constantly force matters into their own mould, and so two further possibilities bear consideration.

First, it is possible that the
Zielfahndung
opted to seize and remove the guerillas from Bulgaria as a result of the fact that Yugoslavia was still holding onto Mohnhaupt, Boock, Hofmann, and Wagner. Belgrade's refusal to extradite the four was turning into a serious wrinkle in the FRG's much-hoped-for “antiterrorist” rapprochement with the East, and preventing a repeat of this problem was clearly in Bonn's best interests.

Second, in both the case of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, it is possible that the Eastern authorities only went along with capturing the guerillas because they had been “caught out” by the
Zielfahndung,
which had located its targets independently. This would have placed the governments in question in the uncomfortable position of having to brazenly admit to sheltering the guerillas or else make a show of cooperating. In this light, it is possible that Belgrade's insistence on trading for the Croatian nationalists held by the FRG—as much as they wanted the Croatians—was intended to provide a convenient excuse for eventually releasing the West Germans.

Further evidence of the complex relationship between the guerilla and the various East Bloc nations came just days after the Golden Beach busts. On June 27, Viett, her longtime companion and fellow 2JM member Regina Nicolai, and 2JM member Ina Siepmann, found themselves detained while transiting through Czechoslovakia on their way to Baghdad.
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The three were questioned extensively about the 2JM's attitude toward the socialist countries, the strength of anticommunism in the West German left, and their reasons for traveling to the Middle East—but the FRG was never informed that they were being detained. After three days, the guerillas tired of this and requested that the GDR be informed that Inge Viett was in custody. As soon as this was done, three agents from Department XXII (Terrorism) of the MfS
were sent to retrieve the 2JM fighters, bringing them to the GDR where they were entertained by Colonel Harry Dahl, Major Helmut Voigt, and his understudy Gerd Zaumseil.
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The women remained in the GDR for two weeks, before continuing on to Baghdad.
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Viett had apparently first made contact with the
Stasi
after breaking out of prison in 1976. Now the East Germans had gotten her out of a bind, and it would seem that each side was apt to view the other with favor. A situation that would not be without its consequences.

But for the moment, the 2JM, like the RAF, was in crisis. For all the beauty of the 1978 jailbreak, Meyer was now back in prison, as were several other members. The group had split, and post-'77, their experience with the Austrian students served as an object lesson as to the challenges of integrating new recruits, never mind carrying out new actions.

Discretion being the better part of valor, keeping a low profile and staying out of the country struck those left as the wisest option to pursue.

Unlike the RAF and the 2JM, West Germany's third guerilla group did not emerge from West Berlin, but from the self-styled “antiauthoritarian” wing of the post-APO left in Frankfurt, the same scene that also gave rise to the
Spontis.

Dubbed “the after work guerillas,” the Revolutionary Cells adopted a very different approach from either the RAF or the 2JM. Anybody could carry out an action within the context of the RZ's politics—defined as anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and “supporting the struggles of workers, women, and youth”
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—and claim it as an RZ action. In line with this, the Cells did not field underground militants, but rather advised comrades to maintain their aboveground existence while carrying out clandestine activities. Finally, within the FRG, the group purposefully stopped short of carrying out lethal attacks, the sole fatality during their entire nineteen-year existence being a politician who bled out when an RZ cell kneecapped him. (The group subsequently issued a communiqué explaining that they had not meant to kill him.)

Apart from bombing the Chilean consulate, the offices of El Al, police stations, U.S. army bases, government buildings, and bosses' cars, for years the RZ also forged public transportation passes which were
broadly distributed, and food vouchers which were passed out to homeless families. While some of these actions were relatively high-level, requiring as much planning and risk as the RAF's bombings, in general RZ attacks were considerably less heavy, as can be seen by this partial list from the period covered by this volume:

• In April 1979, pesticides were used to destroy the garden at the Frankfurt home of IGM Chairman Eugen Lorderer, and stink bombs were dumped on the floor of IGM Vice Chairman Hans Mayr's house—workers at IGM had recently experienced a defeat after six weeks on strike.
  
• In November 1979, sugar was put in gas tanks and tires were slashed at the Seeland Trucking Company, involved in building a nuclear power plant.
  
• In January 1981, four trucks belonging to Bilfinger and Berger, a Frankfurt construction company involved in gentrification, were torched.
  
• In May 1982, the Mercedes belonging to the head of the Frankfurt Real Estate Office was torched in protest against gentrification.
  
• In November 1982, stinking liquid was poured into the home of George Luze, managing editor at the
  Braunschweiger Zeitung,
  for his role in driving competing newspapers out of business.
  

As indicated by the above, RZ actions were carried out around a variety of issues and could at times be considered little more than vandalism. (One wag, comparing them to the RAF, dubbed them the “property destruction faction.”) Unlike the illegal activities carried out by the RAF's support scene—which were timed and determined in the framework of the RAF's own campaigns, with the militants taking their lead from the guerilla—the Cells tended to take their direction from the social movements themselves. What prevented all this from simply dissolving into a sea of movementism was the ideology and identity established when an action was claimed by the Cells. Furthering this process, ever since May Day 1975, people in the Revolutionary Cells milieu had been issuing an annual newspaper,
Revolutionärer Zorn
(Revolutionary Rage), which helped establish a common framework for RZ actions and politics; it was immediately banned under §88a, but widely read in the scene regardless.

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.
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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.
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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.
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It was in reaction to Entebbe that the United States established its first counterterrorist military units.
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As for Israel, the Mossad was given the mission of assassinating PFLP (EO) head Waddi Haddad, which it accomplished in 1978.
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