The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (26 page)

NATO began developing its program against the armed resistance of the RAF the moment we came into being. Under orders from NATO, cadre incarcerated in West German prisons have been executed. For those of us who struggle on the outside, there is the order to preventively shoot us in the head.

The eradication of every revolutionary group and movement “the activities of which are directed against the interests of this alliance”—and that's everyone who understands and carries out their struggle within the framework of internationalist anti-imperialism—is the necessary precondition for the imperialist offensive, and that is clearly understood.

The only question is what we will do. How, for example, will we mobilize the revolutionary forces in this phase in which U.S. imperialism continues to act as the deadly enemy of humanity?

THE STRUGGLE NEVER ENDS!

SMASH U.S. IMPERIALISM AND ITS BASES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD!

ORGANIZE ARMED RESISTANCE IN WESTERN EUROPE!

BUILD THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST FRONT IN THE METROPOLE!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE AGAINST THE IMPERIALIST FINAL SOLUTION!

SOLIDARITY WITH THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST RESISTANCE IN TURKEY!

Andreas Baader Commando
June 25, 1979

_____________

¹
Since 1977, France had intervened in military conflicts in Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Chad to support those parties favored by Western imperialism.

²
U.S. policy since Richard Nixon had been to maintain armed forces capable of fighting and winning “one and a half” wars simultaneously, meaning a major war with the Soviet Union as well as a war in the Third World.

³
“Flexible response” had been the U.S. nuclear doctrine since the Kennedy administration; as its name indicates, it called for a graduated use of nuclear and conventional weapons in conflicts short of total nuclear war.

Today, June 26, 1979, the prisoners from the RAF, the other social revolutionary movements, and the social prisoners, are collectively ending the hunger and thirst strike. We are doing this because it has become clear that the FRG aims to use the hunger strike to liquidate any prisoners who were not liquidated at the time of their arrest, through life destroying isolation or by murderous attacks such as those which occurred on October 18, 1977.

This indicates that—as the recent cases of Willi Peter Stoll, Elisabeth von Dyck, and Rolf Heißler made clear—prisoners will no longer be taken.

The FRG believes that it has a handle on international public opinion, and that—especially following the European elections—this will not cause them any embarrassment.

To prevent them from achieving their objective, we are calling off the hunger and thirst strike.

We will now await the outcome of negotiations with the international commission dealing with us,
¹
as well as those going on between Amnesty International and the federal minister of justice.

We will not give up our struggle for survival.

RAF Prisoners
June 26, 1979

_____________

¹
This refers to the networks of supporters that were coming together in this period, and would formally constitute themselves as the International Commission for the Protection of Prisoners and Against Isolation Torture (IKSG); see
page 103
.

Poster from the 1979-1980 period: “Irmgard Must Get Out” followed by a quote from the Andreas Baader Commando: “The only question is what we will do. How, for example, will we mobilize the revolutionary forces in this phase in which U.S. imperialism continues to act as the deadly enemy of humanity?”

A
S THE 1970S CAME TO
a close, two contradictory developments were manifesting themselves in West Germany. On the one hand, Helmut Schmidt and his technocratic “Model Germany” had been buoyed by the guerilla's repeated defeats. On the other, a new radical youth movement was emerging out of various struggles, most notably the direct-action wing of the antinuclear movement.

Politics and history consist of wheels within wheels, and so neither of these developments occurred in a vacuum. Rather, they existed within, and had to respond to, a whole gamut of challenges and forces, both internal and external. Chief among the latter were the changes to the international balance of power that accompanied the end of the 1970s— what the Andreas Baader Commando had referred to hopefully as the “development of the relationship of forces between the revolution and the counterrevolution… the worldwide revolutionary process of the cities being encircled by the villages.”
¹

President Jimmy Carter and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt

Jimmy Carter was sworn in as U.S. president in January 1977. Derided as a bumbling wimp by his right-wing critics, Carter was in actual fact a shrewd imperialist strategist, and in
many ways his policies laid the groundwork for the Reagan offensive of the 1980s. While he presented himself as the “human rights” president, this was little more than a smoke and mirrors act. Bill Vann has explained that

The human rights approach found expression only in what were peripheral areas for U.S. imperialist interests. Security assistance was cut off to the dictatorships in Ethiopia, Chile and Uruguay. In the latter two countries, ties with the U.S. military and economic aid remained untouched. Moreover, the secretary of state announced that the military regime in South Korea and the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines would be exempted entirely from the policy on grounds of “national security.”

In Central America, the Carter administration came up with a unique method for limiting direct security assistance to right-wing dictatorships, while assuring that they remained armed to the teeth for the purpose of suppressing popular revolt. Israel was recruited to fill the gap, supplying Galil assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns to substitute for American-made M16s. Israeli military advisers were likewise dispatched to the region, while U.S. aid to Israel rose dramatically.
²

The neocolonial strategy was necessary, because the wave of decolonization that followed World War II had unleashed forces that imperialism could not simply vanquish, but was obliged to try to integrate. Discretion being the better part of valor, the smarter approach was cooptation, using both carrot and stick. After Vietnam, Nixon, and the global sixties revolt, a soft touch was required.

Indeed, in 1979, it could still appear that American imperialism was being beaten back around the world. The year began with the overthrow of the Shah, a longtime ally of both the FRG and the United States, under whose iron fist Iran had earned its reputation as the gendarme of the Middle East. A campaign of civil resistance had developed in 1978, with strikes, demonstrations, and guerilla attacks paralyzing the country in the latter half of the year. The Shah finally fled in mid-January 1979, and the monarchy collapsed weeks later when rebel forces overwhelmed troops loyal to the old regime. The revolution took international observers by surprise, and soon fears of losing access to Iranian oil led to a panic, which in turn did lead to an increase in oil prices—the “second oil shock.”

In November, students would seize the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking its staff hostage, and demanding the exiled Shah and his family be returned to face trial. While the occupation cemented Khomeini's power vis-à-vis other forces in Iran (including the left), it also resulted in a windfall for all opponents of U.S. imperialism: searching through the embassy, the students found an archive of CIA and State Department documents—these were pieced together and published in book form, representing the single greatest disclosure of foreign intelligence secrets up to that point in postwar history. This not only exposed many of the CIA's activities in Iran, but also in the Soviet Union, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq.
³
(The students would hold the fifty-two American hostages for 444 days. Within a week, Carter had announced an immediate halt to all imports of Iranian oil and froze $8 billion worth of Iranian assets in the U.S.)
⁴

While the Iranian revolution was the most striking reversal for Western interests in 1979, it was not the only one. In March, Maurice Bishop, leader of the Marxist New Jewel Movement, seized power in Grenada, as Prime Minister Eric Gairy fled the Caribbean island. In Zimbabwe, the guerilla struggle was intensifying, and in a stop-gap effort to prevent a Marxist victory, a Black-led government was installed in May (it wouldn't last out the year). In July, Anastasio Somoza, another vicious American ally, fled Managua for Miami, as a coalition of left-wing forces known as the
Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional
(FSLN, or more popularly, the Sandinistas) took power in Nicaragua.

Within NATO itself, Turkey was increasingly rocked by political violence, as a state of general unrest began sliding into full-on civil war. The situation worsened as the economy began to tank: like many Third World countries, Turkey was hit particularly hard by the new economic situation, and was soon spending two-thirds of its foreign currency earnings on oil imports.
⁵

In December 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan to prop up the country's Marxist government against a growing insurgency. Considered by some to be the opening scene in what would prove to be the Soviet Union's undoing, its entry into Afghanistan was immediately condemned around the world. Nonetheless, it has subsequently been learned that elements in the Carter administration were not only aware of the Soviet invasion beforehand, but had actually worked to provoke
it. Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted in a 1998 interview that the CIA had been funding the rebels before the Soviets invaded: “We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would… That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” he explained. “The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”
⁶

With the Soviets in Kabul and the Ayatollah in Tehran, national security propagandists pointed to a purported “arc of crisis” stretching from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, with Moscow pulling the strings.

This rise in tension provided the backdrop for several bellicose developments in the realm of U.S. foreign policy, which together with Afghanistan would usher in a new era of superpower sabre-rattling, known to historians as the second Cold War—it was in fact a counteroffensive, intended to shore up and restore imperialism's power worldwide.

As early as 1977, heartened by his newfound popularity in the aftermath of Mogadishu and responding to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe, Helmut Schmidt had called upon Carter to modernize and expand the U.S. Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF)—the Americans' European arsenal.
⁷
Plans to do so were announced in the last month of the decade, as NATO officially adopted what was known as the “Double-Track” strategy. A double-or-nothing gambit, this consisted of deploying thousands of new Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe, while simultaneously negotiating with the Soviets for their removal—conditional on the Soviets also removing their SS-20s.

The U.S. jacked up defense spending and scuttled the recently negotiated SALT II arms control treaty. At the same time, Carter issued Presidential Directive 59, declaring that the U.S. would strive to develop and maintain the ability to wage a “winnable” war against the USSR. An outgrowth of the already existing “flexible response” strategy, intended to allow for a “limited” nuclear war, Presidential Directive 59 involved a typically Carteresque “humanitarian” shift: missiles would no longer be aimed at Soviet cities, but at Soviet military installations. What this meant in practice was that Moscow faced the prospect of having its retaliatory capacity knocked out by a U.S. first strike; the only way to avoid this possibility would be for the Soviets to fire first.