3

The Sociology of Terrorism

Terrorism, interpreted here as the use of covert violence by a group for political ends, is usually directed against a government, less fre quently against another group, class or party. The ends may vary from the redress of specific “grievances” to the overthrow of a gov ernment and the taking over of power, or to the liberation of a country from foreign rule. Terrorists seek to cause political, social and economic disruption, and for this purpose frequently engage in planned or indiscriminate murder.^* It may appear in conjunction with a political campaign or with guerrilla war, but also in a “pure” form. It has been waged by national or religious groups, by the left or by the right, by nationalist as well as internationalist movements and on some rare occasions even by liberals and conservatives. Terrorist movements have mainly consisted of members of the educated middle classes, but there has also been agrarian terrorism, terror by the uprooted and the rejected, and trade union and working-class terror (United States 1880-1910; Spain 1890-1936). Terror has been directed against autocratic regimes as well as democracies; some times there has been an obvious link with social dislocation and economic crisis, at other times there has been no such connection. Movements of national liberation and social revolution (or reaction) have turned to terrorism after political action failed. But elsewhere and at other times terrorism has not been the consequence of politi cal failure but has been chosen by militant groups even before other options were tried. Terrorism has never occurred in modern totali tarian regimes; individual attempts at assassinations have taken place but the means of control and repression at the disposal of a totalitar ian state rule out any organized terrorism. It has been infrequent in modern societies where violence has not been part of the political culture, but outside totalitarian rule few parts of the world have been altogether free from it.

National oppression and social inequities are frequently men tioned as the main factors responsible for the spread of terrorism, and it is of course true that happy, contented people seldom, if ever, throw bombs. But this does not explain why the struggle for political freedom, for national liberation or for secession, or for other aims, sometimes has led to terrorism but at other times has not. Further more, any analysis of terrorism is incomplete unless it considers those against whom terror is directed: terrorist groups have made their appearance in our time in Britain and in France, in Spain and in Ethiopia; they have not been seen in Russia or China or the countries of Eastern Europe. Generalizations about terrorism are exceedingly difficult for yet another reason: terrorist movements are usually small; some are very small indeed, and while historians and sociolo gists can sometimes account for mass movements, the movements of small particles in politics as in physics often defy any explanation.

Some of the most startling assassinations of the last hundred years were carried out by individuals without the help or knowledge of any organized body — the murders of Stolypin and President McKinley; the killing of President Carnot, of Gandhi and President Kennedy. Such individual actions apart, there have been groups which killed and bombed in order to express protest rather than in the hope of defeating their enemies. The anarchist propagandists of the deed clearly belong to this category. Some of them registered their protest in their novels, some in their pictures and others threw bombs. Frequently there has been a general concept, sometimes vague, some times quite precise, underlying acts of terror. The advocates of “pure terror” in Russia assumed that the assassination of a handful of leading officials and other pillars of the establishment would lead to the downfall of the regime. They were not, as a rule, concerned with what would happen beyond this point; their historical mission, as they saw it, ended with the destruction of the system (or of foreign oppression). Yet almost inevitably, as the terrorist campaign con tinued, the terrorists became concerned with the seizure of power and more distant perspectives. This happened for instance to Narod-naya Volya, who eventually came to envisage a general insurrection even though they must have been aware that they were far too few to organize and direct a popular movement. Right-wing terrorists such as the German Organization Consul or the Japanese officers of the 1930s had more modest aims — they wanted to change the policy of the government so as to prevent “national betrayal.” It is doubtful whether the Rumanian Iron Guard ever seriously intended to con quer power even though at one time it constituted a serious danger to the government, The extreme wing of the Fenians announced in 1885 that “this dynamite work will go on till Ireland is free, or till London is laid in ashes.”¹ Again, it is very unlikely that they thought this to be a realistic alternative. What they actually expected was a more complicated sequence of action and counteraction: as Captain Lomasney explained to Jim Devoy, the Irish bombings would pro voke British countermeasures but these would not succeed, for the Irish were a fighting race and their fighting spirit would be aroused by the struggle, the sympathy of the world would be won for Ireland, the English would have to make concessions and these could be used to wring further concessions and eventually Ireland would win full freedom.² Similarly, in 1918 the Russian Social Revolutionaries as sumed that the murder of the German ambassador in Moscow and the German governor general of the occupied part of Ukraine would lead to the renewal of hostilities between Russia and Germany.

This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of provocation. The Armenians hoped that their actions would bring about the intervention of the European powers,- a similar strategy, based on outside help, underlay the campaigns of Irgun, LEHI, the Palestinian Arab organizations and other such groups. The Serbian Black Hand decided to kill Arch-duke Franz Ferdinand not because they regarded him as particularly wicked but, on the contrary, because they were afraid that he would make political concessions, thus weakening the spirit of the nationalist movement in Bosnia.³ For similar reasons the Freikorps terrorists killed Rathenau, the foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. The drawback to this strategy was that it worked only if the international constellation was auspicious. If it wasn’t, terrorist acts made no difference, or even led to disaster, as the Armenians discovered to their cost. Orsini’s attempt on the life of Napoleon III was a political success despite the fact that it failed. Orsini was executed but he became a hero with Napoleon’s approval: his letter to the emperor (“Set my country free”) was reproduced in full in the Moniteur. It was a success because Napoleon was already inclined to pursue an anti-Austrian policy.⁴ A few years later a Pole tried to kill Napoleon III. The political effect was nil, for Poland was far away and the French emperor had no intention of antagonizing the Russians. Where terrorism has been successful its aims have usually been limited and clearly defined. The daily wage of the American iron workers (AFL) went up from $2.00 to $4.30 (for shorter hours) between 1905 and 1910 as the result of the bombing of some one hundred buildings and bridges.⁵ Spanish workers, using similar methods, improved their wages during the First World War.⁶ Alternatively, terrorist actions succeeded because they were used within the framework of a wider strategy. An obvious example was the systematic killing by the Viet-cong of some 10,000 village elders during the late 1950s and early 19605, thus preparing the ground for a takeover from within.⁷ They used the same tactics against opponents of the left, such as the Saigon Trotskyites, as did the Algerian FLN vis-a-vis their nationalist rivals, the Messalists. But the use of “urban guerrilla” tactics against the French was much less successful and in any case neither the Vietcong nor the FLN was predominantly a terrorist movement.

It is widely believed that with the growing vulnerability of modern technological society the prospects for urban terror are now greater than ever before. But “pure terrorism” has so far only succeeded in very specific circumstances which will be discussed later. Urban terrorists have, on the whole, been aware of the difficulties facing them and, in theory, urban terrorism should be linked with rural guerrilla warfare or with attempts to win over sections of the army or with the vision of a general insurrection or a people’s war. But in practice the emphasis is usually on urban terror, either because the countries concerned are predominantly urbanized or because the masses do not respond or because the army is not inclined to cooperate with the terrorists. It should be noted in passing that while terrorist move ments, including the right-wing terrorists of Central Europe, of Hun gary and Rumania, attacked the police without hesitation, they were unwilling to take on the army and not only because they were afraid of the outcome of an unequal contest. Thus neither the Narodnaya Volya nor the Polish terrorists in 1905-1906 attacked army installa tions and personnel, in the hope that restraint would win over some officers; these hopes were by no means unjustified and eventually the Russians had a “military organization” consisting entirely of officers or ex-officers. The Palestinian Arab terrorists and the IMRO pre ferred to direct their operations against the civilian population, this, of course, being less risky. The IRA on the other hand had no such inhibitions; but then it knew that, given the political restrictions facing the army, the danger of retaliation was insubstantial. Latin American terrorists have tried with varying success to draw army officers into their ranks; as a rule they suffered badly whenever they clashed with soldiers.

There has always been a certain discrepancy between terrorist doctrine and practice. But even on the purely theoretical level, there was a great deal of inconsistency and some of the key questions were left unanswered. Was. the terrorist struggle the prologue to the revolution (or to national liberation) or was it already the revolution? Were the terrorists the avant-garde of the revolutionary (or nationalist) movement — or were they the movement? Few terrorist groups have ever claimed that radical change could be effected without the active participation of the masses, but most of them have acted as if it could be done. But for how long could they continue to act (and to speak) on behalf of the masses without losing their credibility if the population was unenthusiastic or even hostile? The position of terrorist groups acting within the framework of political movements has been less complicated; they had to carry out a mission and no one expected them to worry about long-term perspectives. This applies, for instance, to the Social Revolutionaries, the Irish terrorists, Irgun and other such groups. But the division of labor has worked more easily in theory than in practice, for the “fighting organizations” always needed some autonomy and their political ideas usually di verged to some extent. There was always resentment against the “politicians” who risked so little and had therefore no moral right to dictate a course of action to the terrorists — unless it coincided with the wishes and the convictions of the “fighters.” In short, there was almost always dissension and competition between the political and the terrorist wing of the movement, and a tendency toward full autonomy among the terrorists.

Terrorist Organization

Systematic terrorist operations involve careful planning, resembling the staff work of a minor military campaign. The intended victim has to be watched for a certain time, his habits and movements studied to establish the most promising place and time for the action. The terrorists need transport to and from the scene of the operation; they have to have false identity papers, effective arms and, above all, money. To make the most of their operation they need a publicity department. All major terrorist movements have had a central com mand, sometimes highly professional and efficient, at other times rudimentary and amateurish. Important decisions among the Narodnaya Volya were taken at committee meetings, but this system has usually proved ineffective in an emergency, and since terrorist groups face emergencies much of the time, the general tendency has been toward centralization and the leadership principle. But strong leadership tends to produce rivalry and opposition and the inevitable centralization also creates certain practical problems. Terrorism al ways involves an element of improvisation; even the most careful planning cannot possibly make provision for all eventualities. Elabo rate planning that sacrifices the element of improvisation could re dound to the disadvantage of the terrorists. A small local group, on the other hand, will usually lack the resources and the know-how for carrying out a major operation. The ideal pattern is strong central leadership concerned with broad strategy, but with the details left to the local branches. Mao had a great deal to say about this in his writings on guerrilla warfare but, again, it is a principle easier to adhere to in theory than to observe in practice.

The central command of the terrorist movement has sometimes been located abroad; Switzerland, the United States, Lebanon have been centers for movements operating elsewhere. The advantages are obvious; the terrorist leaders can move about freely without fear of arrest. But so are the drawbacks, for the more remote the head quarters from the scene of action, the less complete its knowledge of current events, the more tenuous its contacts with its own men. While the Narodnaya Volya would never have envisaged operations outside Russia, some modern terrorist groups specialize in “third country operations.” In 1973, for instance, out of 221 major terrorist operations all over the globe, 47 were carried out in third countries.⁸

The larger a terrorist movement, the greater the danger of detec tion. The Narodnaya Volya, at the height of its activities, had 500 members; the Fighting Organization of the Social Revolutionaries (1903-1907) was considerably smaller, though there was a large pe riphery which it could draw on for support. Both IZL and LEHI had only a few hundred members who could be enlisted for terrorist operations. The nineteenth-century Irish terrorist groups consisted of a few dozen militants. The IRA and Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations had many more members but only a small number were trained for terrorist action. Terrorist groups in contrast to guer rilla units do not grow beyond a certain limit. The basic unit usually consists of three to ten people. Some of the recent terrorist “armies” such as the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof group (Rote Armee Fraktion), the Angry Brigade, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc., numbered a few dozen members at the height of their exploits. The Tupamaros started their operations with 50 members in late 1966; five years later they had about 3,000; yet their success was their undoing, for the very size of the movement made it easy for the security forces to track down the terrorists and eventually to arrest many of them and to destroy their organization. The Argentinian ERP was believed to have 5,000 members in 1975, but again, only a part were engaged in fighting operations.^* The Montoneros were even more numerous but lacked cohesion and split into several factions.

Urban terrorist campaigns have seldom lasted longer than three to four years. Once the security forces have mastered counter tech niques, terrorist losses usually become unacceptably high. Further more, the initial enthusiasm in the ranks of the terrorist groups has tended to wane, once it appears that even a series of successful operations fails to bring about the downfall of the system. In a few cases, terrorist campaigns have lasted longer — when launched from sanctuaries, as in the case of the Palestinian organizations — or when the terrorists have fairly strong mass support, usually of a nationalist-separatist or religious kind (IRA, Euzkadi). According to Z. Ivianski, terrorism frequently occurs in cyclical upsurges.⁹ The ere des attentats in France came twenty years after the Paris Commune, and two decades later there was another, albeit minor, wave of terrorist operations. In Russia, too, twenty years were to pass before a new generation resumed the terrorist tradition of the Narodnaya Volya. In Ireland, on the other hand, the intervals be tween the terrorist upsurges were considerably longer. Once a ter rorist organization has failed to attain its objectives, the fighting spirit of a new generation is needed to rekindle the flame. Seen in this light, terrorism is a concomitant of generational revolt; but there is no eternal law of generational revolt and even when it occurs it does not necessarily turn to terrorism. Furthermore, there are a great many factors that either hasten or delay the outbreak of a terrorist campaign even in countries in which violence is more or less endemic; the international political constellation, for instance. At other times the echo effect has obviously had a certain impact insofar as a terrorist campaign in one country has provided inspira tion for others elsewhere.

Terrorist Finances

Modern terrorists do not live by enthusiasm alone; they need a great deal of money. The preparations for major operations may be expensive and money is needed to bribe government and police officials. Nineteenth-century terrorist movements could sometimes be run on a shoestring. The Narodnaya Volya got the little it needed from well-todo members or sympathizers; the Social Revolutionaries re lied mainly on “expropriations.” The Anarchists were poor, and had no significant outside support, apart from occasional windfalls. Fran cisco Ferrer, the Spanish Anarchist, received a million francs from a French lady he had befriended. The Irish Revolutionary Brother hood was founded in a Dublin timberyard on St. Patrick’s Day 1858 with four hundred dollars received from the U.S.A.; more substantial sums were collected in later years (the “Special National Fund,” Rossa’s Skirmishing Fund). Some of the money was contributed by a sympathizer who was a billiards champion. Irgun and, to a lesser extent, LEHI received financial support from Jews in the United States and also engaged in “expropriations.” Occasionally the politi cal police would contribute indirectly to the budget of Anarchist and terrorist groups but these gifts were hardly ever of great importance. In 1906-1907, Indian terrorists tried to manufacture forged notes, counterfeit coins and even prepare “chemical gold.” When these attempts to raise money failed they turned to robbery (dacoity). Some of them suggested that only government funds should be sto len but this was considered impractical and a resolution was passed that an accurate account should be kept of the amounts taken from private individuals with a view to returning them after indepen dence was achieved. It was also suggested that only those who had amassed wealth by dishonest means should be victimized. But, as noted by a historian of the Indian freedom movement, “it is difficult to believe that this principle was always followed in practice.” Nor could all terrorists, “human nature being what it is,” live up to the ideals of high moral purpose and absence of greed; dacoities were committed for personal ends, and political objectives were used as a disguise.¹⁰ The Ustasha forged Yugoslav 1,000 dinar notes, apparently with Italian help, and LEHI printed government bonds with the assistance of a specialist serving in the Polish army in exile.^*

After the First World War it became the fashion among some governments to finance terrorist groups; thus the Italians and the Hungarians gave money to the Croatians and IMRO (44 million lira in 1929-1933). IMRO also received funds from the Bulgarians, and the Poles allegedly paid the Rumanian Iron Guard, although this had not been proved. This fashion became even more popular after the Sec ond World War. The Soviet Union either directly or through its East European satellites has supplied arms, technical instruction and pos sibly money to terrorist groups in various parts of the world; Libya, Algeria and other Arab countries have distributed money on a rather lavish scale — sometimes, as in Ulster, supporting both sides in a conflict. The IRA have continued to receive contributions from the U.S.A. and the Palestinian Arab terrorist groups have been given hundreds of millions of dollars from the oil-producing countries. Latin American groups such as the ERP and the Montoneros ex torted millions of dollars from the firms and families of kidnaped businessmen. Nineteenth-century terrorist groups had been more or less uniformly poor, whereas more recently there has been a clear “class differentiation”: a terrorist aristocracy with rich and powerful protectors has emerged on the one hand, and a terrorist proletariat on the other.

This development was first noted in the 1930s. Who are the assas sins? asked a contemporary commentator after the murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in 1934.¹¹ Are they Croats, or Czech, or German or perhaps Hungarian? Everything about them is wrong — with the exception of their money and their arms. Where did the money come from, how have these poor, persecuted Croats been able to pay for expensive journeys through many countries? Who has armed and financed them, who has provided their false passports? In short, who has commissioned them?¹² No one had asked questions of this kind about the Narodovoltsy or the Anarchists, be cause they had been poor and there had been no secret about their funds. But in the 1930s and a fortiori after the Second World War, terrorism became, on occasion, big business with multinational ramifications and a great deal of effort was spent in keeping their sources of income obscure. The “proletarians,” such as the South Moluccans, could not obtain outside help because their objectives did not coincide with the interests of foreign governments. The affluent groups could engage in expensive operations far beyond the reach of the poor terrorists; they could employ costly equipment, hire assistants, buy information without having to worry about where the money would come from. Sometimes this money was given in the form of an annual subsidy, sometimes as a reward for specific actions; Black September reportedly received seven million dollars for the Munich murder of Israeli athletes.¹³ On the other hand, this new wealth created temptations that had not existed before. True, even among the Fenians in the 1880s and among the Russian Maximalists there had been occasional accusations about misappropriation of money, about squandering of funds and spending for personal use. But the sums involved were insignificant in comparison with the millions amassed by Arab and Latin American terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the affluent groups, officials were paid salaries far above what they could earn in any legitimate profession. Swiss bank accounts were opened; there were investments in real estate and other tran sactions more in line with major business enterprises than the tradi tional terrorist ethos of the Narodnaya Volya or the Fenians. Pro longed exposure to life in luxury hotels produced a new type of terrorist different from the lean and hungry fighters of a previous generation. A member of the Berlin urban terrorists relates that his group split on account of money: “When there is too much money, unnecessary things are bought, first a record player and a television set, then expensive suits and cars, and in the end you look like some thing straight out of Playboy. . .,”¹⁴ In the history of Irish terrorism, there were many accusations of misuse of money and embezzle ment; the most recent concerned a Provisional IRA man from County Tyrone who fled to the U.S. with about £100,000 seized in a bank raid in County Meath in 1975. A spokesman of his organization said, “A certain decision was taken in relation to Hughes and it did not include military honours at his funeral.”¹⁵

Intelligence

The success of terrorist operations depends on reliable information about the targets to be attacked and the movements of the victims to be killed or abducted. The Social Revolutionaries disguised themselves as coachmen and street traders in order to patrol unobtru sively in the neighborhood chosen for an attack.^* Other terrorist groups used sympathizers, such as repair workers, postmen or street cleaners, for intelligence-gathering. Government employees were of great help and sources inside the police were invaluable since they could warn the terrorists about impending raids and help to unmask spies in their ranks. The Narodnaya Volya owed some of their suc cesses to the information received from Nikolai Kletochnikov, who had found employment in the “third section,” the Tsarist political police. From perusing police files, he established that there was a spy (Reinstein) among the Narodovoltsy — who was promptly killed. The Social Revolutionaries also had a sympathizer in the police who helped them on several occasions, and it is doubtful whether Azev would ever have been unmasked but for the information they re ceived from leading police officials.¹⁶ Michael Collins’s attack against British intelligence headquarters in Dublin in November 1920 effec tively paralyzed British operations during the critical period of the insurrection, since vital documents were destroyed and undercover agents were discovered and killed. The IRA regarded the “G” Divi sion of the Dublin Metropolitan Police as its main target; the British could always send new soldiers to Ireland but the number of knowl edgeable intelligence officers was limited and they could not easily be replaced.

Nationalist terror groups such as the Irgun had sources of information in the police who collaborated with them, either because they were sympathizers or because they were paid. Schulze and Tillesen, the murderers of Erzberger, the leading Catholic politician, were warned by the German police and succeeded in escaping abroad. The Nazis boasted on occasion that they received copies of the secret communications of the police and of the ministry of the interior almost as soon as they had been dispatched from headquarters.¹⁷ Latin American terrorists had well-wishers in key positions, and the multinational terrorist groups of the 1960s and 1970s, with almost unlimited funds at their disposal, had no difficulty in getting informa tion, including presumably Interpol bulletins.

Terrorist Arms

The dagger and the pistol were the traditional terrorist weapons up to the dawning of the age of dynamite. The invention of the first time bomb is attributed to a M. Chevalier, a resident of Paris; he produced a cask filled with powder and missiles to which a musket barrel with a trigger was attached. A similar machine was used by one St. Regent, a former naval officer who tried to blow up Napoleon when he was still First Consul. The barrel was placed on a cart at the corner of the Rue Nicaise, on the road from the Tuilleries to the Rue Richelieu. A time fuse was used, but either St. Regent had miscalculated or Napo leon’s driver was in a hurry — the explosion took place a little too late.¹⁸ Explosives such as gunpowder and fulminate of mercury had been used before Alfred Nobel made his invention, and occasionally with great effect: 12 persons were killed and 120 injured in the Fenian mining of Clerkenwell Prison in December 1867; 500 pounds of black powder were used on that occasion. A decade earlier, in Paris, Or-sini’s bombs left 8 dead and 156 wounded. The quantities of explo sives needed were considerable; it was difficult to transport them without arousing suspicion and it was only with the invention of nitroglycerine and later of nitrocellulose (gelignite) in the 1860s and 1870s that bombing and mining became much easier. It was widely believed at the time that dynamite was the ultimate weapon; the American and the French Anarchists based their whole strategy on its use and Patrick Rallihan of Brooklyn published a paper with the title Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly.¹⁹

Narodnaya Volya was the first to use dynamite on a wide scale; one of their members, Serge Kibalchich, was an accomplished scientist who introduced important innovations such as mixing nitroglycerine with other materials, using fulminate of mercury as a detonator.²⁰ But if the new explosives were highly effective they were also ex tremely dangerous. Quite a few Russian revolutionaries were killed while producing or transporting dynamite. Grinevetski was blown up by the very bomb which killed the tsar in 1881; Rokotilov was fatally injured while preparing bombs; Dembov lost his life while experimenting with dynamite, as did Schweitzer, one of the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries and their main weapons expert. Similar mishaps were frequent in the history of Irish terrorism, from the time of Captain Lomasney to present-day operations in Ulster. Since the early exaggerated hopes connected with dynamite were not fulfilled, the revolver, the rifle and even the dagger remained often-used terrorist weapons — President Carnot was knifed, as was Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898.

Dynamite was far more destructive than all previous explosives, but the quantities needed were still substantial. The average mine prepared by the Narodnaya Volya weighed sixty pounds or more and even then it did not always have the desired effect. Khalturin, who had access to the Winter Palace and placed a bomb there, asked his comrades for a mine of about two hundred pounds. They gave him only seventy pounds of dynamite which, as it emerged, was not enough for his purpose. The mines used by the Irish dynamiters of the 1880s were smaller and on the whole not very effective. In his handbook, Most had solemnly predicted that a ten-pound bomb would totally destroy any warship; the terrorists were learning by trial and error that this was just not so.²¹

The great technical problem that faced the terrorist during the last third of the nineteenth century was the miniaturization of bombs, the production of a hand grenade no bigger than an apple which could easily be hidden and thrown a considerable distance, while having as much explosive power as an old-fashioned mine. The Aus trian terrorists of the 1880s experimented with metal boxes containing some five pounds of dynamite. But workable grenades of this weight were produced only by the Social Revolutionaries and were used in the killing of Plehwe and the Grand Duke Alexei.

The bomb clearly was not the all-destroying weapon it had been thought to be, but it had become a symbol replacing the barricade, and it certainly made a great deal of noise. Ivan Dragomiroff, the head of the Assassination Bureau in Jack London’s novel, while giving a cut rate to anarchists, regretted their enthusiasm for dynamite and other extremely hazardous machines to insure that their exe cutions were sensational and spectacular (“our killings must be red. . . .”). Dragomiroff charged them ten thousand dollars for the killing of a police chief of a great city, half a million for a major king or emperor, seventy-five to a hundred thousand for second er third-rate kings.²²

The American Irish made many suggestions for improving terror ist technology. These included an early version of the Molotov cock tail — a zinc vessel filled with a pint and a half of benzine regulated by a clock connected to it to light and burn for a certain time.²³ Rossa’s plan for using osmic gas in the British Houses of Parliament has been mentioned. The British government was worried, unneces sarily as it emerged, by the reports concerning submarines built in New York. Sixty thousand dollars were spent on building three such vessels but it appears that only one was actually constructed, by Messrs. Delamater & Co. of New York. This “Torpedo Boat” was said to have “most wonderful powers as a destructive machine; more so than any boat yet invented.”²⁴ But the ship never saw action. Cap tain McCafferty pioneered the idea of using a railway train and a steamer in a terrorist operation in the 1860s but the raid did not materialize.

The idea of preparing letter bombs seems to have first occurred to the Russian terrorists of the 1880s. They discussed the dispatch of small quantities of explosives to the tsar in little parcels purporting to contain drugs against rheumatism and asthma.²⁵ But this plan was apparently not carried out. Johann Most, in his journal and in his other writings, recommended incendiary devices contained in letters and small parcels, but again the technical difficulties were apparently insurmountable at the time.^* One of the first successful cases of assassination by means of a letter bomb was the killing of the Hungarian (Uniate) vicar general in Transylvania by a group of Rumanian terrorists just before the First World War. In 1908, Indian terrorists first used (unsuccessfully) a primitive letter bomb, or, to be precise, a book bomb. The Irgun used the technique on a few occa sions and it was widely used by Arab terrorists and others in the early 1970s. Azev, the head of the Social Revolutionaries Fighting Organi zation, acutely feeling the need for innovation, told his comrades that new methods were needed since the police were familiar with all the old tricks. He intended to buy an automobile, and when he heard in 1906 that Buchalo, an anarchist engineer, was constructing a new type of airplane in Munich he gave him 20,000 rubles in the hope of using the plane in a future operation.²⁶ It was however only some seventy years later, in January 1974, that a plane was used for the first time in a terrorist operation, when the IRA dropped two bombs from a stolen helicopter. Buchalo’s plane was never completed and motor cars were first used for terrorist purposes by the Bonnot gang in Paris in 1913 to facilitate their escape following bank raids. The modern submachine guns were first used, so far as can be established, by the IRA shortly after the First World War; Irish sympathizers had just delivered a few specimens of Colonel Thompson’s new gun.²⁷

If the terrorists did not find the miracle weapon, they had no great difficulties in obtaining firearms and explosives; there was usually ample opportunity for buying or stealing them. Arms for the Irish terrorists were smuggled in ships from the United States; revolvers for the Indian terrorists came from Britain. The Armenians smuggled some of their weapons from Russia and the Balkan terrorists received theirs from their protectors abroad. Army arsenals were always a potential source of supply, either because individual officers or soldiers sympathized with the terrorists or because the terrorists found some venal official. Following major wars, weapons and explosives were in ample supply all over the world. The Western Federation of Mine Workers in the United States certainly had no difficulty in getting explosives for their operations in the early years of the century, and in the 1960s, with the emergence of multinational terrorism, plastic bombs and even missile launchers were transported from country to country under the seal of diplomatic baggage. Since the Second World War, explosives have been made even more effective and the new developments taken up by the terrorists with only a few years’ delay.^* TNT and picric acid, which had been the main military explosives in the First World War, have recently been replaced by the more powerful and durable RDX and PETN. New types of delay caps have come into use, while mercury fulminate, which served several generations of terrorists as both primary and secondary ex plosive, has gone out of fashion and considerable progress has been made with various Electro-Explosive Devices (EED). Arab terrorist groups have used Soviet-made RPG-2 and RPG-7 (Orly airport, 1975) grenade launchers and SA-7 heat-seeking rockets (Rome airport, 1973). Reports that American terrorists were experimentally manu facturing nerve gas were later denied.²⁸ Some bombs were carried in shopping bags or suitcases; at other times cars were used to store the explosives. The fuses were fired electrically, by pressure, by chemical methods; most recently photoelectric and X-ray-sensitive fuses have been used.²⁹ But with all these technological advances the accident rate among terrorists has remained high. Few terrorists use homemade explosives these days, and the accidents usually occur not in laboratories but while transporting the explosives or preparing the charges. There are no foolproof explosives, and as the technology has become more complicated few terrorists have the technical know-how required to handle them competently.

Counterterrorism

Police forces in democratic societies, applying traditional methods, have found it exceedingly difficult to cope with terrorist activities. There are not enough policemen to deal with an enemy likely to strike at any time against almost any target. Even in a totalitarian regime the police force cannot guarantee the life of the dictator against attempted assassination by one man acting entirely on his own. Terrorists do sometimes fail through sheer incompetence — because they do not adhere to their own timetable, such as happened so often with nineteenth-century Irish terrorists, or because too many people know about the plot. Sometimes their weapons are not in good working order and sometimes they are simply out of luck. But they have the great advantage that, unlike the security forces in a democratic society, they do not have to act within the law. The police must not use illegal methods to repress terrorism — in theory, if not always in practice. They cannot engage in indiscriminate ar rests nor torture captured terrorists to extract information. The forces of law and order have not always been able to hold those already arrested and sentenced; one need only recall the mass es capes from prison and internment camps of Irish terrorists or of members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Russian revolutionaries (including Bakunin, Kropotkin, Deitch, Savinkov, Trotsky and many others) escaped from prison or from Siberia. Hence it became and becomes ever more necessary for the police to collect information via informers. The success of the British police in repressing Irish terrorism throughout the nineteenth century was largely due to the presence of a few agents in the ranks of the terrorists (Leonard MacNally, Nagle, Corydon, Richard Pigott, “Red” Jim MacDermott, “Nero,” Massey. The “Prince of Spies” was Major Le Caron (1841-1894) who first informed his father in 1865 that he had been contacted by an Irish revolutionary organization; the father told the police, and Le Caron supplied important information for the next two decades. His cover in the United States was that of an agent for drug manufac turers and he was thus able to travel constantly. Le Caron later wrote that he had done his duty as a man who loved his country and saw it threatened by a deadly and unscrupulous foe. “I consider myself a military spy and my conduct justifiable under the same ethical considerations which justify all military spies.”³⁰ The French police were served by Lucien de la Hodde, the master spy and provocateur of the 1830s and 1840s, who later published an interesting if some what subjective history of the secret societies.³¹ Even earlier, Baboeuf s conspiracy had been betrayed by Grisel, who in the words of Buonarroti had pretended to be the “most outrageous patriot”; the Dekabrist plot was denounced by Sherwood. Andrieux, prefect of the Paris police, had his agents among the Anarchists; he provided money for Anarchist newspapers and later wrote that though he fought Anarchism he preferred the spread of their doctrine by the press rather than by other means and saw “no reason for depriving myself longer of their gratitude.”³² The German and Austrian Anar chist movements were riddled with police spies, who included some of Most’s closest collaborators. When Most was in a British prison, Freiheit was published by Schroeder, a police agent in Schaffhausen.³³ But these police agents were inclined, as Bismarck once put it in a letter to his wife, to “lie and exaggerate in a most inexcusable manner.” For want of material, when there was nothing to re port, they and their superiors began to play politics and to instigate acts of violence. Some of the heads of the Okhrana were past masters in this game; they had had their agents among the revolutionaries since the late 1880s, with Harting-Landesen as the most prominent among them. By 1912 the Okhrana had some 26,000 paid agents, most of them part-time informers, and in addition a permanent staff of some 50,000. Informers were paid between twenty and fifty rubles a month but Azev had a monthly salary of five hundred by 1902 and in later years presumably got even more.³⁴ Azev, a young Jewish engineer, had offered his services to the political police while studying in Germany. With the approval and help of his bosses he worked his way up in the Fighting Organization of the Social Revolutionaries until he became its commander. But his was a complex personality, for he was neither a petty provocateur out for a few rubles nor an admirer of the Tsarist system. He played a very intricate double game and, while betraying many of his comrades, also misled the Okhrana by withholding from them essential information about forthcoming terrorist operations. He was involved in the assassination of Plehwe and the Grand Duke Serge Alexeievich and other leading personalities. He was eventually unmasked in 1908 and the Social Revolutionary Fighting Organization never recovered from the blow. While he was active, much of the time and energy of the Okhrana had to be invested in combatting acts of terror they had themselves instigated. Azev’s protectors in the Okhrana were driven by personal ambitions and rivalries, but they were also convinced that they had to demonstrate to the government (and public opinion) that there was a major terrorist menace which had to be fought against. For this purpose they needed occasional demonstration effects such as the assassination of highly placed personalities.³⁵ Men tion has been made of the fact that a considerable proportion of the terrorist journals of the 1880s and 1890s were in fact founded or maintained by secret police money. The tendency of the secret po lice was usually to discredit the terrorists by sheer exaggeration. One such Russian emigre paper called not only for the killing of all landowners but also for the destruction of all their cattle.³⁶ Terrorist journals would accuse each other of cooperating with the police — and on occasion both were right. There was enormous confusion; those who had provided the funds obviously got value for money. In Russia special units were established to combat terrorism. These units acted separately from and often in competition with and oppo sition to the general police forces. This approach prevailed in most countries. When Brackenbury was appointed under secretary for police by Gladstone after the Phoenix Park murders in 1881, he ar gued from the very beginning that the police were quite incapable of coping with secret societies and that for this purpose a (secret and separate) organization was needed with a budget of its own (£20,000 at the time) to infiltrate the terrorists and “break their nerve.”³⁷ But the British officials, unlike the heads of the Okhrana, did not believe in a mammoth counterorganization — nor would they have obtained a sufficiently high budget to keep such an apparatus going. Unless the terrorist movement was very strong and/or highly decentralized, a few police agents strategically placed were quite sufficient to para lyze the whole movement. One single agent, James McParlan, acting on behalf of the Pinkerton Agency, caused the downfall of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s.

Temptations and Dangers

The most dangerous threat to terrorists is the promise of a reward for information leading to their capture. This weapon has, of course, been widely used. After the Phoenix Park murders an almost un precedented reward of £10,000 was promised. Gershuni, the head of the Fighting Organization of the Social Revolutionaries, had a price of 15,000 rubles on his head. The Weimar government promised a reward of one million marks for information leading to the capture of the Rathenau murderers. In this way Nazi security forces caught Heydrich’s assassins and effectively smashed most of the Allied un derground in occupied France. A terrorist, unlike a guerrilla, cannot hide in forests, jungles and desolate mountain ranges; he has to find cover among people, many of whom will feel no sympathy for him. He needs a roof over his head, food and other supplies. He is never alone in the big city, some people will know of his whereabouts, many more will have their suspicions. He is exceedingly vulnerable, and the greed of an informer or the ill-will of an enemy can over come the fear of vengeance — especially if the reward is high enough.³⁸ But police forces in democratic societies have never been at liberty to use this weapon to full effect, since informing has never been considered an occupation for gentlemen and there has almost always been opposition to encouraging the practice. After the Irish dynamiters’ attempt to blow up London Bridge in the 1880s a reward of £5,000 was first promised — and then withdrawn. Furthermore, the size of rewards in the 1960s and 1970s has been proportionally much smaller than in the nineteenth century, and with the bureaucratization of police work informing has become much riskier. A nineteenth-century police chief in Britain, France or Russia could dispose of relatively large sums with no questions asked. Sir Robert Anderson, from whom Joseph Conrad drew some of his inspiration for the Secret Agent, related with some pride that his idea of secrecy was not to tell the secretary of state:

The first Fenian who ever gave me information was murdered on his arrival in New York. I had given his name to no one but Lord Mayo; and he assured me that he had mentioned it only to the Lord Lieutenant, when sitting alone with him after dinner at the vice-regal lodge. But there happened to be a servant behind the screen, and through him it was, as the Dublin police ascertained, that the information reached the Fenians. Never again would I give an informant’s name to anyone and no man who afterwards gave me information was ever betrayed.³⁹

Today the chain of command in the police is far more complicated; decisions are taken by committees, officials are responsible to their superiors, accountants have to be informed and it may be very difficult to keep the identity of the informer secret. But the reward remains the most effective weapon by far, and when in 1975 Mr. Ross McWhirter was killed by the IRA it was precisely because he had announced a substantial reward to be given for the collection of information.

Many captured terrorists have behaved with great dignity and even heroism. Leonid Andreyev (The Seven that were Hanged [1908]) described the whole gamut of emotions among a group of Russian revolutionaries sentenced to death: “Werner, totally sure of himself, young Tanya caring like a mother for her comrades, Vasily absorbed in a frightful struggle ‘between the intolerable terror of death and the desperate desire to subdue his fear and conceal it from his judges.’”

But not all men and women are heroes (or have suicidal impulses), and quite a few terrorists have broken down during interrogation though they were neither tortured nor even threatened with vio lence. Some have not even been promised that their sentence would be reduced. Every case has been different: some realized that what they had done was wrong. Ivan Okladski proudly declared at his trial in October 1880 that he would be deeply offended if he did not receive a death sentence. Soon afterward he became a police agent on a monthly salary of 200 rubles. Merkulov also became a police official. Mirski, Goldenberg and Rysakov quite unnecessarily im plicated their comrades in their depositions; they were young, inex perienced and confused. Rysakov was executed anyway and Golden-berg committed suicide in prison after he had realized the enormity of his betrayal. There were those who after their arrest became police agents, others who pretended to serve the police but had no intention of working for their new masters, and there were all possible variations in between. Some acted as double agents with the knowledge of their comrades. As the result of Degayev’s betrayal in 1883, the whole existing apparatus of the Narodnaya Volya was destroyed. The police engineered his escape from prison but Degayev deeply regretted his betrayal; to expiate his crime, he killed Sudeykin, a high official of the “third section.” Degayev later voluntarily submitted to a trial by a revolutionary tribunal in Paris which ex pelled him. He went to the United States, changed his name to “Dr. Pell,” graduated in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, be came a professor at the Armour Institute of Technology, and died at Bryn Mawr in 1921.⁴⁰

Solomon Ryss (“Mortimer”), one of the leaders of the Maximalists, also collaborated with the police after his arrest; he too was helped to escape but returned to terrorist work and was again captured and this time hanged. His case, like that of Bagrov, the police agent who killed Stolypin, has remained a mystery to this day.⁴¹ Among the anarchists there were few such startling intrigues and double games simply because most of them had acted alone, without the knowl edge and help of an organization.

In Ireland too, cooperation with the police was by no means infre quent; Carey, one of the chief accused in the Phoenix Park murder trial, turned Queen’s evidence. He was acquitted and left Britain, but was killed, allegedly by an “avenger” in circumstances that have remained obscure, on board a ship sailing between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.

Many terrorist groups have attracted criminal elements at one time or another. Some originally bona fide politicals later turned to crime, others, such as the Mafia, were predominantly criminal from the very beginning but also had political interests. The dividing line between politics and crime was by no means always obvious and clear-cut: criminals were quite often good patriots or instinctive revolutionaries (or reactionaries) and they certainly could teach the terrorists more than a few tricks of the trade. But they would not accept discipline and their presence caused friction, corruption and eventually demoralization. The temptation to use the loot for private gain or to settle personal accounts was overwhelming. The Bonnot gang, the bande tragique, operating in Paris in 1912, kept 90 percent of their booty for personal use and only the remainder was allocated to the cause. Sometimes former terrorists engaged in blackmail or entered the protection racket. There was the famous case of Juan Bull who prepared bombs which were deposited by his old mother in the streets of Barcelona. As long as he was paid a monthly retainer by the authorities there were no bombs. Of great psychological inter est are the terrorist groups which gradually changed their character. The lofty ideals of IMRO were movingly described in the diary of a young member:

We know that the revolutionary is something of an ascetic who has given up the idea of enjoyment and personal happiness. Not one of us will marry and settle down. No one will leave Macedonia or think of studying. Whoever marries or leaves Macedonia or enrolls in a univer sity is a villain, a traitor. Macedonia cannot wait. . . . There can be no other lover. . .,⁴²

This was written on January 1, 1902; three decades later IMRO still existed, but it had become a group of hired assassins.

Criminal elements joined the ranks of terrorist groups in times of general unrest when there were good chances for looting, as in the Russian revolution of 1905, and on many subsequent occasions. The “Symbionese Liberation Army,” like some early terrorist sects but unlike the Narodniks, deliberately enlisted criminals; they did not go to the people but to the underworld. In the age of the highly specialized multinational terrorism of the 1970s with so many interested parties and paymasters involved, it is no longer possible to know with any degree of accuracy to what extent these terrorists are still moti vated by revolutionary or nationalist fervor or by any “cause” at all. Some undoubtedly are; for others it has simply become a way of life — the only one they know.

External dangers apart, terrorist groups have always been threatened by internal dissension. Most terrorist groups came into being in the first place as the result of a split between the moderate and the more extreme wing of an already-existing organization, and almost all of them later underwent further fission. This is true of the Narodnaya Volya, the Social Revolutionaries, the Fenians, the Spanish, Italian and American Anarchists, Irgun, the Palestinian Arab terrorists and, of course, the terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s. Outwardly, these splits were ideologically based but underlying political differ ences there was usually a clash of personalities. Terrorists’ fighting potential was not always reduced thereby; despite their disagree ments they did not necessarily strike at one another. The Socialist Revolutionaries did not attack the Maximalists; Irgun and LEHI kept a truce, and there has been an understanding of sorts between the various Palestinian Arab terrorists, and between the ERP and the Montoneros. In some ways these splits made the task of the police even more difficult, for its resources had to be spread even more thinly. In other cases, rivalry between terrorist groups led to bloody clashes: the Irish troubles in the early 1920s, the killing of IRA regu lars by Provisionals and vice versa, the feud between Mikhailovists and Protogerovists in Bulgaria (40 of the former and 220 of the latter were killed between 1924 and 1934). Besides interfactional strife there was always the tendency in an underground movement to liquidate those who challenged the authority of the leader, as hap pened among the Iron Guard in Rumania and in various Latin American terrorist movements. Sometimes a leading member would be shot because he was considered a liability to the whole group (the case of “Shaul” in LEHI). In other cases mere suspicion of treason (Verrater verfallen der Fehme — the Freikorps) would be sufficient cause for murder. Dr. Patrick Cronin, the American-Irish patriot, was killed in May 1889 simply because he had accused another leader of misappropriating funds. This case profoundly shocked the whole movement; 12,000 men and women walked past his bier. History, as Albert Camus has noted, offers few examples of fanatics suffering from scruples. The Russian terrorists of 1881 and of 1905 were an exception, but from that time on a general decline set in and there have been few of which it could be said, as Savinkov said about Dora Brilliant, that terror weighed on them like a cross. Killing without hesitation, often without thought and reason, has become the rule, not the exception.

Varieties of Terrorist Tactics

The assassination of leading representatives of the “system” is the oldest method and has been the one most frequently adopted by terrorists.⁴³ Indiscriminate terror has become widespread only in recent times with the invention of more effective explosives on one hand and the emergence of the modern mass media on the other. The case for indiscriminate murder is, of course, well known: it dramatizes the demands of the terrorists; it spreads a climate of fear and discredits the government incapable of suppressing it; and, if frequently repeated, it disrupts the normal functioning of society. At the same time, from the terrorist point of view it is far less risky than attempts against the lives of leading personalities who may be well guarded.

The drawbacks of indiscriminate terror are equally obvious — “intimidation by deed” will not gain political support and it is there fore mostly used against foreigners or by very small terrorist groups lacking both a clear political aim and a consistent strategy.

If the “death penalty” is the rule, other punishment has occasion ally been meted out by terrorist groups; the Tupamaros set up “peo ple’s prisons” but the inmates were usually hostages to be released upon receipt of money. Irish terrorists have occasionally inflicted injuries on suspected minor spies or “collaborationists” and this has also been the practice of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations — ranging from beating up the victim and tarring and feathering to permanently depriving him of the use of a limb.

The second most frequent kind of terrorist operation has been “expropriation,” i.e., bank robbery, or, less frequently, robbery of mail trains or vans transferring large sums of money. The Russian terrorists first attacked a bank in 1879 and the practice spread rapidly during the first Russian revolution (1905-1906). In October 1906 alone there were some 362 “expropriations.” The most notable was the robbery (by the Maximalists) of a bank in Fonarny Pereulok in Mos cow when some twenty assailants seized nearly a million rubles. Polish terrorists were even more successful in 1908, attacking the St. Petersburg-Warsaw mail train and getting away with more than two million rubles. The Bolsheviks netted more than 300,000 rubles when “Kamo” and his comrades robbed a convoy in Tiflis in June 1907. Banks were occasionally robbed by the Irgun and the Stern Gang and also by the small European and North American terrorist groups. It became almost a daily occurrence in Latin America in the late 1960s; it was generally considered the easiest kind of operation, in which new recruits could be tested. Well-established terrorist groups collected contributions from supporters or extracted money by threats. This was the practice among the Macedonian IMRO and the Pales tinian terrorists before they received regular major allocations from the oil states.

The liberation of captured comrades from prison has always been a top priority for terrorists. The Fenians equipped and dispatched a ship (the Catalpa) to Australia to help in the escape of six of their members who had been exiled there. Their attempts to liberate Fenian prisoners in Clerkenwell and Manchester failed, with tragic consequences. Narodnaya Volya had to shelve a project to liberate Nechaev, for Schliisselburg was too well guarded. But there were individual and mass escapes, usually with some help from outside, in Tsarist Russia, Mandatory Palestine (Latrun and Acre), Ulster, West Germany, Uruguay and Argentina.

Kidnapping for political purposes and the extortion of ransoms has been practiced since time immemorial. In 1819, Guiglielmo Pepe, Neapolitan general and Italian patriot, planned to capture Emperor Franz I and Metternich. But this plot proved to be as unrealistic as the Fenians’ scheme in the 1860s to abduct the Prince of Wales. In 1920, the IRA kidnapped a British general while he was fishing. In the United States, following the arrest of Socialist militants and their extradition across state lines in the early years of the century, Eugene Debs threatened retaliation in kind: if kidnapping was a legitimate practice “we all have a perfect right to engage in it. . .,”⁴⁴ And he proposed that for every working man kidnapped a capitalist should be seized and held for ransom; the kidnapping of the first capitalist would convulse the nation. Even earlier, in a pamphlet published in London in 1903, Vladimir Burtsev had recommended kidnapping as one of the tactics to be used in the terrorist struggle, but his advice was not heeded by the Social Revolutionaries. In 1947 the Irgun kidnapped (and later hanged) two British sergeants in a futile at tempt to prevent the execution of two of their members under sen tence of death.

Abduction became exceedingly fashionable in the late 1960s. Among those kidnapped, to mention but a few of the outstanding cases, were the United States ambassadors to Guatemala and Brazil, the West German ambassadors to Guatemala, Haiti and Brazil; Aramburu, the former president of Argentina (May 1970); Pierre Laporte, Quebec labor minister (October 1970); the Swiss ambassa dor to Brazil; the British ambassador to Uruguay (kidnapped in Janu ary 1971, released in September); the leader of the West Berlin Chris tian Democrats, as well as the whole OPEC executive in Vienna (December 1975), and countless consuls, public figures, businessmen, officers and even racing drivers, football stars and men and women who could not be considered public figures by any stretch of the imagination.⁴⁵ In some cases, no ransom terms were demanded and the victims were killed after a few hours or days; more often the release was made conditional on the release of political prisoners and payment of ransom and, of course, safe passage. In some of these instances huge ransoms were paid: in Argentina, $1,000,000 for Mr. Aaron Beilinson (May 1973); $2,000,000 for Charles Lockwood, a Brit ish business executive (June 1973); $3,000,000 for Mr. John R. Thomp son (representing Firestone Tires, June 1973); Exxon allegedly paid $14,200,000 for Mr. Victor Samuelson, and Bunge and Born $60,000,000 for three of their executives. In yet other cases, such as the OPEC hijack, no clear demands were made by the kidnappers. After 1973 the number of kidnappings decreased, partly, no doubt, for technical reasons. For while guerrillas can always conduct their hos tages to a “liberated area,” terrorists have, of course, much greater difficulty in hiding their victims.

This list of the varieties of terrorist activities is far from complete; agrarian terror was practiced in Andalusia in the early 1880s by a mysterious organization called the Mario Negra.⁴⁶ Agrarian terrorism also took place in Ireland, in eastern Poland and in north Ger many (in the 1920s) against big landowners, tax collectors or government representatives. Industrialists and trade union leaders have been threatened and occasionally killed in labor disputes and system atic intimidation has been used against judges and journalists. A Berlin chief justice, von Drenkman, was killed by terrorists in West Berlin in the autumn of 1974. A fairly typical incident which took place before 1933 was described by a Nazi publication after Hitler had come to power. It was directed against a “disgusting scribbler” called Paeschke who edited a left-wing newspaper in the city of Reichenbach. Every day the storm troopers were subjected to poi sonous comment and as a result a “few courageous men” decided to give this villain the deserts he had so amply deserved. Paeschke was to be killed on the way home from his office; unfortunately the artillery shell which was to serve as a landmine exploded in the hands of the SA man who carried it.⁴⁷ Similar methods were used in various parts of the world by left-wing and right-wing terrorists against pub lic figures, sometimes to intimidate, at other times to kill. In February 1971 the Tupamaros kidnapped Homero Farina, editor of Accion, because (in their own words) “we wanted to make clear the role played by the media at that time, namely, the role of being part of the repressive forces. . . . We do ask them not to tell too many lies; we understand we cannot ask them not to lie at all because the lie is essential to bourgeois journalism.”⁴⁸ Farina was released after eigh teen days, having been given a stern warning.

Perhaps the most dramatic new technique used by terrorists has been the hijacking of airplanes. One of the first recorded cases was that of a Peruvian plane in 1931 during a military coup in that coun try. Between 1945 and 1950, some 25 hijackings took place; in most cases refugees from Iron Curtain countries used aircraft to escape to the West. During the 1960s, a great many American planes were compelled to fly to Cuba, not always by political terrorists — there were twenty-two such cases in 1968 and forty the year after. But, following an agreement between the United States and Cuba in 1969, the number fell rapidly. In July 1968, Palestinian terrorist organiza tions first hijacked an El Al plane which was flown to Algeria; the last passengers were released only after some eighteen arrested Arab terrorists had been freed in Israel. Following the introduction of stringent security measures, no further Israeli planes were success fully seized after that date. But the hijacking of third country aircraft increased rapidly, culminating in the Zerka incident in 1970 when several jumbo jets were compelled to land in an airfield in Jordan and were subsequently destroyed. These operations attracted enormous attention at the time, and great apprehension was expressed with regard to the future of civil aviation. But these fears were exag gerated — after 1972 there was a steady decrease, partly due to more effective security measures at airports and partly because of the growing reluctance of governments, even among the Arabs, to pro vide shelter for hijackers. Moreover, it was a case of diminishing returns, for there were few tangible achievements and even the publicity value of hijacking decreased with repetition.⁴⁹

Terrorism and the Media

If individual journalists have suffered at the hands of terrorists, terrorist attitudes toward the media as a whole have been friendly, and with good reason. The success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives. This was one of the main reasons for the shift from rural guerrilla to urban terror in the 1960s; for in the cities the terrorists could always count on the pres ence of journalists and TV cameras and consequently a large audi ence. In the words of a Latin American terrorist: “If we put even a small bomb in a building in town we could be certain of making the headlines in the press. But if the ‘rural’ guerilleros liquidated some thirty soldiers there was just a small news item on the last page. The city is exceedingly important both for the political struggle and for propaganda.”⁵⁰ The lesson was quickly learned by North African and Arab terrorists. Thus an Algerian leader: “Is it better for our cause to kill ten of our enemies in a remote village where this will not cause comment, or to kill one man in Algiers where the American press will get hold of the story the next day?” Abdul Fatah Ismail, who headed the anti-British struggle in the Aden protectorate, reached similar conclusions; the struggle in the countryside was not worthwhile be cause no attention would be paid to it.⁵¹

Thus, in the final analysis, it is not the magnitude of the terrorist operation that counts but the publicity; and this rule applies not only to single operations but to whole campaigns. Throughout the year 1975 twenty-six Israeli civilians were killed as well as fourteen soldiers and seven tourists as a result of terrorist operations — a number of victims considerably less than those killed in Argentina or Ulster in one month, or in Beirut during one night.⁵² But far more foreign journalists are stationed in Israel than in Ulster or Argentina and so the impression was created that internal security had broken down and that a major political explosion was about to take place. The media, with their inbuilt tendency toward sensationalism, have always magnified terrorist exploits quite irrespective of their intrinsic importance. Terrorist groups numbering perhaps a dozen members have been described as “armies,” their “official communiques” have been discussed in countless television shows, radio broadcasts, articles and editorials. In a few cases even nonexistent groups have been given a great deal of publicity. All modern terrorist groups need publicity; the smaller they are, the more they depend on it, and this has, to a large extent, affected the choice of their targets. Even an apparently illogical or senseless attack becomes more effective if given wide coverage in the media than an operation against a seemingly obvious target. Thus Orsini chose Napoleon III as his target rather than some Italian ruler or a high Austrian official. Terrorist operations in Paraguay, the Philippines or Bangladesh will hardly ever be newsworthy, but an attack by Paraguayan or Philippine terrorists directed against their embassies in Washington, London or Paris will receive extensive coverage, and if they should choose the president of the United States or the head of some West European country as their victim they will receive even more publicity. It need scarcely be pointed out that such strategies work only in societies which have no censorship.

Popular Support

Terrorist groups usually hope for a measure of public support. Extreme nationalists operating against foreigners can always count on some sympathy among their fellow countrymen. The misguided ac tions of a few hotheads will be condemned but at the same time extenuating circumstances will be found to explain, if not altogether to excuse, their behavior. This goes for Irish, Basque and Palestinian terrorists, whereas public support for Armenian, Indian and Jewish (Irgun and LEHI) terrorism was less wholehearted because their activities were considered politically harmful.

Nationalist terrorist movements can at the very least expect not to be betrayed by their compatriots. In Palestine, the cooperation between the Hagana and the British Mandatory government against the “dissidents” (i.e., terrorists) was a rare exception and took place while the Second World War was still in progress. The support mustered by terrorists fighting their own government depends very much on the plausibility of their cause. The operations of Narodnaya Volya had not the slightest impact on the peasantry and very little on the working class. But the intelligentsia was overwhelmingly in sympathy, and the same was true for the next generation of Russian revolutionaries. The two major Russian writers who, in their novels, depicted terrorists in a negative light, Leskov and Dostoyevski, were never forgiven by the Russian intelligentsia even though they made amends in their later works, for example Dostoyevski’s Pushkin anniversary speech. In intellectual circles such criticism was anathema; there was the belief — as in Latin America today — that even if the terrorists tended to make mistakes, they were motivated by a deep humanism and the desire to build a better world, and for this reason even their outrages were forgiven. In Western Europe support was limited, by and large, to fairly small sections of the intelligentsia. Quite a few French writers and artists toyed with Anarchism in the 1880s and 1890s, among them Zola, Paul Adam, Octave Mirbeau, Mallarmé, Pissaro, Seurat, Signac and Steinlen. They could under stand the motives of a Vaillant and Emile Henry, even a Ravachol; they would sign petitions on behalf of Vaillant since no one had been killed by the bomb he had thrown: “We were all anarchists without throwing bombs,” Kees van Donghen wrote in later years, “we had those kinds of ideas.”⁵³ Mallarme appeared as a character witness on behalf of his Anarchist friend Fénéon. Clemenceau, watching the execution of Emile Henry, was deeply disturbed; he saw a man (he wrote) with the face of a tormented Christ, terribly pale, implacable in expression, “trying to impose his intellectual pride upon his child’s body.” There was some sympathy even from the extreme right which hated the Third Republic and everything it stood for, and on the part of aesthetes like Laurent Tailhade whose petite phrase be came immortal: “Qu’importe les victimes si le geste est beau.” Tail-hade, who lost an eye in a subsequent terrorist attack, was not exactly a man of the left, looking forward (as he once wrote) to the happy days when the plebs would kiss the poets’ footprints.. . . But this was purely platonic support; in the last resort even the French intellectu als of the left were horrified by the senseless violence perpetrated by the Anarchists. There was even less sympathy for terrorism in Brit ain, and in the United States. There was some support for the victims of the Haymarket trial, but chiefly because those executed were almost certainly innocent of the crime.

The working-class terrorism of later years, such as the McNamara brothers’ bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, was attacked even by the left; such acts, it was argued, were commercial, not idealistic. Enthusiasm for the terrorism of the 1960s was limited in extent and, like most fashions in America, short-lived.

Right-wing terrorists in Weimar Germany could almost always count on lenient judges and on support, hidden or open, from the nationalist parties. The murderers of Erzberger and Rathenau be came heroes in these circles, for, to paraphrase a famous slogan of the period, there were “no enemies on the right.” The Baader-Meinhof Gang and the June 2 Movement had some sympathizers among left-wing intellectuals; there was no attempt to justify their actions but they were understood: society was mainly to blame, not the terror ists. Thus, after Ulrike Meinhof’s suicide in May 1976, a group of French intellectuals (including Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Bourdet, Claude Mauriac and others) published an appeal deploring Meinhof’s “inhuman sufferings” and stated that the practices of the federal German government reminded them of Nazism.⁵⁴ This de spite the fact that the members of the BaaderMeinhof group and the June 2 Movement had been kept in prison in Conditions of almost unparalleled permissiveness, and that, while in prison, they had in fact continued to direct the terrorist operations of those members of their group who were still at liberty.

In Latin America as in pre-revolutionary Russia, there has tradi tionally been a reservoir of goodwill for what the terrorists stand for. True, the Tupamaros and the Brazilian ALN were bitterly criticized by the left for their misguided and counterproductive actions. But in an emergency they could always rely on the support of intellectuals, churchmen and sections of the middle class to defend them against the harsher forms of government repression.

International Links

There have been conspirational ties between revolutionary groups in Europe since the early part of the nineteenth century with Mazzini’s Young Europe as the precursor. But these relations were largely abstract, limited to verbal or written expressions of sympathy and solidarity. There was a great deal of cross-fertilization: the example of the Russian terrorists of 1881 inspired the Fenians and above all the Anarchists; the Russian Social Revolutionaries, the Italian terrorists of the nineteenth century and the early IRA found imitators in many parts of the world. It was certainly not true (as alleged at the time) that “Russian gold and Russian craft” governed Armenian terrorism. But the leaders of the movement who came to Turkey in 1892 were certainly of Russian origin.⁵⁵ The Indian nationalist press, on the other hand, frequently stressed that the application of “Russian methods” by the British administration was bound to lead to Russian methods of agitation, and a British committee of investigation on terrorism in India noted that, together with the emphasis on religious motives, Bengali terrorist propaganda dwelt heavily upon the “Rus sian rules” of revolutionary violence.⁵⁶ There were a few cases of active collaboration: Orsini had British friends who helped to pay for his bombs. In later years there was a London group of British friends of the Russian revolution which contributed to pro-terrorist publica tions. The Fenians consulted the French General Cluseret when planning a rising in 1867; at a later date the Clan na-Gael played with the idea of enlisting Russian help against Britain, just as Pilsudski envisaged an anti-Russian alliance with the Japanese. Devoy sug gested helping the Mahdi with 20,000 armed Irishmen; John Mac-Bride and Arthur Lynch fought in the Boer War against the British.⁵⁷ Italian Anarchists operated in France, Switzerland and Spain as well as in their own country; Indian terrorists received theoretical in struction from the Russian Social Revolutionaries. Sometimes active intervention by foreign powers was alleged; thus Miguel Angiolilo, who killed the Spanish prime minister, Canovas, in August 1897, was said to have been paid by the Cuban rebels against the Spanish, but this has not been proved. Russian involvement with the Serbian Black Hand is well known, but whether the Russians actually knew about the preparations for the murder at Sarajevo is not at all certain; the Black Hand had in fact voted on June 14,1914, against the assassi nation precisely because it feared war would ensue. Whether “Apis,” who organized the assassination, informed his Russian contacts of the vote is doubtful. But the aims of the Black Hand certainly transcended Serbia; in 1911 they had planned the assassination of the king of Greece.

Neighboring countries often provided a sanctuary for terrorists; the Social Revolutionaries escaped whenever they could to semi-autonomous Finland where the Okhrana could not operate with as much ease as in Russia proper. One of the Sarajevo conspirators of 1914, Mehmedbasic, escaped to Montenegro; when the Austrians de manded his extradition, the government went through an elaborate charade of searching for him but in fact let him escape arrest. In later years IMRO had such a base for its forays in Bulgaria, the Croatians in Italy and Hungary, the IRA in the Republic of Ireland, the Pales tinians first in Jordan and later in Lebanon. But for the existence of these sanctuaries many groups would have had to cease operations.

Mention has been made of the fact that the massive systematic involvement of governments in terrorist movements in foreign coun tries dates back to the 1920s. The Italians were most active in this respect; Balbo, Ciano and other Fascist luminaries met the leaders of the Croat Ustasha, provided them with every possible help and after the murder at Marseilles, Kvaternik and Pavelic, the main wire pullers, escaped to Italy. The Italians refused to extradite them and at the same time Mussolini bitterly attacked those charging Italy with abetting terrorism: “We do not give our hands to murderers. Those who want to implicate Italy are cowards and liars.” Declarations of this kind on the part of the Libyan and Algerian governments be came quite frequent in the 1960s and 1970s. Italy also gave money and supplied arms to the Macedonian IMRO. Previously IMRO had gravi tated toward the Soviet Union but opposition within the organization (and on the part of official Bulgarian circles) prevented a rapproche ment with Moscow. The Italians also supported the French CSAR (Comite Secret d’Action Revolutionnaire), a right-wing terrorist group founded by Eugene Deloncle in 1936. These were the cagou-lards, the hooded men, who assassinated, among others, the brothers Rosselli, leaders of the Italian anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Liberia, in their French exile. For these and other services rendered, the Italians sent the CSAR 12,000 hand grenades, 170 machine guns and submachine guns, as well as hundreds of pounds of explosives.⁵⁸ Right-wing terrorist groups in Germany after the First World War seem to have received only minimal help from abroad and the Rumanian legionaries apparently obtained none at all.

Nationalist terrorist groups usually had no scruples in looking for, and accepting, aid from foreign powers. Thus LEHI sent emissaries to Beirut in 1940 to establish contact with Italian and German officials, and four years later sought a link with Soviet representatives. IRA leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, which did not prevent them from accepting help from communist countries two decades later. Members of LEHI or the IRA were not necessarily either Fascist or Communist. Like the Croats, the IMRO, the Palestinian Arabs or the Indian terrorists, they acted according to the time-honored principle that the enemy of their enemy was their friend. Some foreign aid was given without strings attached but this was not always so. The fact that Lenin accepted German money in 1917 did not make him a German agent — but not all terrorists had the strength of character and the clarity of vision of Lenin. Prolonged and substantial subventions by foreign governments usually had a demoralizing effect on both the leader ship and the rank and file of terrorist movements, who became in creasingly dependent on their sponsors. Sometimes, when the pay ments were stopped, the terrorists would turn against the paymasters — more often the movement would simply collapse, as happened to the IMRO after the Bulgarians withdrew their support. Multinational terrorism reached its climax in the early 1970s, in volving close cooperation between small terrorist groups in many countries, with the Libyans, the Algerians, the North Koreans and the Cubans acting as paymasters, suppliers of weapons and other equipment as well as coordinators, a fascinating amalgam of Commu nism East European and Latin American style, North African “cleri-co-fascism,” West European anarchism, unpolitical technicians of terror and probably also a few madmen and madwomen. The Soviet Union supported a number of terrorist movements such as some Palestinian and African groups and the exile Croats; mostly such assistance would be given through various intermediaries so that its origins would be difficult to prove and any charges of complicity could be indignantly denied. Even the Libyans, who provide support to terrorists all over the world, will not always admit it. Countries such as South Yemen, Somalia and Uganda cooperated with the ter rorists for both political and financial reasons, but this was repre sented as a humanitarian act motivated by the desire to save human lives. In short, terrorism became almost respectable, and there was a substantial majority at the United Nations opposing any effective international action directed against it.⁵⁹ This new multinational terrorism was, however, for all practical purposes surrogate warfare between governments; it had little in common, except in name, with the movements of national and social protest that had engaged in terrorist activities in previous decades. Some terrorist groups, to be sure, retained a substantial measure of independence, but others became almost entirely subservient to outside interests. If the Syrians supported Saiqa, one of the factions of the Palestinian “resistance,” the Iraqis, Libyans and other Arab states would back other groups and, as the Lebanese civil war was to show, would expect their proteges to represent their interests. In brief, a new species of terrorism emerged, an almost impenetrable maze of linkages, intrigues, common and conflicting interests, open and covert collaboration with foreign governments who preferred to stay in the shadows.

Is Terrorism Effective?

That the murder of political opponents has altered, or could have altered the course of history goes without saying. If Pichegru or Cadoudal had killed Napoleon, if Lenin had met with an accident on the road to the Finland Station, if Hitler had been shot in front of the Munich Feldherrenhalle in 1923, the map of Europe would look different today. But these are the exceptions; in democratic and many undemocratic societies, statesmen are usually expendable. It has been said that Orsini’s attempt on the life of Napoleon III con tributed to the unification of Italy. But then Napoleon was in any case inclined to intervene in Italy. The Sarajevo assassination triggered off the First World War but, given the tensions and military prepara tions in Europe at the time, a war would probably have broken out — if not in 1914, perhaps a year or two later. It has been maintained that as a result of the murder of Canovas in 1897 and of King Umberto I in 1900, the treatment of political prisoners in Spain and Italy im proved somewhat. But even if this were true, these were hardly results of world-shaking importance.⁶⁰ In a similar way, it has been argued that Sazonov’s bomb which killed Plehwe, the Russian minister of the interior, intimidated the Tsarist regime and inaugurated a more liberal course. Sazonov, to be sure, was not sentenced to death; he died soon afterwards in prison. But the short-lived era of liberality was overtaken by the first Russian revolution, which was caused not so much by the bombs of the Social Revolutionaries as by the Russian defeat in the war against Japan. These examples refer to individual assassinations, but the results of systematic terrorist cam paigns have not been very different. If there was an impact at all, it was usually negative; unlike King Midas, everything that was touched by the propagandists of the deed turned to ashes. Their actions usually produced violent repression and a polarization which precluded political progress. Anarchist activities bedeviled political life in Spain for decades, culminating in the Civil War of 1936-1939 and its fateful consequences. The activities of the Portuguese terror ists of the early 1920s had similar results; the murder of the right-wing dictator Major Sidonio Pais in December led to the butchery of the liberal government headed by Antonio Granjo in 1921. Left-wing and right-wing terrorist groups, the Red Legion (Legiao Vermelha), the Scorpions (Os Lacraus), The Thirteen (O Grupo des Treze), so prolif erated in Portugal that one left-wing historian (A. H. de Oliveira Marques) later wrote of them that it was difficult to draw a clear line dividing political aims from criminal purposes. These and other groups decisively contributed to the fatal weakening of the demo cratic republic and the emergence of the dictatorship which ruled Portugal for the next four decades. While it is unlikely that Tsarism would have been able to change from within, whatever small hope there was for compromise and peaceful development was destroyed by the terrorists. The prospects for democracy in Central and South eastern Europe were not promising after the First World War, but again, right-wing and, to a lesser extent, left-wing terrorism further reduced these chances. Following the Second World War, the strat egy of provocation practiced by the “urban guerrillas” has had simi lar results; the Uruguayan experience is a striking example. The Tupamaros were one of the more attractive Latin American terrorist groups, reminiscent in some ways of the early Russian terrorists. They did not, on the whole, engage in indiscriminate murder, they wept when they killed (but they killed). They were genuine idealists; some of the best of the young generation belonged to them. Their activities were initially quite successful, proving that civilian government could easily be disrupted and providing striking headlines for the world press. But, in the final analysis, the only result of their campaign was the destruction of freedom in a country which, alone in Latin America, had had an unbroken democratic tradition of many decades and which had been the first Latin American welfare state. True, the Uruguay of the 1960s was far from perfect and was faced with serious economic and social problems, but it is in any case doubtful whether the Tupamaros had a better answer to these prob lems than the government of the day. The Tupamaros’ campaign resulted in the emergence of a right-wing military dictatorship; in destroying the democratic system, they also destroyed their own movement. By the 1970s they and their sympathizers were reduced to bitter protests in exile against the crimes of a repressive regime which, but for their own action, would not have come into existence. The gravediggers of liberal Uruguay, as Regis Debray later wrote, also dug their own grave. There were many other such cases of sorcerer’s apprentices bewailing the cruelties of the demons they themselves had released. Terrorism from below produced massive and infinitely more effective terror from above.

Terrorist groups that were more successful in attaining their objectives can be divided, broadly speaking, into three groups. There were some that had narrow, clearly defined aims, for instance in an indus trial dispute. Second, there were those with powerful outside protec tors. The Palestinian Arab groups succeeded in keeping the Pales tinian problem alive; so did the Croat Ustasha, who, for a while, got their own state. Left to their own resources they would have been no more successful than the South Moluccans (or the Kurds or the South Sudanese tribes). Last, there were the terrorist groups facing imperial powers, no longer able or willing to hold on to their colonies or protectorates. Thus Britain gave up Ireland after the First World War and the Palestine Mandate and Cyprus after the Second World War; the terrorism of the IRA, the Irgun and LEHI and EOKA certainly played a part in these decisions. But terrorism was not the decisive factor in any of these countries, where the British retreat was, after all, part of a general historical process. Political resistance in Ireland, as in Palestine, while less dramatic and less widely publi cized, was, in the long run, more effective. Historical experience shows that the nationalist-sectarians stand a better chance of success than other types of terrorism. But even their achievements are often problematical. By aggravating the crisis, they make the solution of the problem more difficult or even impossible. For national and religious minorities are dispersed in such a way in today’s world that resolving one grievance usually creates a new one. Given the com plexity of the modern world, not every minority can have a state of its own. Seemingly successful terrorist operations (such as in Cyprus) have, in fact, ended in disaster insofar as they have poisoned the relations between the communities and made peaceful coexistence impossible. Recent events in Ulster and the Middle East may have the same results: the longer terrorism lasts, the stronger the belief that there will be no peace until the other group is annihilated. With the progress in terrorist technology from the dagger to the means of mass destruction, the consequences seem ominous.

Seen in historical perspective, terrorism has been effective only in very specific circumstances. It has not succeeded against effective dictatorships, let alone modern totalitarian regimes. In democratic societies or against ineffective authoritarian regimes it has on occa sion been more successful, but it is doubtful whether the Tupamaros have felt altogether happy, in retrospect, about their victory over the liberal system. There have been exceptions, but these have usually occurred whenever terrorism appears as part of a wider political strategy — against Machado in Cuba in 1933,⁶¹ the systematic assassi nations of village headmen by the Vietcong in the early 1960s, etc. This is not to say that terrorism has been doomed always and every where, or that its impact has invariably been negative. However, past experience shows that terrorism frequently occurs where there are other, nonviolent, political alternatives; where terrorism might be justified as the ultima ratio, such as against totalitarian rule, it has no chance, and where it seemingly succeeds, the political results are in the long run often self-defeating. Terrorism always attracts great publicity but its political impact is very often in inverse ratio to the attention it gets in the media. But terrorists are frequently driven by thirst for action rather than rational consideration of consequences, and there is no reason to assume that past failures will in any way act as a deterrent in the future.

The “Terrorist Personality”

Generalizations about the “terrorist personality” are of only limited assistance: even if one assumes that the Russian terrorists of the 1880s shared many common features of character — an assumption that can by no means be taken for granted — they had little in common with the Irish, and the Irish are quite different again from the Ar menian or the Macedonian terrorists. Given that men and women at certain times and in various places have engaged in political vio lence, throwing bombs and firing pistols does not necessarily prove that they had more in common with one another than have rose growers or stamp collectors. Generalizations are of little validity because so much depends on the political and social conditions in which terrorism has occurred, on the historical and cultural context, on the purpose and character of the terror, and, of course, its targets. Seen in this light no two terrorist movements were alike, and in fact, few were even similar.

That their members have been young is the only feature common to all terrorist movements, and that hardly requires explanation. The latest calls to action don’t usually fire the middle-aged and elderly with enthusiasm, and daring attacks also necessitate speed of movement.

Zhelyabov and Kravchinski, both aged thirty, were considered almost elderly by the members of Narodnaya Volya. Sofia Perovskaya was twenty-seven when she was sentenced to death, as was Kibal-chich; Mikhailov was twenty-one. The average age of the Social Rev olutionary terrorists was even lower; quite a number of them had not even graduated from high school. Sazonov, who killed Plehwe, was twenty-five, Balmashev was five years younger. Emile Henry, the French Anarchist, was twenty-one when he was executed. Most Latin American terrorists were, or are, of the same age group; Carlo Marighella became the leader of the Brazilian “urban guerrilla” in his fifties but this was a rare exception; another was Captain Lomas ney who blew himself up while trying to mine London Bridge. Todor Alexandrov, who revived IMRO in the early 1920s, was forty at the time, and his chief aide, Protogerov, was in his fifties. But Alexandrov had become a member of the Central Committee of IMRO at twenty-eight and his successor Ivan Mikhailov, who took over in 1924, was not yet thirty. Many German and Italian terrorists of the 1920s were boys aged sixteen to nineteen “envenomed by the bad luck which made the war finish too soon for them.”⁶² Daniel Curley, hanged for his part in the Phoenix Park murders, was twenty years of age; Artal, who attacked the Spanish prime minister in 1904, was nineteen, as were Emelianov and Rysakov who threw the bomb at Alexander II. Gabriel Princip was twenty when he shot Franz Ferdi nand in Sarajevo; his fellow conspirators, Popovic and Cabrinovic, were eighteen and seventeen respectively. None of them was ex ecuted, because they were under age. Alexander Berkman was nine teen when he tried to shoot Frick; Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother, yet another leading advocate of “systematic” terror, was twenty-one when he was executed in 1887.

Apart from the fact that they belonged to a certain age group, it is difficult to find other features common to all of them. Some had unhappy, others happy childhoods. Alexander Mikhailov wrote that from his earliest days a happy star had shone on him — “my child hood was one of the happiest that a man can have.”⁶³ Among the Russians, relations with their families were close, as shown by the letters to the parents of the terrorists about to be executed. Bakunin and Nechaev may be promising material for students of the human psyche, but Kropotkin and Weitling are not; they were outgoing, uncomplicated people who enjoyed life, anything but sinister figures. The Russian terrorists of the 1870s were on the whole remarkably “normal,” i.e., sane and balanced human beings. So were Gershuni, who headed the Fighting Organization of the Social Revolutionaries, and Michael Collins, who led the Irish terrorists in 1919.

Almost a quarter of the Russian terrorists were women, whose devotion and courage are described in the works of many contempo rary authors. But only in Russia were women to play such an impor tant role at the time; there were no Judiths or Charlotte Cordays among the Anarchists (Emma Goldman being a rare exception) nor in other terrorist groups of the left or right, nor in national resistance movements. Female terrorists in Ireland or Japan were quite un thinkable and there were only two or three in India. Bomb-throwing was clearly considered a man’s job; the growing role played by women in Europe and America is a phenomenon of recent date.

Minorities were (and are) prominently represented in many terrorist movements. There were quite a few Jews among the Narodnaya Volya and even more among the Social Revolutionaries. These included Gershuni and Azev, the two commanders of the “Fighting Organization.” Some of the leaders of the nineteenth-century Irish revolutionary movement were Protestants. The head of the Rumanian Iron Guard was not a Rumanian by origin, nor was Szalazi, the Führer of the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian. Dr. Habash, the leader of the PFLP, the most extreme Palestinian terrorist organization, was a Christian, like his deputy Wadi Hadad, and Naif Hawatme, head of the rival PDFLP. Among the Irgun and the Stern Gang there were many youngsters from the Oriental Jewish community, which was not widely represented in the non-terrorist Hagana.^* In some cases these terrorists from minority groups perhaps perceived griev ances even more acutely than the others; more often there may have been a psychological need to prove themselves, to show that they were as good, or better, patriots (or revolutionaries) than their comrades.

Lucien de la Hodde, writing in 1850, provides a most interesting analysis of the social composition of the secret societies in Paris in the first half of the last century, groups who from time to time engaged in terrorist actions. He listed nine categories of participants: first, and above all, the students. There was a rebellious tradition among students dating back to the Middle Ages. De la Hodde made it clear, however, that he did not have in mind the students who studied but those who thought all bourgeois ideas ridiculous and who had a weakness for le bruit, les coups, les evenements. The author admired the British for their political wisdom in having set up their universities outside the capital. Secondly, de la Hodde lists les impuissants — advocates without clients, physicians without patients, writers without readers, merchants without buyers, and all unsophisticated souls who saw themselves as statesmen, having studied politics in the newspapers. In short: the educated, or semieducated, declasses, who have always constituted the backbone of such groups. De la Hodde further lists les bohemes, une classe de fantaisistes ayant horreur de la vie ordinaire, mainly to be found in the capital, hardly ever outside it. Furthermore, le peuple souverain, i.e., the working class; les gobe-mouche — the simpletons, well-meaning but naive and credulous people (and true believers); the permanently discontented; political refugees; and lastly the bandits, the criminal elements.⁶⁴ De la Hodde was the master spy of the French police in the ranks of the revolutionary movements; while detestation made him an astute observer, his description contains no mention of idealistic motives. But even had he noted evidence of idealism, his comments on France would still be of little help for an understanding of the social back ground of the secret societies that were to develop soon afterward in Ireland. Some members of Narodnaya Volya were of humble ori gin: Zhelyabov’s father, for instance, had been a house serf. But the sons and daughters of the aristocracy and the landed gentry were far more numerous among them. Bakunin and Kropotkin, it should be noted in passing, came from upper-class families; Sofia Perovskaya’s father had been governor general of Petersburg. A partial list of 365 revolutionaries arrested in the 1880s shows that 180 belonged to the gentry (including 32 officers), 104 were of middle-class or lower-middle-class origin, and the fathers of 46 had been priests.⁶⁵ Among the Social Revolutionary terrorists of the following generation, the mid dle- and lower-middle-class element was much more strongly repre sented, even though there were still numerous terrorists of impec cable aristocratic background. In this respect Russian terrorism resembled the composition of terrorist groups in Latin America in which the sons and daughters of the middle and upper-middle class have traditionally predominated. In Uruguay, as well as in other Latin American countries, available statistics tend to show that the sons and daughters of the administrative middle class are particularly strongly represented — educated persons without independent means, the academic proletariat.⁶⁶ The composition of the Argentine ERP seems to be similar, whereas in the Montoneros the lower-middle class and even, to a lesser extent, the working class appear to be more strongly represented. The small West German, Japanese and U.S. terrorist groups consisted to a large degree of university dropouts, and, like the early Fascist movements, of declasses, spostati, socially uprooted elements. The social origins of the membership (and particularly the leadership) of these groups is of considerable interest. Ernst Halperin reaches an interesting quasi-Marxist conclusion when he argues that terrorism in Latin America is “a vigorous reaction against economic stagnation and social putrefaction by the most energetic members of the administrative class, a bid for abso lute power in order to give that class the challenging task of totally transforming society.” In this way “class interest,” idealism and social consciousness neatly complement each other. But it is also true that the smaller the group, the less meaningful the search for common social patterns.

The nationalist-separatist terrorist groups almost always consist of young people of lower social background than the socialist-revolu tionary groups; the IRA is an obvious example. Inasmuch as the nationalist-separatist movements have a left-wing fringe, this again consists mainly of intellectuals of middle-class background or white-collar workers; Fatah is more “proletarian” than the more radical PFLP and PDFLP. In the United States up to the First World War, and in Spain up to the Civil War, terrorism frequently accompanied industrial disputes; hence the presence of many workers among the terrorist militants.

Close foreign observers of the Russian scene, such as Masaryk and George Kennan, Senior, noted that the young terrorists were men and women of the highest ethical standards. Most Russians, even their bitterest opponents, tended to agree with them. Dostoyevski’s villains are mere caricatures: Pyotr Verkhovenski, a buffoon, slan derer and traitor, and Shigalov with his enormous ears (“all are slaves and equal in their slavery”). Any similarity between the “Possessed” and the terrorists of the 1880s is purely accidental.⁶⁷

The Russian terrorists anxiously questioned whether they had the right to kill, in contrast to many latter-day terrorists with their philosophy of killing for fun and profit. Dora Brilliant, one of the martyrs of the Socialist Revolutionaries, confessed that it was easier to die than to kill; Timofei Mikhailov, who was to participate in the assassination of the tsar in 1881, at the last moment felt unable to do the deed, but he showed no weakness when he was about to be executed. Kalyayev, who set out to kill the Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, did not throw the bomb at his first attempt because the intended victim was accompanied by his family, and clearly it was wrong to kill children.⁶⁸ For the same reason Angiolilo, the Italian Anarchist, did not shoot Canovas, the Spanish prime minister, when he first had the opportunity to do so. Police spies who had been infiltrated into the ranks of the Russian terrorists and who had been unmasked, escaped death on more than one occasion by appealing to the hu manity of the terrorists, who hesitated to kill them if there was even the slightest doubt concerning their guilt. These men and women had little in common with the IRA, the German Freikorps of the 1920s, the Japanese “Red Army” and many other present-day terror ist groups. Killinger, the Freikorps leader who later became a Nazi Gauleiter, describes with evident relish how he and his comrades whipped a woman so that there was not one white spot left on her back.⁶⁹ The cruelties committed by Macedonian and Croatian terror ists are well documented, and there was also a cruel streak in Irish terrorism from an early date. John Devoy, it is true, said on one occasion that Celtic nature revolted at the mere idea of assassination. But national character changes and the practice of cutting the vic tim’s Achilles tendon was reported in Ireland as early as 1813, a system refined in recent years.⁷⁰ In the light of historical evidence it would be wrong to juxtapose the “humane” character of left-wing terrorism to the “sadistic” terror of the nationalist and right-wing groups. Criminals have frequently shown greater humanity than terrorists; they are out for profit, not for psychological satisfaction. They don’t normally torment their victims. Terrorists are fanatics, and fanaticism frequently makes for cruelty and sadism.

In February 1972, a United Red Army hideout was discovered in Karuizawa, a mountain spa some eighty miles from Tokyo. There fourteen mangled and tortured bodies were found; one half of the group had liquidated the others for antirevolutionary failings, a few had apparently been buried alive. This has been explained against the background of unfathomable Oriental traditions, but would hardly account for the comments of Bernardine Dohrn, leader of the Weather underground, on the Sharon Tate murder: “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” The Black September assassin of Wasfi Tal, the prime minister of Jordan, thirsted, he said, to drink his victim’s blood after having fulfilled his mission.

The preoccupation with ethical problems, it has been said, was very much a nineteenth-century European phenomenon. In the twentieth century, human life became cheaper; the belief gained ground that the end justified all means, and that humanity anyway was a bourgeois prejudice. Selfless devotion, idealism, courage and the willingness to sacrifice oneself had not disappeared, but these qualities can be found in all parts of the political spectrum. They have been demonstrated by militants of good causes as well as of very bad ones. Right-wing terrorism is not just gangsterism and Brecht’s Arturo Ui is about as helpful for the understanding of Nazism as The Possessed for Russian terrorism. Horst Wessel, paradoxically, is a type out of the pages of Tolstoy or Dostoyevski — the student from a middle-class home who goes to live with a prostitute in order to “redeem her.” At another time and in another place he would have been an Anarchist hero; in his lifestyle he belonged to the counter culture, not to the establishment. It has been said that the sterling qualities of the members of Narodnaya Volya deeply impressed even their political enemies. But it is also true that the fanatical devotion of some of the Nazi terrorists inspired admiration among many who were opposed to their political beliefs. For, it was asked, how could men possibly fight with such passion for a cause that was all wrong? Karl Radek wrote a famous obituary for Schlageter, the terrorist who was an early member of the Nazi party, in which he said that this courageous soldier of the counterrevolution should be sincerely ad mired by the soldiers of the revolution. “The fact that he risked death shows that he was determined to serve the German people. . . . We shall do everything in our power so to ensure that men like Schla geter, willing to go to their deaths for an ideal, should not die in vain but be harbingers of a better world.”⁷¹ Radek was later criticized for this indiscretion but he was, of course, right. In other circumstances, Schlageter could have turned with equal ease to the left. The par ents, the brothers and sisters of Fascist terrorists were as convinced as the families of Russian revolutionaries that their dear ones had died for a “holy cause.”⁷²

The mystical element has been noted in Russian terrorism, but it is also found in Ireland, in Rumania, and among Japanese, Indian and Arab terrorists. Some of the Social Revolutionary terrorists were deeply religious believers. Rasputina went to church each morning, much to the consternation of the detectives shadowing her; Benevskaya, another Social Revolutionary, became a terrorist precisely because she was a believing Christian. There were more than a few practicing Catholics among Latin American terrorists. It is, however, true that most Russian terrorists had nothing but contempt for the religious establishment, and that most French Anarchists and Ameri can terrorists were confirmed atheists. Yet their belief in their cause had a deeply religious quality. The last words of some of those about to be executed — such as Fischer (of the Haymarket trial): “This is the happiest moment of my life” — reveal that these men and women were deeply convinced that upon them, as on Christ, rested the burden of deliverance. They were martyrs for their faith, making the supreme sacrifice for the salvation of mankind; but in contrast to the early Christian martyrs they no longer believed in the command ment “Thou shalt not kill.” Describing the spirit with which his comrades, the Russian terrorists, were imbued, Kravchinski fre quently drew on illustrations from the Bible.⁷³ Bjørnsterne Bjørnson, the Norwegian writer, noted in his Beyond Human Power that it was among the Anarchists that modern martyrs might be found. The idea of the martyr who has gained eternal life appears in the history of Irish terrorism from its beginnings to the present day. Writing about Russian terrorism, Masaryk detected a “mysticism of death”; the same is true of Anarchism, some Fascist groups and above all of the Rumanian Legionnaires with their rite of calling the names of the dead at parades and answering “Present.”

The political issues in nineteenth-century Russia were clear-cut; there was no constitution, no elementary rights, no legal redress against the abuse of power. Elsewhere, the issues were more com plex, and terrorists had to persuade themselves that there was no alternative to violence, that democracy was dictatorship and that radical change could be effected only if bombs were thrown and pistols fired. In these circumstances the choice of terrorist means was less obvious, and those opting for them were usually more prob lematical characters. Emma Goldman, defending the Anarchists in a famous essay, said that they were torn in a conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.⁷⁴ Highly strung they certainly were but for their motives one has to look as often as not to their private lives rather than to their political and social environment.

The “propaganda by deed” in Western and Southern Europe was carried out by individuals acting on their own, mostly men of little education. Some were Herostratic figures; the last words of Bonnot, the leader of a gang of Anarchists and criminals in the Paris of the belle epoque, were “I am a celebrated man.” Some were sick in mind as well as in body, which led Cesare Lombroso into his premature conclusions about the connection between bomb throwing, pellagra and avitaminosis. By the turn of the century, some terrorist groups already included adventurers and even criminal elements. In the later stages of the Russian terrorist movement, there were comments about the dictatorial behavior on the part of some leaders, on their disregard for human life and waste of money; such complaints would have been unthinkable in the days of the Narodnaya Volya.⁷⁵

The less clear the political purpose in terrorism, the greater its appeal to unbalanced persons. The motives of men fighting a cruel tyranny are quite different from those of rebels against a democrati cally elected government. Idealism, a social conscience or hatred of foreign oppression are powerful impulses, but so are free-floating aggression, boredom and mental confusion. Activism can give meaning to otherwise empty lives. Sofia Perovskaya and Vera Figner were the symbols of one kind of terrorism — Ulrike Meinhof and Patty Hearst of another.

The subsequent fate of some of the leading terrorists of past ages is of some interest. Durruti, the fiery Spanish Anarchist, was killed in the defense of Madrid, Marighella died in a shoot-out with the Brazil ian police. Johann Most and O’Donovan Rossa, two of the grand old men of violent action, mellowed a little with age. Joseph Casey, the Fenian leader, faded away in his Paris exile: as Kevin Egan he ap pears in Joyce’s Ulysses: “He prowled with Col. Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog.” Kropotkin, Emma Gold man and Alexander Berkman advocated nonviolent action in later life. Of the nineteenth-century Irish terrorists in the United States, some went into American politics, a few became Congressmen or diplomats. Among those who lived to see the emergence of the Irish Free State, many were killed in the subsequent internecine struggle; the survivors constituted the political elite of the new state. Sean Mac Bride, a former chief of staff of the IRA, became a distinguished international civil servant — and winner of the Nobel Prize for peace. The leaders of the Irgun and the Stern Gang became opposi tionist members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, others went into the army or into business. A Russian-Jewish terrorist of earlier vintage, Pinchas Rutenberg, reappeared in Palestine as a distin guished industrialist and founder of the local electricity company. Andrea Costa and Paul Brousse, leading anti-parliamentarians in the 1880s, were to enter parliament soon after. Brousse, who had coined the phrase “propaganda by deed,” in later years was to congratulate the king of Spain on his escape from assassination. Of the surviving Russian terrorists of the 1880s some subsequently moved to the ex treme right, many made a name for themselves as scientists. Kropotkin had been a distinguished geographer all along. Mention has been made of Morozov and Sternberg, and one should also add to this list the biochemist A. N. Bach, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science in later years, the ethnographers BogorazTan, Yokhelson and Krol, as well as the bacteriologist Kharkin.⁷⁶ Of the Social Revo lutionary terrorists of early twentieth-century vintage not one joined the Bolsheviks; most emigrated from Russia, or did not return to Russia after 1917. Savinkov, who had served in the Kerenski government, actively fought the Communists, as did Maria Spiridonova; she had been given a life sentence in Tsarist Russia, and in 1918 again found herself in prison where she died twenty years later. The heroic example of the Freikorps terrorists was praised by the Nazis but with very few exceptions these men were kept at arms’ length in the Third Reich. Pilsudski and Arciszewski, leaders of the Polish terrorist struggle in 1905-1906, became chief of state and prime minister of Poland respectively. Ante Pavelic, the leader of the Ustasha was made the (Poglavnik) of an “independent” Croatia during the Second World War; with the defeat of the Axis his career came to a sudden end, and he became one of the most wanted war criminals. It is too early to generalize about the fate of the European and North American terrorists of our time; some advocates of individual terrorism in the United States have already changed their views and life style, having realized that the imperfect system against which they were fighting was by no means the worst possible.

The search for a “terrorist personality,” it was maintained earlier on, is a fruitless one. The Russian terrorists of 1880 had certain characteristics in common, as had the Irish or the Anarchists or the Palestinians, but to search for a common denominator spanning various countries, periods, cultures and political constellations is no more helpful than attempting a quantitative analysis of the height and weight of terrorists. Some were the sons of well-known revolution aries — the Russian Balmashev, for instance, or Emile Henry, whose father was a leading communard, or Sean Mac Bride. But the father of young Cabrinovic, who was involved in the Sarajevo plot, was an Austrian police spy, and the large number of sons and daughters of high Tsarist officials in the revolutionary movement of the 1870s and 1880s has already been noted.

Nechaev was totally devoid of moral scruples in his private life, but in this he was an exception among nineteenth-century revolutionaries. Most and O’Donovan Rossa were heavy drinkers, yet many of their comrades were fanatic abstentionists. Some Russian and Ser bian terrorists suffered from tuberculosis and died young, some en joyed perfect health. Ravachol, Emile Henry and a few of the Russian terrorists were mystics or believers in the occult, others had not the slightest inclination in this direction. Some contemporary observers noted a suicidal urge among terrorists; they were todestrunken, in the words of one observer.^* But for every intellectual preoccupied with death there were no doubt several others who enjoyed life as much as the next man. In short, there has always been a great variety in character traits, mental makeup and psychology among terrorists.

All that can be said with any degree of confidence is that terror was (and is) a pursuit of young people, and that in most other respects the differences between terrorists are more pronounced than the features they may have in common. The character of terrorism, furthermore, has undergone a profound change. Intellectuals have made the cult of violence respectable: there had been no such cult among the Russian terrorists. Vengeance played a certain role, but not cruelty: Emile Henry wanted to avenge Vaillant, who had thrown the bomb in the French parliament; after Henry’s execution, Caserio killed Sadi Carnot, the French president, because he had not pardoned Henry. The explosion in the Barcelona opera house (1893) was to avenge Paulino Pallas who had been executed shortly before. The bomb thrown at the Corpus Christi procession two years later, also in Barcelona, was in protest against the conditions at Monjuich prison. The particular ferocity of LEHI terrorism was no doubt con nected with the desire to avenge the death of their leader, Abraham Stern. In the history of Russian terrorism, and also in Rumania and Ireland, repression frequently caused a new wave of terrorist operations.

Not all nineteenth-century terrorists were knightly (or saintly) figures; there were doubtful characters among them and some were half mad. But by and large these were fighters against brutal dictatorships and against hideous persecution. It was surely no coincidence that terrorism was most widespread in Tsarist Russia and Turkey, the two most oppressive regimes in Europe. Nor is there any doubt about the genuineness of the grievances of the Irish rebels, the American workers and the Spanish peasants. Inasmuch as there was indiscrimi nate terror, it was perpetrated by unstable individuals; it was not a matter of systematic policy. Atrocities were committed, but the ethi cal standards prevailing in Macedonia around the turn of the century and in Mexico were not quite comparable to those of countries on a higher level of civilization.

The terror of the 1960s and 1970s is different in quality. The more oppressive regimes are not only free from terror, they have helped to launch it against the more permissive societies. The fate of the terrorist of the 1880s and 1890s, when apprehended, was not an envi able one; in contrast, no West European, North American, Japanese or Middle Eastern terrorist of the 1960s or 1970s has been executed (except in some cases by his comrades) and there is always a good chance that he will be released even before serving his term, his comrades having blackmailed the authorities into freeing him. Much of the risk has gone out of terrorism. It is no longer a daylight duel between giants in a kind of Russian High Noon as the Narodovoltsy saw it. With time bombs left in public places and the dispatch of letter bombs, the struggle has become anonymous and much of the heroism and sacrifice have gone out of it. Sometimes terrorism has become bureaucratized and at others it is manipulated from afar.

Standards and modes of behavior have changed. The Narodnaya Volya, the French Anarchists or the Irish dynamiters would not have abducted children and threatened to kill them unless ransom was paid, they would not have hired agents to do their own work, nor would they have given parcels with explosives to unsuspecting tour ists. They would not have sent parts of their victims’ bodies with little notes to their relatives as the (right-wing) Guatemalan MANO and NOA did. They would not have expected a premium of millions of dollars from foreign governments for commissions executed, they would not have tormented, mutilated, raped and castrated their victims, nor would they have engaged in senseless wholesale slaugh ter of their own ranks. Not all recent terrorist movements have made a fetish of brutality; some have behaved more humanely than others. But what was once a rare exception has become a frequent occur rence in our time. It is still true that, as initially noted, generalizations about the “terrorist personality” are of limited value because there are so many variations. But it is also true that where a common pattern, a general trend, can be discerned at the present time, it is precisely that which has just been noted. When all allowances have been made for the primitive character and the violent traditions of certain societies, there is no escaping the fact that nineteenth-cen tury terrorists acted according to standards very different from those prevailing at present. This is not to idealize the Narodnaya Volya or to denigrate the terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s; Latin American or Arab terrorists may be fervent patriots or feel the injustice done to their people as acutely as the terrorists of an earlier age, but they still belong to a different species. Whatever their motives may be, the “ardent love of others” which Emma Goldman observed is not among them, the driving force is hate not love, ethical considerations are a matter of indifference to them and their dreams of freedom, of national and social liberation are suspect precisely because of their personalities. Nineteenth-century nationalist terrorists were fighting for freedom from foreign domination, but of late appetities have grown; the Basques have designs on Galicia, the Palestinians want not only the West Bank but also intend to destroy the Jewish state, the IRA would like to bomb the Protestants into a united Ireland. The aims of terrorism, in brief, have changed, and so have the terrorists.

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*Any definition of political terrorism venturing beyond noting the systematic use of murder, injury and destruction or the threats of such acts toward achieving political ends is bound to lead to endless controversies. Some terrorist groups have been indiscriminate and their victims are “symbolic,” others have acted differently. Some merely wanted to create a climate of fear, others aimed at the physical destruction of their opponents tout court. Purists will argue that one is not even entitled to stress the systematic character of terrorism because in some cases the execution of a single act did have the desired effect (Sarajevo in 1914). It can be predicted with confidence that the disputes about a comprehensive, detailed definition of terrorism will continue for a long time, that they will not result in a consensus and that they will make no notable contribution toward the understanding of terrorism.

*The ERP repeated some of the mistakes committed earlier by the Tupamaros and in addition, against all the rules of urban terror, frontally attacked major army units. About 70 of them were killed in the attempt to storm the Monte Chingolo army camp in the spring of 1976.

*The IRA in Ulster was reported to have derived some of its income from legitimate business ventures (such as running taxi services) but also from extorting protection money.

*The figures are based on estimates; terrorist movements have not as a rule kept accounts to be examined by outsiders or tax inspectors. However, enough facts and figures are known to give a general idea of their income. The estimates are calculated on the basis of 1976 dollars; the sums that were at the disposal of terrorist groups before the Second World War were, of course, in absolute terms much smaller. But prices were much lower too; the Irish paid 5 to 6 dollars for a rifle in 1914; the Russian AK-47 assault rifle is sold now for 110 dollars.

†1974 and 1975 were exceptionally profitable years for the Argentinian terrorists.

‡Estimates of the income of Palestinian terrorist organizations vary greatly. According to Israeli sources, Fatah has an income of $150-200 million; figures mentioned in the press of the “Rejection Front” and by Syrian spokesmen ($240 million) are higher. If expenses for political work and donations in kind rather than cash (arms, equipment, training camps, etc.) are included, the higher figures may well be close to the truth.

*When Bhagwati Charan and his friends of the Hindustan Socialist Revolutionary Army planned to blow up the viceroy’s train near Delhi in 1929, one of the group disguised himself as a fakir so as to study the locality without arousing suspicion. (Yashpal, Singhavalokan II (Lucknow, 1951), 93, quoted in Vajpeyi, The Extremist Movement in India (Allahabad, 1974), 247.

*The first recorded actual use of a letter bomb (or, to be precise, a parcel bomb weighing some twenty-five pounds) was in June 1895 when a package that was leaking was opened in a Berlin post office. It had been prepared and dispatched by Paul Koschemann, a mechanic twenty-one years of age with anarchist leanings. It was addressed to a senior police officer. But the addressee was not at all connected with the political police, nor did Koschemann have the backing of any organized group; the motive for the action did not become clearer in court. The design was primitive; Koschemann used gunpowder, bottles filled with ligroin and a little revolver activated by an alarm clock was to serve as the detonator (H. Friedlaender, Interessante Kriminalprozesse (Berlin, 1922), II, 156). A few years later more sophisticated parcel bombs were already used by criminals in the United States (Roy A. Giles in Scientific American (April 1923), 226).

^*The first booby-trapped bombs appeared well before the First World War. The public was warned that it was dangerous to tear out a burning fuse and then freely handle the bomb for “many dynamiters are ingenious enough to attach the fuses to the more dangerous bombs of the liquid type in order to mislead the finder” (“Studying the Anarchists’ bombs scientifically,” Scientific American (July 1911), 100; the article had been published originally in a German periodical Reclam ‘s Universum). The great technical difficulties involved in the construction of homemade bombs were amply described in the professional literature. (See, for instance, Jules Bebie, Manual of Explosives (New York, 1943), 156.) Some of these complications vanished with the appearance of plastic explosives such as Nexit which were apparently used for the first time in the assassination of Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo in Prague on May 29, 1942. The bomb which exploded in Hitler’s bunker on July 20, 1944, consisted of a similar material, presumably cyclonite mixed with a plasticizing medium.

^*George Schoeters, the founder of the Canadian FLQ, was a Belgian who had arrived in Canada only in 1951.

^*This seems to have been true with regard to some of the French Anarchists and also Orsini who wrote in his famous last letter that he had tried to kill Napoleon III in a fit of mental aberration, that he did not believe in murder and that Italy would not be liberated by attempts to emulate his deed.