The simple chain-link fence around the Olympic village in Munich was only two metres high. There was no barbed wire, the perimeter was not regularly patrolled, and there were no security cameras. Guards were trained for nothing more threatening than an athlete’s drunken celebration. All this was deliberate. The Germans wanted the 1972 Olympics to be ‘The Friendly Games’, a calculated counterpoint to Berlin 1936.
The organizers did ask Georg Sieber, a police psychologist, to think about worst-case scenarios. Number 21 on his list of 26 envisaged an attack by Palestinian terrorists who would scale the fence at night, then make for the building housing Israeli athletes. After killing a couple of hostages, they would offer to exchange the rest for comrades held in Israeli jails. Since Israel would refuse to bargain, the terrorists would be forced to execute their hostages. Sieber’s warning was rejected because it was too frightening – the precautions it implied contravened the spirit of the friendly games. The organizers wanted an occasion remembered for Waldi, the dachshund mascot, not for jackbooted security personnel.
Palestine, a nation that did not technically exist, was not invited to the 1972 Olympics. A group of Palestinians therefore invited themselves. ‘If they refuse to let us participate, why shouldn’t we penetrate the Games in our own way?’ Abu Mohammed, of the Black September organization, asked his comrades on 15 July 1972. Black September was formed in late 1970, in reaction to King Hussein’s decision to expel thousands of Palestinians from Jordan. They were a militant response to the issue of self-determination, a group of zealots who considered the Palestine Liberation Organization insufficiently aggressive. ‘There was not an organisation,’ Abu Daoud, one of the ringleaders of the Munich action, explained. ‘There was a cause, Black September. It was a . . . state of mind.’1
When Daoud first visited Munich on the 17th to reconnoitre the site, he found the answer to his dreams: a pathetic fence, minimal security, and guards who acted like a welcoming committee. On a subsequent visit, he talked his way into the residence set aside for the Israelis by claiming to be a Brazilian with a passionate love for Israel. On 24 August, two days before the Games began, Abu Iyad and two others flew into Frankfurt with five bags packed with weapons. Customs officials opened only one bag – the one containing clothes.
Since the operation carried enormous risk, neither Iyad nor Daoud would take part. That privilege went to the young and expendable. The leader was Issa, a sensitive man whose devotion to Palestine permitted acts of cold-blooded barbarity. Directly under him was a quiet psychopath nicknamed Tony. Joining them were six faceless fedayeen – youngsters radicalized in Lebanese refugee camps and susceptible to promises of glorious martyrdom. ‘We were convinced Palestine could only be liberated by its children,’ Jamal al-Gashey confessed. ‘For the first time, I felt proud and felt that my existence and my life had a meaning, that I was not just a wretched refugee, but a revolutionary fighting for a cause.’2
The fedayeen were trained in Libya, then sent to Munich. Not until the evening before the attack did they receive details of their mission. Each was given a duffle bag decorated with the Olympic symbol and containing a gun, ammunition, grenades, food, rope, first aid kit, nylon stockings for use as masks, and amphetamines. Daoud told them: ‘The operation for which you’ve been chosen is essentially a political one . . . It’s not a matter of liquidating your enemies, but seizing them as prisoners for future exchanges. The grenades are for later, to impress your German negotiating partners and defend yourselves to the death.’ Issa added: ‘From now on, consider yourself dead . . . killed in action for the Palestinian cause.’ Despite the imminence of death, al-Gashey felt ‘pride and joy . . . My dream of taking part in an operation against the Israelis was coming true.’3
At 04.30 on 5 September, the fedayeen, dressed in tracksuits, arrived at a pre-selected point on the perimeter fence. The spot was popular among those returning late from unofficial trysts in Munich. The guards knew that athletes were scaling the fence, but decided to ignore the practice in the interest of goodwill. At the fence, the Palestinians encountered some Americans also sneaking in. Trading banter, the two groups helped one another over. ‘Hey, man, give me your bag,’ one American remarked. Weapons were hoisted over the fence in the spirit of Olympic camaraderie.4
The fedayeen then made for the Israeli apartments. Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, was awakened by the sound of someone tampering with the lock. When he saw the muzzle of a rifle poke in, he threw himself at the door while yelling at his housemates to escape. Gutfreund, a huge man, kept the attackers at bay long enough for Tuvia Sokolovsky to flee through a window. When the terrorists managed eventually to force their way in, Moshe Weinberg, a wrestling coach, jumped them. He was shot through the cheek.
The wounded Weinberg was forced to take his captors to the other Israelis. He took them past Apartment 2, claiming that it did not contain Israelis, on the slim hope that the wrestlers and weightlifters in Apartment 3 might be able to overpower their attackers. Unfortunately, they were still sound asleep and easily subdued. As they were marched back to the first apartment, Gad Tsobari broke loose and escaped amidst a hail of bullets. While the terrorists’ attention was focused on Tsobari, Weinberg again attacked. This time, the Palestinians shot him dead. When they arrived back at the apartment, Yossef Romano, a weightlifter, managed briefly to overpower one of the terrorists, but he too was killed.
The fedayeen now had nine hostages and two bodies. A cleaning woman, having heard gunfire, alerted the Olympic police at 04.47. Arriving at the scene, an unarmed officer encountered a hooded man on the balcony. Two sheets of paper were tossed down. These contained an ultimatum: the hostages would be released in exchange for 234 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. If the demands were not met by 09.00, one hostage would be killed with each passing hour. In a gesture of solidarity directed at the German radical left, Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction were included on the list. A short time later a more senior policeman arrived. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he shouted, as if authority could melt terror. Issa ignored the question and nodded in the direction of the house. Two terrorists emerged carrying Weinberg’s bloody corpse, which they dumped at the policeman’s feet. Issa reiterated the ultimatum: ‘One each hour.’5
A crisis team was formed, consisting of West German Interior Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber and the Bavarian Interior Minister Bruno Merck. Since the Germans had refused to consider such a disaster, they were ill-equipped to handle it. Schreiber tried to buy the Palestinians’ surrender, but they refused. Genscher pleaded with Issa not to allow Jews once again to be massacred on German soil, but that appeal got nowhere. Genscher, Schreiber and Merck then offered to take the place of the hostages, again to no avail.
Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, informed the Germans that under no circumstances would Israel agree to an exchange. That came as no surprise, but did nevertheless underline the fact that the problem facing the Germans was rescue, not negotiation. An attempt was made to get policemen in by disguising them as a food delivery team, but the fedayeen saw through that ruse. A similarly ill-conceived plan to invade through the heating ducts was called off when it became apparent that preparations were inadvertently being televised and undoubtedly watched by the Palestinians.
Competitions were run and victories celebrated while the Israelis awaited execution. Anxious athletes, uncertain about the fate of the Games, passed the time in grim imitation of normality. ‘People played chess or ping-pong,’ the American marathon runner Kenny Moore recalled. ‘Athletes sunbathed by the reflecting pool. It seemed inappropriate, but what was one supposed to do?’ Gerald Seymour of ITN found the atmosphere ‘unpleasant, selfish, [and] slightly obscene . . . It seemed like people having a noisy picnic in a churchyard.’ Gossip was traded on a rising wind. ‘Rumors leaped and died,’ Moore remembered. ‘There were 26 hostages. There were seven. The terrorists were killing a man every two hours. They were on the verge of surrender.’ At 16.00, the IOC belatedly suspended competition. A dejected Moore returned to his room. ‘I experienced level after level of grief: for my own event . . . those years of preparation now useless; for the dead and doomed Israelis; and for the violated sanctuary of the Games.’6
The crisis team stalled by claiming that there were problems liaising with the Israeli government. The fedayeen proved tolerant, since delays increased the coverage their cause received. The deadline was extended three times, eventually to 17.00. This annoyed Olympic organizers, who pressured the Germans for a resolution. ‘[They] naturally wanted the Games to resume as soon as possible, which meant that the situation had to be resolved in one way or another,’ Schreiber recalled. Unfortunately, haste is ill-advised in a hostage situation – the usual procedure is to prolong negotiations so as to wear down the captors. Munich was instead rushing to a conclusion.7
Just before the final deadline, the Palestinians changed tactics. They demanded a jet to fly to Cairo, on the assumption that Israel might prove more willing to negotiate if the hostages were held in an Arab country. The Germans welcomed the new demand, on the assumption that it would be easier to take out the terrorists on airport tarmac than in the rabbit warren of the Olympic village. While that was undoubtedly true, a commando operation at the airport required skills the Germans did not possess. One consequence of the revulsion against all things military after 1945 was that West Germany did not possess an elite commando unit. Realizing this, Meir directed Mossad chief Zvi Zamir to ask the Germans for permission to use an Israeli force. Chancellor Willy Brandt was open to the idea, but Bavarian state officials, in whom constitutional authority rested, demurred.
The operation was therefore left to ordinary police officers. ‘We were trained for everyday offenses, to be close to the people, unarmed – but not for an action against paramilitary-trained terrorists,’ Schreiber later admitted. Five marksmen were selected simply by going through personnel files in search of those who had performed well on target practice. Buried within the official post-mortem is a stark admission from the man identified only as ‘Sniper No. 2’: ‘I am not a sharpshooter.’8 The ad hoc force was both blind and deaf, since neither walkie-talkies nor night vision goggles were provided.
‘We were 99 per cent sure that we wouldn’t be able to achieve our objective,’ Schreiber later confessed. ‘We felt like doctors trying to bring the dead back to life.’ To make matters worse, a misunderstanding allowed his deputy, Georg Wolf, to assume that there were only five terrorists instead of eight. Five marksmen against five terrorists was frugal; five against eight was suicidal. Meanwhile, another set of police officers selected to pose as the flight crew on the jet decided among themselves to abort their operation because it seemed too dangerous. ‘It was nothing more than a suicide mission which was cancelled unanimously,’ one later explained.9
The helicopters carrying the hostages and their captors arrived at the airport at 22.35. Six Palestinians disembarked, along with four pilots. The hostages remained inside, along with one terrorist in each helicopter. Issa and Tony then went to inspect the jet. Their suspicions were aroused when they discovered no crew. As they walked back to the choppers, Wolf ordered his men to open fire. Only three heard the order, the other two joining in once the shooting began.
Two fedayeen were killed instantly, another was mortally wounded. The effectiveness of the marksmen was, however, limited by the fact that they had placed themselves in one another’s line of fire. Confusion intensified when the surviving terrorists methodically shot out the airport lights, thus plunging the area into total darkness. With the situation now in stalemate, an eerie quiet descended. The Germans decided to call in a SWAT team, an option that had not occurred to them before. The team arrived by helicopter a full half hour after shooting had commenced and, for some reason, landed two kilometres from the jet. Six armoured personnel carriers were also mobilized, but their arrival was delayed because the roads to the airport were clogged with people eager to witness an Olympic tragedy. One of the APCs was delayed further because the driver mistakenly went to Munich’s civilian airport.
The arrival of the APCs just before midnight convinced the terrorists that the jig was up. One opened fire inside the first helicopter, killing three of the hostages and wounding a fourth. He tossed in a grenade and then turned his gun on his attackers, before being cut down in a torrent of fire. The grenade turned the helicopter into an inferno, killing the remaining hostage. A similar scenario was played out in the second helicopter, where five hostages were huddled. When the shooting stopped at about 00.30 all the hostages were dead, as were five of the terrorists. The remaining three lay on the tarmac, two pretending to be dead. They were captured alive.
‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized,’ Jim McKay, the veteran ABC sportscaster, told his American audience. ‘Tonight our worst fears have been realized. They’re all gone.’ While he was uttering those words, morning was breaking in the Village. As news spread that the hostages were dead, thoughts turned to the fate of the Games. Willi Daume, chairman of the Munich organizing committee, felt it would be wrong to continue. The IOC commissioner Avery Brundage overruled him, on the grounds that terrorists could not be allowed to destroy the Olympics. ‘The games must go on, and we must . . . continue our efforts to keep them clean, pure and honest,’ he told the crowd gathered for a memorial service in the Olympic Stadium that morning. He referred to ‘two savage attacks’ on the Games: the other one being the ‘naked political blackmail’ of black African nations whose threatened boycott had resulted in the expulsion of Rhodesia. An astonished crowd was left wondering whether Brundage meant to suggest parity. He later apologized for ‘any misinterpretation’ his words might have encouraged.10
Reactions to Brundage’s decision varied widely. ‘Incredibly, they’re going on with it,’ Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote. ‘It’s almost like having a dance at Dachau.’ Norwegian athletes stayed, but some registered their protest by not competing. Six Dutch athletes left, complaining of the ‘obscene decision to continue’. In contrast, Tom Dooley, an American walker, thought that the Games should go ahead, simply because the athletes needed ‘to stay together. Who wins or loses now is ridiculously unimportant, considered against these men’s deaths. But we have to stay together.’ The Egyptian, Kuwaiti and Syrian teams went home, fearing reprisals, but the Lebanese team stayed, in order to preserve the Olympic spirit. That sentiment was echoed by Steve Prefontaine, the American distance runner: ‘These are our Games,’ he insisted. ‘Anyone who would murder us for some demented cause just proves himself incapable of understanding what we do.’11
In the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, Golda Meir promised the Knesset that ‘we will smite them wherever they may be’. The opposition leader, Menachem Begin, goaded her, demanding ‘a prolonged, open-ended assault against the murderers and their bases’. Meir then promised ‘to strike at the terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfil that obligation undauntedly.’ Her determination for revenge increased exponentially when West German authorities released the three surviving Munich terrorists on 29 October 1972 after the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet. Daoud claims that the deal had been prearranged and that the hijacking was staged as a pretext.12
Meir, feeling ‘physically sickened’ by news of the release, gave the green light to two operations. The first, called Spring of Youth, was carried out by Israeli Special Forces on 9–10 April 1973 and hit several terrorist targets in Lebanon. A second operation, called Wrath of God, went to Mossad. Over the next six years, agents killed at least twenty Palestinians in cities around Europe and the Middle East. ‘The people who were shot all had nothing to do with Munich,’ Daoud later claimed. That was not strictly true, since Adnan al-Gashey (cousin of Jamal al-Gashey) and Mohammed Safady, two of the three Munich survivors, were eliminated, as was Ali Hassan Salameh, who had helped organize the operation. As for the rest, however, Daoud was essentially right: Wrath of God was simply a pretext for eliminating Palestinians that Israel wanted dead. David Kimche, former deputy head of Mossad, later admitted that, ‘The aim was not so much revenge but mainly to make . . . [the Palestinians] frightened. We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them.’ It did not really matter that the slain often had nothing to do with Munich. ‘A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist,’ a senior Mossad agent confessed. ‘We don’t check too much if he was or wasn’t involved . . . If he didn’t do it yesterday, he’ll do it tomorrow. He’s a terrorist.’ That was not strictly true either, since in July 1973 agents gunned down a completely innocent Moroccan in Norway, mistaking him for Salameh.13
‘I regret nothing,’ Daoud later confessed. He insisted that the Olympic killings were a legitimate response to Israeli injustice. Palestinians would ‘fight as long as it takes for Israel to recognize our rights’. ‘The only aim’, Adnan al-Gashey claimed, ‘was to scare the world . . . during their “happy Olympic Games” and make them aware of the fate of the Palestinians.’ By that standard, the operation was a success; as Daoud claimed, it ‘brought the Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously cared about Palestinian victims’. Nevertheless, while the operation made the issue much more difficult to ignore, quite a few people managed to do so. Abu Iyad was astonished at Western priorities. ‘A large segment of world opinion was far more concerned about the twenty-four hour interruption in the grand spectacle of the Olympic Games than it was about the dramatic plight endured by the Palestinian people . . . or the atrocious end of the commandos and their hostages.’14
The families of the slain hostages, unable to bring the perpetrators to justice, have instead focused blame on the German authorities who bungled the operation. ‘They should have protected my husband and the other athletes and they didn’t,’ argues Ankie Spitzer, widow of fencer Andrei Spitzer. Her anger is understandable, but if the Germans were guilty of anything, it was of quaint naivety. They weren’t the only ones who wanted to pretend that the Olympics could be kept free of political violence.15
Moore recalls feeling that ‘we were . . . actors in the modern Olympics’ great loss of innocence’. The Olympic Village had seemed to him ‘a refuge . . . from a larger, seedier world in which individuals and governments refused to adhere to any humane code’. The spirit was contrived, but still important. ‘For two weeks every four years we direct our kind of fanaticism into the essentially absurd activities of running and swimming and being beautiful on a balance beam. Yet even in the rage of competition we keep from hurting each other, and thereby demonstrate the meaning of civilization. I shook and cried as that illusion, the strongest of my life, was shattered.’ In future, experts like Sieber would prove as important to pre-Games preparations as stadium architects. Munich spent $2 million on security; Athens in 2004 spent $600 million. However sensible modern-day precautions are, a sanctuary cannot be turned into an armed camp and still remain a refuge. Munich provides a cruel reminder of a moment when sport ceased to be sacred.16
Benno Ohnesorg was a twenty-six-year-old literature student when he was fatally shot by a police officer during a demonstration in Berlin on 2 June 1967. An official inquiry concluded that Ohne-sorg’s shooting was accidental. Militant students concluded otherwise. For them, the incident demonstrated the lengths to which the government would go to stifle dissent. Afterwards, students found themselves on the banks of a moral Rubicon. Some concluded that violence had to be met with violence, since the state would not respond to a movement that posed no physical threat. ‘It was a very strange time,’ Hans-Georg Brum, a former activist, concludes. ‘We were all very critical of society. The question was, how far can you go? Can you turn to violence?’17
Some found the answer easy – too easy. One radical student paper promised: ‘If the police open fire on us again, we will shoot back.’ This was not simply tit for every tat. Violence, it was believed, would provide the stimulus necessary to awaken a lethargic proletariat. For proof, the students looked to successful revolutions in Latin America and Asia, assuming that Third World truths could easily be transplanted to an advanced industrial society.18
For Andreas Baader, violence was neither tactic nor strategy but a way of life. Born in 1943, he lost his father in the war and developed into the stereotyped delinquent who drew sadistic pleasure from being the tough male in a household of fawning females. He stole cars, snatched purses, and was always ready for a brawl. He was not, however, an ordinary hooligan. Good looks, sharp clothes, charisma and intelligence made it difficult to dismiss him for the thug he was, and gave his violence erotic frisson.
Baader moved to Berlin in 1963 in order to avoid compulsory military service. The intense political climate in the divided city gave thugs like him revolutionary validity, effectively camouflaging their psychosis. In 1968, he fell under the spell of Gudrun Ensslin, a willowy beauty with a first-class mind. The daughter of a Lutheran minister, she had converted to radical socialism after attending college in the United States. For her, linking with Baader was a dramatic rejection of an inherited moral code. He was, she confessed, ‘refreshingly close to reality’, by which she meant that he preferred action to thought. As such, he offered her the opportunity to act upon fantasies of violence. ‘They will kill us all,’ she proclaimed when Ohnesorg was shot. ‘You know what kind of pigs we are up against. This is the generation of Auschwitz we’ve got against us. You can’t argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven’t.
We must arm ourselves.’19
On 2 April 1968 Baader and Ensslin – two fashion-conscious terrorists – firebombed a Frankfurt department store. ‘[Their] idea was that they would throw something into the world of consumerism which was very similar but on a much smaller scale to what was being dropped on people in Vietnam,’ their lawyer Horst Mahler later explained. ‘So they could then say: “You are horrified by a little fire in a department store in which a few clothes go up in flames. You should see what goes on everyday in Vietnam. What kind of people are you? Are you human?”’ Fortunately for the police, Baader and Ensslin were conveniently inept, and therefore easily captured. Arrest slaked their craving for attention, which came aplenty when their trial provided the perfect opportunity for radical theatre.20
Released on bail while awaiting the outcome of their appeal, Baader and Ensslin returned to revolution. He was re-arrested on 3 April 1970, at which point the journalist Ulrike Meinhof turned the cosy couple into a revolutionary ménage à trois. She had previously worked for the radical journal Konkret, earning a solid reputation for insightful commentary. In 1968, she left her husband and job and migrated to Berlin, where she met Baader and Ensslin. After working with young female delinquents, she became convinced of the futility of capitalism. The ‘system’, she decided, could not be reformed – it had to be smashed.
After Baader’s re-arrest, Meinhof launched a plan to free him. On the pretext of collaborating with her on a book, he was regularly escorted to the Free University library under armed guard. On 14 May 1970, she and two accomplices smuggled guns into the library and, after a shoot-out, freed Baader. That was the symbolic starting point of the Red Army Faction, commonly known as the Baader– Meinhof gang. For Meinhof, springing Baader was a personal statement of commitment to revolution; she shed the last vestiges of bourgeois respectability and became an urban guerrilla. This meant jettisoning (on the advice of Ensslin) the excess baggage of her twin daughters, who were dumped in a commune in Sicily. She became obsessed by the need to erase her past life. ‘Ulrike Meinhof and I had the same problem,’ Horst Mahler reflected. ‘She had a bourgeois career, too. She was very successful and . . . felt hemmed in by that. For this reason, Gudrun held a huge fascination for her. She looked up to Gudrun. She pushed herself to the front line of this struggle.’ Beate Sturm, briefly a member of the gang, thought Meinhof ’s hunger for action was typical of the radical intellectual: ‘One only has to explain to her that action is more important than her scribbling and that is sufficient.’ She was captivated by Baader’s ‘great idea that criminal action is itself political action’.21
‘Did the pigs really believe that we would let comrade Baader sit in jail for two or three years?’ a Meinhof communiqué asked. ‘Did any pig really believe that we would talk about development of the class struggle, the re-organisation of the proletariat, without arming ourselves? . . . Whoever does not defend himself will die. Start the armed resistance. Build up the Red Army.’ She genuinely believed that Baader’s release, by signalling that the war had begun, would stimulate a proletarian uprising. ‘The release of Baader is only the beginning!’ Members assured themselves that the working class, seething with anger, was a conscious revolutionary mass lacking only leadership.22
An urban guerrilla movement was constructed according to blueprints borrowed from Che and Mao, with jungle verities recklessly applied to the metropolis. ‘What is now being launched here has already been launched in Vietnam, Palestine, Guatemala, in Oakland and Watts, in Cuba and China, in Angola and New York.’ Since the war had already begun, to take up arms was sublime moral duty. Those who refused were by definition ‘responsible for the crimes of capitalism’. That included left-wing reformists as well as those on the far right. State socialism was a dead end; it simply meant ‘better means of discipline, better methods of intimidation, better methods of exploitation. That only breaks the people, it doesn’t break what breaks the people!’ A call to arms was issued: ‘Don’t sit around on the shabby, ransacked sofa and count your loves, like the small-time shopkeeper . . . Build up the right distribution apparatus, let the pants-shitters lie, the red-cabbage eaters, the social workers, those [who] only suck up . . . Get out where the homes are and the big families and the sub-proletariat and the proletarian women, who are only waiting to smash the right people in the chops.’23
‘We despised what our parents had created,’ Astrid Proll reflected. ‘We were angry that we had to live with the past like that. Our generation was in love with revolution.’ With the revolutionary path so clear, ideology seemed an obstacle to action. ‘Whether it is right to organise armed struggle depends on whether it is possible,’ the group blithely maintained. ‘We affirm that . . . it is correct, possible, and justified.’ Ensslin and Meinhof were millenarian fantasists for whom faith superseded theory.
Not with cheap words, but with deeds, have we come to stand on the side of the overwhelming majority of the people, who today all over the world are taking up arms to free themselves from imperialist suppression and any kind of exploitation . . . This . . . is a world war – it will be the last and at the same time the longest and bloodiest war of history . . . It is not a war among nations but a war of classes, which will sweep all national, social, cultural, and religious boundaries and barriers forever from the stage of history.
Meinhof and Ensslin foresaw a cataclysm of biblical proportions from which the world would emerge transformed and through which individual redemption could be gained. Third World national liberation movements were attractive because of their purity – they involved revolutionaries uncorrupted by consumerism. Yearning for a condition of innocence, they saw peasants as living examples of humanity before the Fall. The revolution was felt and lived, not just conceived and planned. This explains the emphasis upon action and on action’s dramatic expression – violence. Theory, in truth a cacophony of jargon, was picked up and pasted onto a great collage constructed to suit the millenarian mood. Each element in the collage could be carefully explained, but the picture itself was a mess, especially when viewed from detached distance. Meinhof, given her journalism background, should have been the one to explain the group’s political ideas to sympathizers and critics, but, as Sturm explained, ‘she couldn’t do that because there were no ideas at all’.24
Blind faith encouraged a gargantuan self-righteousness, which provided a force field against doubt and made error inconceivable. The world was cleaved into black and white, good and evil, thus rendering a moral crusade both attractive and possible. The absolute certainty that they understood ‘the people’ led to an automatic assumption that they were popular and capable of leadership. RAF members saw themselves as an enlightened cadre: ‘It is our task’, Meinhof argued, ‘to present the connection between the liberation struggle of the peoples of the Third World and the longing for liberation wherever it emerges in the metropoles.’25
The RAF’s strength lay in the manipulative power of Baader, a demagogue who preyed on his followers’ weaknesses. He was the macho stud who boasted that he suffered from ‘revolutionary orgasm problems’ – whatever that meant. Leadership was defined by the ability to down the most drugs, fuck the most women and spread the most hate. ‘Everything was shit, arsehole, pigs, and it was like that all day long,’ Ello Michel said of her former boyfriend. ‘Full of hate against the whole society.’ ‘He had a great sense of self-belief,’ Thorwald Proll recalled, with conspicuous understatement. ‘He had this way of pushing everything to the limit.’ Power was wielded partly through the psychological torture of female comrades who fell in love with him. ‘I could not understand the way he insulted women all the time,’ Mahler remarked. ‘He called his girlfriend, Gudrun, “you silly bitch”. He called Ulrike Meinhof “you really stupid bitch”.’ Self-criticism sessions turned acolytes into emotional wrecks, rendering them easier to manipulate. ‘Everyone was criticized,’ Margrit Schiller recalled. ‘The only one who wasn’t was Andreas.’26
After Baader’s escape, the RAF prepared for a major offensive. Since terrorism was expensive, banks had to be robbed. A Robin Hood image was cultivated, but in truth it was paper thin. ‘It was not about redistributing wealth,’ Monika Berberich admitted. ‘It was about getting money and we weren’t going to mug grannies in the street.’ Money bought weapons which were used to get more money. Training was provided by the PLO, at a summer camp in Jordan. Most of it was irrelevant to the German context, but RAF members did learn to make bombs. Disagreements with their hosts quickly developed, however, because Baader insisted that men and women who trained together should be able to sleep together. The PLO also objected to Ensslin’s fondness for sunbathing topless. Before long, the Germans were sent packing.27
With all the pieces in place, the RAF launched a wave of violence which peaked with the May Offensive of 1972. On 11 May, they bombed the American 5th Army Corps base and on the next day detonated three bombs at the Augsburg police headquarters. On the 15th, a car bomb in a vehicle belonging to the federal court judge Wolfgang Buddenberg seriously injured his wife, and four days later a bomb caused considerable damage at the headquarters of the Springer Press in Hamburg. The offensive ended on the 24th with the bombing of the Heidelberg headquarters of American armed forces in Europe.
The May actions were designed to provoke authoritarian repression and spark a mass uprising. The first aim was certainly successful; around 130,000 security personnel were mobilized to find and destroy the tiny gang. ‘We could ask for anything we wanted,’ Wolfgang Steinke of the German Federal Police Force recalled. ‘We built crime-fighting technology which was the finest of the finest.’ New computers ‘collected information on a scale which would give any civil rights lawyer a heart attack today’. That effort resulted in the arrest of all the main players by 15 June 1972. Feeling smug, the government concluded that the RAF had been decapitated.28
Authoritarian force did not, however, inspire a mass uprising. The RAF was mildly popular on the student left, with perhaps 25 per cent of those under thirty expressing ‘sympathy’. Frustrated by the failures of 1968, some leftists drew vicarious excitement from the May attacks and admired the concentration on ‘praxis’ – that wonderfully revolutionary word. In addition, shallow image inspired adoration: black leather, good looks and stolen sports cars suggested that revolution was cool. In contrast, the proletariat – those whose interests the RAF claimed to represent – reacted with nearly universal derision.
Imprisonment provided credence to claims about the evils of the authoritarian state. At Stammheim prison, gang members encountered a regime designed to break them. They were allowed books, newspapers and radios, but only limited human contact and few opportunities for exercise. This provoked accusations of torture by means of sensory deprivation. ‘The political concept’, one inmate argued, ‘is the gas chamber. My image of Auschwitz became real . . . [We] are surprised that they haven’t sprayed in the gas.’ ‘In not knowing what to do except torture when faced with revolutionary politics,’ Baader argued, ‘the state proves itself to be an imperialist state.’ While that was perhaps true in theory, it was not a truth that elicited much sympathy. Most Germans agreed with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt that severity was entirely justified. As he told the German parliament: ‘He who wishes to faithfully protect democracy must be fully prepared to go to the limit of what democracy permits.’29
The RAF trial, which began in May 1975, was held in a specially built courtroom in the grounds of Stammheim. The state, determined not just to gain a conviction but also to crush the movement, ran roughshod over civil liberties. The press was regularly leaked evidence for the purpose of creating the spectacle the state desired. That strategy worked, since the public became convinced that the RAF was a far greater menace than was actually the case, which in turn suggested that they had foreclosed on their right to justice. This conclusion was reinforced when the defendants acted like the demons they were supposed to be. They used the trial as an opportunity to preach rabid, often racist polemic, including one bizarre expression of solidarity with the Palestinian terrorists who had murdered Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. Israel, Mahler argued, ‘has burned up its sportsmen like the Nazis did the Jews – incendiary material for the imperialist extermination policy.’30
On 9 May 1976, Meinhof was found dead in her cell, a makeshift noose around her neck. Sympathizers concluded that she had been murdered, or that she had been driven to suicide by the brutal Stammheim regime. While the latter is possible, more compelling evidence suggests that the torment of prison was minor compared to the persecution meted out by Baader and Ensslin. ‘Our self criticism took such a hard form we tortured ourselves with it,’ Margrit Schiller admitted. ‘Ulrike, the problem is that you, terribly confused pig that you are, have now become a burden,’ Baader wrote. ‘It’s you who is driving us mad, something the legal system never managed to do. As it now stands, I’ve got nothing to say to you. So shut your trap until you change, or get lost.’ Encouraged to believe that she was ‘a hypocritical cow from the ruling class’, Meinhof probably took her own life. ‘They destroyed this woman,’ Mahler felt.31
Meanwhile, government claims that the RAF had been eradicated proved false, as a second wave of attacks demonstrated. The new generation of activists included members of the Socialist Patients Collective, a gaggle of depressives and psychotics who became convinced (thanks to their psychiatrist) that their illnesses were caused by the injustices of capitalism and that a cure could be effected through violent revolution. ‘The system has made us sick,’ went the mantra; ‘let us strike the deathblow at the sick system.’ From his prison cell, Baader goaded the new revolutionaries, threatening to withdraw their right to call themselves RAF if they failed to prove themselves worthy. This culminated in the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977, a series of brutal kidnappings and murders. While the first wave of RAF actions had targeted institutions responsible for ‘imperialist’ crimes, this new offensive struck at individuals whose guilt arose from the simple fact that they were wealthy or powerful.32
On 5 September 1977, a woman pushing a baby stroller stepped in front of the chauffeur-driven car of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the Federal Association of German Industries, forcing it to stop. She pulled a sub-machine gun from the stroller and, along with her accomplices lurking nearby, opened fire. Schleyer’s bodyguards were killed and he was taken hostage. In exchange for Schleyer, the RAF demanded the release of eleven of its imprisoned members. When the government refused to negotiate, a Palestinian commando unit allied to the RAF hijacked a Lufthansa flight en route from Palma to Frankfurt on 13 October, forcing the pilot to land in Mogadishu. The commandos demanded the release of RAF prisoners, along with two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine held in Istanbul. Negotiations proceeded for the next four days, but they were just a stalling tactic designed to give GSG-9, the anti-terrorist unit formed in the wake of Munich, time to prepare a rescue. The commandos struck in the early hours of the 18th, killing three of the four hijackers. All hostages were rescued.
The hijack, according to Peter-Jürgen Boock of the RAF, ‘was the moment of highest escalation and also the moment of . . . final failure’. Messages smuggled out of Stammheim presented a stark choice. ‘They told us: “Either you manage to free us or we will decide our own fate.” It was obvious to us what that meant – namely collective suicide.’ Shortly after receiving the news from Mogadishu, Baader, Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead. Baader and Raspe had died of gunshot wounds that prison authorities claimed were self-inflicted. Ensslin had hanged herself. These ‘suicides’ seemed even more suspicious than that of Meinhof a year earlier. Sceptics questioned how Raspe and Baader had managed to get hold of a firearm in a high security prison. That said, the government had nothing to gain (and much to lose) from executing the leading lights of the RAF. It seems entirely possible that, faced with the choice of growing old in prison, or offering themselves as martyrs, Baader and his acolytes chose the latter. Thorwald Proll thought the suicide of Baader was a last act of manipulation: ‘It was like he was saying . . . “Here’s a riddle you’ll never be able to solve. I am going to make it look like I was executed.” Always the paradox, he played with truth and lies to unsettle other people.’ Agreeing with that assessment, Mahler felt that Baader must have come to the conclusion that ‘we are still left with our bodies. These we will now use as our ultimate weapon.’33
On the following day, the dregs of the RAF ‘decided to put an end to the corrupt and miserable existence of Hanns-Martin Schleyer’. Boock admitted that this was ‘simply revenge’ for the deaths of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe. The group then went quiet until 25 June 1979, when it attempted to assassinate General Alexander Haig, commander-in-chief of NATO. Sporadic actions were staged in the 1980s and 1990s, but the carnage of the German Autumn was never replicated. Deprived of its revolutionary celebrities, the RAF could no longer pretend to be anything other than a group of psychopaths as sadistic as the imaginary enemy they hoped to destroy. In its final communiqué, released on 20 April 1998, the group proclaimed: ‘Almost 28 years ago . . . the RAF was born from an act of liberation: Today we are ending this project. The urban guerrilla in the form of the RAF is now history.’34
Contrary to the febrile fantasies of its members, the RAF was not a beginning, but an end. It provides a rather familiar epilogue to the 1960s, one echoed by the Weather Underground and Angry Brigade. Frustrated with their inability to change the world by polite persuasion, a small group of militants turned to bullets and bombs. As Meinhof wrote from Stammheim, ‘Nauseated by the . . . system, the total commercialisation and absolute mendacity . . . deeply disappointed by the actions of the student movement . . . [we] thought it essential to spread the idea of armed struggle.’ In the hothouse of radical politics, a consciousness developed in which revolution, in order to have meaning, had to be total – powerful enough to overthrow not just government, but ethos. Reform was not enough, since that perpetuated and validated oppression.35
‘We answered the violent conditions with the violence of revolt,’ the group proudly boasted in its final communiqué. Violence was like snake oil – a cure to every ill. It was not only supposed to destroy the state and remove oppression, it would also transform the people into a true proletariat. The group thought they knew how to energize workers. ‘A half dozen fighters who really put their backs into it . . . can fundamentally change the political scene, and provoke an avalanche,’ the group claimed in 1972. The process seemed so beautifully simple. ‘We said we would throw bombs into the consciousness of the masses,’ Mahler recalled. ‘We meant that those who are oppressed know it but they repress this knowledge because they identify with their oppressors as long as they believe their oppressors are invincible. The activities of the guerrillas were meant to generate an army of the people parallel to the army of the state. One day the masses would rise and say: “We want the old state to go away.”’36
‘In hindsight,’ Berberich concluded, ‘the revolution was impossible.’ The RAF fostered that impossibility. Their gargantuan hubris prevented them from noticing how their actions alienated the proletariat. Instead of acting like a vanguard, they became outlaws. As was the case with the Angry Brigade, the RAF demonstrated that violence requires the context of a mass movement; it cannot by itself create that context. Nor is it possible to alert the people to the oppression of the ‘police state’ by physically attacking the state. Ordinary citizens who believe that the role of the police is to maintain social order do not suddenly abandon that belief at the onset of disorder. In fact, the opposite is much more likely. The massive mobilization of police resources in response to the RAF seemed, to most people, entirely logical and acceptable. In other words, violence is no substitute for organization. Granted, any attempt to organize the proletariat, no matter how sensitively conducted, would probably have failed. But the RAF did not even try. They decided instead that the proletariat lacked only a leader and that ordinary people would, on observing the state under attack, abandon their lives and follow this brave, violent Messiah.37
The only conspicuous success of the RAF came in spreading fear and paranoia. In response, German society became even more intolerant than it had once been. By attempting to defeat the state, they succeeded only in providing the rationale for its reinforcement. The self-proclaimed inheritors of the vision of 1968 were in fact its executioners.
California: Comrade Patty Hearst
They called themselves Cinque, Fahiza, Teko, Yolanda, Cujo, Bo, Gabi, Zoya and Osceola – names plucked from a beginner’s guide to martyrdom. The Symbionese Liberation Army was a revolutionary force consisting of one field marshal, a handful of generals and no troops. They were the kind of activists Woody Allen might have created if he had turned his attention to urban guerrillas instead of making Bananas. This ridiculous band of militant dwarfs might never have been noticed if not for the fact that they kidnapped Snow White – a.k.a. Patty Hearst, a.k.a. Tania.
Like the RAF and the Angry Brigade, the SLA are the fag end of the Sixties dream, an example of fantasy turning to frustration. While most radicals were shaving beards, getting married and joining the workforce, a few turned to bombs and guns in the vain hope that violence could achieve what protest had not. Like the Weather Underground, the SLA was composed mainly of white, middle-class desperados riddled with ‘white skin guilt’. Fulfilment, they came to believe, would come through joining a militant Black Power group and being told what to do by a black man – the badder the better.
The guilt of whiteness encouraged an uncritical chain of logic which held that, since all blacks were oppressed, crimes they committed were justifiable responses to oppression. Rapists, murderers, thieves and drug dealers – as long as they were black – were miraculously transformed into political prisoners. On college campuses, action groups were formed to bring together self-conscious white students and the black inmates they worshipped. Most of these started as noble efforts at prison reform, but some morphed into schemes more perverse. At Berkeley, a teaching assistant named Colston West-brook took some of these ghetto groupies on regular visits to Vacaville prison, where they ‘rapped’ with members of the Black Cultural Association. The students obligingly provided pseudo-Marxist explanations for black incarceration. Validation of this sort appealed to Donald DeFreeze, a BCA member doing time for armed robbery. He set up a subgroup called Unisight, dedicated to the seven principles of Kwanza. Members took on African names, hoisted the tricolour black liberation flag at meetings, and perfected a rhetoric contemptuous of white honkies.
Within the ghetto community, DeFreeze was scum, a police informer notorious for mugging prostitutes. To the whites who visited him, however, he was a revolutionary prophet. Desperately seeking heroes, Angela Atwood, Nancy Ling Perry, Russ Little and Willie Wolfe fell hopelessly in love. For them, black prisoners provided the revolutionary vanguard they had failed to find at Berkeley. ‘DeFreeze wasn’t just some criminal,’ Little explained. ‘He couldn’t live the American Dream, the thing you’re seeing on TV, he couldn’t do it just by working. So he also became a thief . . . I liked him.’38
DeFreeze escaped from prison in March 1973 and went straight to his white friends in Berkeley. They were delighted, since giving sanctuary to a black convict was the ultimate in radical chic. In a flash, he underwent a remarkable transformation: from petty criminal to romantic revolutionary, from Donald DeFreeze to Cinque Mtume. The new name was a reflection of his ambitious self-image: ‘Cinque’ was the leader of a 1839 slave revolt, while ‘mtume’ is Swahili for ‘apostle’.
To the young white radicals who sat reverentially at Cinque’s feet, he was ‘not only a military genius to lead us but a spiritual prophet to save us’. By the end of the summer, the SLA had coalesced, committed to ‘the most devastating revolutionary violence ever imagined’. Westbrook, the original catalyst, wanted nothing to do with the monster he had helped to create. He saw Cinque as a white-hating criminal who was being stage-managed by deluded white radicals. ‘It’s the same old thing. These people claim they’re working for the good of the black community when really all they care about is their own ego.’ In truth, however, manipulation went both ways.39
Russ Little discovered radical politics while studying engineering in Florida. When the Vietnam War ended, he watched in disgust as friends put down placards and returned to middle-class respectability. ‘A lot of people were going, “Oh everything’s over now, we’ll go back to college” – and it wasn’t over at all. The same stuff was still going on. The same criminals . . . were still running the government.’ For him, the SLA offered an opportunity to act out boyhood fantasies of being Robin Hood. Another misfit drawn into the vortex was Bill Harris, a Vietnam vet who had difficulty finding purpose after demobilization. ‘He got impatient when he found out other people hadn’t read all the books he had,’ a friend recalled. His wife, Emily, had already decided that she would ‘never be free until there are no more rich people and no more poor people’. Together they headed to Berkeley in search of fulfilment, which they found in Cinque. ‘I am in love with a beautiful black man,’ Emily wrote. Equally in love, Bill adopted pathetic ghetto slang. Taking comfort in the refuge of absolutes, he proclaimed: ‘White men . . . have only one avenue to freedom and that is to join in fighting to the death those who are and those who aspire to be the slave masters.’ ‘I’m a revolutionary now,’ he proudly told his mother. ‘The government . . . wants to kill me. That puts me in the same class with some pretty fantastic and beautifully courageous people.’40
‘Symbionese’ was an invented word suggesting symbiosis, or the cooperation between disparate elements. The SLA adopted as its emblem a seven-headed cobra, or naga, invoking the seven principles of Kwanza. ‘Our forces are from every walk of life, from every religion, and of every race,’ a manifesto proclaimed. They were united in the ‘common goal for freedom from the chains of capitalism’. While that sort of rhetoric had been uttered by many a Sixties radical and was usually intentionally hyperbolic, with the SLA it was entirely sincere. When Emily Harris, or Yolanda, sent ‘Greetings of profound love to all comrades in the concentration camps of fascist America’, she meant precisely what she said.41
Members easily assumed their right to represent the oppressed. ‘I am a black man and a representative of black people,’ DeFreeze proclaimed. ‘I’m that nigger you have hunted and feared night and day . . . I’m the wetback . . . the gook, the broad, the servant, the spick. Yes indeed you know us all, and we know you, the oppressor, murderer and robber. And you have hunted and robbed and exploited us all. Now we are the hunters that will give you no rest . . . Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.’42
Like tinpot dictators, they awarded themselves grandiose titles. DeFreeze was ‘General Field Marshal in the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army’. Atwood became Gelina, a general, the same rank held by Bill Harris, or Teko. An already minuscule cabal was subdivided into intelligence, medical, communications and logistics branches – in truth ministries of one.
DeFreeze used his underworld connections to buy weapons, while Harris, the former Marine, taught comrades to use them. Intense hours of political discussion provided a hothouse for radical fantasy. Spare time was spent demonstrating against monogamy – an invitation to Cinque’s bed was equivalent to being anointed. All members eagerly anticipated the moment they might turn fierce rhetoric into real violence. ‘We know that we have a long way to go to purify our minds of the many bourgeois poisons,’ a manifesto proclaimed, ‘but we also know that this isn’t done through bullshitting and ego-tripping – it is done by fighting.’43
Cinque drew up a roster of ‘slavemasters’ requiring elimination, in truth a shopping list of his idiosyncratic hate. The first target was to be Charles O. Finley, the tyrannical owner of the Oakland As baseball team, but DeFreeze settled instead on Dr Marcus Foster, superintendent of Oakland schools. That seemed a strange choice, given that Foster, a black man, was adored by the African American community for his success in battling truancy. To Cinque, however, he was the ‘black Judas of Oakland’. ‘We’re gonna waste that nigger,’ he told his troops.44
Sure enough, on 6 November 1973, Foster was ambushed in a parking lot and shot with eight bullets dipped in cyanide. Little, who would eventually be convicted of the murder, struggled to understand. ‘I remember saying to DeFreeze, why? Why would you kill a black guy?’ Explanation came in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle – Foster’s ‘fascist’ policies, specifically a plan to introduce ID cards in public schools, warranted his assassination. In fact, he had withdrawn support for that proposal. Through one profoundly stupid act, the SLA leapt from utter anonymity to widespread scorn. Even Bernardine Dohrn, a paragon of senseless violence, confessed she could not ‘comprehend the execution of Marcus Foster . . . who is not a recognized enemy of his people’. Condemnation was greatest amongst the blacks the SLA claimed to represent. ‘They killed hope,’ Paul Cobb, a local resident, recalled. ‘They killed our opportunity to identify with a great educational leader. What Marcus Foster was to Oakland, . . . President Kennedy was to the country . . . hope and unfilled promise and endearment and opportunity crushed.’45
Two months later, Little and Joseph Remiro were stopped on a minor traffic offence and found with firearms used in the Foster killing. Police subsequently raided a house in Concord, forcing the gang into hiding. Out went any hope of indoctrinating the masses. ‘The capture of our two comrades really hurt us and threw us into a panic,’ Emily Harris reflected. ‘Our changed situation compelled us to place primary importance on obtaining survival and military skills . . . We got ourselves into . . . a heavy military state of mind.’46
Blundering forward without a logical plan, on 4 February 1974 the SLA kidnapped the heiress Patricia Hearst. The kidnapping was punishment for ‘crimes that her mother and father have committed against we the American people and the oppressed people of the world’. A communiqué explained:
Randolph A. Hearst is the corporate chairman of the fascist media empire of the ultra-right Hearst Corporation, which is one of the largest propaganda institutions of this present military dictatorship of the militarily armed corporate state that we now live under . . . I wish to say to Mr. Hearst and Mrs. Hearst, I am quite willing to carry out the execution of your daughter to save the life of starving men, women and children of every race. And if as you and others so naively believe that we will lose, let it be known that even in death we will win, for the very ashes of this fascist nation will mark our very graves.
Little, awaiting trial in San Quentin, had begun to doubt his comrades’ sanity. ‘They did exactly what I, for one, didn’t want to do . . . We heard this stuff . . . and we just couldn’t believe it. The heat on us was bad enough. After that happened man it was . . . really a nightmare. We [were] now . . . the premier antigovernment terrorists.’47
The fact that the daughter of Randolph Hearst had been kidnapped led the FBI to assume that they were dealing with a formidable group. ‘The FBI really didn’t know what to do,’ the journalist Tim Findley concluded. ‘They didn’t have a clue . . . who these people were.’ Reporters were told that new recruits were enlisting every day, when in fact the entire SLA could fit inside a Chevy van. Dan Grove, a FBI agent, admitted that the Bureau had ‘no idea whatsoever’, but, given the circumstances of what seemed ‘a terrorist investigation as well as a kidnap case’, erred on the side of overreaction. What resulted was the biggest FBI manhunt in history, involving thousands of officers, all searching for eight confused fantasists. U-2 spy planes were deployed to search for hideouts in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada.48
Eight days after her capture, a message from Patty was delivered to the media. ‘I’m OK,’ she began. ‘I’m with a combat unit that’s armed with automatic weapons. And these people aren’t just a bunch of nuts . . . they’re perfectly willing to die for what they’re doing. And I want to get out of here but the only way I’m going to is if we do it their way.’ The group originally wanted to trade their ‘prisoner of war’ for Little and Remiro. When that proved impossible, DeFreeze improvised. He demanded that Hearst should feed the poor in California for one month, at a cost of around $6 million. This was the SLA’s first and only clever move, in that it forced a very rich person to do something substantial for the poor and also placed Hearst in the uncomfortable position of having to put a monetary value on his daughter’s life. ‘I just want you to know that I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of there,’ he assured her. ‘It’s a little frightening because the original demand is . . . one that’s impossible to meet. However, in the next 24 to 48 hours I’ll be trying my best to come back with some kind of a counter offer.’49
On 19 February, Hearst announced the formation of ‘People in Need’, a compromise that cut the number to be fed, lowering the cost to around $2 million. Within a few days, the first food packages were distributed. As part of the agreement, boxes were stamped with the seven-headed cobra, so that the poor would know who to thank. ‘I hate to take advantage of what could happen to the young lady,’ one woman remarked. ‘But my children need food.’ The programme made the SLA into real-life Robin Hoods. ‘It was like a dream that you didn’t want to wake up from,’ said Mike Bortin, a sympathizer. ‘There was thousands of poor Black people and poor Hispanics in line showing poverty in America, which is what we wanted to show for years.’ Governor Ronald Reagan was not, however, impressed. ‘It’s too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism,’ he quipped.50
People in Need soon fell victim to its own limitations. With not enough food for everyone who wanted it, ugly scenes erupted at distribution centres. Angry at being excluded from Hearst’s negotiations, the police and FBI willed the programme to fail. The state attorney general, Evelle Younger, attacked the scheme, promising that ‘every crime committed in connection with the kidnapping will be prosecuted. And I’m including any persons who participated in any sort of a food distribution plan.’ The SLA also expressed disapproval, using Patty Hearst as a mouthpiece: ‘Mom, Dad . . . So far it sounds like you and your advisors have managed to turn [the food programme] into a real disaster. You said that it was out of your hands, what you should have said was that you wash your hands of it . . . most of the food is low quality. No one received any beef or lamb. Anyway, it certainly didn’t sound like the kind of food our family is used to eating.’51
Hearst’s subsequent promise to provide another $2 million worth of food in January 1975 made it seem like he was trying to buy his daughter back on an instalment plan. ‘I felt my parents were debating how much I was worth,’ she is alleged to have confessed. ‘Like they figured I was worth $2 million but I wasn’t worth $10 million. It was a terrible feeling that my parents could think of me in terms of dollars and cents. I felt sick all over.’ When he again assured her that he was doing everything he could, she responded: ‘You’re not doing anything at all.’ The nation was told that she was brainwashed, yet this sounded suspiciously like a spoilt child chastising her parents by way of the media. ‘Should we be doing this?’ the journalist John Lester asked himself. ‘We’re . . . being a mouth-piece for the family, we’re recording what they have to say. We’re recording what the bad guys are saying, . . . we’re just sort of being messengers back and forth. Are we really doing our jobs?’52
Fifty-nine days after her capture came Patty’s announcement that she was joining the SLA. ‘I have chosen to stay and fight,’ she explained. She railed against her parents and their shabby bargaining. ‘The things which are precious to [them] are their money and power. It should be obvious that people who don’t even care about their own children couldn’t possibly care about anyone else.’ Most SLA members had grown to respect Patty, but they still opposed her joining, on the grounds that her presence would make them infinitely more vulnerable. But DeFreeze, who saw Patty’s conversion as proof of his power, was ecstatic, and he always got his way.53
‘I have been given the name Tania after a comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia,’ she announced. ‘It is in the spirit of Tania that I say, “Patria o Muerte, Venceremos.”’ Tania proved perfect for communicating SLA fantasies, for the simple reason that the whole world was watching.
Mom, Dad. Tell the poor and oppressed people of this nation what the corporate state is about to do. Warn Black and poor people that they are about to be murdered down to the last man, woman and child. Tell the people that the energy crisis is nothing more than a means to get public approval for a massive program to build nuclear power plants all over the nation. Tell the people that the entire corporate state is, with the aid of this massive power supply, about to totally automate the entire industrial state to the point that in the next five years, all that will be needed is a small class of button pushers.
She later elaborated: ‘I [have] renounced my class privilege . . . And I would never choose to live the rest of my life surrounded by pigs like the Hearsts.’ For good measure, she ridiculed her boyfriend, Steven Weed – an ‘aging, sexist pig’.54
On the Dick Cavett Show, Weed replied that Patty was clearly brainwashed but would come to her senses once they were reunited. To that, Patty responded: ‘Frankly, Steven is the one who sounds brainwashed. I can’t believe those weird words he uttered were from his heart.’ Little, following the soap opera from his prison cell, found the whole thing utterly bizarre. ‘Joe [Remiro] and I would read this stuff and just look at each other and like, you know, “Is everybody stoned, what’s going on over there?” . . . It was just like total Hollywood. But I guess the whole thing had turned into Hollywood so why shouldn’t it be Hollywood for her too. “Yeah, I’ll go join Robin Hood.”’55
Meanwhile, Randolph Hearst, much to the annoyance of the FBI, pursued his own strategy. He welcomed to his home a ragtag collection of mystics, con-artists and delusionists who offered help, including a swami who sought inspiration from Patty’s shoes. Joanna Harcourt-Smith promised to find Patty in exchange for the release of her boyfriend Timothy Leary. A shady character called Popeye provided a conduit to the Bay Area underworld, in exchange for Hearst helping out with his probation hearings. The FBI, feeling marginalized, paid the misfit Sara Jane Moore, who had earlier worked on the People in Need campaign, to spy on Hearst. She later gained notoriety when she attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford.
On 15 April came a new twist: surveillance cameras showed ‘Tania’, armed with an automatic weapon, taking part in a robbery at the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Those who wanted to believe that she was brainwashed reiterated that argument with shrill frenzy. In her next communiqué, however, she offered a calm rebuttal: ‘As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous to the point of being beyond belief. I am a soldier in the People’s Army.’56
A month later, Emily and Bill Harris stopped at Mel’s Sporting Goods in Los Angeles to get supplies for the revolution. Bill, never the sharpest of outlaws, decided that since buying a rifle bandolier might raise suspicion, he would steal one instead. When a store clerk caught him, a scuffle ensued. Patty, waiting in a van outside, feared that the entire SLA would be exposed if Bill and Emily were arrested. In order to create a diversion, she raked the storefront with rifle fire. In the ensuing panic, the three escaped.
In the abandoned van, police found clues leading them to a hideout in Compton. SWAT teams moved in, closely followed by the media. Viewers around the country watched as a fiery confrontation played out in real time. After a perfunctory warning, officers opened fire. Incendiary tear-gas canisters created an inferno that killed DeFreeze, Wolfe, Atwood, Ling Perry, Camilla Hall and Patricia Soltysik. ‘They just went in and killed everybody,’ Little later remarked. ‘Joe and I heard the whole thing . . . And we figured, well, this is it. This is what we were afraid of and now it’s happened.’57
Patty watched the massacre with the Harrises on television from a hotel a short distance away. Bill, the lone surviving male, quickly promoted himself to Field Marshal. At a loss over what to do next, the three limped back to the Bay Area, in search of supporters. Thanks to the massacre, the mood in Berkeley had shifted. Once dingbats, the SLA were now folk martyrs. The three hooked up with Kathy Soliah at a rally protesting the killings. She offered them shelter and introduced them to Bortin, who had been eager to join the cause. He found his new comrades distinctly unimpressive. ‘I was kind of disappointed in how flat they were. They didn’t seem to be that smart. There wasn’t a fingernail of charisma among the three of them. That was kind of dawning on me, how middle class they all seemed.’58
On 7 June, three weeks after the massacre, Hearst released a new statement that poured cold water on claims that she was acting under duress:
I want to talk about the way I knew our six murdered comrades because the fascist pig media have . . . been painting a typically distorted picture of these beautiful sisters and brothers. Cinque was in a race with time believing that every minute must be another step forward in the fight to save the children. Gelina [Atwood] was beautiful . . . Gabi . . . practiced until her shotgun was an extension of her right and left arms. Zoya [Soltysik], female guerrilla. Perfect love and perfect hate reflected in stone cold eyes. Fahizah [Ling Perry] taught me to shoot first and make sure the pig is dead before splitting. She was wise and bad. Cujo [Wolfe] was the gentlest most beautiful man I’ve ever known . . . Neither Cujo or I had ever loved an individual the way we loved each other . . . I died in that fire on 54th Street, but out of the ashes I was reborn. I know what I have to do.
Hearst’s love for Cujo added a new twist to the guerrilla soap opera. It also severely damaged solidarity within the tattered remnants of the SLA. Since Harris’s stupidity had led police to the house in Compton, Patty blamed her new field marshal for the death of her lover.59
Little, watching from prison, hoped the massacre would bring this sordid story to an end. ‘To this day I can’t understand why the need was felt to keep on with this kind of militaristic fantasy. Just end it and be done with it and good luck.’ Harris, however, still clung to dreams of revolution. He decided that the group needed to escape the ‘heavy scene’ in the Bay Area, lie low and regroup. The radical sports journalist Jack Scott offered help, in exchange for cooperation on a book he was writing about the SLA. A farmhouse in Pennsylvania was found, where Scott and his wife Micki spent from July to October with the fugitives and a new recruit, named Wendy Yoshimura. At their rural idyll, they sunbathed, swam, did callisthenics, read Marx and shared each other’s bodies. As autumn approached, the harmony began to unravel. Harris was desperate to ‘give the pigs another defeat’. His dutiful wife agreed. Though Hearst and Yoshimura were fed up with Harris’s machismo, they reluctantly agreed to accompany him back to the Bay Area.60
On their return, they hooked up with Soliah, Bortin and a new recruit named James Kilgore. They hoped to merge with the Weather Underground, but that group, busily disintegrating, had no room for additional lunatics. Hearst briefly stayed with the Harrises, but then moved into a house of her own, which she occasionally shared with her new lover, Steven Soliah. She jogged, played tennis, watched B-movies at the local cinema, and cut coupons in order to make ends meet. The monotony was occasionally broken by hide and seek sessions in local malls, in preparation for eluding the police. Alienated from the Harrises, Hearst drew closer to Yoshimura. She adored Patty (‘She is incredible!’), but found the others pathetic. ‘They are victimized by the guilt they feel [for the] death of their comrades,’ she told her brother, ‘[and the] guilt they feel for being born white.’61
Harris still had a hit list of candidates for assassination but seemed disinclined to act on it. The SLA concentrated instead on holding up banks, which made it difficult to distinguish its agenda from that of ordinary robbers. During a heist in Carmichael on 21 April 1975, Myrna Opsahl, who was depositing the collection plate money from her church, was gunned down. ‘How’s the woman who was shot?’ Hearst asked Emily Harris as they fled from the scene. ‘Oh, she’s dead,’ came the reply, ‘but it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig.’62
Behind the bravado, the group was torn apart by the killing. Bortin recalls thinking, ‘I have family in the world. I have friends in the world. I don’t want to be thought of as a murderer. I don’t want to be thought of as some fucking maniac that goes and shoots up a bank, acting like a radical, leave a woman to die like that.’ Pretending to be revolutionaries was no longer fun, but alternatives were not readily apparent. On 18 September, the police finally caught up with the pathetic remnants of the SLA. Hearst, the Harrises, Yoshimura and Steven Soliah were arrested at separate locations. ‘Please call it a rescue, not a capture,’ Patty’s mother instructed reporters. Only Kathy Soliah and Kilgore remained at large, as they would for the next twenty years.63
The great debate then ensued: was Patty victim or accomplice, brainwashed or lucid? She had earlier claimed: ‘I’ve been brainwashed for twenty years, but it only took the SLA six weeks to straighten me out.’ On her arrest, she gave her occupation as ‘urban guerrilla’ and defiantly thrust a fist into the air. A short time later, however, came a long statement from her attorney detailing a cruel process of indoctrination. ‘She lived in a fog, in which she was confused, . . . unable to distinguish between actuality and fantasy.’ Psychologists supplied a plethora of theories to support her innocence. She eventually settled on the explanation that compliance was her strategy of survival: ‘I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs.’ The jury at her trial for the Hibernia Bank robbery was not, however, convinced. She was given seven years in prison, a sentence commuted after twenty-two months by President Jimmy Carter.64
‘It was always a pipe dream,’ Little admits. The constant repetition of revolutionary rhetoric – words like ‘fascist’, ‘pig’, ‘struggle’ and ‘liberation’ – wore a groove in their minds, to the point that they actually believed the nonsense they preached. Absolutes of hatred and extremism made life easy – faith smothered reason. In thrall to their fantasies, they became their own cult-masters – a collection of guerrilla gurus with no following. Badly drawn caricatures of themselves, they might have been hilarious if not for their ability to kill.65
The Symbionese Liberation Army was well-named, if only for the peculiar symbiosis between Hearst and her captor-comrades. ‘All these naïve radicals [were] just hearing what they wanted to hear,’ Bortin felt. ‘They wanted a rich person to convert to their cause. She . . . just had a mutual agenda for a little while, that’s all it was . . . We were all fooled.’ That seems a good enough explanation. The mystery of Patty will never be solved for the simple reason that even she was baffled by it. No amount of sifting through ashes will reveal ‘the truth’ of the SLA or her involvement.66
The Hearst kidnapping changed the SLA’s agenda in a way the group never intended. From that moment they found themselves on a media roller coaster that was impossible to control. The whole world was listening, but the group had nothing to say, except for the tired catchphrases of faux Marxism. The revolution was hijacked by Patty Hearst, and, because of the media, turned into caricature. The Hearsts, instead of conforming to the fascist pig image the SLA preferred, became instead loving parents living every family’s worst nightmare. Meanwhile Patty, depending on the audience, became either romantic heroine or tragic victim – Tania or the Lindbergh baby. But the most serious and under-appreciated transformation pertained to the SLA itself, which became important because it kidnapped someone important. A group of silly fantasists was transformed into a frightening terrorist monster the entire country was encouraged to fear.
In the early 1970s, the most articulate voice of opposition in Italian politics came not from a politician or journalist, but from a novelist. Leonardo Sciascia’s mordantly sardonic novels exposed the festering miasma that was Italian government. No group was neglected – with equal venom Sciascia attacked bureaucrats, union bosses, Mafia hoods and terrorists of right and left. But his greatest wrath was directed against the plutocrats of the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) whose power was unassailable and therefore infinitely corruptible. In Todo Modo, the film based on Sciascia’s novel, a satanic priest played by Marcello Mastroianni rails at an assembled group of party bosses: ‘After thirty years in power, how much longer do you really think you have? You are all dead, can’t you understand? Dead!’67
Sciascia was perceptive and disturbingly prophetic. On 9 May 1978, Aldo Moro, the DC president and former prime minister, was assassinated by terrorists of the Brigata Rossa (Red Brigade). That murder was foretold in Todo Modo, in which the character based on Moro falls victim to a dark plot engineered by the CIA. After Moro’s murder, quite a few Italians suspected that life might be imitating art. Rejecting the simple explanation of a Red Brigade assassination, they imagined instead clandestine plots. The CIA, KGB, Mossad and secret Masonic cabals headed the list of likely culprits. Conspiracy theories, popular to this day, provided explanation to the otherwise incomprehensible, thus recasting this story in a style closer to a Sciascia novel.
The Christian Democrats were the most successful party in postwar European politics. For three decades, the question was not which party would govern, but which DC faction would dominate. Lacking a credible opposition, Italy became what one journalist called ‘a political unicycle without a spare tire’. With power taken for granted, complacency, cynicism and corruption thrived – the party served itself more than the country. While most members enjoyed this arrangement, a few sensitive souls worried about democratic legitimacy and complained of being ‘doomed to govern’. ‘It’s the logic of the democratic system to go into opposition,’ Industry Minister Carlo Donat-Cattin argued in 1976. ‘That’s how the system defends and regenerates itself.’68
The Partito Comunista Italia (PCI) regularly came second at elections but, because it was communist, was kept at arm’s length by the DC. A coalition was unthinkable because, so the argument went, the PCI’s loyalty was to Moscow, not to Rome. Voting communist was nevertheless becoming an increasingly popular way for Italians to express discontent with political stagnation. The PCI threat was enhanced further when the charismatic Sardinian aristocrat Enrico Berlinguer became General Secretary in 1972. His success in attracting support suggested that the PCI might soon supplant the DC as the dominant party. Christian Democrats watched helplessly as economic change edged their party closer towards impotence. Postwar industrial growth had increased the number of voters who considered themselves working class, and the DC found it difficult to reach them. ‘Our problem is that we have no organization representing us in the factory shop, in the schools, wherever people are massed together – nothing to match the Marxist unions,’ one DC politician complained. The PCI’s growth also frightened Britain and the United States, both of whom treated Italy as an irresponsible child to be protected from itself. Italian anti-communists began lurking at the CIA office in Rome, where they received assurances that ‘the United States would . . . [support] any initiative tending to keep the communists out of government’.69
To many, Italy seemed a stagnant pond unable to purify itself. Support for the Christian Democrats was haemorrhaging away, yet no viable alternative seemed apparent. Some Italians concluded that democracy itself had failed. Eager to hasten its demise, terrorists on the right and left used violence to create the conditions for revolution. Atrocity was more common than rain – nearly 8,000 terrorist attacks occurred during the 1970s. By far the most frightening and formidable faction was the militant right, whose strategia della tensione (strategy of tension) was designed to engineer a crisis so intense that it would provoke a military coup. Ordinary Italians, tortured by fear, watched their world disintegrate during the ‘Anni di Piombo’ (Years of Lead).
Right-wing atrocities were often carelessly blamed on the left, for the simple reason that the Red Brigade had a more clearly defined profile than other terrorist groups. When the clouds of Sixties idealism scattered, militant leftists in Italy saw a shining path toward revolution. Renato Curcio, Alberto Franceschini and Mara Cagol, who founded the Red Brigade in 1970, were Marxists who held the PCI in contempt for its belief in parliamentary change. As with so many leftist revolutionaries, they knew precisely what the proletariat wanted. A romantic notion of a Third World liberation front was easily imagined – without reference to political or social context. As with the RAF, the Brigade recklessly assumed that the workers could be roused by violent attacks upon the state. As one brigatista reflected: ‘One does not make such a choice if one does not believe completely in Communism, if one does not believe in the armed struggle as the only way to bring it about, if one does not believe in victory.’70
The Brigade had some success recruiting young, disaffected factory workers around its base in Milan. Its first operations were modest, involving petty thuggery, sabotage and burglary. More ambitious actions became possible after clandestine aid arrived from the Soviet bloc, in the form of money and weapons. The Brigade thrived upon the obligatory respect the European left so often shows toward Marxist psychopaths, no matter how demented they might be. Buttressed by this support, the brigatisti avoided the steep descent into absurdity experienced by the Weather Underground. Their cult status allowed thousands of vicious crimes to be brushed under a mammoth rug of moral relativism. Left-wing philosophers like Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre showed the way by cheering every explosion detonated in honour of Marx. Romanticism obstructed reason, which meant that the more desperate the violence, the more heroic it seemed. For sympathizers on the sidelines, violence became a measure of the Brigade’s virility and legitimacy.
Bombs and bullets provided backing rhythm to the drama of the 1976 election. The very real possibility that the PCI might out-poll the DC caused panic in NATO. General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of Italy’s military counter-intelligence unit, came to the conclusion that his American colleagues ‘would do anything to stop Italy from sliding to the left’. A top secret CIA mission in Rome code-named ‘Gladio’ organized meetings with other intelligence services, including Britain’s MI5, in the hope of undermining the PCI. Maletti claims that the CIA tried to destabilize the Italian government by supplying right-wing terrorists with explosives. Meanwhile, Sir Guy Millard, British ambassador to Rome, warned that Berlinguer’s entry into government would be ‘catastrophic’, and John Killick, Britain’s NATO ambassador, feared that ‘communist ministers’ might leak military secrets to Moscow. A flurry of documents proposing military intervention, subversion, black propaganda and expulsion of Italy from NATO were circulated in Whitehall. ‘Theoretically a coup could be promoted,’ one Foreign Office paper suggested, while accepting that there was a risk of ‘prolonged and bloody’ civil war, not to mention adverse Soviet reaction. In the end, all options were strangled by their own impracticality. That suited Prime Minister James Callaghan, who found the very notion of ‘interference in the internal affairs of a European ally’ dangerous and distasteful.71
The election on 20 June gave the PCI slightly over 34 per cent, while the DC managed just 38 per cent. A PCI victory had been averted, but the potential remained. Reacting to the election, Moro began thinking the unthinkable. What he called ‘the inevitable convergence of parallel lines’ made a deal seem sensible. He hoped that by bringing the PCI into government, the communist juggernaut might be stopped. Participation in government would render the communists more vulnerable to public criticism and more inclined to moderation.72
The idea of a compromesso storico, or historic compromise, had originated with Berlinguer, who felt that a government of unity was the only way to tackle the political crisis. He was also desperate to reward his supporters with something more substantial than perennial opposition. In addition, mindful of how Salvador Allende’s left-wing government in Chile had attracted the hostile attention of the CIA, Berlinguer thought that an alliance with Christian Democrats might offer protection against such a calamity. The deal he proposed called for cooperation on a programme of reforms, not, at this stage, actual Cabinet seats.
When Moro discussed the compromesso storico with Henry Kissinger during a visit to Washington in 1974, the latter allegedly shouted ‘You will pay dearly for it.’ While Kissinger vehemently denies that allegation, there can be no doubt that the US was bitterly opposed. That opposition, however, probably made Moro more determined to proceed, if only to assert Italian autonomy. He reached agreement with Berlinguer in early 1978 and on 16 March was scheduled to present the proposal to the House of Representatives. On the way to the House, however, his car was ambushed by brigatisti who took him hostage. The stated purpose of the kidnap was to exchange Moro for thirteen Red Brigade prisoners awaiting trial. That motive, however, ran parallel to a desire to sabotage the compromesso storico and kick off the revolution.73
Interviewed by La Repubblica a week after the kidnapping, Sciascia raised a point Italians feared to contemplate. Rejecting the idea that the Red Brigade was operating in isolation, he remarked: ‘The . . . problem is to see with whom they communicate; that is, to raise the question . . . who benefits from this?’ As Sciascia implied, the Brigade was not alone in desiring the destruction of the compromesso storico. The number of people who did not want Berlinguer and Moro to succeed could have filled the Coliseum many times over. The existence of so many powerful people who did not want this story to have a happy ending inevitably colours interpretations of it. Once raised, Sciascia’s question for ever tormented. This tale of conspiracy is told in whispers, with ‘allegedly’ peppering the narrative.74
Moro was held for fifty-five days in an apartment in Rome. As long as there was hope that a deal could be struck, the brigatisti were happy for him to remain alive, since by doing so they prolonged their domination of the news. For eight weeks, other issues struggled for attention. The nation was essentially held hostage by a story which did not diminish but stubbornly refused to develop. Starved of hard news, the public gorged itself on rumour.
The government of Giulio Andreotti adopted a policy of fermezza – firmness. Negotiation was ruled out, on the grounds that it would set a dangerous precedent. In actual fact, precedent already existed, but Andreotti pretended otherwise. A government that had not previously shown much respect for principles suddenly discovered the convenience of integrity. The PCI, keen to demonstrate their credibility, echoed the Andreotti line. In contrast, the Socialists, led by Bettino Craxi, pushed hard for negotiation. Equally adamant was Pope Paul, a close friend of Moro’s from university days. While he publicly demanded release ‘without conditions’, in private he worked hard to engineer a deal. On the Pope’s urging, prison chaplains tried to establish a communication link with the Brigade. A ransom of up to $10 million was mooted. At one point, rumours circulated that the Pope was willing to take Moro’s place, a preposterous offer which, if true, only demonstrates the Vatican’s desperation.
The case for negotiation was presented most forcefully by Moro himself. In a letter to the Interior Minister, Francesco Cossiga, he argued that ‘the principle according to which the demands of kidnappers should not be met . . . is not valid in political cases where inevitable and incalculable damage would ensue not to the victim alone but to the State’. That was a veiled hint that he might be forced to reveal state secrets. Mario Moretti, the ringleader in the kidnapping, found Moro’s behaviour fascinating. ‘We didn’t know a thing about how the power game is played,’ he later confessed. ‘This was his universe, and he knew it to perfection.’ While that might have been true, Moro’s impeccable logic failed to pierce Andreotti’s armour. Undaunted, Moro (according to Moretti) remained ‘convinced that the hard-line bloc would be broken . . . His friends and his party might not agree with his position, but how could they ignore it?’75
Andreotti and his cronies rudely dismissed Moro’s pleas, publicly speculating that he had fallen victim to torture or mind-altering drugs. His credibility was further impugned in an open letter from fifty self-proclaimed ‘friends’, who argued that his pleas were not in keeping with ‘the man we knew’. Increasingly perturbed at this betrayal, Moro replied: ‘Let none of those responsible seek to hide behind the call of an imaginary duty. All things will come to light. Soon they will come to light.’ To his Red Brigade captors, he dismissed Andreotti as ‘cold, impenetrable . . . without a moment of human pity’, yet at the same time he speculated that his party might have been neutralized ‘by someone or something’ – a hint of menace that intensified the whiff of conspiracy.76
On 2 April, a dozen esteemed academics (including the future prime minister Romano Prodi) were whiling away a rainy Sunday afternoon playing with a Ouija board, or so their story goes. They asked the board where Moro was being held and the board replied: ‘Gradoli’, along with the numbers 6 and 11. This information was then relayed to the police with a nod and a wink – everyone understood that the séance story was bogus but no one was pressed to reveal the true source. Three days later, 450 police and paramilitaries raided the village of Gradoli north of Rome, but found nothing. When Moro’s wife suggested that Gradoli might refer to a street in Rome, Cossiga replied that no such street existed. A map quickly dispelled that misconception. As it turned out, Moretti was living in flat 96 at 11 Via Gradoli. Police had been alerted to suspicious activity there on the second day of the kidnapping, but did not follow it up, choosing instead to trust local advice that the residents were respectable. The revelation from the Ouija board should perhaps have warranted a second visit, but that didn’t happen.77
As the affair suggests, Moro’s chances of rescue were reduced significantly by police incompetence. Evidence was ignored, leads were not followed up, clues were simply lost – or never found. A performance so consistently dismal has convinced conspiracy theorists that what seems to have been ineptitude was in fact a clever plan – in other words, that police conspired to let Moro die. This has in turn fed suspicions that the clandestine organization Propaganda Due (P2) was involved. P2 was an ultra-secret right-wing Masonic lodge with members in the judiciary, secret service and police. The organization considered overtures to the PCI fundamentally abhorrent and might therefore have been interested in eliminating Moro. Tina Anselmi, a Christian Democrat who headed a parliamentary commission investigating P2, believes that lodge members would have had the inclination and ability to sabotage the search for Moro. Nevertheless, as was noted in the first trial of Moro’s killers, an efficient and professional police investigation would have been even more surprising than a bungling one. As the historian Richard Drake has argued, mistakes ‘cannot be redefined as crimes without a more solid basis of fact than has ever been unearthed’.78
Level-headed analysts like Drake do not, however, sell many books. Conspiracy theorists do. Dark revelations, like those of the maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli and the former judge Ferdinando Imposimato, always seem to surface when someone is trying to sell a book. That perhaps explains the disclosures of Steve Pieczenik, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who was called to Rome the day after the kidnapping to take part in a crisis committee headed by Cossiga. Pieczenik claims that the purpose was not to effect Moro’s release, but to manage the fallout from his death. He alleges that the government, worried that Moro might release state secrets, adopted a strategy designed to force the Brigade to kill him and thus to sabotage the compromesso storico. ‘We sacrificed Moro for the stability of Italy,’ he asserts. Pieczenik’s collaboration with Tom Clancy on espionage thrillers might, however, raise suspicions of a tendency to confuse fact with fiction. Richard Gardner, American ambassador at the time, dismisses Pieczenik’s version of events. ‘After one month I asked . . . him to go back to America. He is not a reliable man.’ Cossiga likewise feels the entire premise, as represented by Pieczenik, Imposimato, Pecorelli and others, lacks basic logic. ‘Why would I have wanted Moro’s death?’ he asks. ‘If I hadn’t refused to negotiate the state would have collapsed and we would have found ourselves in a crisis, which it would have been very difficult to get out of.’79
Andreotti claims that he agonized ‘almost every evening’ over Moro’s plight and did all he could to secure his release. The fact remains, however, that not much was done. Whether fermezza was principled or cynical remains open to debate. What is clear is that the Red Brigade had been playing for a deal all along and was left flailing when one did not materialize. The Brigade’s point had been made the minute Moro was grabbed. ‘We had wanted to demonstrate that we could attack the D.C. and make our accusations known,’ Moretti recounts. ‘In this we had succeeded. A solution could have been found – if it were wanted.’ The refusal of the government to budge pushed the brigatisti toward a conclusion they dreaded, namely that Moro would have to be killed. Moro was fully aware of the approach of inevitabilities. Disgusted with his colleagues, he directed that ‘neither State authorities nor Party members attend my funeral. I wish to be followed by those few who truly loved me and are therefore worthy of accompanying me with their prayers and their affection.’ ‘He knew nothing could save him,’ Moretti feels. ‘He knew he was going to die. Those final words to his party were written from the depths of his soul.’80
In Andreotti’s dramatic scenario, Moro had been assigned the role of martyr. His death would provide tragic proof of the agony of courageous decisions. But he refused to play that role, choosing instead to scheme and plead. Fully aware of just how corrupt Italian politics was, he refused to provide it with ersatz dignity by dying a hero’s death. He tried instead to play politics, but was defeated by a group who held better cards. In the end, his scheming looked sordid compared to Andreotti’s synthetic resolve. The public, playing its assigned role, mistook the government’s cynicism for principle. ‘I felt infinite compassion for Moro,’ Moretti recalls. ‘Nobody in the world should ever have to feel as alone as he did. Here was a man who knew the most powerful people on earth . . . and not a single one of them lifted a finger to help him, or made the slightest move to step forward from the pack. This was what Moro could not accept.’ Other gang members argued for release, but Moretti felt that their arguments, though ‘not unreasonable’, were ‘at that moment undoable’. To release Moro with nothing gained would make the Brigade seem weak and would validate Andreotti’s tough line. Backed into a corner, the Brigade had but one option. ‘When we decided to carry out the death sentence,’ Moretti recalled, ‘it was done with the awareness that from that moment forward our struggle would be one of desperation. I had a sense of doom.’81
‘The time for reasoning had run out,’ Moretti concluded. ‘Now it was the time to pick up a gun and fire.’ On 9 May, he delivered what the Brigade called ‘proletarian justice’. ‘[Moro] knew it was over,’ he recalled. ‘You can’t imagine what you feel. I told myself over and over that it was a political choice, that it was unavoidable, that it was taken collectively, that we’re not the ones to blame for the failure to negotiate.’ He shot Moro eleven times. Later that day his body was found in the back of a car, parked at a point midway between the offices of the DC and the PCI – symbolism that was lost on no one.82
The murder was ‘a bloody mark which dishonours our country’, the tearful Pope remarked. ‘He was a good and wise man, incapable of doing harm to anyone . . . a man of high religious, social and human feelings . . . His premeditated and calculated slaying, carried out in hiding and without mercy, has horrified the city, all Italy, and has moved the entire world with indignation and pity.’ Three days later, the Pope seemed to chastise God for the terrible murder ‘of this good and gentle man . . . who was my friend’. Exhausted, demoralized and near death, he felt deserted. ‘Lord Hear us. Who is it that can listen again to our lament if not you, oh God of life and death? You have not answered our prayers for the safe deliverance of Aldo Moro.’83
‘To recall the collective fear of those long days still leaves me gasping,’ writes the journalist Judith Harris. ‘When Moro’s body was found . . . I knew what had happened immediately because a thousand sirens were screaming at once . . . I was there to see the end of his personal drama – but not the end of Italy’s, which is still recovering.’84 The process of rehabilitation is obstructed by imagination of what might have been. ‘Moro’s assassination still conditions Italian life,’ argues Rosy Bindi, a family friend. ‘We . . . lost the architect of the project for a mature democracy . . . For 30 years we have been paying the consequences.’85
When a leader dies violently, he often becomes someone better, particularly if his passing leaves mysteries in its wake. That is the case with John Kennedy, a president loved even more deeply after Dallas. So, too, with Aldo Moro, the consummate Italian politician who has been assigned something close to sainthood. Conspiracy theorists live by the phrase ‘if only’ – they construct a better present by imagining a different past. We can never know if Moro would have successfully re-cast Italian politics, thus rendering men like Andreotti redundant. The compromesso storico might actually have proved historic only in its gargantuan folly. What we do know, however, is that anger over opportunities lost has fuelled a search for parties to blame. Italians are still obsessed with the question Sciascia once asked: ‘Who benefits?’
Moro’s political opponents, Andreotti chief among them, certainly benefited. So, too, did the United States and its loyal ally Great Britain. But advantage is not the same as guilt. There is no escaping the fact that Moro was killed by a bunch of sadistic terrorists who were convinced that a lunatic crime would bring closer the Marxist millennium. ‘There are some who don’t want to accept this one thing: that Aldo Moro was killed by the Red Brigades,’ argues Cossiga. ‘Some in the former Christian Democratic Party – who turned Moro into an icon, a left-winger, an enemy of the United States – they don’t want to accept that Moro was killed by people from the left. It must inevitably be that he was killed by the right, by the Americans, by the CIA. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work for them.’ That is a valid point. The left is notoriously bad at recognizing and condemning the crimes of communists. In this case, however, Moretti admits he shot Moro. Andreotti’s guilt, if it exists at all, lies in omitting to take action to prevent such a calamity. ‘Conspiracy theories . . . thrive’, writes Drake, ‘because the truth hurts.’86
Fermezza might have been hypocritical, but it was successful. The outcry that followed Moro’s death cured Italy of her bizarre love affair with left-wing radicalism. The Robin Hood masks were torn from the brigatisti, exposing the psychopaths beneath. The terrible ‘Anni di Piombo’ came to an end, though occasional acts of brutality offered painful reminders of just how awful the 1970s were. Those who indulge in counterfactuals might wish to consider the potential effects of a deal done to free Moro, and the damage a triumphant Red Brigade might subsequently have wreaked.
Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco was a model of predictability. The Spanish prime minister, who had been hand-picked by Generalissimo Francisco Franco to be his successor, attended Mass at the same time every day at the San Francisco de Borja church, and then took precisely the same route back to his office. That predictability killed him. For five months, a group of young men, pretending to be art students, rented a basement flat on the street the admiral travelled along. From the flat they tunnelled under the road. They then packed the tunnel with 80 kilograms of explosives. On 20 December 1973, the explosives were detonated at the precise moment Carrero Blanco’s car passed overhead. It seemed at first that car and passenger had completely disappeared. As it turned out, the blast threw the car over the roof of a four-storey building and into an internal courtyard, where it landed on the first-floor roof of a Jesuit college.
The assassins were members of the Basque separatist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or ETA. Because the odious Carrero Blanco promised continuismo – Francoism after Franco – his assassination was widely celebrated. Spaniards joked about Spain’s first astronaut and, in the Basque country, a folk song with the chorus ‘Whoops he goes’ was popular on the streets. For a brief period, ETA enjoyed folk hero status. ‘I was a bit of an ETA fan,’ the journalist Christopher Hitchens confessed. ‘Not only was the world well rid of another fascist, but, more important, the whole scheme of extending Franco’s rule was vaporized in the same instant . . . If this action was “terrorism”, it had something to be said for it. Everyone I knew in Spain made a little holiday in their hearts when the gruesome admiral went sky-high.’ Ignorance, however, ran deep. The terrorists were judged on the basis of what they had achieved, not what they represented. ‘We thought they were fighting Franco,’ writes the former student radical Gotzone Mora, who openly supported ETA in the 1960s and 1970s, and now deeply regrets having done so. The vile nature of ETA’s nationalism was conveniently ignored.87
The foundation of Basque identity is the ancient language of Euskara and the culture associated with those who speak it. Victor Hugo once observed that ‘the Basque language is the land itself, almost a religion’. The fact that Euskara lacks Roman roots suggests that the Romans did not conquer Euskadi, the Basque homeland straddling the border between Spain and France. Indeed, Basques proudly assert that they have repelled successive waves of Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths and Franks, all the while distilling their ethnic exceptionality. The fact that language is the essential indicator of ethnicity has made it easy for nationalists to identify those within and those beyond the pale. Euskara became the badge of belonging. This narrow definition of ethnicity complicated identity in the Basque territories, since at no time in the twentieth century did the percentage of the population who could speak Euskara exceed
50 per cent.88
Deeply chauvinistic Basque nationalists felt threatened when, beginning in the late-nineteenth century, workers from other parts of Spain migrated to Biscay for jobs in the steel mills. For the Basques, a predominantly agrarian people, the influx was unwelcome not just on racial grounds, but also because it represented evil modernity. Sabino Arana, the acknowledged father of modern Basque nationalism, condemned this ‘invasion by Spanish socialists and atheists’. Arana, who gave Basque nationalism its distinctively racist cast, called for ‘the salvation of the common fatherland and the race itself’, while encouraging followers to see Spain as a ‘foreign power’. In the interests of racial preservation, he advised followers not to teach Euskara to outsiders, nor to marry those unable to speak the language.89
A nation was imagined into being. ‘We had to construct our nation to persuade our people, our culture, our economy to strengthen our consciousness, of belonging to one collectivity,’ the prominent Basque nationalist José María Etxebarria confessed. Even the beloved Basque flag, the ikurriña, was a modern invention. Nationalists encouraged the belief that it dated to the Middle Ages, but in fact it was designed by Arana, using the Union Jack as a model. While sacred myths told of a Basque nation always united against Spanish oppression, the truth is that Madrid has consistently been able to depend upon a significant level of support within the Basque territories. In other words, resistance to the idea of a Basque nation is as deeply rooted as is support for ethnic exclusivity. Though a high percentage of Basques have traditionally had no truck with independence, that nuance has not altered the determination of extreme nationalists, who dismiss such people as unwelcome in Euskadi. Fierce paranoia has been the distinguishing feature of Basque nationalism. In contrast, the much more confident and cosmopolitan ethnic pride displayed by the people of Catalonia has rendered them more welcoming of outsiders. Those outsiders have, in turn, developed a deep pride in their adopted region, often learning the Catalan language and joining in sacred cultural traditions.90
Basque nationalism need not have become a serious problem, if not for the efforts of Franco to eradicate it. Instead of seeing ETA as a political problem meriting clever concession, Franco treated it as a disease to be eradicated. His obsessive pursuit of an indivisible Spain based upon Castilian hegemony meant that he banned expressions of ethnic identity, such as Sardana dancing in Catalonia, or the speaking of Euskara. By this means, everyday behaviour was transformed into rituals of defiance. Given the hatred of Franco among some Spaniards and most foreigners, the policy also had the effect of turning bigoted Basque nationalists into folk heroes.
ETA started in 1952 as a student discussion forum at the University of Deusto in Bilbao. It had loose affiliations with Euzko Gaztedi, the youth wing of the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV; Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea, in Basque), the main nationalist party founded by Arana in 1895. At that time, the group called itself EKIN, but seven years later reconstituted itself as ETA, and split from the PNV. Militants rejected the PNV preference for reform through established political channels, preferring instead direct action, not excluding violence. In common with so many revolutionary movements of the 1970s, ETA believed that violence would expose the repressive nature of the government and, in the process, raise the consciousness of otherwise apathetic Basques. Given that the opponent was Franco, a man devoid of subtlety, this was entirely possible. The opportunity for violence rendered ETA attractive to those who had grown impatient with the PNV’s unfulfilled promises, especially urban youths of low education and unstable employment. For them, terrorism seemed a rational political choice – the only alternative in an environment otherwise resistant to change. Romantic fantasies derived from fairy tales of an invented history provided the downtrodden with pride and excitement otherwise lacking in their lives.
The dialectic of violence was tested on 18 July 1961, when ETA attempted to derail a train carrying civil war veterans to a remembrance ceremony. The action was not entirely successful, but it did provoke a suitably intemperate reaction from the government. Playing their role to perfection, Franco’s police put up roadblocks, searched houses and arrested around 110 ETA suspects, who were then subjected to brutal interrogation. Emboldened by their success, an increasingly confident ETA executive declared that all Basques had a legal and moral duty to support the resistance, and therefore that ETA was morally entitled to force compliance. In practice, this meant extorting money from Basque businessmen, who were powerless to complain.
A faction known as ETA-Militar (ETA-m) meanwhile pushed resolutely for the commencement of armed struggle, a line officially adopted in 1965. For the next three years, the Basque country resembled the Wild West, with beatings, intimidation, bank robberies and extortion the common currency of daily life. Ordinary Basque workers contributed to the chaos by frequently downing tools – hours lost to strikes in the Basque region trebled during the 1960s, and nearly 40 per cent of Spanish strikes occurred there.
True to the revolutionary script, ETA adopted a Marxist–Leninist line, without properly assessing its applicability to Basque nationalism. This included manufacturing solidarity with Third World liberation movements. Since ETA had by this stage assumed the status of mythical freedom fighters, few noticed the utter nonsense of its revolutionary rhetoric. ‘Our objectives’, a manifesto proclaimed, ‘are to favor . . . the organization of the working class and of the people, so that the latter, directed by the former, can carry out the revolutionary fight . . . revolutionary activities will be directed at dividing and isolating the oppressors, in an effort to radicalize the contradictions that exist in the breast of the exploiting classes.’ ETA felt obliged to recite Marxist mumbo-jumbo, even though the dialectic of class struggle was ill-suited to their predicament. The basis for the Basque struggle was ethnic, not economic. Basques, among the most devout capitalists on the Iberian peninsula, hated Spain, not the ‘oppressor class’.91
On 7 June 1968, a Guardia Civil officer was shot dead by an ETA operative at a routine roadblock. Keen on revenge, Melitón Manzanas, chief of the secret police in San Sebastián, instructed his forces to gun down the popular young activist Txabi Etxebarrieta, who became ETA’s first martyr. Since even moderate Basques saw the Guardia Civil as the physical embodiment of Francoist repression – an occupying army – Etxebarrieta’s funeral became a massive expression of nationalist anger. Crowds lined the streets shouting abuse at Manzanas and Franco. Few mourned when ETA avenged Etxebar-rieta’s death by shooting Manzanas, the group’s first planned assassination.
Borrowing from the writings of Franz Fanon, ETA followed a clever strategy of action-repression-action, a cycle of violence made more effective by Franco’s dependable brutality. In the aftermath of the Manzanas shooting, hundreds of Basques, not all of them ETA members, were taken into custody, beaten and tortured, thus providing the rest of Spain with a ready collection of martyrs. To disgruntled Spaniards, ETA seemed a shining example of active resistance. The government responded to the increasing tide of militancy by declaring a state of emergency from 24 January to 25 March 1969, in the process ratcheting up the cycle of repression. Summary arrests removed older ETA activists from the fray, thus offering opportunities to ambitious young militants eager to outdo their mentors.
In 1970, fifteen ETA members were tried by a military court in Burgos for conspiring in the killing of Manzanas. The Proceso de Burgos was in every sense a show trial – an attempt by Franco to impose his will. Government manipulation, obvious to everyone, guaranteed a guilty verdict. The trial nevertheless served as a megaphone for ETA. The accused did not deny membership, but pleaded innocent to involvement in the Manzanas killing. When questioned why their pleas contradicted ‘confessions’ obtained in jail, they were given a golden opportunity to tell the world about torture. Six members were sentenced to death, though their sentences were reduced to thirty years’ imprisonment after a huge international outcry. The trial made ETA into revolutionary celebrities, with sympathy demonstrations taking place in most European capitals. Meanwhile, the cycle of assassinations, kidnappings and extortion continued, but these actions only rarely provoked condemnation.
The assassination of Carrero Blanco took the policy of action-repression-action to new heights. ETA justified the killing by claiming that ‘Carrero more than anyone else symbolized . . . “pure Fran-quismo” . . . the Spanish oligarchy was counting on Carrero to ensure a smooth transition to a “franquismo” without Franco’.92 This was a rather cynical attempt to court favour by connecting the Basque struggle to the anti-Franco movement across Spain. As another communiqué proclaimed, ‘We . . . consider our action against the president of the Spanish government to be indisputably an advance of the most fundamental kind in the struggle against national oppression and . . . for the freedom of all those who are exploited and oppressed within the Spanish state.’ That was bollocks. The Basque struggle was not against Franco, it was against Spain. In the eyes of ETA, Franco was simply the most recent manifestation of persistent
Spanish oppression.93
The assassination was nevertheless an important step on Spain’s road to democracy, since it eliminated the man assigned the task of continuing Francoism, and left a leadership vacuum eventually filled by the clandestine democrat King Juan Carlos. Effect should not, however, be confused with intent. According to the former ETA member Jon Juaristi, ETA’s goal was not specifically to destroy Francoism, but to provoke a spiral of violence so intense that it would destabilize Spain. The resultant backlash by Franco’s forces would leave no room for apathy, forcing the Basque people to choose between separatism or continuismo. Faced with that stark choice, most would presumably judge ETA the lesser evil. That was indeed what happened. As a Time correspondent found two years after the assassination, ‘Silent support for [ETA’s] bloody strategy seems to be rapidly growing . . . “No one is neutral any more,” said one Basque lawyer . . . “Franco has polarized everyone here. You’re either pro-E.T.A. or pro-Franco, and there aren’t many of the latter.”’94
In the aftermath of the assassination, Madrid seemed to act precisely as ETA predicted. The transition government of Adolfo Suárez, which followed Franco’s death in 1975, was remarkably dexterous in most respects, but clumsy in dealing with Basque nationalism. ETA, for its part, kept fires stoked by continuing its terror campaign. Just eleven days after Franco formally ceded power to Juan Carlos, ETA exploded a bomb in a Madrid bar frequented by soldiers, killing twelve. Suárez reacted like Franco, treating the problem as a public order matter. He failed to recognize that what the Basque region needed most was devolution, in particular an indigenous security force. The brutality therefore continued. Suárez seemed a boon to ETA in that it appeared nothing had changed.
Subsequent months, however, demonstrated that the times were indeed changing. The speed with which democracy was introduced encouraged the Spanish to expect a wholesale transformation of their nation. Before long, the new government indicated that it would address the thorny problem of ethnic nationalism in Catalonia and the Basque region. A form of devolution was offered, along with a general amnesty extended to political prisoners. This strategy sought to neutralize regionalist movements by absorbing them into the party political system. The new constitution, while confirming the ‘indivisible unity of the Spanish nation’, acknowledged ‘the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions which form it’. That right was enshrined in law with the Basque Autonomy Statute, which gave devolved status to the regions of Alava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya.95
While this did not satisfy all Basque nationalists, it did seriously divide their ranks. For ETA, progress was disaster. In a pamphlet entitled ‘ETA against Juan Carlismo’, it proclaimed: ‘We cannot postpone the struggle because liberal democracy is nothing more for us than a tactical objective . . . we have to create struggle organizations capable of winning over the power of the oligarchy, just as much if this power is exercised under dictatorial forms as if it is done under liberal forms.’ Despite the bluster, ETA was clearly flustered at the prospect of sensible government. Madrid brutality was its oxygen – the policy of action-repression-action would not work if the government refused to repress. This explains why the worst period of ETA violence occurred after the new democracy was in place. Prior to the Carrero Blanco assassination, ETA only rarely resorted to murder, preferring instead bombings of important symbols of Spanish rule, like government offices and monuments. But from 1973 to 1982, the critical years of the transition, ETA was responsible for 371 deaths, 542 injuries, 50 kidnappings and hundreds of other explosions. Violence also grew more indiscriminate, contradicting ETA claims that only the guilty were targeted.96
The transition gave rise to a strange symbiosis between ETA and the fascist hardliners who still lurked in the military and police. Each needed the other to justify their existence. ETA wanted the fascists to gain ascendancy so that repression would resume, while the fascists needed ETA to provide proof that the transition was not working. ‘I am convinced that some sectors in Madrid find ETA’s existence convenient,’ Xavier Arzalluz, head of the PNV, remarked. ETA pinned its hopes on a right-wing coup toppling Juan Carlos. As one Basque nationalist explained: ‘It would only demonstrate what they already believe, that Spain is basically fascist, that they were right all along to continue fighting and that they have the people with them.’97
According to Arzalluz, Basque identity is intrinsically linked to ‘its historic rights, the memory of which has never been lost. This has nothing to do with the ups and downs of the economy. It reflects an awareness of identity and history that is deeply felt.’ As time passed, however, many Basques found it increasingly difficult to hang on to that manufactured certainty. Moderates grew tired of violence and increasingly disenchanted with ETA. This was especially true of the middle class, who craved a quiet life. For the first time in a generation, businessmen refused to pay when ETA extorted. Within ETA itself, a new faction called ETA politico-militar (ETA-pm) advocated the renunciation of armed struggle in exchange for political concessions from Madrid. Typical of the new attitude was the writer Angel Amigo, who had joined ETA in 1972 and had direct experience of torture. After the transition, he decided that violence was no longer justifiable. ‘There has been a change in the scale of values among the young,’ he reflected in 1981. ‘Under repression, all life turned on politics. War was heroism, but all that is over now. Now there is political choice. It is possible to be constructive.’98
‘The bringing of democracy was meant to divide us,’ one ETA activist admitted. In that sense, the transition succeeded brilliantly. Though ETA still tried to sow chaos, the character of the struggle changed: instead of Basques fighting Spain, Basques increasingly fought other Basques. Radicals turned against moderates, including prominent members of the PNV. In July 1976, ETA-m kidnapped and then murdered Eduardo Moreno Bergaretxe (or ‘Pertur’), a prominent ETA activist and theoretician who had committed the unforgivable sin of renouncing violence. A similar fault proved fatal for José María Portell, a journalist otherwise fiercely loyal to Basque independence. ‘Suddenly, anyone and everyone became fair game,’ reflected Eduardo Uriarte, one of the original fifteen defendants in the Burgos trial. He became a target of condemnation when he publicly endorsed the Autonomy Statute. ‘Some in ETA argued that we had to go on after Franco’s death, that nothing had changed,’ he remarked in 1981. ‘But clearly, that was not true. Since 1978, Madrid’s legal reach over us here in the Basque Country is marginal at best.’99
The rug had been pulled from under ETA. Virtually overnight, folk heroes became pariahs. Instead of being defined by ideology, ETA would henceforth be defined by tactics. Whereas violence had once been seen as the only legitimate response to an oppressive state, it would now be seen as the defining feature of an intransigent terrorist group mired in the past. ETA did not, however, disappear, since it could always depend upon a small constituency in thrall to its warped logic. As one former member remarked: ‘ETA is carried along by its own weight. They cannot give up the armed struggle because the families who have lost sons would feel their heroes had been betrayed.’ For hardliners, Basque identity and ETA remained indivisible – the latter implied the former. ‘ETA will not disappear until there are profound guarantees of rights for the Basque people,’ argued Xabin Olaizola, the mayor of Rentería. ‘It is better to take the gamble of having ETA. It is the guarantee that we can keep fighting for our rights.’ That, however, was a self-fulfilling prophecy, since ETA would always be able to manufacture the conditions for its own oppression.100
On 19 June 1987 an ETA car bomb exploded in an underground parking lot in Barcelona, killing twenty-one and injuring forty-five. Among the victims were several small children. The action left all but the most militant of Basque nationalists completely mystified. With Franco removed from the equation, ETA had ceased to make sense. Yet as was the case with every terrorist group described in this chapter, an organization defined by terror needs to kill in order to keep mediocrity at bay. The past oppresses the future.