Japanese Red Army and Black September

The Red Alliance

Germany's Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, and Italy's Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) were linked in name, political leftist leanings, time, and murderous violence.[1] Each of these non-Palestinian groups had similarities. None worked together for similar aims though the RAF and the Japanese Red Army had agreed in principle to aid each other through the Palestinian alliance. Though the Red Army Faction worked and trained with various Palestinian organizations, they never numbered more than 60 participants with some estimates lower.

As the Red Army Faction haunted Germany in the early seventies, the Italian equivalent of the RAF gang, the Red Brigade, worked their violence at the same time, one of over 500 terror groups that haunted Italy in the 1970s. The Red Brigade, like the RAF, aimed to undermine the Italian government and create a new Marxist-based government. Founded in 1970 by Renato Curcio, the group grew to 400-500 members.[2] In 1978 they murdered former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, 1981 kidnapped U.S. Army General James Dozier until his rescue by the Italian police, and assassinated two government aides, Roberto Ruffilli (1988) and Massimo D'Antona (1999).

The Japanese Red Army (JRA) was the synthesis of two extreme leftist groups that began their terror in 1969 by hijacking numerous Japanese Air Lines airliners. The Sekigun-ha, known as The Red Army Faction, was the first of the groups famous for Japan's first airline hijacking in 1970, which was carried out with swords as their only weapons.[3] Members of the Japanese Red Army Faction merged with another extremist group, Keihin Ampo Kyoto (dedicated to fighting the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty). Members of this group that believed the "revolution" was international allied themselves with the Palestinian radicals and became the Japanese Red Army. In the early 1970s in-fighting caused the murder of 14 of the Japanese Red Army's own members. Gangs of street demonstrators, who violently protested the surrender of Japan during World War II, were the inspiration for the formation of the Japanese Red Army. On August 15, 1945 gangs of young people wearing white bands around their heads roamed through the street of Tokyo and Yokohama shouting slogans and setting fires to houses. A group called "The Righteous Group of Upholding Imperial Rule and Driving Out Foreigners" entered the home of the prime minister and set fire to the homes of other government officials. A group in Tokyo linked arms, sang the national anthem, screamed, "Long live the Emperor," and detonated five grenades, killing everyone in the group.[4] The JRA were similar to the Bolsheviks and the Red Army Faction in the fact that they were not so much a part of a nationalistic movement but interested in worldwide revolution and global domination.

The Japanese Mata Hari

One of the principal leaders of the Japanese Red Army was a woman, Fusako Shigenobu, nicknamed "Mata Hari" by her revolutionary colleagues and also known as the "Red Queen of Terror." Shigenobu ordered the murder of one of her Japanese Red Army soldiers, a pregnant woman who was considered "too bourgeois" when she asked one of her comrades to pass her a paper handkerchief. She was buried alive under the floorboards of a house. Fusako Shigenobu was born in 1945 only a few weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a family that struggled economically. Classmates that mocked her family's poverty tormented Fusako at school. Her father was a member of right-wing organization, the Blood Oath League, dedicated to ridding Japan of corrupt politicians. Due to the poverty of her family she was unable to afford college; she married and supported herself as a topless dancer writing, "I hated the men who pawed me . . . I had murder in my heart . . . I saw every kiss turn into a rice ball for the Red Army."[5] Her social misery led her to the promise of communism's elimination of hunger and social status. Determined to place the JRA on the terror map, she allied her group with terrorists that already had made their mark in the world: the Palestinian terror groups, claiming that the "revolution is my lover."

At a 1972 meeting the Japanese Red Army was asked by Dr. Wadi Haddad, [6] a founder of the PFLP, to help avenge the failure of a hijacking of an El Al plane. On May 30, 1972 three Japanese Red Army terrorists, in a suicidal fervor akin to the ancient Japanese spirit of kamikaze,[7] fired indiscriminately in the Tel Aviv airport with VZT-58 Czech automatic rifles killing 24 (one terrorist accidentally killed another terrorist before a grenade accidentally killed him), and injuring 78. Many of the victims were Puerto Ricans on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. One of the survivors pathetically wondered why Japanese would kill Puerto Ricans because Arabs hate Israelis.[8]

One of the terrorists was Takeshi Okudaira, the husband of Fusako Shigenobu. Due to a previous arrest, Shigenobu was unable to leave Japan and travel to the Middle East to expand the Japanese Red Army's revolution. She married Okudaira and the marriage of convenience allowed her to leave the country with a new name. She then conveniently ordered her husband to be part of a suicide squad that would attack bystanders at the Tel Aviv airport. All three were trained for seven weeks by PFLP terrorists. Two of the three attackers were killed, Yasuda Yasuyuki and Okudaira. The surviving Japanese Red Army terrorist, Kozo Okamoto, used a fake passport with the name Daisuke Namba, the name of the man who had attempted an assassination of Crown Prince Hirohito in 1923. The connection with the PFLP had started in 1970 when an Iraqi revolutionary, Bassim, traveled to Tokyo and established contact with the Japanese Red Army. The two groups made a film called Revolutionary War Declared. Okamoto was involved in the showing of the film at a university and eventually became involved in the Japanese Red Army. Before being convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in an Israeli court, Okamoto described the link between his Japanese Red Army and the PFLP as a means to propel the Japanese Red Army on the world stage, claiming the Arab world lacked "spiritual fervor, so we felt that through this attempt we could stir up the Arab world. The present world order has given Israel power, which has been denied the Arab refugees." The PFLP praised the attack. The PFLP's Abu Sherif rationalized the atrocity as an attack against Zionism and imperialism. Shigenobu declared the massacre was to "consolidate the international revolutionary alliance against the imperialists of the world."[9]

Okamoto was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1985 during a prisoner exchange between Israel and the Palestinians. During his prison time he converted to Islam, then wished to be converted to Judaism and tried to circumcise himself with a pair of nail clippers. In 1975 he called himself a Christian. When he was released in Libya in 1985 he was greeted as a hero and met by Fusako Shigenobu. He was later arrested in 1997 with five Japanese Red Army companions in Lebanon for carrying false identity papers and again did some jail time. Shigenobu was arrested in Japan in November 2000 under terrorist charges for masterminding the Japanese Red Army's seizure of the French embassy in The Hague, Netherlands in 1974. She is also believed to have played key roles in a 1975 seizure of the U.S. consulate in Kuala Lumpu, a 1977 hijacking of a Japan Airlines jet over India, and a bomb attack on a club for U.S. servicemen in Naples in 1988 that resulted in the death of five Americans.[10]

Black September was encouraged by the success of the Japanese Red Army. In August of 1972 the group successfully destroyed a Trans-Alpine oil terminal at the Adriatic port of Trieste, Italy but failed in another mission when they tried to blow up an Israeli El Al Boeing 707 in mid-air. However, their next and most infamous attack would occur in the RAF's backyard: the Munich Olympics. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud were the main masterminds. Iyad would eventually be murdered in 1991 by direct orders of Sadam Hussein through one of Abu Nidal's hitmen, possibly because Iyad condemned Hussein's attack on Kuwait.

1972 Munich Olympics - Terror for the Games

On September 5, 1972, at 4:30 a.m. eight Black September terrorists sneaked into the Olympic village, immediately killed two Israeli athletes, and demanded the release of more than 200 prisoners, including Meinhof and Baader. West Germany had downplayed security for the Games in an attempt to erase the Nazi military image that had goose-stepped its way through the streets of Munich a mere 27 years earlier.[11] East Germans aided the terrorists in locating the particular Israeli apartments in Building 31 of Connollystrasse, as well as providing them with athletic uniforms and identification. The West Germans, due to post-war treaty restrictions involving , were unable to use any military force and had no police officers trained in commando operations. Though German secret police intelligence sources had uncovered a possible plot against the Olympic athletes and relayed that information to local German authorities, no extra security was introduced for the Israeli athletes or anywhere else in the athletes' living quarters.

West German police volunteers, showing extraordinary courage, quickly assembled to storm the apartments hoping to overpower the terrorists. The volunteers were armed with little more than concealed pistols. However, the plan was aborted after an East German television crew broadcast images of the police preparing the assault -- the Black September terrorists saw the broadcast.

The terrorists were directed by planners of the assault to take the prisoners to any Arab country if their demands were not met. The plot was laid months before in Sofia, Bulgaria, by various Fatah extremists and the Bulgarian Intelligence Service, which acted as a subagency of the KGB for promoting terrorism. Abu Iyad claimed that a letter was sent to the Olympic Committee asking that a team of Palestinian athletes be admitted to the games. When the letter was ignored Black September decided to play a part in the games to prove the existence of Palestine.[12]

Nine hostages were taken to Munich's Furstenfeldbruck Airport to be flown to Cairo. German sharpshooters opened fire on the Palestinians. For two hours a gunfight ensued. During the exchange of fire between German sharpshooters and the terrorists, the media announced that all the terrorists were killed and the hostages were safe. However, the good news was false. Finally the terrorists sprayed the inside of one of the escape helicopters with Kalashnikov submachine guns and a grenade was thrown into the other. All nine Israelis and five terrorists were killed. Three terrorists were taken into custody. Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was delighted over the deaths of the Israelis and paid five million dollars to Al Fatah leader Yasir Arafat.[13]

Though the main members of the RAF were in prison (22 core members had been jailed by the summer of 1972), free members of the RAF have been accused of having had a hand in the Munich slaughter. The connection between the RAF and the Black September attack at the Olympics has never been clearly established. It is possible that the terrorists had help from the RAF in the form of arms, identification, and safehouses.[14] An interview with a man who refused to identify himself claims that the ex-Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny's secret Nazi organization ODESSA (aka The Organization, International Fascista, Kamaradenwerk, Nazi International) was involved in smuggling weapons, grenades, and explosives to the terrorists through Kuwait and Hamburg. Additionally, according to this Nazi sympathizer, the American Olympic medallist Mark Spitz was also to be targeted in the slaughter.[15]

After the tragedy, the imprisoned Ulrike Meinhof wrote a manifesto entitled "The Action of Black September at Munich - Towards the Strategy of the Anti-imperialistic Struggle." The title page showed the Red Army Faction logo of star and Kalishnikov. A pamphlet of the manifesto praising Black September for setting an example for a fight against imperialism made its rounds through universities. Black September, Meinhof wrote, had brought their 1970 disaster, "home to the place whence that massacre sprang: West Germany . . . the place from which Jews . . . were forced to emigrate to Israel, the place from which Israel derived its capital by way of restitution, and officially got its weapons until 1965 . . . [where] Israel's blitzkrieg of June '67 [was celebrated by the German press] as an anti-communist orgy . . ."[16]

Willy Brandt and Black September

On October 29, 1972, just seven weeks after the Munich tragedy, a Lufthansa Boeing 727 left Damascus, Syria, bound for Frankfurt, Germany, with a stop in Beirut. Two Black September terrorists boarded the plane and demanded to be flown to Munich. They called for the release of the three remaining terrorists, who had survived the carnage at Furstenfeldbruck Airport in Munich, Jamal Al-Gashey, Adnan Al-Gashey, and Mohammed Safady. Without consulting the Israeli government, Chancellor Willy Brandt had the terrorists released saying, "The passengers and crew were threatened with annihilation . . . I then saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed."[17] The three terrorists initially thought they were being taken to another prison but they were flown to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, where the Lufthansa plane had been diverted. The plane then flew to Tripoli, Libya, where the three were greeted as heroes. Mass celebrations erupted throughout the Middle East.

Later there were questions about the hijacking. Why were there no passengers on the plane as it left Damascus? Why were there only 12 passengers and no women or children on the plane as it left Beirut? Why had the German government so quickly agreed to the demands? When Jamal Al-Gashey was back on Arab soil he found out why: PLO leaders told him that the entire hijacking had been a setup between the PLO and the German government. Fearing more trouble from Black September or the Red Army Faction, Brandt and senior German officials had allowed the hijacking to be staged so Brandt could release the three terrorists in exchange for an agreement by the PLO to stay out of Germany. Lufthansa had previously been involved with a deal with the PLO in February 1972 when Lufthansa paid the PLO a ransom of $5 million.

Black September's agreement to stay out of Germany did not last long. On March 1, 1973, eight Black September terrorists struck again seizing a Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. Among their demands was the release of the surviving Japanese Red Army terrorist of the Tel Aviv Airport attack, Kozo Okamoto, as well as Meinhof, Baader, and the rest of the RAF that languished in German prisons. When their demands were refused, the terrorists murdered U.S. ambassador Claude Noel and two other diplomats.[18]

Jamal Al-Gashey, nineteen-years-old at the time of the Munich attack and the only surviving member of the original Black September hit squad, survived into the twenty-first century by living incognito in Africa. He was interviewed for the film One Day in September, which won the 1999 Academy Award for Best Documentary.[19] In this film, German government officials Ulrich Wegener and Hans-Jochen Vogel admitted that the Germans had staged the hijacking, though Germany never officially recognized it.

Ali Hassan Salameh, Miss Universe, and the Beirut Mata Hari

The staged hijacking infuriated Golda Meir and the Israelis. Even before the October 29^th hijacking the Israeli secret intelligence group, Mossad, had mailed letter bombs to PLO leaders, seriously injuring PLO leaders from Algeria and Libya. Meir assembled an assassination squad called The Wrath of God. They targeted the planners of the Munich tragedy, killing two of the terrorist survivors, Adnan Al-Gashey and Mohammed Safady. The Wrath of God assassination team was given the objective to kill the three surviving Munich terrorists and Abu Hassan (Ali Hassan Salameh), the same terrorist who had trained and welcomed the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Palestine two years before. The Israelis mistakenly thought Hassan was the mastermind behind the attack.

Ali Hassan Salameh was taken under the wing of Yasser Arafat. It seemed Arafat was carefully grooming Salameh to take a high position in the PLO. Salameh was seen in the shadow of Arafat in New York at the United Nations and lived a playboy life in gambling casinos and hotels throughout Europe. The Mossad were looking for him but he wasn't taking a low profile. He married Georgina Rizak, a former Miss Lebanon who won the Miss Universe pageant in Miami in 1971, honeymooning in Hawaii and Disney World. Over the next several years there were five attempts on the life of Abu Salameh. In 1973 the Mossad thought they had tracked him down in Norway. Israeli agents tracked him with a pregnant woman on a bus. When he left the bus he was shot 14 times. However, the man wasn't Salameh; he was a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki and the pregnant woman was his wife. The Mossad had missed their target.

In November of 1978 a thirty-one-year old University of Southampton geography student arrived in Beirut and took residence in an apartment. She was known in the apartment building as an eccentric who sat by her apartment window painting street scenes. Though the neighbors didn't think much of her art, they thought the odd lady no harm and left her alone. Chambers, also known as Penelope would later be known as the Beirut Mata Hari or the Mata Hari of Lebanon. She was not interested in art but the street activity, especially the comings and goings of Salameh who was living only a block away. The street Chambers watched was used by Salameh on many occasions to drive to meetings with Arafat and other PLO associates. The Mossad had arranged a Volkswagen filled with explosives to be parked just beneath Chambers apartment window. Though there are conflicting reports on exactly what happened, it is clear that Salameh drove by the Volkswagen on January 22, 1979 and was killed when it exploded, the car detonated by a remote control. Four of Salameh's bodyguards were killed as well as, ironically, an innocent bystander: Susan Wareham, a British secretary working in Beirut. One version of the story has the remote control in the hands of Erika "Penelope" Chambers, another says she made a sign to another Mossad agent when Salameh's car was exactly parallel to the Volkswagen. Chambers quickly vanished and lived under the protection of the Mossad in Israel.[20]). The sixth attempt on Salameh was successful; he was dead at the age of 38. A fictionalized account of Salameh's life has been written (Agents of Influence). [21]

Baader and Sartre

In October 1974, Meinhof wrote to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre concerning a hunger strike called by Baader and followed by Meinhof, Raspe, and Ensslin. Sartre was a renowned French novelist, existentialist philosopher, and activist in the French Resistance. He believed that man was violent and because of his natural violent nature nothing could be achieved without violence -- a lawful revolution was meaningless. Sartre wrote in the preface of Franz Fanon's [22] 1967 Wretched of the Earth, a book-length study concerning colonialism, oppression, and imperialism. "The rebel's weapon is proof of humanity," wrote Fanon. "For in the first days of revolt you must kill." [23] This philosophy coincided with the RAF's philosophy that action must be taken over vacant, useless philosophy, and speech. Meinhof knew Sartre would provide the perfect media attention for their strike, and hoped his philosophy concerning revolution would coincide with theirs.

The bond between the four inmates was strained. They were able to secretly exchange letters with each other but instead of gathering strength or comfort from the communication they were increasingly hostile toward each other.[24] Sartre, briliant author Of Being and Nothingness, albeit controversial because of his opinions and communist sympathies, and Baader the playboy, bomber, and arms-and-drug provider for the murderous RAF. Attorneys argued that the RAF should be considered political prisoners and had a right to these freedoms, but the authorities declared that their crimes were common and extreme. In December 1974, Ensslin suggested over the secret information system that one of them commit suicide every month until their isolation ended. However, RAF attorney Klaus Croissant took another approach when he asked Jean-Paul Sartre to visit one of the RAF inmates concerning prison conditions and their treatment. The RAF attorneys had argued with government officials that being subjected to unnecessary isolation was inhumane treatment of their clients. The isolation diminished the inmates' ability to follow trial proceedings. An interview was set up between two of the most unlikely people in all of Europe:

Sartre was chauffeured to the prison by Joachim Klein, a member of June 2 Movement and eventual player in Carlos the Jackal's December 1975 kidnapping of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) ministers in Austria. Sartre spent an hour and fifty minutes interviewing Baader through an U.N. interpreter. Baader explained he was on a hunger strike with other RAF inmates protesting the denial of the RAF's demands that they have free self-organization, payment for jobs on par of the same job outside the prison, self-administration through elections, unrestricted visiting without guards and other outrageous items. When asked about his relationship with the working masses, Baader admitted that the RAF had not won over the kind of public support they wished, but it would be a long educational process to bring around the working class to understand the RAF's fight against capitalism and fascism that the Federal Republic of Germany represented. During questions from the media he agreed with the RAF attorneys that the conditions for the RAF inmates within Stammheim prison were a form of political torture though not reminiscent of Nazi prisoners. The treatment had already driven Holger Meins to a fatal hunger strike. Sartre denounced the murders committed by the RAF and defended violence only in the case of bombs against groups like the Nazis.[25]

Death Night at Stammheim

In 1975 the kidnapping of Peter Lenz, a Christian Democrat party's candidate for the mayor of Berlin, established one of the few successes for the RAF. They demanded six of their comrades be released from Bonn jails. One of the six declined to be released, fearing that the remaining members of the RAF would kill him. Five members of the RAF were released to South Yemen. One of the released prisoners was Gabrielle "Gabi" Krocher-Tiedemann, who would join a terror training camp in Yemen and be selected by Carlos the Jackal as a member of his team that would kidnap eleven OPEC ministers in Vienna later that year.

The trial for Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin, and Raspe began on May 21, 1975 and went on until April 28, 1977. The main charges were murder of a policeman, attempted murder of 54 people, robbery, and formation of a criminal organization. An entire building was constructed in Stammheim prison for the trial at a cost of four million dollars. The transcripts of the exchanges between the RAF members and the judges had an air of Kafka and Pirandello.[26] On May 9, 1976, Ulrike Meinhof, despondent over the long length of the trial, tied together strips of towel and hanged herself in her cell. Though many of her followers believed it was murder, an autopsy performed by the German government showed suicide. However, a mystery ensued that has never been quite resolved when an autopsy sanctioned by the Meinhof family supposedly showed traces of semen in her underwear and bruises inside of her thighs. Believing her death was murder, hundreds filled the streets of Frankfurt with violent demonstrations. One of the demonstrators was Joschka Fischer, the future vice chancellor of Germany. Just a few days later on June 1, 1976 two time bombs exploded at the Frankfurt headquarters of the U.S. Army's Fifth Corps injuring, 15 Americans, and one German civilian. At one point of the trial Ensslin confessed to having caused three of the four murder bombings the group was charged with. All three were convicted and sentenced to life terms.

Upon hearing of the convictions the RAF struck back. On April 30, 1977, RAF terrorists assassinated Jurgen Ponto, chairman of the board of the Dresdner Bank. On September 5, unknown RAF members kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer, President of the Federal Association of Industrialists and the German Employers Federation. Four of his associates were murdered.

The Japanese Red Army showed its devotion to its leader, Fusako Shigenobu, by hijacking a plan in September 1977 to celebrate her thirty-second birthday. A Japanese DC-8 airliner in Bombay, India was commandeered under the threat of being blown up unless 6 million dollars was paid. Japanese officials caved in to the demands. Fusako's friend Leila Khaled collected the ransom. Later Shigenobu wrote in a letter to a newspaper that the Lod and Bombay missions were staged to consolidate an international revolutionary alliance against imperialists of the world.

On October 13, 1977 Arab terrorists, acting on behalf of the RAF, hijacked the Lufthansa aircraft "Landshut" with 86 passengers and five crew members enroute to Mogadishu on its flight from Mallorca to Frankfurt. The terrorists, under orders of Dr. Wadi Haddad of the PFLP, demanded the release of the Baader group from Stammheim prison along with $15 million. On October 16, the hijackers assassinated Lufthansa Captain Jurgen Schumann in Aden. In Mogadishu, the Grenzschutz Gruppe 9,[27] the German swat team that had been created after the tragedy at the Munich Olympic games, stormed the plane. All the passengers and commandos were safe. Three of the four terrorists were killed and the fourth was injured.

Raspe operated a secret radio in his prison cell. He learned of the disaster at Mogadishu and passed on the information to Ensslin and Baader. The German government said that Baader and Raspe took their lives with pistols they had smuggled into the prison, though many believed they were murdered. Ensslin, like Meinhof, hung herself. Another RAF gang member, Irmgard Moller, failed killing herself with a sharpened bread knife. Ingrid Schubert, one of the women who helped free Baader in 1970, was found hanged in her cell three weeks later. Moller would languish in prison until 1994 when she was released. The Baader Meinhof Gang suicides were followed by the suicides of eleven IRA members who starved themselves to death in Belfast in 1981. Were the Stammheim deaths an inspiration to the Irish revolutionaries?

On October 19, 1977, Hanns Martin Schleyer was found across the border in Hulhouse, France, dead. He had been murdered in retaliation for what the remaining members of the RAF thought was the murder of their leaders. In August 1985, the Red Army Faction murdered an off-duty serviceman assigned to the U.S. Rhein-Main Air Force Base. His identification was used to gain access to the base where a car bomb was detonated, which killed two and injured 17. The RAF's Rhein-Main affair had aid from Action Directe (AD),[28] a French Marxist terrorist organization founded in 1979. Though second and third generations of the RAF would create havoc well into the 1980s, Schleyer's murder is considered the last act of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, also known as the first generation of the RAF.

It seemed an inevitable ending for the Baader-Meinhof Gang, typical of all their operations - violent, cruel, and useless. Schleyer represented the successful resurgence of a new prosperous Germany, though he was also the symbol of old Germany's horrors: a member of Hitler's Youth and a SS soldier. His murderers were often called "Hitler's Children," baby boomers who were heirs to the prosperity of post World War Germany and recipients of the curse of Nazism.[29] The Baader-Meinhof Gang would mutate into other generations of self-destructive monsters. The subsequent generations of the RAF would receive the same treatment and sympathy that Germany offered the "first generation."

For the conclusion see Dead End to Terror and Promises to Keep, Baader-Meinhof to Al Qaeda, Part 4 - The Third Position, The Grey Wolves, The Red Queen and the Jackal, The Dead End, Promises to Keep

[1] For a brief analysis of the numerous alliances between twentieth century terror groups see Bennett, Richard M. Espionage - an Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets, Virgin Books, London, 2002, p. 274-277.

[2] For connections between Meinhof and Curcio see Pearlstein, Richard M. The Mind of the Political Terrorist, SR Books, Wilmington, Delaware, 1995. "Better Red than Misled: Ulrike Meinhof and Renato Curcio."

[3] Polite, well-dressed men who treated the passengers with respect carried out the hijacking. The plane was taken to North Korea where the hijackers hoped to learn revolutionary practices from the communists.

[4] Farrell, William. Blood and Rage - The Story of the Japanese Red Army, Lexington, Mass., 1990, p. 81.

[5] Morgan, Robin. The Demon Lover, Washington Square Press, New York, 1989, p. 209.

[6] The deceased Dr. Haddad has been implicated in four major missions by the PFLP, which include the Japanese Red Army Tel Aviv attack. Haddad, in conjunction with a fellow student Dr. George Habash at the University of America in Beirut, created the Arab Nationalist Movement in the 1950s.

[7]Kamikaze is the Divine Wind that refers to typhoons that turned away invading Chinese and Korean invaders in 1275 costing the lives of tens of thousands Chinese and Korean warriors and preserving Japan. When German investigators looked into the link of September 11 Al Qaeda terrorists to Hamburg, Germany they found six of the terrorists were called Hamburg Kamikazes.

[8] Dobson, Christopher. Black September, Its Short Violent History, Macmillan, New York, 1973, p. 71.

[9] Becker, Jillian. The PLO, St. Martins, New York, 1984, p. 106.

[10] United States Department of State. Patterns of Global Terrorism -- Japanese Red Army (JRA), 2000, April 2001.

[11] Murphy, John. Sword of Islam, Prometheus, Amherst, New York, 2002, p. 44.

[12] Becker, Jillian. The PLO, St. Martins, New York, 1984, p. 107.

[13] Parry, Albert. Terrorism from Robespierre to Arafat, Vanguard Press, New York, 1976. p. 541.

[14]Terrorism - A World in Shadows, Marathon Music Video, 1996, v. 4.

[15] Keith, Jim, ed. Secret and Suppressed - Banned Ideas and Hidden History, Feral House, Venice, Ca., 1993, pp. 306-7.

[16] Aust, Stephen. (Trans. From the German by Anthea Bell) The Baader-Meinhof Group, Hoffman und Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 1985, p. 235.

[17] Brandt, Willy. People and Politics, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1978, pp. 439-441.

[18] Henderson, Harry. Global Terrorism, The Complete Reference Guide, Checkman Books, New York, 2001, p. 103.

[19]One Day in September, video, Arthur Cohn Production, Sony Pictures, Kevin MacDonald Director, 1999.

[20] University of Southhampton New Reporter, March 6, 1992, v.9, no.17, People.

[21] Ignatius, David. Agents of Influence, Norton, New York, 1986.

[22] Terrorist expert Albert Parry notes that Dr. Fanon moved from "treating illnesses of fellow humans to becoming a foremost theorist of terror and a glorifier of mass bloodshed," similar to the PFLP's Dr. Wadi Haddad, and his co-conspirator, the pediatrician, Dr. George Habash. Parry, Albert. Terrorism from Robespierre to Arafat, Vanguard Press, New York, 1976, pp. 538-9. Other famous terrorists that were doctors: Ernesto Che Guevara was a dentist who practiced in Argentina in the 1950's before he became involved with Castro's communist revolution, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri was a pediatrician by trade, and Dr. Habash.

[23] Fanon states that decolonization is always a violent phenomenon; decolonization being the replacing of a certain "species" of men by "another" species of men. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, Grove, New York, 1963 p. 350.

[24] Ensslin accused Meinhof of being " . . . the knife in the back of the RAF, because you never learn . . ." Baader attacked both women in a letter to Ensslin " . . . those confused battles with her about the devil knows what. Really, you're two grotesque madwomen . . . You're [Ensslin and Meinhof] the ones destroying us - something the law could never do . . ."

[25] The media coolly received the interview. The newspaper Die Welt headlined the story: "Sartre Stages His Worst Play" and a Stuttgarter Zeitung reporter wrote, "Philosophy, someone once said, is reason in a dinner jacket. But if what Sartre had to offer journalists after his visit with Baader in Stuttgart yesterday has anything to do with philosophy at all, one would have to say it was unreason in its old tweeds." Becker, Jillian. Hitler's Children - The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, J.P. Lippincott, Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1977, p. 273.

[26] For a part of the transcript of the trial see Vague, Tom. Televisionaries - The Red Army Faction Story, 1963-1993, AK Press, Edinburgh, 1994, p. 62.

[27] After the September 11, 2001 attacks on America the Grenz Schutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9) increased its operational strength and came under control of the BND (Federal Intelligence Service), Counter-Terrorist Division.

[28] Action Directe used many of the RAF's tactics (bombings of capitalistic institutions) in its objective of guiding international workers against the "Americanization of Europe." After committing murders in the mid-eighties many of the key leaders were arrested and the group is now defunct.

[29] Copjec, Joan and Sorkin, Michael, editors. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, Verso, London 1999, p. 275.