The Japanese Red Army's Black Widow -- Fusako Shigenobu

One of the principal leaders of the terrorist group known as 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."

Fusako Shigenobu was born in 1945 only a few weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a family that struggled economically. As a young girl classmates mocked her family's poverty. Her father was a member of right-wing organization, the Blood Oath League, dedicated to ridding Japan of corrupt politicians. Due to her family's poverty, she was unable to afford college. A remarkably beautiful young woman, she eventually 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."[1] 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,[2] 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.[3]

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."[4]

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.

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.

Shigenobu secretly returned to Japan and was arrested in Osaka in November 2000 and remains imprisoned in Japan. In February of 2006, she was sentenced to 20 years for involvement in kidnapping of embassy workers of a French Embassy in The Hague during a 1974 Japanese Red Army operation. 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.[5]

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

[2]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.

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

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

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

Additional source:

http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/fusako-shigenobu/