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<text> <title> (1970s) Terrorism </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 07456> <link 07458> <link 07400> <link 07255> <link 00189><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Terrorism </hdr> <body> [The 1970s was a decade of turmoil; the world often seemed to be spinning into a maelstrom of mindless violence. With the U.S. pulling back from international entanglements after the trauma of Vietnam and the Soviets engaged in opportunistic worldwide trouble-mongering, small, hitherto insignificant countries--or even groups within those countries--found themselves, through violence or economic blackmail, in a position to wield power out of all proportion to their size or inherent strength. The paradigm for the decade was the terrorist: fanatically dedicated, secretive, prepared to go to any lengths to achieve some political goal--nationalistic, ideological or sectarian--that stood little chance of realization by legitimate, nonviolent means. The major cockpit for terrorism was the Middle East, where Palestinian guerrillas, frustrated by Israel's survival and strength, had already begun attacking civilians and hijacking international aircraft in the previous decade. But in the 1970s terrorism was everywhere: in Latin America and Canada, Europe and South Asia--and of course the U.S. The biggest terrorist spectacular to date occurred in September 1970, when Palestinian extremists hijacked three jet airliners in Europe.] (September 21, 1970) Deep in the timeless Jordanian desert, the three silvery jetcraft glinted like metallic mirages in the afternoon sun, their finned tails emblazoned with the insignia of three famed airlines: TWA, BOAC and Swissair. Then suddenly a huge explosion, then another and another. The planes crumpled, then burst into flame. From the burning wreckage rose columns of black smoke that were visible 25 miles away in Amman, where Arab guerrillas fired their guns in celebration. Mercifully, just hours before that apocalyptic scene occurred last week, the aircraft had been emptied of some 300 men, women and children who had been held hostage in them for as long as six days. But at least 40 of those passengers remained in the hands of their captors, waiting under threat of death for a political bargain that would free them in return for the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Israel and elsewhere. The rest were free to fly away. The sky pirates responsible for one of the most audacious acts of political blackmail in modern times belong to a small band of Arab extremists called the popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Equipped only with guns and grenades, they managed to terrorize air travelers from the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf jeopardize a shaky truce in the Middle East, bargain for human life with some of the world's most powerful nations, and hold the entire international community at bay. In all, they detonated some $50 million worth of jet aircraft. Faced with the outrage of most of the world, including nearly all Arab governments, the commandos bragged about their act, saying that "the headlines have shown that our cause is now clearly publicized." [The cycle of violence rose higher and higher. The limit seemed to have been reached by the kidnaping and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; then by another airline hijacking spectacular in December 1973 in which 31 people--a record--were killed. Finally in 1976, the Israelis, who had always taken a tough line on negotiating with terrorists and regularly retaliated against Palestinian terrorism with attacks on Palestinian installations in Lebanon, had a chance to stage a spectacular of their own.] (September 18, 1972) Until last week, the XX Olympiad had been a huge and happy success. Never before had so many records been toppled or so many political quarrels forgotten. West Germans even made a point of cheering whenever East Germans won. In that atmosphere, security was progressively relaxed. Forgotten, too, was earlier concern over security for the Israeli team. As the Israelis took it last week, they had asked two months ago for special protection at the Games, and had been promised that they would be safeguarded. The West Germans said that they had offered the Israelis special protection, and been turned down. The Arabs made their move at 4:20 a.m. as the sprawling Olympic Village lay quiet and sleeping in the predawn darkness. Two telephone linemen saw a group of young men wearing sporty clothes and carrying athletic equipment scale the 6 1/2-ft. fence surrounding the village. It was a fairly common occurrence; many of the Olympic athletes had broken training to enjoy a night on the town, and then scaled the fence to re-enter the compound. But once out of sight, the Arab group stopped to blacken their faces with charcoal or put on hoods, and pull weapons out of their bags. Then they set off toward the Israeli quarters at 31 Connollystrasse. The 22 male Israeli athletes, coaches and officials shared five apartments in the modernistic three-story building. Uncertain how many of the three-room apartments housed Israelis, the intruders knocked on one of the doors and asked in German, "Is this the Israeli team? Wrestling Coach Moshe Weinberg, 32, opened the door a crack, then threw himself against it when he saw the armed men, and yelled for his roommates to flee. Weinberg was hit by a burst of submachine-gun fire through the door. Boxer Gad Zavary bounced out of bed, broke a window and climbed out. "They fired after me," he said. "I heard the bullets whistling by my ears." Virtually the same scene was repeated at a second apartment. Wrestler Joseph Romano apparently fought off the intruding Arabs momentarily with a knife, but he was mortally wounded. In all, 18 Israelis managed to escape. Nine who did not make it to the exits were taken hostage. They were bound hand and foot in groups of three and pushed together into a bed. At 9 a.m. the Arabs tossed out of a window a message in English that listed 100 Arab prisoners presently held in Israeli jails and demanded their release. Also on the list were the names of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, leaders of a gang of German leftist terrorists that had robbed at least eight banks, bombed U.S. Army posts and killed three policemen before the last members were captured in June, and Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese terrorist who took part in last May's massacre at Tel Aviv's Lod airport. As the police read the list, the Olympic Games continued only 400 yards away. A 727 was flow to Furstenfeldbruck, a West German airbase 16 miles outside Munich. No crew could be found to take the plane out again loaded with Arabs and Israelis, that scarcely mattered, since the Germans did not intend to let them leave. Already, plans were under way to transfer sharpshooters to Furstenfeldbruck. At 10 p.m., nearly 18 hours after they had started their assault, the eight guerrillas herded their prisoners, who were now tied together in chain fashion and blindfolded, out of the building and into a gray German army bus. They were driven through a tunnel under the village to a strip of lawn that had been converted into an emergency helicopter pad. Two choppers took the Arabs and their hostages on a 25-minute ride to Furstenfeldbruck airport; a third preceded them, carrying German officials and Israeli intelligence men. The airport had been ringed by 500 soldiers. Sharpshooters were staked out, but, strangely and disastrously, there were only five of them to pick off eight. Arabs, the rest had been left at Olympic Village in case the Arabs presented targets of opportunity there. The sharpshooters--three of them posted in the control tower 40 yards from the helicopters and the other two on the field--had been instructed to fire whenever the Arabs presented the greatest number of targets. The cautious terrorists never exposed more than four of their number at a time. Nonetheless, one marksman squeezed off a round and the others quickly followed suit. The two Arabs guarding the helicopter crews were hit, and in the firefight that followed one of the pilots was wounded. A third guerrilla on the tarmac was killed. The battle continued sporadically for another hour before five guerrillas, including the leader, were killed and three surrendered. In that interval the hostages died too. One group of four burned to death when a terrorist tossed a grenade and set fire to the helicopter in which they were being held. The rest were machine-gunned by the Arabs. (November 13, 1972) For weeks, West Germany's government had been uneasily aware that the Black September movement, which struck so viciously in Munich two months ago, would almost certainly strike again. The Arab terrorists' objective this time: freedom for the three young fedayeen who had been confined in separate Bavarian prisons since they were captured during the Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes and coaches. Last week Black September acted--and took the Germans by surprise. In one of the boldest skyjackings so far, two Palestinian terrorists commandeered a Lufthansa 727 with eleven other passengers aboard and forced the release of their three captured brethren. The reaction in the Arab world was undisguised rejoicing. "Despite Zionist terrorism, the Palestinians are still able to present their cause to the world," crowed the Cairo newspaper Al-Gumhouri. When the Lufthansa jet landed in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, the three rescued Black Septemberists aboard--Sammar Abdullah, Abdul Kader Dannawi and Ibrahim Badran--were welcomed like conquering princes. Angered by the alacrity with which the West Germans had agreed to turn over the three Arabs, Israel temporarily recalled its ambassador to Bonn. Complained Foreign Minister Abba Eban: "Who knows what people have been condemned to death or injury by their release?" (December 31, 1973) The fusillade signaled the start of a guerrilla attack in Rome last week that turned into the bloodiest rampage in the surreal five-year history of Arab skyjack terrorism. Before it ended 30 hours later--in the sand beyond a runway of the airport in Kuwait--31 people had been killed in Rome and one more in Athens. The terrorists, who later identified themselves as Palestinian guerrillas, first struck at the Rome airport's security checkpoint during the early afternoon rush hour. "I was heading toward the security check, and up front I saw a tall, well-dressed young man," a British stewardess recalled. "As he approached the guards, he put his hand in his pocket and took out a pistol." Instantly, his companions--perhaps as many as seven--opened their overnight bags, took out submachine guns and began to spray gunfire in every direction. The gunmen then ran out onto the flight field. One group of the terrorists headed toward Pan American's Flight 110, which was preparing to depart for Beirut and Teheran with 59 passengers and ten crew members on board. At the first sign of trouble, Captain Andrew Erbeck told the passengers to crouch on the floor. Before he could order the 707's doors closed, a clean-shaven young man in a white sweater ran to the foot of the steps, a canister in his outstretched hand. "They're coming with grenades!" First Officer Robert Davison shouted. "Get the people out of here!" It was too late. Somehow, 40 passengers and crewmen managed to escape, mainly through emergency exits over the wings. Many suffered burns, including one passenger who died hours later. But 29 more were trapped inside, including all eleven passengers in the first-class section. From the Pan Am plane, the terrorists ran down the tarmac to a West German Lufthansa 737 jet that had already been commandeered by the second group of guerrillas. On board, besides the pilot and three other Lufthansa crew members, were ten hostages who had been rounded up in the terminal and outside on the tarmac. An Italian customs guard had resisted the terrorists and been shot dead outside the Lufthansa jet. At 1:32 p.m., only 41 minutes after the first shot had been fired, the plane took off with the crew, hostages and five guerrillas aboard; other terrorists may have stayed behind. The terrorists first flew to Greece to demand the release of two Palestinians who were in prison there awaiting trial for their role in an attack at the Athens airport last August in which four people had been killed. As soon as the 737 landed at Athens, the skyjackers announced to Greek authorities that they had already murdered four of their hostages. Unless their demands were met, they said, they would take off against and crash the plane into the heart of Athens. They had actually murdered one hostage and wounded another, but the rest of their boast turned out to be a gristly bluff: they harmed none of the others, and had no intentions of killing themselves. After 16 hours on the ground in Athens, the plane took off again. Both Lebanon and Cyprus refused to allow the jetliner to land, and the terrorists finally ordered it to put down at Damascus. Syrian Air Force Commander Major General Naji Jamil tried to talk the skyjackers into releasing their hostages "for humanitarian reasons and for the sake of Arab patriotism." When the guerrillas refused, the Syrians refueled the plane, provided food and treated an injured terrorist for a bad wound. A little more than three hours later, the "mad odyssey," as one Arab commentator described it, ended in the Persian Gulf emirate of Kuwait. Again airport authorities refused landing permission. Under threat from the terrorists, Captain Joe Kroese brought in his plane anyway on a secondary runway. After an hour of haggling between the terrorists and Kuwait officials over conditions of surrender, the twelve hostages and crewmen walked down the ramp, followed a short time later by their captors. "We are Palestinian Arabs, not criminals," declared one of them. "The criminals are the ones who bomb Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon." (July 12, 1976) For nearly a week, pro-Palestinian skyjackers had held 105 hostages--mostly Israeli--at Uganda's Entebbe Airport. Now, with time rapidly slipping away and the deadline merely hours off, death seemed ever more certain for the terrified captives. Then suddenly, three Israel C-130 Hercules transports, guns firing, appeared in the dark sky over the airport. Soon they touched down, disgorging about 100 paratroopers and infantrymen and powerful armored personnel carriers. As the engines of the Hercules were kept racing, the commando units, in civilian dress, fanned out across the airfield and headed for the old terminal (with its WELCOME TO UGANDA sign) where the skyjackers were guarding the hostages. After a 15 minute blaze of gunfire, it was all over. The terrorists, according to Israeli reports, were dead, and the hostages were on the planes. It had taken less than a half-hour, and the transports were back in the air. Before they left, the Israelis badly damaged or destroyed the Soviet-made Ugandan air force MIGs parked on the field, thus eliminating the danger of being pursued. The drama had begun almost a full week earlier, aboard Air France Flight 139, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. Minutes after the Airbus took off from its stopover at Athens International Airport, a German girl in her late twenties got out of her seat in the first-class section of the jetliner. "Sit down!" she shouted. Holding two hand grenades aloft, the girl then herded the startled passengers into the tourist section of the plane, where three male comrades--a German and two Arabs--were already in control. With that, 242 passengers and twelve crew members began a terrifying odyssey that first took them to Libya for refueling (where a pregnant passenger was allowed to go free) and then to Uganda's Entebbe Airport. At Entebbe, the original skyjackers were reinforced by four men, probably Arabs, carrying submachine guns, rifles, a Beretta pistol and dynamite. Passengers and crew were herded into a seldom-used terminal; later, Israelis were separated from the others when one of the terrorists barked in English, "Israelis to the right." Via Radio Uganda, the skyjackers proclaimed that they were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Using Uganda's mercurial President Idi ("Big Daddy") Amin Dada as an enthusiastic mouthpiece, the skyjackers warned that their hostages would be killed and the jet blown up unless 53 assorted "freedom fighters" were released from prisons. The hostages remained in the terminal, huddling together during the bitter-cold nights, trying to sleep on the hard benches and the stone floor as rats scampered around them. Claiming to be swayed by Amin's plea for humanitarianism, the terrorists released 47 elderly women, children and sick hostages at midweek. By then, the skyjackers had set late Thursday afternoon as their deadline; either the 53 imprisoned terrorists would be delivered to Uganda or all the hostages would be killed. Shortly before expiration of the deadline, Jerusalem declared that it was willing to negotiate with the skyjackers. The skyjackers then postponed the deadline three days and allowed an additional 101 captives to fly to Paris. Remaining as hostages were 93 passengers--mostly Israeli or those with Jewish sounding names--and the twelve crew members. It was their lives that hung in the balance as the Israelis decided to launch their raid. [In Northern Ireland, a centuries-old quarrel between the Roman Catholic minority and the Protestant majority had flared to life again in the late 1960s when Catholics mobilized protest marches to demand their civil and economic rights. British troops had to be called in to protect Catholics against Protestant violence. In the 1970s the soldiers' presence sparked the revival of the Irish Republican Army, that relic of early 20th-century Irish nationalism now transformed into a terrorist force.] (January 10, 1972) What began in 1968 as a nonviolent campaign for civil rights by Ulster's half-million Catholics--one-third of the North's population--has inexorably grown into an all-out campaign of terror by that most fabled and storied of guerrilla organizations, the Irish Republican Army. Best estimates are that the army in Northern Ireland numbers no more than 200 hard-core gunmen, and deaths and arrests have decimated its cadre of trained leaders. But the I.R.A. clearly has no shortage of potential recruits. Terror, even when cloaked in idealism, is an ugly form of politic--the strategy of determined, desperate men. The I.R.A. is determined to survive and to win. Says Sean MacStiofain, chief of staff of the army's militant Provisional wing: "This is not just another glorious phase in Irish history. We must win. We can't afford to lose. We will keep the campaign going regardless of the cost to ourselves, regardless of the cost to anyone else." Even if they were somehow neutralized by British troops, it is already clear that the gunmen have come surprisingly close to winning their political goals. Since its establishment in 1916, the I.R.A. has had but one aim: the creation of a united Ireland wholly free of British control. The army's tactics of terror have succeeded in reopening the issue of "the border," and the reunification of North and South--Ulster and the Republic of Ireland. They have made all but untenable the Protestant-dominated government of Northern Ireland at Stormont. [The utter intransigence of the two sides and the inability of the British government to suppress the violence or implement any solution to the underlying grievances left the field to the terrorists. By decade's end, almost 2,000 people had been killed and thousands disabled; Irishmen, on both sides of the border, were more completely polarized than ever before. In West Germany, meanwhile, the bourgeois coloration of political life, extending even to the Socialist parties, had spawned radical groups dedicated to destroying the country's prosperity and serenity. The most violent of these was the Red Army Faction, organized by two zealots known as "Bonnie und Clyde," in honor of the American gangster immortalized in a 1960s film.] (February 7, 1972) "Bonnie" is Ulrike Meinhof, 37, a slim, tough-faced divorcee who was once the editor of the leftist monthly magazine Konkret. "Clyde" is Andreas Baader, 28, a personable art-school dropout, Lothario of sorts, and sometime student revolutionary. Accompanied by a fluctuating number of associates (as many as 23 at times), the Baader-Meinhof gang during the past two years has pulled a string of bank robberies and car thefts, and has had shootouts with police in half a dozen cities. The toll so far: one policeman killed and another seriously injured, two gang members killed. Unlike the real Bonnie and Clyde, who robbed banks mostly for the hell of it, Baader and Meinhof are far-left political revolutionaries who are turned to crime as a way of waging war against bourgeois society. As Meinhof put it in a clandestine interview published by Der Spiegel, "What we want to do and show is that armed confrontation is feasible--that it is possible to carry out actions where we win, and not the other side. Cops have to be fought as representatives of the system. Cops are pigs, not human beings." (September 19, 1977) The two-car armed convoy that wound its way through Cologne's streets last week was bringing well-known Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, 62, home from his downtown office. Suddenly the blue Mercedes carrying Schleyer screeched to a halt in order to avoid crashing into a yellow sedan that was blocking half the street and a baby carriage that had rolled across the other half. Sensing danger, the driver of the convoy's second car pulled up behind Schleyer's auto. As three of the bodyguards jumped out, they and Schleyer's chauffuer were mowed down by at least 300 machine-gun bullets, fired by about half a dozen terrorists. His ambushed guards sprawled dead in pools of blood, Schleyer was dragged into a white Volkswagen Kombi bus and whisked away. The day after the abduction, the kidnapers made six demands in a letter anonymously left at a police station. The kidnapers' message warned that Schleyer would be killed unless eleven terrorists were released from German prisons, each given 100,000 deutsche marks (about $43,000), and flown out of the country. Among the eleven: Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin, the top members of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, who are serving life sentences for the 1972 bombing murders of four U.S. servicemen and 34 attempted killings. [The links between terrorist groups around the world were revealed when Arabic-speaking, presumably Palestinian, guerrillas hijacked a Lufthansa airliner to underline the R.A.F.'s demands.] (October 24, 1977) Most of the passengers aboard Lufthansa Flight 181 were vacationers homeward bound for Frankfurt from the balmy Spanish playground of Majorca. Shortly after the Boeing 737 took off from Palma, two Arabic-speaking men and two women pulled out pistols and grenades and ordered the pilot to change course. So began a terrifying odyssey for the 82 other passengers and the five-man crew. For 2 1/2 days, they were held in the Persian Gulf sheikdom Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Early this week, they were flown to Aden, South Yemen, after being refused permission to land in Oman. They faced the possibility of death if the skyjackers' demands were not met. By demanding freedom for the same prisoners whose release was being sought by Schleyer's abductors, the skyjackers have--in the words of a German official--"enormously complicated an already difficult situation." In the six weeks since the seizing of the 62-year-old industrialist, West German authorities have been deftly buying time in hopes that they could find a way to obtain Schleyer's release without giving in to the kidnapers. (October 31, 1977) The behavior of the hijackers became increasingly erratic and menacing as another deadline approached. At one point, they tied the hostages' hands behind their backs with stockings and doused them with the remaining liquor aboard, apparently to help fuel the flames if they set the plane afire. The terrorists later united the hostages, after being told by a West German diplomat in the control tower that Bonn would release eleven prisoners and fly them to Mogadishu. Mahmud consulted his "committee" and agreed to put off the deadline once more, this time until 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. He advised the tower: "Don't try any tricks. This will not be another Entebbe." But it was. Forty minutes before the terrorists' final deadline, the G.S.G. 9 rescue operation began. While two of the terrorists were in the cockpit talking with the German diplomat in the control tower, 28 commandos--their faces blackened and bodies camouflaged--stealthily approached the hijacked plane. Suddenly, there was an explosion on the runway--a diversion, and a signal for the attack. Smashing the emergency exits and blowing open the main doors with special explosives, the rescuers lobbed their stun grenades into the cabin. "Hinlegen! Hinlegen!" (Lie down! Lie down!) they shouted as they streamed aboard. [Except for the captain, who had been coldbloodedly murdered by the terrorists, no one died in the assault except the hijackers themselves. In Italy, too, the triumph of bourgeois politics also bred radicals As Italy's Communist Party grew more responsible, helping support centrist governments and working toward a greater share of political power, extreme leftists formed the Red Brigades as a "genuine" revolutionary vanguard. Here again,, the brigatisti apparently worked together with the German R.A.F. to pull off their most daring act, the abduction of Italy's most respected politician, former Premier Aldo Moro.] (March 27, 1978) The abduction was carried out with deadly precision. At 9 a.m., after first attending his daily Mass, the punctual Moro left his apartment in the Trionfale quarter on the north side of Rome and got into the back seat of his blue Fiat 130. His police driver and his bodyguard sat in front. An Alfa Romero, carrying three plainclothes policemen, followed closely behind. About half a mile from Moro's home, a white Fiat station wagon came to an abrupt halt at a corner stop sign, forcing Moro's driver to brake sharply. The police escort car slammed into the rear of Moro's vehicle. Then two masked men jumped out of the white Fiat, opening fire on Moro's driver and bodyguard, killing them where they sat. Standing at the corner, ostensibly waiting for an airline bus, were four or five men wearing the uniforms of Alitalia personnel. As the shooting started, they pulled out hidden weapons and peppered the police car with a heavy fusillade. A few residents rushed to their terraces, but a terrorist warned them away with a wave of his submachine gun and a few words spoken in Italian with a guttural foreign accent. At week's end the Red Brigades, Italy's most infamous terrorist gang, produced a Polaroid photograph of the captured Moro and a handbill warning that he would be subjected to a "people's trial." The Red Brigades were set up in November 1970 as "an armed proletariat vanguard to be the revolutionary power of the exploited classes." The Communists, in the organization's view, had sold out; the aim of the brigatisti, much like that of 19th century anarchists, was to purify society by overthrowing all existing institutions. But the Red Brigades seems to have no coherent vision of what would replace them. At first, kidnaping was the prime instrument of terror: plant managers, executives and judges were abducted, subjected to humiliating "people's trials," and then released. In 1974 came the first murders; one of the victims was the chief inspector of the antiterrorist squad in Turin. (May 22, 1978) The Brigate Rosse had kept Italy on a cruel seesaw of suspense since Moro's abduction on March 16. They had spurned pleas for mercy from the Vatican, from the Pope himself ("I beg you on my knees") and from the United Nations as they dangled their victim like a political puppet. The end came when they executed Moro with eleven shots. </body> </article> </text>