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- [00:00]
Host
Ugh.
- [00:01]
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Eli
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Eli
Hi, Breaking History listeners, this is Eli. As you know, normal programming is off air for the moment. We're still working on this second season of Breaking History, which we'll tell you about soon. But tune in because this episode we've got our producer, Poppy Damon, who sat down with Jason Burke, who's the author of a great new book about terrorism in the 1970s,
- [01:03]
Host
Irving Berlin.
- [01:05]
Depop Advertiser
What happened once happens again.
- [01:10]
Eli
If you're a listener of this show, you probably don't like being told what to think, and you definitely don't like being tracked while you're thinking it. But here's the truth. Every time you go online, your activity is fair game. For advertisers, for your Internet provider, and sometimes even for bad actors. It's like walking through a crowded room and announcing your every move. That's why I use Surfshark vpn. A vpn, or virtual private network, is like a tunnel for your Internet traffic. It hides your location, encrypts your activity, and gives you back a little bit of control in an online world that thrives on surveillance. With Surfshark, I get two big benefits. First, privacy. Whether I'm researching for the show or reading the news, I know my data isn't being logged, tracked, or sold. Surfshark encrypts everything I do online. Even my Internet provider can't see what I'm up to. Second, access. Surfshark has servers in over 100 countries, which means when I hit a not available in your region wall, whether it's news, documentaries, or international television, I can get around it with a couple of clicks. They even offer tools like Surfshark Alert, which scans the web for your personal info, email, passwords, credit cards, and alerts you if anything has been compromised. It's like having a bodyguard for your digital identity. Now, here's how you get it yourself. Go to surfshark.com elideal that's E L I D E A L. Or use code ELIDEAL at checkout to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN, you'll get a risk free 30 day money back guarantee. Again, that's surfshark.com Eli Deal or just use the code Eli Deal at checkout. That link and code are also in the show notes.
- [03:09]
Jason Burke
I'm Jason Burke and my book is the Revolutionists the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s. The Palestinian guerrillas added 113 more people
- [03:22]
Eli
to their bag of hostages today and increased their diplomatic pressure on Britain by
- [03:27]
Jason Burke
hijacking that BOAC liner flying from Bombay, India to London. How narrow was the escape of the passengers when they came off this plane? This is an ITN news flash from the Olympic village in Munich where early this morning armed Palestinian guerrillas raided the sleeping quarters of the Israeli team. In recent years in Fiyart alone There have been 12 shootings, three kidnappings and nine bombings, fires or acts of sabotage. Working people of Turin are totally opposed to terrorism and will fight it with resolution, with courage and with determination.
- [04:03]
Host
Now you have worked as a security correspondent for many years and now currently at the Guardian through. Thank you for being on Breaking History. Your book really opens with this spectacular coordinated hijacking in September 1970. Can you tell us about what happened and why you started the story there?
- [04:20]
Jason Burke
So the revolution airport operation, which is what it was called in September 1970 is the most extraordinary event in many ways. There's nothing like it before or since until you get perhaps to 9 11, 2001. I mean it's a coordinated hijacking of four planes is the plan. It doesn't go according to plan. So they end up hijacking more planes or trying to. And the idea is to fly all these planes full of passengers to a makeshift air strip in Jordan, in the desert in Jordan, so smack in the middle of the Middle east and then demand the release of hundreds of prisoners from Israeli jails and from other jails around Western Europe and publicize a whole load of demands. And the group behind the attack is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which has been formed only a couple of years earlier but has decided to launch this very new strategy of international terrorist attacks. And as I said, the idea is to gain some tactical advantages or the release of some of their members and their people are in prison. But really it's publicity and it's, that's the age old story of terrorism. This is about an absolutely spectacular attack which will get them on all the TV bulletins, all the front pages and really launch their cause and their grievances into the global consciousness. And it comes at this critical, critical moment of kind of revolutionary ferment around the world. It's 1970. It's just the very end of the 60s. Vietnam is still raging as a. As a conflict, you know, around. You've had just had all these big protests in Western Europe. There's violence in the U.S. there's violence in Latin America. And people are shouting revolution. And they're saying it with like, no irony. I mean, they believe it. They want a revolution. And so I started there because it seemed like the kind of explosive moment at the beginning of the decade 1970s, and a really great place to launch the story I wanted to tell.
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Host
And I guess the big question is, why the 1970s? What did you think it could reveal about our present moment?
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Jason Burke
Well, kind of going back to the 1970s was in some ways a really strange experience because it's so different from today. I mean, you know, I mean, it's not even pre Internet, pre like cell phone, pre kind of all the technology that we have today. I mean, people thought differently, acted differently. Access to, to politicians was sort of completely different. For example, I mean, I was reading accounts of journalists who would spend four or five hours with a head of state talking to them as an interview with no PR people around, no, no flax, no kind of, you know, operation. Just, you know, you could disappear. People in my book just, they go underground, they burn their passports and they just disappear in the middle of cities in Western Europe and stay disappeared for months, even years. In fact, some of them are still disappeared. I mean, there's still some around who they haven't found yet. And I mean, that would just be inconceivable today. There was lots and lots, quite apart from the music and the clothes, that was very, very different. But I then started seeing quite a lot that was quite similar. You're talking about a period where there are a lot of people who are very angry, a lot of people who want ra. Radical change, particularly young people. And almost all the people in my book are in their 20s or even younger. Actually, a few are a bit older, but not very many. It's a period of great economic distress often and economic instability. There are conflicts in the Middle East. There's great power conflicts. We now talk about a new Cold War. Well, that was the old Cold War. And you have massive technological disruption as well. You have these new media technologies that are coming through that are causing huge change and huge instability. So history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme as the old adage goes. And here you could. I could really see people wrestling with problems that we're wrestling with today and again, hoping for some kind of solution. And some of those people then, as now hoped to reach that solution through violence.
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Host
One thing that really struck me as a difference though, was that the ideology was so cohesive, whether it was Marxism or other philosophers, it was a kind of collective action with really clear targets. If you look at Luigi Mangione accused of taking out a United Healthcare official, it's a lot less clear what the goal was, what it's asking for. And I sort of really noticed that, that it was a much more collective action. Was that something that struck you as well, in terms of who the profile of these individuals?
- [09:35]
Jason Burke
Yeah, I think that's, that's a really good point. It's all framed within this kind of leftist ideology. And that ideology is fairly well defined. I mean, we know who the enemy are. If you like, the people who are doing these actions knew who the enemy were. And they were the imperialists, they were the capitalists. That it was the global system of imperialism, capitalism. And Israel was seen as an enemy because it was part of that system. And there are these common words, common slogans, common clothes, common icons. Like Che Guevara, who dies in 67, actually is like the big martyr. I mean, he's the iconic figure. That famous photograph of him looking handsome, staring into the distance, you know, rugged and romantic. Yeah, absolutely. Completely obscures who he was and what he did and some of the nastier things about him. But he was a huge icon. And you get him on posters. I found him all the way through my research. He kept cropping up, like on a poster in a bedsit where one of the Barda Meinhof gang get arrested. He's on the T shirt that worn by Palestinian attackers in 77. He's, you know, being waved on flags by guerrillas later on. I mean, he's everywhere. And so you have that kind of shared idea and shared image and shared project, which is this revolution. And as I say, people talk about it, everybody talks about it. The Shah of Iran talks about it at one point. I mean, it's mad. But, you know, everybody thinks about revolution. There's going to be a revolution. How do we make a revolution? And by that they mean a kind of massive radical transformation of the entire planet. I mean, looking at it from where we are now, it just seems insane that anybody would try it. But they, they believe it. But there's one thing that you do start saying, which is, yeah, there's all this shared vocabulary and, you know, culture, if you like, but when you actually drill down, they're massive differences. So, you know, the German leftists and the Italian leftists, you think would get on quite well, actually. They're really big differences. And there's another point where you have a bunch of radicals who've come again, some from Germany, some from Holland, and they end up in a camp, a training camp in Yemen, and all part of the same group, but you'd think they'd kind of all get along. They don't. They really detest each other. The Germans think the Dutch are amateurs. The Dutch think the Germans are all really anal and kind of, you know, overly controlling. And then all this history about the Second World War comes out and they start having arguments, you know, so actually, within this broad movement, when you get down to the kind of individual level, people are people and people are very different.
- [12:39]
Host
Yeah. And actually maybe even particularly different. Like, you know, for all their talk of solidarity, it seems like they. They do quibble over differences rather than reaching for maybe the things they. They have in common. I want to pick up on that hijacking that we talked about at the beginning. What was the response to it? And, and you know, distinctly, they, they were using a hijacking rather than actually sort of executing people. So just say a little bit more about how that unfolded and as say how sympathetic people were to that.
- [13:04]
Jason Burke
Yeah. So the, the hijacking is super complicated because they go for four planes. They. One ends up being flown to Egypt and destroyed, two end up in Jordan. They don't think they need another plane because they haven't got enough British hostages. And they want to free Leyla Khalid, actually the famous Palestinian militant. They want to get her out of a prison in the uk so they go and get another British plane and they hijack that as well. So they end up with three planes in the desert in Jordan, and there's this standoff, and it's happening in a very agitated local context as well, because the Palestinian groups are kind of semi at war with the Jordanian monarchy right in the middle of Jordan. So there's that going on. But the Western governments are all looking at this with hundreds of their citizens now sitting in a desert controlled by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in this makeshift airport they've called Revolution Airport. And honestly, they don't know what to do. I was reading the minutes of conversations in the White House, and Kissinger is discussing it with Nixon, and they're coming up with all these ideas, like they're going to drop in Special Forces or they're going to bomb various bits of the pflp, the hijackers infrastructure. They can't do any of it. They don't know where it is. They haven't got the intelligence, they haven't really got the means to do it either. So they're a bit stuck. And there's this big argument among all these various Western powers about what to do. The Americans want to take quite a hard line, the Europeans basically want to cave, the British are sort of trying to negotiate something in the middle and being a bit wishy washy and the Israelis don't want to give anything away and make any concessions whatsoever. And basically this goes on for a couple of weeks until the hijackers basically start realize they've now got something of a problem, not least because civil war is breaking out Jordan, that they're in the middle of it and they decide they're going to blow up the planes now. And this is, speaks to your excellent point. What they do is they get everybody off the planes. They've already released a lot of people, but they make sure everybody's off the planes and they blow them up just to make a point, just for this spectacular image. And it is spectacular. And because of the modern technology at the time, the film of the exploding planes gets onto the evening news in the UK and then in the US eventually and it has quite a big impact and a whole series of things happens that basically means the, the, the hostages are eventually released, the civil war breaks out in Jordan and the Western powers kind of all breathe a bit of a sigh of relief. I mean there's one point where they kind of, they're worried about Soviet aircraft carriers and so forth intervening. I mean they don't. But there's this Cold War aspect as well. So by that time it's the whole thing's over. There's this sort of sigh of relief, but a realization that they're in a completely new world now. You know, no one has done anything like this before and this is a new era. And it was that era that really interested me. And two years later you get the attack on the Munich Olympics, which really makes that point that this is something you're dealing with, something completely different than anything that's happened before.
- [16:47]
Host
Did you find in your research, aside from what the government's response was, what was the general public saying? Because as I say, it's strange to fantasize about a time when terrorists would blow up a plane and not the individuals. Obviously there were Casualties, but the goal was never just to murder for the sake of murder. And you know, your book kind of ends with the beginning of the religious terror that we live in today. So I just wonder whether people sort of writing op eds and things saying, well, they wanted to get their point across or, you know, any kind of sympathy for them.
- [17:16]
Jason Burke
It's really interesting. Basically there's a big political split, as you'd expect. So some of them were left wing newspapers. And in some of the more left leaning countries you get the response that this is really bad, but you have to understand the background and there are reasons for this. And let's talk about the problems in the Middle east that have motivated this violence and it won't go away until we deal with them, which is a very reasonable argument. And then you have another response which is, we must stand against this, we can't release anybody. What are they going to ask for next? Are they going to demand? There's one British parliamentarian who writes angry letters saying what are they going to demand next? That we're going to airdrop them boxes of gold in the desert or nuclear weapons? I mean, it's this sort of thing, I mean, it's quite hysterical, but it's a real cleavage point. I mean it splits people. And all through the decade you see people being split. But one thing that is quite funny is that is the whole question of airport security that comes up because basically the hijackers have, they fail in one instance and that is because they try and take an Israeli plane and there's an armed air marshal on the plane. The other, the other hijacking is just basically they walk onto the planes with weapons. I mean, it's madness. And you could, I mean at the time the, the planes were in the airport. So with the security more or less like a train station, I mean, very, very light security. And so there are all these discussions about what, what could be done. And this is played out in the kind of public arena and there are lots of letters coming into newspapers and one of them I read said, well, there's some suggestion that, you know, everybody getting onto a plane could take all their luggage out of their bags or to put their bags on a conveyor belt or something and someone could check it. And the response is like, oh, come on, don't be ridiculous. You know, like nobody is going to accept that. That's madness. I mean, so, so you're seeing these kind of debates playing out and basically from everybody, from the man in the street through to prime ministers and presidents, they Just don't know what to do. They don't even know what to call it. They call them air pirates and skyjackers. I mean, they haven't got vocabulary yet. Ten years later, it's all changed. And that's. And that's really interesting, as you point out at the beginning. You're talking about, as one commentator said, the terrorists want a lot of people looking and not a lot of people dead. So they want to make the point, but they don't really want to kill anybody. At the end of the decade, we're in a different world. Certainly 15 years later, by the mid-80s, you mentioned Munich.
- [20:18]
Host
So I would love to jump two years ahead after this hijacking to Munich. Give us a little bit of the story. I mean, people may be familiar, but remind us what happened in Munich.
- [20:26]
Jason Burke
Yeah, so Munich is another sort of extraordinary event where you have, again, a Palestinian group called Black September, which attacks the munich Olympics in 1972, targeting the Israeli delegation, and takes a whole bunch of coaches and athletes hostage in their accommodation in Munich in the Olympic village. And it all plays out over a day. And it's extremely dramatic. And it's meant to be extremely dramatic because the reason they've targeted the Olympics is partly because they can, because the security is very, very light, but also because they know it's going to have just so many people watching.
- [21:23]
Host
The world is watching.
- [21:24]
Jason Burke
Yeah, the world is watching. It's the Olympics. And they're. It's actually a really interesting moment where for the first time you have kind of live feeds from other part side of the world of continuous shots of the house where these hostages are being held. And it really is this epic media event, which is what it's meant to be. It was not meant to end up with the deaths of 11 hostages, which is what happens. And what you see is how the German authorities try to find some kind of resolution. They try to negotiate, and then they start planning an assault, and then that doesn't work. And then they come up with this really complicated plan where they're going to try and fool the attackers into thinking that they provided a plane. And then when they try and board the plane with the hostages to fly to an undisclosed third country in the Middle east, they're going to try and shoot them with snipers. It's very complicated. It doesn't work, basically. And all the hostages and a policeman and all but three of the attackers actually are killed. I mean, it's an absolutely awful event and a genuine tragedy at the end of this sort of appallingly dramatic day. And it's one of those sort of seismic events that anybody who's alive at the time were able to remember it, and alive at the time has strong impressions about. And speaking to people who I've spoken to, people involved in the investigations, people who were at the Olympics at the time, and they're really affected by people in Israel who had relatives and so forth. And you read the accounts, it's a really powerful moment. And then it leads to. It leads to all sorts of major changes from the security perspective. But it also leads to this Israeli effort, famous Israeli effort. There's lots of Hollywood films have been made about it, particularly Spielberg Munich film. There have been others, lots of books about this Israeli assassination campaign basically over the next year or so, which targeted those supposedly purportedly involved in the attack. Although actually most of those targeted were not. I mean, this is one of the things I found is that lots of misconceptions about both Munich and what happened afterwards that I found in my research. So one of the iconic moments during the attack in Munich is meant to be when the Germans are planning an assault. And then there's all this TV coverage. This was all in the excellent film recently, September 5th. But yeah, yeah, well, I mean, sadly for. For the filmmakers and for the historical record, the film shows how as the Germans are planning the assault and moving into position to attack the house where the hostages are being held, the actual hostage takers can see them doing it on a TV inside the house. And that's it. It's just a fantastic image of modern media and violence and terrorism. And it's just great. It says so much. Sadly, it didn't happen. I got hold of like the reports, the investigations on into the. Done by the Germans afterwards, and they went through that house in incredible detail. They were noting down apple cores in terms of what was in there. There was no tv. There wasn't even a plug for a tv. I mean, there's no way anyone could watch it on tv. So that's kind of become a myth, a really good myth, if you like. And like all myths, it says something really important, but it's not true. So I had to take it out of my. Which was a shame because it was a great episode, but just didn't actually happen. But the other thing that we know a lot about now, partly because some amazing documents have been released, previously classified documents were released and also I got a few that are still classified that spoke to this subject and that immediately after the attack on Munich, the Israelis felt they had to do something they felt very strong and they'd been let down by the Germans and Europeans, which they had been. And so they launched a clandestine assassination campaign across Western Europe, which it's long said, or their justification too was that they were targeting those who were actually responsible for killing their people in Munich. And in fact, they weren't really going after the exact culprits. They did get most of them, the survivors, eventually, but they were really just looking to disrupt and eliminate lots of people who they felt were involved in the Palestinian armed factions and their terrorist violence in Europe. And quite a lot of those they hit were really the only ones they could find. They weren't particularly deeply involved. And it ended in a real disaster when they killed completely the wrong person. They just killed a waiter in Norway. But it's still a kind of storied episode. And again, it says a lot about these conscious estates, grasping, groping really for some kind of solution to the problem they had, that they'd lost the initiative at this stage and they were looking for a way of doing it. And I spoke to people who were involved with that campaign in Israel and I spoke to some of the people who were targets on the Palestinian side when I was in, in the west bank and elsewhere, Jordan. And one of the other. They all framed it differently. So the Israelis framed it as going after the guilty of Munich and said they never felt any doubt that they were doing the right thing. And the Palestinians said, yeah, it was an unequal battle in the end, but at that stage it was, you know, eye for eye. They felt that they, yeah, they'd given as good as they'd got, basically.
- [28:12]
Host
Yeah. I mean, I think it all underscores. I was reading that section and thinking it's the worst dilemma you could be in as a. As an official. Because what came later is that there are official policies. We don't negotiate with terrorists and so forth. But at this time, it's all still being worked out. So every single decision you make can cost lives. The whole world's watching. And I just couldn't think of a worse situation because you, you, you can say we're not negotiating and everyone gets killed, or you could negotiate and then that leads to further terror later. You've basically said it's a good policy. So I don't think we've ever got to a solution of it. But this is really playing out with them having those in this moment.
- [28:51]
Jason Burke
Absolutely. And one of the things that changes over the decade is that at the beginning they almost had no alternative. But to negotiate because they didn't have any capability that they could deploy against terrorists who seized a plane or a train has happened or a building or, you know, whether it's in Munich or London or wherever. And because of Munich, they all sit up, all these various governments and think, we've got to have a team who we can deploy a team of specialists. And so the British use ESIS and the French use the GIGN and the Germans use GS9 and these various groups, the units, the specialist units that they then set up. And that means by the end of the decade or even quite fast actually by 1977, 78, they've got these teams. The Israelis do it in 76, the Israelis are actually doing it earlier. The Israelis are doing it in 72, 73. They're using special forces to assault planes that have been hijacked. But it's worth pointing out with the hijackings, there'd been lots of hijackings in the 60s all over the US but they tended to be criminals or they just tended to be people who were just trying to get to Cuba. Small Gulf. Yeah, exactly. And nobody really. And the policy then was just give them what they want and they'll just go away. And obviously that wasn't going to work in the 70s. So they do develop these, the capability, these sort of specialist squads that can go in and, and hopefully end the hijacking without hurting too many or killing too many or too many casualties among them.
- [30:36]
Host
And I think that question of the status of the hostages again continues. We saw under the caliphate that different nations had very different policies towards journalists, for example, captured. You know, I did some reporting around John Cantley and it's just so interesting that the Brits and Americans said, we're not coming to help you. Spanish and French were basically like, will pay the ransom and get them back. And again, when we've had the hostage crisis in Israel, in that instance, it was, you know, sometimes people were killed when they were trying to do rescue missions. I mean, it becomes really a complicated issue.
- [31:08]
Jason Burke
All through the book, writing the book, I was finding these dilemmas and these moral questions that are still very current today. And it's not just interesting on the side of the officials. In fact, I mean, the book is not about the officials and the official response. The book is about the perpetrators and, you know, and really about why they were doing what they did and how they did it and just telling those stories. And among them, this is what was interesting, is you find similar discussions, I mean, from the, the terrorist side, if you like the extremist side. And there's this amazing scene that I came across with German extremists in 1977 when they are under huge pressure. This is the Red Army Faction, better known as the Bada Meinhof group. And they're under huge pressure. Their leaders are all in prison. Their leaders have said, if you do not get us out or do an attack that might get us out within two weeks, then we'll take matters into our own hands. Which implied that they were either going to commit suicide or they would launch some kind of suicidal attack inside the prison. The outsiders, these often younger, quite inexperienced members of the Red Army Faction were meant to do this attack where they were going to abduct a senior industrialist, a former Nazi, and hold him ransom against the freedom of their leaders. That was a plan. And they worked out that if they were going to do this, they would have to kill his bodyguards. And his bodyguards were just, as they would put it, proletarians, normal working class men feeding their families, doing a job, nothing special, low grade policemen, but they would have to die if they were going to seize their target. And this amazing scene that is really well described in a lot of the literature of German literature, which I was able to read, the. Not in the British stuff, the English language stuff, but the of how for all night this group of 20 somethings sat around smoking endless cigarettes and discussing, they're in a safe house in Cologne, discussing whether they should go ahead with the attack. Is it morally justified to kill these working class men just to free their leaders or should they wait? But they're under pressure and, and it's a really kind of human moment. Even if what they're doing is abhorrent, morally and entirely unjustifiable. And that's the sort of thing that really interested me, you know, kind of trying to get inside these people's heads. Very young people, often, I mean somewhere like 18, 19, and they're making life, literally life and death decisions based on ideology, based on all sorts of other reasons.
- [34:19]
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- [34:42]
Host
there are so many vivid characters. I did want to make some time to talk about Carlos the Jackal as a kind of flamboyant figure. Tell us a bit about him and how you tell his story.
- [34:53]
Jason Burke
So Carlos is just awful. I mean, he's just a horrible man and has been hugely glamorized, partly because he's called Carlos a Jackal, which kind of sounds great. His real name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez and I call him Illich Ramirez Sanchez in the book. I mean, why should he get a special name and no one else does? I actually managed to get in touch with him in prison and we exchanged some letters. I wasn't able to go and see him, but it was really interesting, partly because what he sent me was a load of press cuttings, mainly about him. And he was very keen to sort of make sure that I'd understood him and his background and his story as he wanted to be seen as a revolutionary and as a revolutionary hero. And it struck me then. And he was also very charming, I mean, very polite. Sent these nice letters and things that his. In everything I'd learned about a man who killed a lot of people, of course, enormous amount of suffering was that he wasn't actually a particularly good terrorist. Quite a lot of what he did went wrong. But he was really successful because he was very charming, very seductive, very manipulating, really good at getting people to do what weaker people to do, what he wanted them to do. And he also really knew how to build a myth. And he was basically the first celebrity terrorist. In an age where, you know, this sort of celebrities like we have now was just coming through. He was known everywhere. I mean, I was reading reports of him being in kind of Mexico and Germany and Uganda all more or less at once. I mean, he was like this sort of global figure. Like once we had with sort of Osama bin Laden and these other terrorist celebrities, the same sort of thing. Actually his story is much more mundane. He's a left wing, middle class kid from Venezuela who ends up kind of in an expat life in Britain, educated for a year in Moscow, gets involved with the Palestinian armed factions, worked for them for a while as leading a couple of attacks, very high profile attacks, gets globally known. The Carlos and the Jackal name is completely fictive. It comes from a passport that the French found in a false name. And the fact that the Day of the Jackal, the famous Forsyth novel, was in a. It was in the house or the flat of an ex girlfriend and that the journalist kind of put it together and went, okay, this is Carlos the Jackal. And that stuck. And it gave him this amazing aura and he uses it. That's what's incredible. He uses it later to get himself out of a whole load of scrapes by sort of saying I'm the famous Carlos the Jackal, so you can't possibly execute me for messing up your terrorist operation. And also if you're, as was the case, an Eastern European communist regime, you can't throw me out because partly I'm a revolutionary, partly because I'm a revolutionary hero and also because you know who I am and you know what I could do to your embassies around the world. So please, I'm going to stay here in my five star hotel in the middle of your capital and have a nice life. And you're not going to do anything about it, are you? And it worked for quite a long time. I mean it worked until the mid-80s. So he was a fascinating guy and there were so many stories, I mean there's so many ridiculous stories about, you know, what he was doing and you know, how he's buying designer clothes the night before he goes on doing these attacks and he drives this gold plate, gold sprayed Mercedes in Prague and it just generally. And in the end it all goes wrong for him because he launches this, he launches his personal campaign to free his girlfriend who's been detained by the French police when she tries to blow up a newspaper office in Paris that's a commission from the Syrians. But you know, let's not get too into the detail but the stories are just mad. But at the base of it, it's actually because, you know, this is what interests me is it's pretty squalid. I mean, it's pretty sordid at the end of the day. I mean he's a, he's a sociopath megalomaniac who just kind of uses people. He has no ideology at all.
- [39:22]
Host
I was just going to ask that question because there's so many things that I thought about of that. I mean it's also the age of serial killers as well and a kind of type of celebrity. But in this instance they get to at least act as if there's a moral basis for the killings that they have. But when you gave the examples there of all his spending, these kind of tropes of capitalism, one might think, is that just because he's a narcissist who doesn't really care or was it he would say two fingers to the establishment or what's going on there, He's a
- [39:49]
Jason Burke
narcissist who doesn't care. I know, I mean he sometimes, he sometimes has to explain it and he gives One interview. It's not really an interview. It's quite a complicated story, how it happens, and he gets very cross about it. But he's quoted as saying how he likes the finer things in life and he likes fresh, clean, fresh sheets in the theater and fine cigars and fine wine. And then he sort of realizes that he's probably said a bit much. And then he. So he starts going, but I am. But my heart is. Above all, I am committed to the revolution. I mean, it's total rubbish. There are others. And, you know, that's why he's a sort of outlier. I mean, you know, some of the people I was talking to and I tracked down quite a lot of them and those who are still alive and out of prison, quite a lot of them were prepared to talk, some at very great length, for days. I spent days with someone. Some became quite good friends, actually, bizarrely. But. Yeah, but the. The. And they were, you know, they were deeply committed. I mean, they were young people who were hugely committed ideologically and. And they would talk to me about it. Some still are actually very ideologically committed. But others were saying, you know, I was young and I just. I believed it. You know, I just genuinely believe we could change the world. And then you look at some of those who are obviously now dead. Someone like Gudrun Enslin, who was one of the main founders of the Red Army Faction in Germany. And she's a highly intelligent, literate, articulate, ideologically committed woman. I mean, much too ideologically committed. I mean, completely binary in her thinking. And that's what leads her into violence and doing some pretty dreadful things. But, you know, no one could say that those people were not genuinely committed to doing what they wanted to do in terms of a project.
- [41:54]
Eli
Others.
- [41:55]
Jason Burke
Carlos is one. Andreas Barda is another of the Red Army Faction founders. I mean, they're more interested in the mayhem than the Marxism. I think, certainly they're more interested in the megalomania than the Marxism. And, you know, it's fun and it's adventurous and it's exciting, and they're at the center of something that is extraordinary and they build themselves into these myths. They watch too many films. They, you know, it's. And it's. It's pretty squalid at the end of it and has a huge cost in sort of human suffering. And I try to. I kept that in my head all the time, that it's, you know, it's quite easy to get into the sort of 70s shtick and the flares and the disco balls. And actually what they're doing is really horrible.
- [42:45]
Host
Yeah. And that is something I wanted to ask you about. One thing we explored on the show was looking at Bada Meinhof group as an explanation or to try and understand the Mangioni effect. And the question we were looking at was like, why do middle class, very intellectual kids become the ones that break bad so often? Some of them have such a specific profile, it's almost like copy paste. And I wondered if you got to that, whether you know that there is a type and why it's them. And over anyone else.
- [43:13]
Jason Burke
I think there are two really interesting points to make. That one is that absolutely, I mean, almost everybody in my book has got a university degree. And the Germans then looked at this and spent huge amounts of money and time trying to do these studies of radicalization and find that unique factor that explains it. And there isn't one. There just isn't one. The only thing you can say is there's no direct link between poverty and violence, certainly not political violence. There's nothing that we've ever found that shows that clearly people who feel more empowered, people who feel more able to control their own lives, have that degree of agency, are like more likely to go out and try and change the world for good or ill. I mean, historically it's the kind of the middle classes or the often extremist actors, or at least very political actors, very political act, politically active. And that leads me to the second point I was going to make, which is obviously some of the book is about the Islamist wave that comes through in the Middle east in the second half of the decade and in the 80s. And what really interested me was how a lot of the elements, the attributes, qualities of the secular actors, the left wingers, whether in the Middle east or elsewhere, and those of the Islamist were the same. And there's this amazing study that was done with Egyptian Islamists in, in the early 80s, actually one of the very few that have ever been done, certainly at that period of that nature, which showed how similar the leftists were to the Islamists in the Middle east, how they were mainly middle class kids, how they were often educated. I mean, they were obviously far fewer women among the Islamists. But then there weren't very many women among the leftists in the Middle east anyway. There were obviously in the west, but much less so in the Middle East. But that, you know, in both cases this researcher found you were talking about model Egyptians was how he put it, he was talking about Egyptians, but it would have been the same In Iran, it would have been the same in Jordan or Syria. And, you know, there are all these, these middle class, educated young people who genuinely often believe that they are trying to change the world and have different ways of doing it or different thoughts about how it should be changed. But this project of, you know, challenging an older generation, challenging authorities that you think are corrupt or hypocritical or, or unrepresentative, rejecting pacifism because you think it doesn't go far enough and that the only way to bring about change is through the shocking kind of dreadful spectacular of violence. All of that is, you find, not just across the period I'm looking at my book, but also the period I've been reporting on for the last 30 years, which is, you know, our last decades. And you could look at right wing violence, which I haven't had time to look at space in the book, but also really interesting, has its roots like us right wing extremists, has its roots in this period in the 70s. And you have other people coming through with kind of cookie ideas of what you like a Unabomber and so forth. I mean, all of this, this project starts in the 70s and kind of gathers pace through the 80s and 90s, as I think ideology, or the kind of big structural ideology, the big kind of Marxist ideologies, Cold War ideologies, that kind of falls away and you get much more kind of identity motivation and that. So that can be the white supremacy, it can be Islamism, it can be a whole series of kind of subsets of identity politics pushed to the absolute extreme. And that's the kind of thing that's what I really thought was interesting. In the 70s you kind of start with one where it's all ideology and you end in a place where it's much more identity and actually with much more lethal violence as well.
- [47:51]
Host
Yeah, and that's why I just want to end with asking you about, as you said, it kind of is almost the origin story of our present day. How much did you find that, or in your reporting or through the book, that there's an awareness by Hassan Bin Laden and others of that past, of how it failed, of how it didn't achieve those goals and how did they actively use that to utilize the change they want to see and the means they take?
- [48:15]
Jason Burke
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, bin Laden is a child of the 70s. This is one of the things I, you know, I found, if you like, and I've looked at reports on bin Laden for decades, but it hadn't really struck me he was born in 57, you know, he was a teenager through all this, this period, and was obviously just sort of soaking in everything that was around him at the time. And other things I found was that how the Islamists were actually influenced by what the leftists were doing. And the fact actually that the leftists were the ones that caught the brunt of the state repression was very useful to the Islamists because it opened up a vacuum that in places like Iran they could absolutely fill because the leftists all been killed or incarcerated or expelled. But, you know, they were looking at what the leftists were doing. They were seeing it as an example, they were seeing it as a challenge. How come they can do it? They're trying to do it when we have our faith and we're not doing it, you know, so there was absolutely lots and lots of interaction and influence and so forth in a way that I think has been completely ignored, as seen as completely rightly. I mean, they're completely different strands of extremism. But they did start at the same time in the late 60s and they grew at the same time. And necessarily that's going to have an influence and an impact. The only thing I would say is obviously that in the west it's pretty much over in terms of the leftist stuff by the end of the 70s. And that's largely because societies worked, a lot of reforms were enacted, voting ages were dropped, money was better funding for university, better divorce rights for women, abortion rights. All this stuff came through in that period and meant that for a lot of young people, by the early 80s, there wasn't that much to shout about. Or if there was, it was the environment, it was nuclear disarmament, but it wasn't revolution. Whereas in the Middle east where you got none of that, you know, there wasn't a single single concession, none of the grievances were answered in any meaningful way. You know, there was a reason to shout for revolution and they went and did it. It was just a very different sort of revolution.
- [50:48]
Host
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Breaking History. It really helps us if you leave us a five star review and share with your friends. We'll be back very soon with that series that Eli has been teasing and we'll have more details to share with you very soon.