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- [00:02]
Jay Solomon
Saeed, Buffalo and Backlabbable. The pod you got is next year's model. Lee Harvey, Oz, Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again.
- [00:19]
Eli Lake
Like you, we care a lot about craftsmanship at breaking history, how things used to be made and whether that still matters today. Which raises a fair question. Can you still build something well, on purpose in America? Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare, that's V A E R was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking. And they've actually pulled it off. Veer is now the largest independent watch assembler in the usa, building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida.
- [01:00]
Host/Interviewer
Now, I have to tell you something.
- [01:02]
Eli Lake
I happen to have a beautiful DS2 Meridian Black Vare. It's quartz, 39 millimeter, and I get compliments on it all the time. I love this watch.
- [01:13]
Host/Interviewer
And the great thing about it is
- [01:15]
Eli Lake
I know that when I have this watch, I did not pay a premium for a brand name that simply just
- [01:22]
Host/Interviewer
connotes that I have a lot of money or I am in style or something like that.
- [01:26]
Eli Lake
No, people admire my watch because it looks wonderful, it looks great and it tells time. Great.
- [01:34]
Host/Interviewer
And one of the things I really like about the watch is that it
- [01:36]
Eli Lake
also is quite durable. It's waterproof, it uses some of the
- [01:41]
Host/Interviewer
top grade luxury materials that you would expect in your Rolexes or your other more expensive brands. And I can tell you that the public agrees.
- [01:51]
Eli Lake
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- [02:11]
Host/Interviewer
So I want to start off by just saying Jay Solomon and I have been friends for many years. I think he is really one of the best journalists I know in the national security space. His first book on kind of the history of U.S. iran Shadow War Diplomacy is one of the best accounts you will read. And I just am so delighted that we are colleagues at the Free Press. So welcome, Jay, to Breaking History podcast again. Thank you very much.
- [02:40]
Jay Solomon
It's exciting. I love Breaking History.
- [02:42]
Host/Interviewer
Oh, I appreciate you saying that. So the reason that we have Jay on the show right now is because he just dropped, I think, a masterpiece. So let's start by just talking about the story that you've been working on. And we've talked about who is Kala Walsh and why is she in Lebanon?
- [03:04]
Jay Solomon
So Kala Walsh is now 21 years old. And she's essentially a full time propagandist now for the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, and other members of the Axis of Resistance, as you said, living now in Lebanon, basically almost in exile, as far as I can tell, because of legal troubles in the U.S. but the story is amazing because just a few years ago when she was 17, she was profiled on the front page of the New York Times due to her Democratic Party activism and her efforts in Massachusetts to get Ed Markey reelected and fend off a challenge from the Kennedy family, Joe Kennedy iii. And she mobilized an online army called the Markie Verse to help Markey get reelected. So the story I really was interested in was how did she go from A to B in such a short period of time? And it really is, you know, a story of radicalization in the. In the moment we're living in. And just the myriad actors that were involved in getting her radicalized. Everyone from the Cuban government to a political grifter named Fergie Chambers, to the Singham network, the Neville Singham network, which a lot of people have heard about recently, and then the Iranian government itself. So Kala Walsh is this woman. I kind of nicknamed her the Little Drummer Girl in reference to a John Le Carre novel about another story of radicalization. But she, she really is now kind of the Gen Z propagandist for the Islamic Republic.
- [04:50]
Host/Interviewer
Well, before we. We go further with Kalawas, just let's. Let's talk a little about the great John Lecar, who in my view, is really up there with Graham Greene as one of the great spy novelists that we know. Who was the Little Drummer Girl? Why did you choose that as the kind of frame for your piece?
- [05:08]
Jay Solomon
The Little Drummer Girl was a 1983 novel, was twice made into movies. But in the novel, there's a young, kind of a little disillusioned British actress known as Charlie, who basically gets brainwashed by the Israeli Mossad and inserted into a Palestinian terror cell. And she ends up kind of. It's. It's a bit unclear in the book whether it's the brainwashing or she herself becomes a devotee to the Palestinian cause. She's trained with Palestinian terrorist groups in Lebanon and eventually sort of moves bombs around for the, for the Palestinians. So Calla, I thought, was similar. I don't. There's no evidence she was brainwashed by the Mossad, but this way, this a bit kind of a young woman can kind of get seduced by the revolution, seduced by militancy. I thought I Saw a lot of parallels there. And the title, the Little Drummer Girl, just stuck in my head.
- [06:11]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, so let's, let's start with the process. She is a high school student in Massachusetts. She likes Ed Markey. She volunteers for the campaign and then at a certain point she discovers the Democratic Socialist of America. Is that right?
- [06:26]
Jay Solomon
Yeah. She goes from being really active as early as 15, she was helping to organize climate strikes in Boston. She gets into democratic politics big in the marquee campaign. She also volunteered for the Elizabeth Warren, kind of shortly lived presidential campaign. So she's, she looks like she's going in that direction. I interviewed for the story people who met with her back then and said she was incredibly, you know, precocious at this age. But then just almost as quickly as she starts getting into it, she kind of pulls back part of it. She wrote kind of a long Me too screed about how she had been kind of groomed by kind of sexually abused in some ways by people in the Democratic Party ecosystem in Massachusetts. And then I think kind of the seminal moment in her radicalization is she goes to Cuba with, in an, or in a kind of a mission. They're called brigadistas. They go for mayday celebrations. And she does this in 2022. The organization in Cuba that helped get her there is called icap, which if you read kind of, I read some old CIA reports, they think it's essentially an arm of Cuban intelligence that helps recruit and indoctrinate people. And they love kind of teenagers or young Americans who have kind of this leftist worldview and in Kala's case, talented in social media, politically connected. So I, in the story, it really seems like the Cubans were the first to really kind of spot her spotter. And you know, she talked about elders here in the US it kind of helped bring her over there. And I think that was the first kind of case where she really starts to break.
- [08:18]
Host/Interviewer
So let's talk about one of the elders, I guess, Pepe Cohen. Who is Pepe Cohen?
- [08:23]
Jay Solomon
Well, Pepe Cohen actually is a former Cuban spy who defected in 1994. And, and he told me about how this, how this ICAP group and how the Cubans really do look for people. They have very good intelligence networks in the United States just because they're so close. This conflict's been going on for, you know, 70 years. And Pepe Cohen described like she. Kalawa was a motherload for these guys. She was, you know, all these political connections, clear talent for social media. She was spotted, as you said, and, and went over there and it's not like she would go there for a few days. She talks about going there for weeks at a time where she's, you know, tours hospitals and local elections and the two, you know, the memorials for Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. She came back all in. You know, Cuba was great in her WorldView and the US was, was a decrepit, dying, imperialistic state.
- [09:28]
Host/Interviewer
I guess she did not notice the poverty or the state failure.
- [09:33]
Jay Solomon
No, I mean, it's amazing because when she comes back, their investment in her was great. It was. She immediately, at just the age of 18, becomes the head of this organization that sort of organizes 60 some groups that are against the US embargo. You know, all of Iran, all of Cuba's travails in, in Kal's worldview were just a result of American peelism and the bar, the embargo. So she comes back here and she's all over the place. She's even doing joint appearances with Cuban diplomats in Washington about the, you know, the terror the US government inflicts on the Cuban people. But the poverty is all just the result of Western imperialism in, in her review. Nothing to do with the Cuba.
- [10:18]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, so at this phase is she like, is this. She briefly is in the Democratic Socialist of America. Right. And that's following Cuba.
- [10:26]
Jay Solomon
I'm assuming it's around the same time she writes about being one of the youngest delegates. I think this is when she's 17 years old. So the DSA stuff is right before she goes to Cuba.
- [10:39]
Host/Interviewer
Okay.
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Jay Solomon
It's kind of in between. It's kind of in between steps.
- [10:42]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, so she's now kind of now to the left of Elizabeth Warren.
- [10:47]
Jay Solomon
Correct.
- [10:47]
Host/Interviewer
And at this point she hooks up with what, the People's Forum and Neville Singham. Right. I mean this is the network that has been out front with really the Gaza protests. They have something called breakthrough news. Talk a little bit about Singham's network and how that enters into the Callowash story.
- [11:08]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, she, I mean it's one of the most interesting thing is she spent all this time helping to get Markey re elected in, in 2020. And just a few months later she's outside of his Massachusetts office with arms of the SIGM network, something called the People's Forum and, and Code Pink, both of which are part of that network very much campaigning against Mary's decision to back increased defense spending for the Pentagon in East Asia. And as you know, like the SIGAM network, US government officials believe it's tied into to Chinese intelligence. Which explains why Kala would, would be out protesting against Markey's desire to support funding in East Asia. I mean, she really, it's part of the story that's amazing. She kind of moves from one links to one intelligence service, whether it's Cuban to the CO to the SIGM network, which allegedly has ties to the Chinese and then eventually the Iranian. So she really is kind of moving around, almost getting passed around from these various forces against American empire.
- [12:17]
Host/Interviewer
Well, in some ways that's not surprising. Singham has ties to China and probably Chinese intelligence. And yet it's Singham's network that really is the kind of initial push right after 10-7-23 to begin protests that are effectively praising the mass shooters and rapists of that deadly day. So, you know, you can ask yourself, well, what is, you know, what does Chinese Communism have to do with the, the jihadism of Hamas? But here we are, of course, they share an enmity to America. So she's in now the People's Forum network. How long does that phase last? And then what is the next step for her?
- [13:12]
Jay Solomon
She comes back from Cuba and like you said, there is definitely People's Forum. That infrastructure is definitely ingrained in these trips to Cuba. So she ends up making four trips and, and doing all this lobbying inside of the United States on behalf of Cuba. Then in 2023, sort of in the fall, another very kind of dangerous step in a radicalization. She hooks up with a guy named Fergie Chambers who is an heir. It's a self proclaimed Marxist. He was an heir to the Cox Communications empire and in 2023 inherited something like $250 million. And he builds this sort of Marxist compound slash martial arts dojo in the Berkshire region of, of Massachusetts. And Cal Walsh is amongst kind of a number of youngsters who joined something he called the Berkshire Communists. And Chambers was, you know, there's all sorts of stories what was going on there, paramilitary training, Marxist training, drug use. I mean, it was all sorts of stuff. But after October 7, this whole operation gets supercharged. They start descending, people in Chambers, Berkshire Communists start descending on local towns doing pro Hamas.
- [14:37]
Host/Interviewer
By the way, when we talk about the Berkshires, we're talking about like where Williams College is. And they have theater festivals. It is one of the most idyllic. Like if you wanted a poster for like, why America, The American way is better. Having I was in the Berkshires last summer, go to the Berkshires. It's beautiful. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, it's like all ice cream stands and antique stores and. Right.
- [15:05]
Jay Solomon
Yeah. Fergie Chambers shows up and then after a few weeks after October 7, Chambers and Kalawalsh create the U. Well, I. It's inspired by something in the UK called Palestine Action uk It's an anti Israel activist group that the British government actually designated as a terrorist organization last year. But Walsh decides to help create a U.S. she says it was inspired, not like formally part of it, but they clearly got their manuals on how to stage activities and their fixation became defense companies supporting the Israeli Defense Forces in the U. S In particular Elbit Systems, which is Israel's largest defense contractor. The, the, the Palestine Action people in the UK really went after.
- [15:55]
Host/Interviewer
By the way, we should, we should say because there's a propaganda campaign about this. It was not non violent protests. It wasn't environmentalists chaining themselves, you know, to a redwood tree to stop deforestation. This was pretty violent, you know, break ins into a factory. There were individuals who were not killed, but they were nearly killed. I'm talking about the UK stuff that I've looked into as you know. So we should say Palestine Action is not civil disobedience. How would you describe Palestine Action? It's direct action, I think.
- [16:34]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, it's direct action and.
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Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [16:36]
Jay Solomon
Essentially use any means you can almost to stop to take these companies out.
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Host/Interviewer
And there was a, there was a hunger strike for some of those activists who were arrested in the UK And I mean, I think it was basically that they should be. I mean they were trying to short circuit the entire legal process. Process basically. And you know, my view was, you know, you could eat a sandwich, you know. But anyway.
- [17:02]
Jay Solomon
Well, some of your friends are helping them out. It's particularly Roger Waters.
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Host/Interviewer
Oh really? We don't need the organization and the. Into his brain.
- [17:10]
Jay Solomon
Yeah. When they got prescribed as a terrorist organization, Wall Waters joined their.
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Host/Interviewer
Of course he hates the Jews. Okay. So she wants to start this in the United States, but she has not had much success.
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Eli Lake
Right.
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Host/Interviewer
I mean we don't have, we have not seen these attacks or have we?
- [17:27]
Jay Solomon
Well, that she launched two. Her and Walsh launched two operations. One was against an elbit sort of R and D facility in Cambridge.
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Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [17:37]
Jay Solomon
They got briefly. She gets in chamber, she gets briefly arrested, released. And then they launched a pretty sophisticated operation against an elbit facility in Meramec, New Jersey. It was her and three other women. I have to say the whole Fergie Chambers had a very kind of Manson family feel to it because you've got this older Guru type with these younger women doing these actions. But they actually, it was a pretty, like, militant operation.
- [18:05]
Host/Interviewer
Tell me about it. What happened?
- [18:07]
Jay Solomon
They calla Wallace and three of her friends or colleagues, kind of two, three of them storm to the top of this elbit systems facility, and they start essentially trying to destroy the air. The, the air conditioning and other systems going into the building. So you had one person locking them in at the bottom and people on the top sort of trying to, using paint and, you know, other things to bash the air conditioning system. So if you're inside, you'd probably get a little bit panicky. They had 650 people there. So the police, they all got arrested and charged with charges that could have netted them nearly 40 years in prison. So this is, this is late 2023. So she spends most of 2024 dealing with the legal, you know, her, her case.
- [19:02]
Host/Interviewer
And what happened.
- [19:03]
Jay Solomon
What happened in the end, they cut a plea agreement and they only served two months. I mean, they were charged with riot, all sorts of, you know, sabotage, all sorts of things.
- [19:15]
Host/Interviewer
Who was the, who was the prosecutor that allowed that? Was that one of these progressive prosecutor types?
- [19:20]
Jay Solomon
I'm not, I mean, the person who was, was a Republican DA in New Hampshire. I mean, people I've talked to said
- [19:27]
Host/Interviewer
New Jersey or New Hampshire.
- [19:28]
Jay Solomon
This is New Hampshire.
- [19:29]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, got it.
- [19:30]
Jay Solomon
Okay. Mirabach, New Hampshire. Yeah. He was criticized for going too much, like 40 years seemed like a lot. But then in the end, he cut a deal for just two months. And, you know, the terms were she, she, they had to help, you know, financially make Albert whole. I don't know how they did that because the damages were apparently a million bucks.
- [19:51]
Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [19:52]
Jay Solomon
And they also were supposed to not kind of carry on other actions against Albert.
- [19:57]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [19:57]
Host/Interviewer
And what do you know? Israel still exists, and it's also better than ever.
- [20:01]
Jay Solomon
Anyway, she's also still like, targeting elbit, even though she's not in the US Anymore. But, so she gets out after just two months, but she, you can tell she's not, you know, she hasn't been cowed at all. She's screaming Free Palestine at her sentencing hearings, other people of the Fergie Chambers network there and their kafiyas cheering her on, as are her parents. So she comes out after just two months, pretty much fully committed to the revolution.
- [20:27]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, so 2024 is a year where, you know, Carla Walsh is dealing with the consequences of her direct action.
- [20:39]
Jay Solomon
Correct.
- [20:40]
Host/Interviewer
What happens in 2025 now, when do the Iranians kind of say, wait a second, we've Got somebody here who looks like, well, 20.
- [20:47]
Jay Solomon
She gets out in early 2025 in prison.
- [20:49]
Host/Interviewer
Okay.
- [20:50]
Jay Solomon
She immediately kind of moves down to New York and was kind of hanging around the tenta stuff in Colombia.
- [20:58]
Host/Interviewer
Okay.
- [20:59]
Jay Solomon
She. She immediately galvanizes support behind Elias Rodriguez. He's the right.
- [21:07]
Host/Interviewer
Who is he?
- [21:07]
Jay Solomon
So she's on. She's online.
- [21:09]
Host/Interviewer
Who is, who is Elias Rodriguez?
- [21:12]
Jay Solomon
Elias Rodriguez is another activist. I think he was be briefly in the DSA. Briefly in the DSA. He murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in May of 2025 in Washington D.C. and a horrible crime. Terrible, terrible. And he was screaming pre Palestine after he got arrested. But she immediately mobilized as a kind of a free Elias Rodriguez operation online and calls for more. Yes, there should be.
- [21:44]
Host/Interviewer
We should have a whole network to break him out of jail, like.
- [21:48]
Eli Lake
Right. Yeah.
- [21:49]
Jay Solomon
She was thinking Asada Shakur type stuff. So she was. She's now gone full militancy. She's. She's moving towards Bader Meinhof. And then this is where we see her start moving into the Iranian axis. The US and Israel launched the 12 day war in June of 2025.
- [22:08]
Host/Interviewer
She did not like that.
- [22:10]
Jay Solomon
She did not. And she goes to Iran for the first time in 2020. In August of 2025.
- [22:16]
Host/Interviewer
Okay.
- [22:16]
Jay Solomon
And again, it's another one of these things that you don't. These are not kind of, you know, free media bananas is. I. You know, the Iranian intelligence services are very ingrained in everything they do there. Anyone who goes there is going to be cleared by the Ministry of Intelligence, their activities kind of coordinated. So she goes full, full Islamic Republic. She's. She takes part in. They take her to a IRGC kind of military weapons site, and in a Shador, she gets on stage and chants, death to America, Death to Israel. She's.
- [22:52]
Host/Interviewer
She's all in of 25.
- [22:55]
Jay Solomon
Correct.
- [22:56]
Host/Interviewer
Now, I, I mean, you may not know this, but it's. This is only a few months after Max Blumenthal does a similar kind of tour.
- [23:02]
Jay Solomon
By the way, these are similar.
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Host/Interviewer
He posts all these things similar also from military facilities on his, his, his propaganda site. Gray Zone.
- [23:12]
Jay Solomon
Yes. It's probably they went on the same tour.
- [23:14]
Host/Interviewer
They did.
- [23:15]
Jay Solomon
Maybe not at the same time.
- [23:17]
Host/Interviewer
Not the same time, but it was the same kind of tour. Right. This was for activists, so to speak. Right.
- [23:22]
Jay Solomon
Who will, who will propagate whatever line the regime wants.
- [23:26]
Eli Lake
Got it.
- [23:27]
Jay Solomon
Like, because she was basically, the line was, the Iranians won that war. The, The Western imperialists were about ready to fall.
- [23:35]
Eli Lake
Right.
- [23:35]
Jay Solomon
And it's from that point, from what I can tell she's. She basically has flown the coop. Yeah, she is not coming home anymore. She. After that August appearance in Iran, she then starts appearing in Lebanon. She. In October, she takes part in this. It was a conference in a hotel that was like owned by Hezbollah. And it was one of these conferences to memorialize the Palestinians who were in prison. And she's up there with, you know, people from pflp, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In some ways it was kind of her announcement that she had formally broke and was now, you know, kind of setting.
- [24:21]
Host/Interviewer
By way of background, we should say that sometime. I think in the 2000 teens, late 2000 teens, there was a new strategy that was adopted by the. They use the term resistance, the Palestinian terrorists called Unity of Fields, which meant that traditionally kind of Marxist secular groups like the Palestine Front for the or the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine merged and began coordinating with Hamas, which is a jihadist organization that really believes in restoring the ancient Islamic caliphate and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also Islamist, but they share a common goal which is the destruction of Israel. And they also include Kala Walsh, a former volunteer for Senator Ed Markey.
- [25:16]
Jay Solomon
It's the Red Green Alliance. It's interesting actually, she changed the name of Palestine Action Us at one point to Unity of Fields. That was its official title. So you're onto something. I think that kind of. She's, she writes about it a lot. She's like the Iranian Axis are the only ones really taking up arms against the, the Western Empire and the Zionists, which is why as a leftist she's thrown in her lot with, with the Axis of Resistance.
- [25:44]
Host/Interviewer
So you managed to kind of talk to talk to people who have interacted with her. Is that right? And you were able to get, get, you know, some insights into where it would like where she, what she's up to right now in Lebanon. Yeah, well, so what, I mean, what did she say? I mean what, what is she doing in Lebanon at this point?
- [26:01]
Jay Solomon
I mean it's interesting. She's kind of got. On the one hand she's got like a somewhat normal life for a 21 year old. She's like taking classes at the Lebanese American University. But she's. But her main job.
- [26:13]
Host/Interviewer
Aub American.
- [26:15]
Jay Solomon
No, Lau.
- [26:16]
Host/Interviewer
Those are two different schools.
- [26:16]
Eli Lake
Sorry.
- [26:17]
Host/Interviewer
Because that, that's a, that would be an, a bitter irony of given not
- [26:22]
Jay Solomon
AUB taking classes at Lau kind of enjoying, you know, the beauties of, of Lebanon and Beirut, but also like almost like a full time propagandist for Iranian state media and the broader axis of resistance. She's constantly on Press tv, which is the English language arm of Iranian state media, which is a sanctioned entity, you know, taking part in discussions about the glories of Qasem Soleimani and his brilliance as a commander going down to South Lebanon to sort of check out the war between Israel and Hezbollah and just constant like as she did for the Markey campaign, she is now doing for the Axis of Resistance. It's a constant deluge of, of social media postings. She's got a sub stack, virtually all of it promoting the line of, of Tehran and it's, and its proxies.
- [27:24]
Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [27:24]
Jay Solomon
So it's, yeah, it's kind of a, it's weird when people meet her, she says there seems to be a bit of a disconnect. She still comes across as kind of, kind of nice and wide eyed and in person and it's like, wow, where, where does this vitriol come from? And it's like unclear. Is it, is it just an act? Is she a sociopath? It's, it could be. It's kind of unclear, but she's still. There still seems to be a disconnect between kind of a sweet, you know, Cambridge teenager and a member of the Red Brigades or something.
- [27:55]
Host/Interviewer
Now I, I have, you know, we've been talking about your, your piece. I've been so excited by the way. Read it. It's amazing. It's, it's a real journey. Like, you know, pour yourself a, a good barolo and enjoy. But I wanted to kind of get a sense because I've also been kind of monitoring her, her ex feed and things like that. She, she hasn't really taken off and gone viral. I mean, what would you, would you say she's had much success as a propagandist, as somebody kind of in social media that would radicalize others at this point. What's, what is your assessment? Is she effective?
- [28:34]
Jay Solomon
You know, what's hard to tell is like sometimes you watch her and it's almost a bit comical the way she's like trying to accent Iran or kind of like the accent. And sometimes it almost looks like she's reading from a script. But at the same time it's like you, I think you and I and others were like shocked what happened after October 7th as far as the tentifadas and this kind of Gen Z support for the, for the axis of, for Hamas and the axis of resistance. So it does seem like she's speaking to a certain, you know, element of American society that as is dangerously close Maybe not going as militant as she is, but at least kind of siding with the, you know, whether it's, you know, know, the siding with the Iranians in this war or siding with Hamas in the, in the October 7th. She is speaking to an audience that I think is receptive to what she's says. And she is like, she's smart. I mean, she's, she knows how to use social media channels. And I, I'm kind of surprised. It's not just press tv. There's kind of an ecosystem of these far left podcasters where she's constantly showing up.
- [29:50]
Host/Interviewer
Did you get a, A, a sense of, about her family, her parents? Like, what do they make of all this?
- [29:57]
Jay Solomon
You know, I tried to talk to them. All I got in the end was like a statement saying they both loved, love Kala, but have serious differences politically with him. But, you know, the sense I got is that it was kind of, I mean, it's a really interesting family. Her father teaches English literature at Boston University and was sort of an acolyte. It was, he was an acolyte of Saul Bellow, the, the Nobel Prize winning novelist, and I would say, you know, a Jewish intellectual, Zionist. So. But she kind of grew up in this Cambridge environment of the universities there. Progressivism, radical chic. Radical chic. So, you know, I got the sense that her parents kind of were
- [30:45]
Bettina Rolle
her,
- [30:46]
Jay Solomon
her political elevation or influence. It seemed to sort of galvanize them in some ways. I mean, when she was in the, facing prison terms, they were up there supporting her at the trial. And, and I've heard her speaking in podcasts from Lebanon where she's still kind of talking to her siblings back in Cambridge about the, the glories of the axis of resistance. So it doesn't seem like they've severed ties with her, even though they, they must know at some point, at some level now that she's in deep, deep trouble. So, yeah, I think she kind of grew up in that, a family of literati and books and progressive ideas, but a lot of people do. So, like, it still doesn't totally explain the militancy and part of it just might be unique to her DNA and her need to sort of have relevance.
- [31:37]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, all right, this is very useful. Now let's kind of maybe try to put this in some historical perspective at breaking history. As you know, we did, we've done episodes on both Weather Underground and the Baader Meinhof group, and particularly Ulrika Meinhof. Now, Ulrike Meinhof is an interesting case. It's not quite parallel to Kalawals because she, I would say, broke rad, so to speak, kind of in midlife. She had a successful career as a left wing journalist, but she was part of mainstream West German society. She had been doing journalism about the radicals of 68 and then she decided to sort of join a sect of them and help break out the leader, Andres Bader. And at that point she devoted her life to the revolution. And she was willing to give up her daughters to a Palestinian orphanage. She was willing to put herself in great danger. She was willing to turn on one of her comrades who had questioned some of the embrace of violence. And she was willing to bomb innocent people in Germany in order to bring out a socialist revolution. Do you see it parallel in some ways? I mean, the difference is that Kala Walsh did this, I mean, started her process when she was in high school, but nonetheless kind of ended up in the same way. Do you think there's a similar psychology there?
- [33:19]
Jay Solomon
I do. I think like you said, it's, it's younger and it's faster in some ways. But it does seem like she's just on this continuing kind of ladder of radicalization. And one thing that's interesting is like first she ditches the democrats. They're, they're, you know, then she ditches the dsa. She just keeps it going up on this level of purity. Like I think that might be some of the similarities with Ulrica Minoff. She just. No, no one seems pure enough for Kalawalsh. She's been blasting Zorab Mandani and Jamal Bowman in. In recent weeks as being sort of COVID Zionist agents because they're participating in the corrupt u. S Political system. It, it just feels like she's going up on this level where nothing like outside of complete revolution and a dismantling of the system will be good enough for her. So if that's your worldview, how do you come down from that and how do you kind of integrate back into society? Because that's one of the things I was wondering, like is there an off ramp for her? Can she still be kind of saved? And a lot of the counter terror experts I talked to said they were worried. It's kind of like she's gone too far. Like she's like totally brainwashed. So I think that's a similarity. Mhof got to a moment.
- [34:42]
Host/Interviewer
Do you think by the way, that there's a method to the madness? Is there a logic to it? Which is to say if I was to devil's advocate this or steel man her position that America is too complacent, that the Democratic Party is not progressive enough. And by living as an example of a kind of pure radicalism, I'm moving the Overton window. That was an argument, by the way, for some of the black militancy of Stokely Carmichael after Malcolm X as compared to Martin Luther King. I mean, I'm not agreeing with it. I'm just saying could you see that as being a kind of maybe non crazy reason that would drive her to this radicalism?
- [35:26]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, I think, I think you called it. She says that it's like, you can't be in the system. You have to, you have to break the system. So I think, I think that's a, that's a good point. I mean, one of the, one of her role models is Assada Shakur, as who is Tupac's godmother. Correct.
- [35:48]
Host/Interviewer
By the way, also in addition to being Tupac's godmother, somebody who was involved in a deadly shooting of a New Jersey state trooper and who escaped, I guess, was, was she escaped from prison or did she.
- [36:03]
Jay Solomon
Her comrades sprung.
- [36:05]
Host/Interviewer
Sprung from prison and, and, and, and, and escaped to Cuba where she spent
- [36:11]
Eli Lake
the rest of her days.
- [36:12]
Jay Solomon
Correct. And Keller Walsh sees her as one of her models. I don't know if she ever met Assada Shakur when she was in Cuba. It's possible. But when I keep thinking like, what you said, I. She does in some of her appearances, talks about, you know, why aren't we springing our comrades? Why isn't there an effort? So when you think of what she might do next, you know, you can see what's kind of, kind of in her head in this millen titsy, it's. She does talk about we need to spring our comrades. We need to, you know, up our, our active, active measures. So I think you're right. Like, there, there is a method to her madness, if you want to see it, which is that our system is irredeemable and she needs to break it.
- [36:56]
Host/Interviewer
Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to get into is. And by the way, I just want to back on Assata Shakur for just a second. Assata Shakur was valorized by the Black Lives Matter movement. So in the late 20 teens, that was a common phrase. You know, I learned it from Assata or something like that. Like, so it's not surprising that a young and impressionable high school student would be in the middle of that and say, oh, I want to be like Assata Shakur. Look, you know, all the Black Lives Matter loves them And I want to learn about her. And, you know, that there is a certain. It makes a bit. It makes a sort of warped sense in a way. The other question I kind of want to add is maybe is there something to. Let's call it the radical mindset. So she starts off and she believes that the world is going to end because of climate change. That's her first cause.
- [37:52]
Jay Solomon
Yeah.
- [37:54]
Host/Interviewer
And it's. Once you kind of commit to believing in a kind of a. Let's call it an apocalyptic vision of things, it's very easy then to take up other kind of radical causes that seek to destroy an order that you think has been corrupted and is evil. I mean, is there something to that,
- [38:13]
Jay Solomon
which is that she talks about that when she's even like 15, she talks about how, you know, climate change is gonna. I'm gonna have no life because we're all gonna, you know, die because of climate change. And she's even at 15, she's already talking about intersectionality. You know, if essentially, if you're, if you're on the climate change vanguard, you have to support Palestine, you have to support Black Lives Matter, you have to support defunding the police. So you're right. She's. She's got that. You could see that worldview, that maximalist position when she's even 15 or 16. And like you said, it pretty easily transcends to if we don't free Palestine, you know, the rest of the world will go up in, in flames. It's. It's all of a kind of similar mindset. I think you're right on that.
- [39:06]
Host/Interviewer
So at this point, who do you think she's trying to reach out? Who do you think is she? Who does she want to hear her message? She doesn't want. She knows you and me will, you know, think she's nuts. But, like, who does she trying to communicate to or persuade?
- [39:23]
Jay Solomon
I mean, I think she's trying to persuade probably her, her Gen Z generation. I think that's kind of how she came about. You know, she. She was kind of lionized because she had this ability in, in 2020 to mobilize people of her age or, or older, kind of that Gen Z behind Marky, which was kind of pretty kind of amazing if you think about it. Markie was kind of in his late 70s, and this young Kennedy in his late 30s is running for Senate. You think it'd be a lock in, in Massachusetts. And she helped flip the sw. The script. So, yeah, I think, I think the Iranians and the Cubans and These other groups, look, why they're attracted to her is that she's. She's young and does seem to have a track record of speaking, you know, conveying a message to people in her generation. And whether it's climate change or the glories of the Islamic Republic, I think that's who she's speaking to, and I think that's why her patrons seem to want to have her engaged.
- [40:22]
Host/Interviewer
Now, there is something funny in the tragedy of Callowash, which is that her timing is miserable. What I mean to say is that, you know, if she had been born 20 years earlier and went through this process, she could have actually lived to
- [40:40]
Eli Lake
see,
- [40:42]
Host/Interviewer
you know, the inception and fruition of Qasem Soleimani's network of the Middle Eastern axis of resistance. She could have seen how Hezbollah went from a militia in southern Lebanon to effectively the most powerful gang in the state and had taken it over from the inside. She could have lived to have seen the rise of the Houthis, the, you know, a series of things that would give her a sense of historical momentum. She's coming at what appears to be at the end of the party, you know what I'm saying? I mean, like, she decides to sort of, you know, go to Iran after Midnight Hammer, and now she's in Lebanon working for Iranian propaganda.
- [41:30]
Jay Solomon
And she went back to Iran last month.
- [41:31]
Host/Interviewer
Okay, she goes back to Iran last month. So. And then, you know, and she is. Gets to be kind of bear witness to the decapitation of the Islamic Republic, the decapitation of Hezbollah, and the military victory of Israel and the United States. We'll see what happens in the war. But in terms of this project she's got, she's picked the loser, it seems, right? I mean, what is she aware of, like, how the Islamic revolution is. Looks like it might be finally coming to its blessed end, or does she think the Iranians are going to win? I mean, where do you get a sense of that with her?
- [42:16]
Jay Solomon
She. She thinks Iranians are going to win. She's totally blinkered. I mean, on this podcast she did last weekend, it was. This is. This is the momentous. This is the Suez. She didn't say it, but this is a Suez Canal moment for the. For the US they're going to get bogged down in Iran. This is a moment that's going to regalvanize the axis of resistance in the left. So she's. She's totally.
- [42:39]
Host/Interviewer
Assad is in Moscow playing video games. She knows that, you know, Yaya Sinwar is dead. She knows his brother's dead. She knows that Nasral is dead. She knows Khamenei is dead. He knows that all these people have been killed and the Israelis have not really suffered a military scratch. And the United States certainly has not really suffered a military scratch. And that Iran isolated, I mean, even Qatar now is expelling Iranian spies and commanders. I mean, too little, too late. But like, okay, fine, like, Iran is in every respect isolated. If you look at the vision of the late General Qasem Soleimani, and yet she still thinks she, you know, she won't stop believing in the words of Journey,
- [43:27]
Jay Solomon
she's all in. I mean, some of her reportage from, from February, I mean, it was basically just to cover up the massacring of thousands of Iranians.
- [43:37]
Host/Interviewer
What did she say about the Iranian, the massacres of the Iranians and January?
- [43:41]
Jay Solomon
She said it was a CIA Mossad operation that took peaceful protest and turned it into riots that got, you know, people killed and that the, the Islamic Republic, as the rightful voice of the people, put it down. I mean, she was making, that's an example of how the regime likes to use her. She, she'd feed that message back. And it did gain some traction in the West, I'd have to say. But yeah, she just, she doesn't, she doesn't see it. She's. I think she's too far gone.
- [44:10]
Host/Interviewer
All right, now you. We talked earlier about off ramps for her. Does she have a way out? Is there, is there some way for Kyla Walsh to maybe come back to sanity? And maybe one way is the defeat
- [44:26]
Eli Lake
of her new patrons.
- [44:28]
Host/Interviewer
You think, like, if there's a color revolution in Iran, do you think that, that maybe that would cause, cause her to think perhaps my theory of the case is wrong? Or do you think that she'll just find another radical cause? She'll go to China or, you know, she'll, she'll, she'll, she'll start agitating for the, against the territorial integrity of Taiwan. I don't know. You know, I'm just throwing it out there, like, what's left?
- [44:51]
Jay Solomon
Yeah, I don't think she's given up the cause. She'll, she's. What happens, she's gonna fight on. And that's kind of one of the sad things about this. Just, she's still only 21 and, like, what whole life? And it's like, what, she comes back here? I'm pretty sure she'd be arrested at this date.
- [45:07]
Eli Lake
Okay.
- [45:08]
Jay Solomon
She, like, material support for terrorist designated organizations.
- [45:12]
Host/Interviewer
The Lebanese government now has said Hezbollah is a criminal organization. They have expelled the Iranian ambassador. I mean, these are big changes. I'm what I'm trying to get at, you know.
- [45:23]
Jay Solomon
Yeah.
- [45:24]
Host/Interviewer
They are even talking about having face to face discussions with the Israelis, possibly leading to mutual recognition. I'm not holding my breath. But she must be aware of these things. She's an activist. This is her, this is her vibe.
- [45:37]
Eli Lake
Right?
- [45:37]
Host/Interviewer
I mean, like, none of that's penetrating. None of that's like, wait, maybe, maybe I, maybe I picked the wrong horse.
- [45:43]
Jay Solomon
None of it's penetrating.
- [45:44]
Host/Interviewer
Wow.
- [45:44]
Jay Solomon
None of it. She's, she's. She sees victory. She sees victory as in within, within reach.
- [45:51]
Host/Interviewer
I wonder if this conflagration, this long overdue because we've studied this conflict. I mean, this is a near 50 year war in many ways going back to the Islamic Revolution. 79. It happens to coincide with the full introduction of AI and the ability to kind of create very believable videos. We're seeing Iran, by the way, doing this on the propaganda sphere. And I'm wondering if she just chooses to like live in an AI world where Iran is not defeated.
- [46:27]
Jay Solomon
I mean, to her credit, she goes out there. I mean, she's not just in front of the screen all day long. She's in south Lebanon, she's in Tehran. Like, I still don't know how she's getting from Beirut. I've seen pictures of her in like trucks with. They look like to be Hezbollah people, like leaving Beirut to go to, to Iran. I don't know if they're flying part of the way, but yeah, you can't say she's kind of lost in a. On her computer screen, she's going, she's going out there. But it's like she just seems to be so kind of blinkered by what she's read and what she's. The people that she's been around that she's blind to everything else.
- [47:07]
Host/Interviewer
Right. Is she aware that her father's mentor, Saul Bellow, was like a super muscular Zionist?
- [47:14]
Jay Solomon
That's where I really wanted to talk to the father. I was trying to understand the connection. I wonder if she ever met him.
- [47:23]
Host/Interviewer
That is a good question. Do you think I want to kind of switch from her to Neville Singham and that network? Do you think they've been effective? I mean, they have this breakthrough news. They have other activist groups. They're now kind of on the radar of kind of young activists of the right. I mean, I saw some pretty fascinating video of like a group of them kind of going and picking up all These signs and then making it look like an organic protest. It was very extraordinary. I forget. I forget who did it, but I should credit him, but he was. It was really good stuff. But do you think at this point enough people have sort of noticed the network that Singham's money is funding and that, you know, they might now soon be targets or what do you say to that?
- [48:16]
Jay Solomon
I do think their network is now being identified. I think even, you know, when 10, 7 happened, you have all these groups and names and those, like, really hard to understand who was behind what, who was funding what. I do think, you know, Congress is investigating, the US Government's investigating. There was a good long series on, in. On Fox Digital by Azer Nomani recently about just really identifying which.
- [48:42]
Host/Interviewer
Oh, I saw that. That was great.
- [48:43]
Eli Lake
She's terrific.
- [48:44]
Jay Solomon
It. Yeah. So I do think, like, what's incredibly nebulous and hard to follow is now becoming more clear. So I, I do think, but that, you know, they're, they're fueling stuff that wants to be fueled. So if the, if they're, you know, indicted or whatever, does someone else fill the void? It's totally possible, but I do think it was so chaotic in the last few years that they were able to do things and people weren't able to connect the dots. And those dots are now being connected.
- [49:13]
Host/Interviewer
You think she wants to be a martyr?
- [49:17]
Jay Solomon
I mean, I do think that's the risk. It's like she's. She's disavowing everyone around her as not pure enough or not devoted enough to the cause. Whether it's, you know, Zoran Mamdani or Jamal Bowman. What does that leave you? Often, certainly these, whether it was Ulrica Meinhof, they all ended up.
- [49:40]
Host/Interviewer
Her tale is particularly tragic. She becomes estranged from her daughter. And the kind of cosmic revenge of her daughter, Bettina Rolle, is that she becomes like a German neoconservative and exposes her mother's ties to, to East Germany during the Cold War as a, as an adult journalist, you know, which I find somewhat appropriate. But in a lot of other cases of bourgeois radicals in America at least, there was a second act for Bill Ayers and Bernadine Horn. And many of the Weather Underground became college professors. The universities welcomed them. Could you see Kala Walsh going to graduate school, getting a degree in post colonial feminist studies or whatever she wants to study or whatever. And then, you know, like, Bernadine Dorn getting a job at Northwestern. You know, Bernadine Dorn's at the end of her life right now. But Bernadine Dorn, in her early 20s, sounded a lot like Kala Walsh today. She too went to Cuba. She returned from Cuba with a. I think it was like an amulet or something that was like crafted from a US fighter jet that was shot down in Vietnam that she met like Viet Cong. People gave this to her.
- [51:07]
Jay Solomon
Did she do ever any jail time? I forget, did she ever have to pay the pipe?
- [51:11]
Host/Interviewer
She spent a couple years in jail in New York. But then they, because of this is another irony of our recent history is that because the FBI violated its own policies and US Law and spied on them without a warrant, they dropped the charges, basically. And in his memoir called Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers writes, I don't know, something like scot free out of jail is ain't America great country. Like, it's sort of like they beat the system. In part because the FBI was out of control after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. J. Edgar Hoover, I would say that FBI was also out of control. And eventually because of the reforms introduced under, starting with really Gerald Ford, but then Jimmy Carter and you know, reforms of the Justice Department, they were able to uncover these abuses and that, you know, who was the main target of the FBI in the 70s was the weather Underground. And they ended up being, you know, pretty much escaping jail. Now some of them joined other radical groups and then they did spend the
- [52:20]
Eli Lake
rest of their life in jail.
- [52:21]
Host/Interviewer
You know, like that is the Nyack, New York Brinks truck robbery. And Chesa Boudin was raised by Hares and Dorne. And then he was briefly, of all things, the District Attorney of San Francisco, though he was recalled. But my point is that for that generation of the 68 generation in America, a lot of them did have a second act where they did have an exit ramp. And some of them even went so far as to recant their radicalism of that era. They thought it was wrong,
- [53:01]
Jay Solomon
but it. Yeah, I mean, I still think there'd have to be a pretty extensive process for her to be de. Radicalized.
- [53:08]
Host/Interviewer
Sure.
- [53:09]
Jay Solomon
And I do think she still has to pay the like. I, I don't know how she's not in violation of her plea agreement to get only two months. She was supposed to desist from agitating against elbit systems. She's clearly not doing that. And then she's, you know, working with sanctioned Iranian state media companies. It feels like she's get at. She's gonna have to pay the piper some extent. But yeah, I, you know, she's only 21 and clearly smart. You hope that There is some way back from the cliff because the other, you know, she's running around south Lebanon in Iran and Iran sort of not too far from Israeli and American bombers and jet pilots. You do, you know, you asked does she want to be martyred? She's certainly taking major risks where she's running around these days.
- [53:54]
Eli Lake
Yeah, especially now when beloved family patriarch
- [53:59]
Jay Solomon
Gary Ferris went missing. His family looked everywhere on their property
- [54:03]
Eli Lake
until they came across something horrifying.
- [54:06]
Jay Solomon
It's a homicide.
- [54:07]
Bruce Hoffman
Absolutely.
- [54:08]
Jay Solomon
The blame game in this family went round and round.
- [54:12]
Eli Lake
This is Blood is the Ferris Wheel.
- [54:15]
Bruce Hoffman
I would don't see how anyone can look at this story and think they were happy.
- [54:19]
Eli Lake
Follow and listen to Blood is Thicker, the Ferris wheel on the Free Odyssey
- [54:23]
Jay Solomon
app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [54:29]
Eli Lake
Kyla Walsh is not the first alleged terrorist to have middle class beginnings. It's a phenomenon I'm calling Breaking Rad. When a well off winner throws their life away for the thrill of political violence. More than 50 years ago, a West German columnist, Ulrike Meinhof, abandoned her family and her social status to pursue socialist revolution, Meinhof was celebrated. She became a celebrity.
- [54:57]
Jay Solomon
Marianne Faithful.
- [55:04]
Eli Lake
We are now listening to Marianne Faithfull a 60s icon who famously ran away from a convent school to follow the road. Rolling Stones on tour, date Mick Jagger and embrace sex, drugs and rock and roll. Here she is on Saturday Night Live singing a song she had dedicated to Eureka. Meinhoff. And this is far from Meinhoff's only artistic tribute. Her portrait hangs in the permanent collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The Clash's frontman, Joe Strummer, often wore a T shirt with the insignia of of Meinhof's terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. At one point, a celebrated fashion label even released a collection under the title Prada. Meinhof. Meinhof was a leader of the Red Army Faction. The terror cell was young, radical and famous, everything that the modern rock star was desperate to be. But Meinhof was no marginalized, destitute victim of the system. In fact, like many of the pop radicals of the punk era, the she was bourgeois intellectual and fashionable. Unlike Marion Faithfull, Meinhof's radicalism went further than heroin and synthesizers. Instead, the young German was bombing army bases, breaking psychopaths out of jail and plotting murders before breaking. Rad Ulrike Meinhof was a powerful journalist. She was part of a respectable left, writing significant columns and debating politics on television news. But at some point she flipped, turning into the most notorious terrorist in West German history. And the impact of this transformation can still be felt. Meinhof's own daughter, Bettina Rolle, has spent decades struggling with the legacy of her mother's terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. And she spoke to us.
- [56:55]
Bettina Rolle
They infiltrated entire generations with these ideas. At the time, they were actually only circulating in small groups. But these ideas that the state is bad, that capitalism is bad, that the rich are bad in general, and that we should be allowed to murder in order to turn society upside down have actually become incredibly strong today. These very radical ideas from back then have actually reappeared time and again in the decades since then.
- [57:25]
Eli Lake
Red
- [57:27]
Host/Interviewer
Army
- [57:29]
Eli Lake
I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to Breaking History. After the break. What drives a glamorous intellectual with all the right connections to put down her pen and pick up a gun? Coming up next, middle class kings. This is war. Rest our ho.
- [57:54]
Jay Solomon
Virtual Germany. We take the country back. Workers in the rin land refuse to pay your tax. Spit on pigs who say that they're hot.
- [58:06]
Host/Interviewer
Bust up all the windows in the shop.
- [58:11]
Bruce Hoffman
The world moves fast.
- [58:13]
Jay Solomon
Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint
- [58:25]
Bruce Hoffman
and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and
- [58:31]
Jay Solomon
summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot.
- [58:44]
Eli Lake
ULRIKE Meinhof's story begins in Oldenburg. She was born in 1934 into a world of trauma and doom. Nazi Germany. Her aunt was forced to wear the yellow star that marked her out as a Jew. Persecution, madness and total war engulfed Meinhof's childhood. She was 11 years old when Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Life inside the family home was no more secure. Her father died when she was six, her mother when she was 16. Leaving Meinhof and her sister in the care of a friend who rented a room in the family house. Before she graduated from high school, Meinhof's home was a tomb and her country a crime scene. She spent her adolescence orphaned not only from her dead parents, but also a generation of Germans who had chosen to support or stay silent as the death machine of the Third Reich engulfed Europe. She was clever and intellectually ambitious. At university, she made a name for herself as a left wing firebrand involved with the anti nuclear movement. Meinhof's country was divided. West Germany, where she lived, was economically reborn by American money pumped into the devastated nation to protect against the spread of communism. East Germany was trapped behind the iron Curtain, a colony of the evil Soviet empire. When she was 24, Weinhof met Klaus Reiner Rohl, who became her editor and publisher. They fell in love and became a glamorous couple in Hamburg. They had twin daughters, owned a lavish villa and hosted great parties with leading artists, writers and thinkers. A frequent guest of theirs was Martin Niemoller, the author of a totemic poem about solidarity in the face of fascism in Germany.
- [60:30]
Bettina Rolle
They came first for the communists and
- [60:33]
Eli Lake
I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and by that time nobody was left to speak up. Meinhof and Rolle agreed with this sentiment. They would never again allow fascism to creep into Germany. Together the couple ran a cutting edge journal called Konkret. It blended high end cultural coverage with left wing politics and at least it was initially funded by the East German Stasi. It ran nude photos and refused to capitalize proper names and places. You see everything in concrete was radical, including its grammar.
- [61:24]
Bettina Rolle
It was a scene of intellectuals. She was around a lot of publishers.
- [61:29]
Eli Lake
This is Karen Bauer, a German studies professor at McGill University and the editor of a collection of Meinhof's writings. Everybody talks about the weather, we don't.
- [61:39]
Bettina Rolle
They had this place in where they stayed, spent the summer in Sylt. So there was a lot of connections, a lot of journalists. Most of them were middle class bourgeois. Some of them they were intellectual, they were professionals. So that was her life and that was her family.
- [62:01]
Eli Lake
The scene was known locally as the Hamburg Party Republic. The crowd embraced a radical chic and Meinhof was a figurehead in this world. As Konkret's star columnist in the 1960s, German progressives would see themselves reflected in her righteous and strident columns. She wanted reconciliation between America and the Soviet Union. She pressed for disarmament and nuclear non proliferation. She wrote early and often about senior Nazi officials that had managed to get important positions in the West German government. And she despised the Vietnam War and her country's tacit support of it. To Meinhof and many of her readers, America's war in Indochina was no better than the Nazi conquest of Europe. At the same time, Meinhof was never really happy. She suffered from debilitating headaches so severe that she underwent brain surgery to have a benign tumor removed. And then in 1967, her life began to unravel. Meinhof discovered her husband Klaus was having an affair. After catching them in the act, she packed up the twins, Regina and Bettina, and moved to an apartment in Berlin. Her life in Hamburg was over.
- [63:16]
Bettina Rolle
I don't think that played a role necessarily on her radicalization per se.
- [63:22]
Eli Lake
This is Karen Bauer again, but it
- [63:24]
Bettina Rolle
certainly played a role in mat her leave that scene and go to Berlin. And that was a definite change. But she had been unhappy with the whole scene, finding kind of hypocrisy in that scene of liberals.
- [63:42]
Eli Lake
Ulrike was isolated in her new city. Her personal letters expressed despair and solitude. One correspondent remembered how she was depressed and blamed everything on capitalism. And now this feeling was reflected by her surroundings. Her new city was on the verge of rebellion. 1967 was a time of upheaval across the West. There was anger in the air. The energy of Berlin transformed Meinhof forever. She was a 33 year old mother of two, but the new friends she made in the capital were younger and wilder. There was Gudrun ainslin, an attractive PhD student who had briefly studied in the States and appeared in experimental political films. And there was also her lover, Andras Botter. Botter was a charismatic sociopath. He had moved from Munich to escape the law and had a fondness for drugs and guns, not necessarily in that order. Einsling and Bader were part of a radical collective called Commune 1. They squatted in abandoned buildings and protested for socialist causes. They were younger than Meinhof and didn't care much for the intellectual nuance of proper Marxist dialectic. No, they were in love with the idea of praxis, the act of putting theories of revolution into practice. Compared to them, Meinhof felt like a punishment. Perhaps she felt a little like Marion Faithfull or Joe Strummer did when they looked at Meinhof's own direct political action. A Decade later, in 1967, the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, came to Berlin on a state Visit. Meinhof, Commune 1 and the student movement all saw him as a brutal tyrant who starved his subjects. While his court lived in lavish style, huge protests were staged. During one of these, a terrible error was made by the Berlin police, allowing pro Shah demonstrators to clash with the protesters.
- [65:33]
Jay Solomon
When the Shah goes to watch Mozart's Magic Flute at the Deutsche Ope that evening, he's once again welcomed by protesters. The police are ordered to disperse the protesters, giving their truncheons free rein. Around 8:30pm A shot is fired. Detective Sergeant Karl Heinz Kuhl shoots a student at close range. The young man's name is Benno Ornezork. All attempts to save him fail and Onezork dies.
- [65:59]
Eli Lake
The same night, the slain demonstrator, Benno Onozorg, became a martyr for the new left and radicalized the demonstrators of West Germany. Meinhof herself was inspired to produce a short documentary that claimed that, like its political ally Iran, West Germany was itself a police state. Her friend Gudrun Enslin agreed, telling fellow activists at a meeting after one Zurg's
- [66:24]
F
death, they're going to kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're dealing with. It's the Auschwitz generation we're dealing with. And you can't discuss anything with people who created the Auschwitz they're armed and we're not. We have to get armed too. They're going to kill us all.
- [66:45]
Eli Lake
In 1968, Berlin was beset by mass demonstrations, like many of the major cities in Europe and America were. On April 2nd that year, Anders Bader and Gudrun Iceland turned up the volume, claiming responsibility for setting a department store ablaze in Frankfurt. They turned their subsequent trial into a spectacle, smoking cigars, hurling vulgar epithets at the judge. They were courting public attention, arguing that the department store fires were a political act intended to stir the people out of their apathy and see the horror of the Vietnam War for what it was.
- [67:21]
Bruce Hoffman
If you're talking about protest or terrorism, the goal is the same. It's to create drama, and by creating drama, to attract attention to the cause and perhaps the organization behind it, to build an even more expansive support base.
- [67:37]
Eli Lake
This is Bruce Hoffman, one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
- [67:43]
Bruce Hoffman
So historically, especially in the late 1960s, 1970s, this is exactly what happened in many Western European countries, particularly in West Germany, Italy, to a lesser extent France and Belgium, but also in the United States, with student protest movements that provided the seedbed for more radical and indeed more violent offshoots. It was all about Vietnam. And it was the fact that the United States maintained army and air bases in West Germany that the B52s that were bombing North Vietnam often stopped in Wiesbaden at a U.S. air Force base that was part of NATO, the NATO deployment for refueling before heading to southeast Asia.
- [68:26]
Eli Lake
By 1970, Meinhof's life was being swallowed by her politics. Her friends Einstein and Baader were now fugitives, on the run following the arson attacks. Meinhof allowed them to hide in the apartment she shared with her two daughters. It became a hub for revolutionary political action. Imagine the scene. A radical journalist living with her twins and two hardened criminals as their associates set up a safe house to forge documents and plot heists. Here is how Bettina Rolle, the daughter of Meinhof described living in an apartment taken over by terrorists.
- [69:04]
Bettina Rolle
When Anslin and Baadia lived with us, they were already taking heroin and LSD trips. Of course I didn't know that at the time, but that was a different orbit, you know. And I was there, as I described it in my book, because our apartment was a conspiratorial apartment where the group talked about the revolution all night long. So I didn't understand anything at the time, but I think I was the only one in that group, the only one of those 20 or 30 people who didn't later become a terrorist. Of course, I was like a little eyewitness and observed it.
- [69:38]
Eli Lake
Eventually Anders Bader was busted, pulled over for driving without a license and sent back to jail. This was the first domino in a chain of events that would lead to the reign of Marxist terror in Germany. Bader's old comrades in Meinhof's apartment began planning the first operation of what would become the Red army faction. It was May 14, 1970. The plan to free Andrus Bader relied on Ulrike Meinhof's national reputation as a political journalist. But it would be the last time she would be able to play this card. Meinhof applied to meet with Boader to interview him for a book. Permission was granted and Bader was transported to the Central Institute for Social Questions at Berlin's Free University. There was no book project. The meeting was a ruse. When Bader arrived, he sat beside Meinhof at a desk as a pair of guards watched from a distance. Suddenly, two commandos burst in, dressed in wigs and ski masks, armed with handguns and tear gas. This wasn't an interview, it was a jailbreak. The getaway driver that day, Astrid Prohl, explains here why what happened next.
- [70:50]
Bettina Rolle
I think we were all very nervous. I remember some people throwing up because we weren't so wonderful criminals or we weren't so wonderful with the, you know, with guns. We sort of involved the so called criminal who could do it so much better than we and who was, you know. And he was so nervous that he shot somebody. He did, but he shot him very, very badly. And that was really, really, really bad for the whole start of it.
- [71:22]
Eli Lake
In this moment of unexpected violence, Meinhof made the most important decision of her life. The original Plan had been for her to sit still and act surprised, as though she was only there to do the interview. That way she could have held onto her life, looked after her children and enjoyed the best of both worlds. Radical politics with a boy bourgeois salary. But something had snapped and she wasn't going back to a normal life. So as Botter and the other terrorists climbed out of a first floor window, Meinhof decided to follow. They all sprinted to an Alfa Romeo parked across the street. At that moment, Meinhof chose to abandon society and go underground. In 1968, in one of her more enduring essays, Ulrike Meinhoff wrote.
- [72:04]
F
Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like.
- [72:12]
Eli Lake
That day at the Institute, Ulrike Meinhof was through with protest and was on a doomed path to try to put an end to all that she disliked. This is the first official communication from the Red army faction.
- [72:26]
F
Did the pigs really believe that we would let Comrade Bottus sit in jail for two or three years? Did any pig believe that we would talk about the development of class struggle, the reorganization of the proletariat without arming ourselves at the same time? Did the pigs who shot first believe that we would allow ourselves, without violence, to be shot off like slaughter cattle? Whoever does not defend himself will die. Start the armed resistance. Build up the Red Army.
- [73:03]
Eli Lake
The terrorist group was born and Ulrike Meinhof was at its heart. She entered a world of stolen identity papers, safe houses and shootouts. Her face was plastered on wanted posters throughout the country. The army was sent to the border crossings. She dyed and cut her hair, picked up her daughters in West Berlin and escaped to the east where she left the twins in the care of her comrades.
- [73:25]
Bettina Rolle
We weren't feeling so on the day of the so called Bada liberation, which is actually a prison break, liberation always sounds like. Well, on the same day my sister and I were taken to Bremen by the people in the group and then to Sicily.
- [73:40]
Eli Lake
Here is Ulrike Meinhof's daughter Bettina. Roll again on what it was like to be vanished.
- [73:46]
Bettina Rolle
And we were already wanted by Interpol, by my father. That's why we had to cross the green border. But we didn't know that this was a kidnapping or abduction. We didn't know that and we were full of confidence that my mother would come and pick us up. So of course we had no idea that we wouldn't see her again until two or three years later.
- [74:07]
Eli Lake
Eventually Bettina and her sister Regina were taken to A hippie commune in Sicily where they lived in deprivation.
- [74:13]
Bettina Rolle
We spent four months in Sicily, which is a very long time for children. Would someone else come? My father or my mother? What would happen next? And a barrack camp like that isn't by the sea either. So it's not like you go to the beach every day and go on vacation. But it's a dreary thing because there were no windows, there was no running water, there were no kitchens. In other words, there was no Italian happy life.
- [74:40]
Eli Lake
Meyenhof was a fugitive, just like Bader and Enslin. The newly formed Red Army Faction had to get out of West Germany. So they traveled to a training camp for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, in the Jordanian desert. In 1970, the PFLP plotted bombings and assassinations against Israel and its allies abroad. The Red Army Faction wanted to learn from these Palestinians how to be urban guerrillas. But perhaps predictably, there was a culture clash. The PFLP was a seriously organized squadron of Arab Muslim men, while the Red Army Faction was a fruit salad of drug using artist radicals. It was like the premise of an ambitious sitcom. The RAF demanded barracks for both the men and women to share. At one point, the Red Army Faction trainees decided to sunbathe on the roof of their living quarters, scandalizing the pious terrorists who shared the facility. According to Stefan Oust, a a former colleague of Meinhof's at Konkret and the author of one of the best histories of the Red Army Faction, Meinhof asked the PFLP if she could send her daughters to a Palestinian camp for girls where they would be trained as urban guerrillas as well. They told her that they would be happy to take them in, but that she would never get to see them again. Her twins were only seven years old, but Ulrika agreed to the terms. But Bettina and her sister Regina were saved by Meinhof's former colleague Stefan Oust. Here's an excerpt from his book, the Bader Meinhof Complex.
- [76:16]
Jay Solomon
We found out where the children were, made contact with the people looking after them, gave the password, and I then flew to Sicily to receive them there, claiming to be the group's accredited emissary. Our operation was successful, and when Barda's real envoy and his women companions turned up near Mount Etna to take the girls away to the Jordanian camp, the
- [76:41]
Eli Lake
birds had flown for this act of kindness. Oust was marked for assassination by his former comrades. Thankfully, the attempt on his life failed. When Meinhof, Bader and Insulin returned to Germany, they began robbing banks and placing bombs. Meinhof was never very good at this sort of thing, though during one robbery she left stacks of cash behind. Her real talent wasn't robbery, it was in writing. And she drafted the first Red Army Faction communiques. These include a long essay on the principles of urban guerrilla warfare and a tribute to Black September, the terrorist cell responsible for the massacre of Israeli wrestlers at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In this period, the terrorists were treated by some as folk heroes. Journalists couldn't get enough of this story. One of their own, Ulrike Meinhof, going underground and her fame would grow. A 1971 poll found that one in four Germans under 30 years old expressed sympathy for the Red Army Faction. Five percent of all Germans said they would harbor an RAF fugitive. The apex mountain for the Red army faction was May 1972. In a few short weeks, the they pulled off a series of bombings at a US military base in Frankfurt, an Axel Springer publishing house in Hamburg, and a US military intelligence station in Heidelberg. Four US soldiers were killed, scores more were injured. The public, who had previously been sympathetic to the cause of the raf, began to turn. It was one thing to rob banks and get into shootouts with the cops, but now it was clear that these revolutionaries were murderous. In one botched plan, they injured the wife of a federal judge who was driving the car they had rigged with a bomb. In June 1972, the West German National Police received a tip from a teacher who had agreed to harbor Meinhof, unaware of who she was. And when the police arrived, she was gaunt, ill and had little luggage. Meinhof was taken straight to prison. More raids that month nabbed Bader and Enslin. The entire leadership of the the Red Army Faction were imprisoned. For the next nine months, Ulrike Meinhof would be confined to an isolated cell in Ossenburg Prison. Everything in the room was white except for the pale green door. A neon light in the ceiling was kept on 24 hours a day and she was the only prisoner in the building. It was torture. Here's how Meinhelf described the feeling your head is exploding.
- [79:13]
F
The feeling the top of your skull should really tear apart, burst wide open. The feeling your spinal column is pressing into your brain. The feeling your brain is gradually shriveling up like baked fruit. The feeling you're completely and surreptitiously wired under remote control. The feeling the associations you make are being hacked away. A feeling you are pissing the soul out of your body as though you can't hold water.
- [79:46]
Eli Lake
Eventually she got to see visitors, including her twins. Their first visit was in October of 1972. Ulrika wrote to Bettina and Regina. We're now 10.
- [79:57]
F
You were here. I think the whole prison was clad. That's how it seemed to me. Would you visit me again?
- [80:04]
Eli Lake
She kept up this correspondence for another year. She would discuss politics, advise her children on how to treat the weaker students at school, lecture them on the conditions of the working class in West Germany. But Meinhof was losing touch with reality. As Stefan Oust wrote, Shortly before Christmas
- [80:22]
Jay Solomon
1973, Ulrike Meinhof suddenly broke off contact with her children. An Advent calendar they had made her was returned. She refused to accept it. She stopped answering their letters. The girls never saw their mother again.
- [80:42]
Eli Lake
Meinhof and the other RAF members, including Bader and Einslein, were then transferred to Stamheim prison and were allowed to share a floor. They worked on their legal strategy, wrote various communiques, but mainly they fought with one another. And Meinhof was soon the odd one out. Botter and Ainslein had turned on her. As their trial progressed, Meinhof became despondent. On Saturday, May 8, 1976, she ripped apart pieces of the prison's blue and white towels and twisted them together to make a rope. She moved her bed underneath a small grate covering a window, tied the rope to the grate and made a noose for her neck. The guards found her dangling corpse the following morning. It was May 9th, Mother's Day. Ulrike Meinhof was dead.
- [81:38]
Bettina Rolle
Well, I mean, every death is probably terrible when a child is 13. But there was still a lot of unresolved issues. And then two camps formed. the time, most leftists, like for example, the Minister of the Interior, Otto Schilli, said that Ulrike Meinhof had been murdered by the state. The Federal Republic of Germany had murdered Meinhof and the others, like Stefan Auerst or my father, said it was suicide. And I think it's more likely that she was actually murdered, but not by the state, but by her own people, with whom she was in a corridor. They were together Bada, Engel and Jankar. And since they also had pistols and radios and drugs, it's quite possible that they also had the key. After all, they were together all day. But I only dared to say that for the first time a few years ago. Of course, you don't say anything about it when you are 13 years old.
- [82:30]
Eli Lake
After Meinhof's death, Europe's radicals erupted in protests. Bombs went off in Paris and Rome. Meinhof did not leave a suicide note and her supporters insisted that she had been murdered by the state. At her funeral, a procession marched with red banners displaying the RAF logo, a machine gun framed by a pentagram. The other Red Army Faction leaders were still waiting for trial in Stamheim Prison, but their comrades were still in the wild. After Bader and Enslin and others were convicted of murder and domestic terrorism, a gang of RAF operatives stormed the West German Embassy in Stockholm in an attempt to take hostages to trade for Bader, Enslin and the others. The plot failed. Soon after, the group kidnapped the head of Germany's Employers association, again demanding a trade for Bader and Einstein. That plot failed as well. Finally, on October 13, 1977, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a Lufthansa flight and demanded the Red Army Faction prisoners be released. But West Germany did not give in to their demands. The hijackers killed the pilot and flew the hostages to Mogadishu, Somalia. There, a West German SWAT team stormed the plane, killed the terrorists and freed the passengers. When Boader and Enslin got word that the hijackers had failed, they committed group suicide with a pistol likely smuggled in by their lawyers. It was October 17, 1977. The first generation of the Red Army Faction was finished. Now the story takes a bizarre and menacing turn. After Ulrike Meinhof's death, instead of sending her body to be buried, the West German authorities removed her brain during the autopsy, placed it in formaldehyde and sent it for close examination, and didn't really tell anyone. Dr. Bernard Bogart's TOLI press conference in 2002, that Meinhof's brain displayed neurological abnormalities, which he attributed to that operation she received in 1962 to remove a brain tumor. He said at the time that his findings challenged whether Meinhof was ever mentally fit to stand trial. All of this raises a question. Was it really the Vietnam War, the writings of Che Guevara and Herbert Marcuse that turned Meinhoff into a terrorist? Or was it scar tissue left over from that operation to cure her incessant headaches? For what it's worth, Bettina Rolle rejects this theory.
- [85:14]
Bettina Rolle
Suddenly, in 2002, someone called and told me if I knew that my mother's brain had not been buried. But of course, I didn't know that. And it's a pretty scary story when you suddenly realize that there are journalists and researchers all talking about this brain, brain that's in some kind of solution and they want to do research on this brain. Then my husband and I got together to do the research and we published the story in a newspaper and triggered a huge debate about the ethical background. Firstly, whether this is allowed at all, but secondly, whether it isn't. Also Charlotte Trini because if you want to find terror in Mino's brain, then you would have to find it in all terrorist brains, which is really absurd.
- [85:57]
Eli Lake
For scientists, it's very tempting to blame radicalism on a chemical imbalance, an errant brain cell, or a chronic malady. It's perhaps more satisfying to point to a smoking neurological gun rather than a Rubik's cube of personal, ideological and sociological motives. For Meinhof, revolution was a process of socialization. In order to go from journalist to terrorist, she needed a set of almost impossible circumstances. The early trauma of losing her parents and the collective trauma of Nazism in Germany, the cultural typhoon of 1968, radicalism, divorce, betrayal, the existence of the Soviet Union, the misfortune of meeting dangerous lunatics like Andres Bader. It is a cocktail of triggers and motives.
- [86:42]
Bruce Hoffman
We're in a different world of terrorism now.
- [86:44]
Eli Lake
This is Bruce Hoffman again.
- [86:46]
Bruce Hoffman
A lot of the descriptions of terrorism in the United States and elsewhere over the past decade or more, it hasn't been organization or groups. It's been radicalized individuals who on their own, who have never joined a group, who may not have any contact with any organization, who themselves have become frustrated and take it upon themselves to carry out individual acts of violence in service to a broader ideology that's become much more the pattern of terrorism in the 21st century.
- [87:16]
Eli Lake
Meinhof would call this process of self radicalization. The journey of from protest to resistance and the temptation to embrace violence in the name of righting and injustice is strong, especially in our era of populist rage. But it's almost always a mirage and it never leads anywhere good. Just consider Meinhof's cautionary tale. Ponder her fate in Stamheim prison as she dangled from a window grate, cut off from her friends, isolated from her daughters and despised by her comrades, this once celebrated journalist learned from experience. Resistance is brutal. Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends, friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five star rating and a nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content@thefp.com Please become a subscriber today. And until then, I'll see you next time.
- [88:40]
Host/Interviewer
When I end what I don't like? Resist the banks cause they got the
- [88:44]
Jay Solomon
credit Resist the state cause they got the guns?
- [88:47]
Host/Interviewer
Resist the cops cause they gonna get
- [88:48]
Jay Solomon
it Find me slipping when I'm on the run Protesters When I say I don't like this Resist is where I
- [88:57]
Host/Interviewer
end what I don't like Resistor won't live forever Resist the fear of pen
- [89:06]
Jay Solomon
arrest Resist the pigs you know I would never.