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Intelligence Squared
The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part Two)
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- [00:01]
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- [02:17]
Mia Sorrenti
Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti for this episode. We're rejoining for Part two of our live event with Jason Burke, the international security correspondent for the Guardian. Burke joined us recently at the Kiln Theatre to examine the extremist networks that Shook the west in the 1970s. Drawing on declassified documents and new interviews, he unpacks the motivations of the perpetrators, the responses of the governments who confronted them and the lasting impact of these attacks on global security. Burke was joined in conversation by Gordon Carrera, co host of the Rest Is Classified. Now, if you haven't heard part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to get up to speed. Let's return now to the Kiln Theatre.
- [03:01]
Gordon Carrera
In London just to pick up just one or two more characters. Ali Hassan Salami is one of the. Yeah, is one of the. Kind of. To remind people who he is. He's a kind of quite a significant figure actually.
- [03:16]
Jason Burke
He's fantastic. He's on the COVID actually I insisted in going on the COVID and say Carlos much too publishers stress but.
- [03:23]
Gordon Carrera
But that must have been upset.
- [03:25]
Jason Burke
He would have been had he known about. But he's had enough covers with his shades and his long shirt and everything. So Salami was Palestinian, comes from sort of Palestinian resistance in inverted commas Aristocracy as he would call it in that He. His dad died in 1948 in the wars around the foundation of Israel and he was very quickly picked up by the PLO in the late 60s, went into their intelligence side, got involved in Black September attacks as the organization was known. Wasn't involved in the Munich attack on the Olympics but around that doing things and became one of Nass Arafat's close aides. He's a very interesting guy and he's only person I've ever been able to write about and describe how he went on honeymoon with the. With a second wife or actually a bigamous wife who was Miss Universe and went to Hawaii with all expenses paid by the CIA. And when you get very 70s. Yeah, when you get very 70s and when you get. And Disneyland actually or Disney World, I've never. But the. Which he didn't like. And when you get to a character like that you kind of think I've got to include him now he's amazingly interesting. He's kind of flamboyant, he listens to Elvis all the time. He drives fast cars, he speaks English, French, German, Arabic. He's a very politically. Or becomes a very politically savvy operator. So when Arafat decides no more of these kind of long range terrorist attacks, he just goes okay, fine. And he shuts down all these operations and later he is acting as a. All the way through this actually he's acting as a channel, direct channel with the CIA. The CIA tried to recruit him. He says I'm not interested in being recruited. And that actually is what kills him in the end. Because in 79 he's got to the stage where he is negotiating basically non aggression pacts between the PLO and, And the plo, I need to learn this by the way, not many people do. Is the overarching organization for all the Monty Pythonesque little ones, basically. So the PFLP is part of the organizer of the plo. So Arafat is in charge of it and Salome was his aide. So Salome was there as an envoy discussing the rights and wrongs of liberal democracy with the Austrian home minister in 1978, months before he was killed. He's got friends in the CIA, one in particular, he's very well connected. He's shutting down the violence and he's saying to the Europeans, listen, we don't want trouble. We want you to recognize the PLO is a legitimate organization and be able to open representative offices in your capitals. We can make sure that the other groups, the pflp, XO and Da da Da, they all keep quiet. But you've got to give us something. And he's conducting these very kind of cordial but very delicate negotiations. Wears a suit, all the rest of it. And he's killed in January 79. Exactly. At the moment nobody takes much notice because the whole of the Western media is focused on one event, which is the Iranian revolution. And that to me says a lot. He has eliminated someone who you could, the terrorist you could literally talk to.
- [07:18]
Gordon Carrera
And what you're getting is the rise of a new form of terrorism, of political violence.
- [07:23]
Jason Burke
Exactly. And something to that. And then, and then, and then we're into something else that has been building in the Middle east through the decade. But in the next three years. Yeah, you're going to see very, very clearly. And they're not going to be like Ali Hassan Salami.
- [07:39]
Gordon Carrera
I guess part of the story is the, the, the end, the failure, the death of many of those kind of secular nationalists type of revolutionary terrorists that you saw in the 70s and then being then eclipsed by the kind of Islamist strain which is going to emerge, I guess, you know, particularly from 79 onwards. And that's something which is kind of the heart of the book and of the narrative.
- [08:07]
Jason Burke
Yeah, the heart of the kind of intellectual heart of the book, if you have such a thing, is looking at why in the west you start in the same place with the revolutionary kind of moment of the late 70s. In the west you get a flaring of violence through the early 70s and by the end of the 70s it's really disappearing. Certainly by the early 80s it's moved into something else. Nothing is threatening, there is violence, mainly ethno separatists, ira, eta, that sort of thing. But nothing that's going to bring down a government and nothing that's going to really motivate the kind of educated middle class youth or the mass working classes. I mean that's gone. But in Middle east you start in the same place with a kind of secular ish, nationalist, left leaning wave of activism, some of it violent, but you end in a completely different place. So you end, and I end the book actually with Osama Bin Laden up a mountain in Afghanistan and beginning his career. And the latter third of the book really looks at how that happened again through characters, but particularly through events like come right at this moment, 1979, seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic radicals, the killing of Sadat in 1981 by Islamic radicals, and the big attacks on American and Israeli.
- [09:52]
Gordon Carrera
And I mean you even see some, because this is the kind of the big transition and you know, it's interesting to try and understand why. Is it the failure of the previous movements? Is it, you know, a response to changing conditions? Is it something that's going on, you know, independently of that? But you can even see it in some of the characters as well. I mean, Imad McNair who's a very kind of, you know, important figure and will become a big figure in Hezbollah, the kind of Shia organization and you know, very involved with them. I guess he's part of that transition to some extent, isn't he? He's emblematic of that.
- [10:29]
Jason Burke
You see, there's a sort of hinge moment. I mean, well, that one is going to old biography of Mughnier, but the basically a lot of the people who were attracted to the secular movement move over to the Islamist movement at the end of the decade or after the Iranian revolution. And there are lots of examples of that. And it's a really interesting question about why they would do that and how they would do that. And to me it speaks to a much broader point which is that it's not that the ideology is interchangeable but that you can express the same grievances in a different vocabulary if that vocabulary still makes sense to you. And I think the early vocabulary in the, in the early 70s no longer made any sense to a lot of people in the Middle east after 78, 79, 80, 81, 82. And that process was also very much helped by the fact that a Lot of the key people involved in that earlier movement were dead or were in prison or who were scattered. So at the very end of the book, you're in 82 in Beirut when Arafat is forced to leave by the Israelis invaders and with the express intention of destroying the plo, and they'd succeed, effectively, they scatter the plo. Arafat is forced to leave, goes into exile in Tunis, and given the successes elsewhere by other regimes in the region in just obliterating the left. There's a vacuum, but the grievances are still there. Life has not got better for most people. The original impetus to look, to change things has not changed. And there is a new and loud message. And it crucially, I think, doesn't just offer social justice and revolution, however, this guy delete, but it also offers identity, and an identity that is much easier for millions of particularly young people to buy into themselves into. Yeah, yeah. And that said explicitly, actually, in an amazing bit of research that was done in 1981 by an Egyptian sociology that I dug up, where he actually went and interviewed lots of Islamic militants in Egyptian prisons and then compared them to the leftist militants and just basically said they're the same people in terms of their profile, in terms of their backgrounds, in terms of their makeup, except they had this advantage in that they are literally speaking the same language as the masses. As the masses. And particularly identify the educated middle class. Urban middle class.
- [13:39]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. For whom that's become. And, you know, it's interesting, isn't it? Bin Laden as you know, you finish with bin Laden and just reminded. We'll come to questions in a minute, so please get those ready in your mind. And there will be a QR code which will appear, I think, hopefully on screen, which will send questions to me. But, yeah, bin Laden's fascinating that, isn't it? Because we did something on the podcast recently about bin Laden, and there's this bit of him which grows up in the seventies, doesn't he?
- [14:02]
Jason Burke
He's a child of the seventies.
- [14:03]
Gordon Carrera
He's a child of the seventties. He's in Oxford, I think, in Britain.
- [14:07]
Jason Burke
He goes to Oxford, learn some English.
- [14:09]
Gordon Carrera
And you see these pictures of him. He looks like a kind of 70s figure. And then the next thing you know, he's. He's, you know, he's come from this rich family, and the next thing you know, he's identifying himself as this kind of, you know, figure from the kind of past and a kind of, you know, religious past rather than a playboy of the 70s. I mean, you know, he kind of itemizes some of those things.
- [14:30]
Jason Burke
His brothers were kind of playboys. He was always that kid who's a bit weird and just, you know, he was really, he was praying, doing the totally optional middle of the night prayer from the age of like 13 and stuff. But, but he's, he's, he's, he grows up in this environment that is very 70s. I mean, he's born in 57, so you know, he's a teenager when there's stuff like the 73 war and the oil crisis. There's the Israeli raid on Entebbe in 76, there's the Iranian Revolution in 79. There's the most importantly the seizure of the mosque by these Islamic militants in 79. And I know that he was very affected by this because I spoke to people who were close to him who remembered him being very affected by this. And so he grows up steeped in the 70s. But also, and this is something that's really important and I try and bring out in the book the language of the Islamism and that later, that religious kind of package, those ideologies draws very heavily on the earlier leftist secular stuff. And that I hadn't really realized. So there are, there are words you can track from kind of leftist French thinkers into Persian and then into Arabic, particular kind of quotes that you can see sometimes explicitly. I mean, Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini uses them. But the broader, you know, the targets are colonialism, imperialism, Zionism and stuff that, you know, Ulrika Minoff would absolutely have recognized, although she would have had very different views on the role of women. But the, so apart from the sort of social conservatism that the political package and that political view is absolutely interesting. Kind of deriving an awful lot of its, of its power from those previous ideas. And I think that made it much easier to graft on to what had come before. It isn't completely alien, it just has, it has a big element of social conservative ism, obviously which is very different, that will appeal to some and it has the faith and identity, the sense of authenticity. And it also very important, it comes at the moment when the other ideologies, the leftist, secular, nationalist ones, have demonstrably failed to achieve anything. And that means it's also being pushed hard by the Saudis and there's lots of other stuff going on, but that is absolutely crucial.
- [17:25]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, okay, I can see the questions starting to come in, so keep them coming. But I've got a few already. Just before we come to the first question, I Mean any other. You know, you did a huge amount of research for this, tracked down lots of interesting people. Any ones that particularly stand out. I mean there was one character I think you Farouk, you found.
- [17:45]
Jason Burke
Yeah, he was lovely. The nice thing about Farouk is actually it's more, I mean we could talk about him for ages. He was a leftist leader of the leftists in Iran who actually led the Farouk Nagada.
- [17:54]
Gordon Carrera
Is that right?
- [17:55]
Jason Burke
Farouk Nagadar. And he was the leader of the left, the kind of left wing, the Fedayin Ihalq. We were the hard left, very hard left opposition to the Shah of Iran whose role and actually they did the brunt of the actual kind of terrorism of the 70s and were the ones who the Savak, the Iranian secret service were would focus on most. They were seen as the biggest threat, not the Islamic side, the Khomeini and his people, the clerics who came in later because there was a vacuum. But the interesting thing about Farrokh, I mean I talk about briefly but because it talks of going back to this point about how you do these interviews and Farrokh and I spent a long time.
- [18:42]
Gordon Carrera
Tell me where you found him first.
- [18:44]
Jason Burke
Well, he's in Brentford actually. We have a very long course. He's in Brentford. He's a lovely man. And we spent hours and hours talking days and doing these interviews were really interesting because he was, he was really happy to talk and he was really good at talking and he's a really honest interviewee which was really helpful because with all these guys I was kind of cross checking everything they said against all these other sources. And as I said with Leila Khalid it got a bit complicated. But well, I never said to later actually that's total rubbish. You know, it's not going to help in an interview. But the with Farrokh it was great. We had this really good rapport and we spoke about everything until we got to one bit of his story. And that was when he made misjudgments that at the very least it helped in one way or another the deaths of lots of people and some close to him, I imagine. And he basically decided that the Marxists, his Marxist Leninists, should cooperate support the radical clerical regime after Khomeini took power. And this is after fighting the Shah tooth nail, losing his best friend, being in prison, all the rest of it. And he kept that position for two or three years during which time the radical clerics cracked down on women's rights, sent thousands of people to prison of whom few emerged, destroyed Other opposition groups eventually destroyed the communists, at which point the Fedayeen, his group, were the only ones left. And the penny dropped. And at that point he had prepared escape route. So they all got out, as many of them as could got out. He got out. It was quite epic how he got out. But what was really interesting talking to him was until that point, it had been really easy. And to his credit, he never said, no, you can't write that. But we got to that point and I had to ask him basically, you know, do you regret those decisions? You know, and he never answered it straight. He always just said, I can explain why I made those decisions. And in a sense, that's kind of why I wanted to write the book, you know, to. To explain why those people made those decisions. Whether they regret them, whether we can and should condemn a lot of them, I think is one consideration. But I think it's really important to have that thought. It was really important to have that explanation and put in a historical context where I'm not uncritically accepting. He basically said, I believed in Marxist Leninism. I believed that the reactionary clerical regime would fall of its own accord, that it could not stand. Historically, materialism taught us it could not stand.
- [22:14]
Gordon Carrera
And will he say I was wrong?
- [22:18]
Jason Burke
And yeah, he says in that I was wrong. But, you know, I believed it at the time. At the time, it did not seem wrong. It was really interesting. Those sort of things are really powerful.
- [22:30]
Gordon Carrera
Those interviews are amazing. I think they really form the core of the book. Right, I've got questions which have come in. I'll give you first one from Gabrielle. How did you navigate, using specific terms and language in this book, the implications of labeling terrorism violence and revolution? I mean, this is a subject which us journalists, you know, thought about. You know, when do you use the label? How would you use it?
- [22:52]
Jason Burke
I mean, my day job, I do that all day, every day. It's a really, really good question. So. Which I address in the preface, you know, and we're saying that you're going to get people who don't like any way you cut it. Basically, they'll either tell you you should put stuff in, put stuff out, use different things. So my argument on terrorism and it. And the use of terrorism and use revolutionists. It's a literal. I mean, it's a great word because it's. It comes from the 19th century. It's people who actually did, did do, you know, were professional revolutionaries, if you like. But it's almost. It's also a compromise between revolutionaries which is what some people call them, and terrorists, which is what others call them. So it touches on both my argument with terrorism, terrorist, and particularly the word terrorist, is that terrorism is a thing that you can see, name and define. Terrorist is a useful adjective. As a consequence, as a noun, I think it is unhelpful because it reduces an individual to a single category, and that does not help us understand them or their activities. People can argue against that. People can argue for it. I find it worked for me. It's a compromise, but I think you can see and label a terrorist act and condemn a terrorist act. Clearly, you can talk about terrorism. Absolutely. Clearly. You can also say somebody is a terrorist if they have committed a terrorist act. In a big book like this, either I use it all the way through or I don't use it at all. And I decided that to use it all the way through would not help. So I didn't. But, you know, it's open to discussion. That was my choice, Gabrielle, wherever you are. And, you know, there's other stuff like the armed struggle that they talk about quite a lot, you know, So I use that with caps, for example, to make it clear that I'm not saying it's the armed struggle. There's, you know, there's also. Do we talk about. They would talk about the resistance. I wouldn't, because that's a clear judgment. And I have tried, as I try my journalism, to navigate an absolute minefield of these kind of terminology, terminological issues as best I can. And you get it right. Hopefully more than you get it wrong.
- [25:25]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And I think what's great is in a big book like that, you are exploring and explaining, and you. You've got the time and space to do that, if you like. You know, that's the advantage of it, rather than it just being a quick label, you know, in somewhere else, I.
- [25:39]
Jason Burke
Had some of the revolutionists, some of the people I interviewed would say, well, why are you writing a big book about, you know, what you call terrorism in the 1970s? That's not right. Why don't you write about state terrorism? And I'd say, listen, that is a completely legitimate topic. And I do actually touch on it. But it would be wrong if I started in 1970 and ended in 1982. If I just called Mohammed Budia a womanizer and a terrorist, that would be wrong, and that'd be a completely legitimate criticism. But I don't. I start much earlier. I explain why these people are there. I explain why they're doing what they're doing. And that I think is a legitimate.
- [26:21]
Gordon Carrera
There's a question here from Mark. Your book is about leftist extremists during this period. What were the far right doing during the 70s?
- [26:28]
Jason Burke
Yeah. Another great question is 780 pages. If I'd added the far right, it would have been well over 1000. The far right are less present, it has to be said. They crop up from time to time. So it may well have been neo Nazis who supplied the weapons for the Munich attacks. For example, Ali Hassan Salameh I was talking about earlier, he has had connections with the far right. So they play a kind of incidental role. But they weren't as. They weren't doing as much as leftists were. And they certainly weren't doing the international stuff, which is what really interested me, that the leftists were. So that's why I left them. But I, you know, again, it's a perfectly valid area that needs investigation and needs more writing about from gj.
- [27:24]
Gordon Carrera
Thank you. How did the later wave of jihadists, so the bin Laden Zawahiris of that ilk, regard the earlier wave of terrorists?
- [27:33]
Jason Burke
That is a question.
- [27:35]
Gordon Carrera
It is an interesting one.
- [27:37]
Jason Burke
I mean, I was trying to think about. Yeah, I mean, that is interesting.
- [27:42]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, because you're saying that kind of. It's interesting, isn't it, that the language is. There's a continuity of some of the language and approach. But, but do they view them? Do they view that?
- [27:53]
Jason Burke
They certainly don't do them sympathetically. I'm trying to think of references. They barely refer to them at all, actually. I mean, and they, they see, actually. Well, here's an interesting point. I mean, so Abdul Azzam, who is like Osama bin Laden's mentor, he had his sort of epiphany as a religious militant because he heard the Palestinian fedayeen. So people like the PFLP singing songs about their nation and about the armed struggle. And he was a Muslim Brotherhood cleric who. Clerical student at the time. And he said to himself, how is it that these young people, the nationalist secular lot who haven't got my faith, they are fighting and we are not. And that was the moment that he decided that he was going to commit himself to kind of jihad as such religious conflict and religious campaigns. So I think there was somebody very little that was explicit. I think they saw them as the enemy, in part, foreign.
- [29:13]
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Jason Burke
Get optioning those options.
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- [33:19]
Gordon Carrera
From Ellie Is it inevitable that extremists end up having a cult of personality? I think that's interesting because some of your figures do, but some of them kind of cultivate it. But I guess by the time you get to the Imam Magna, some of them are quite secretive and they do, but in a very different way. So there are different aspects of that, aren't there?
- [33:40]
Jason Burke
Yeah, I think Carlos is an exception. I think a lot of them. There's some of the later German leftists. I mean, Andreas Barda does, he loves the attention, Carlos does. But the really serious ones, and with the German leftists, they're usually the women, Gudrun Ensley and Bridget Monhaupt, who comes later. They don't. They're really not interested in that stuff at all. And they are really, you know, if it helps the cause, maybe, but they don't usually think it does. And so they're absolutely not interested in it. And the militants, certainly there's something cultic happening, cultish happening with some of them, which is a kind of different type of cult of personality, but not the kind of more Stalinist sort of version.
- [34:38]
Gordon Carrera
No. There's an interesting question here. Which Maybe also follows on from that from Sam. How do martyrs reshape political movements? Because I guess when you get into the. The religious jihadist world, then the kind of cult of martyrdom becomes a slightly different thing, doesn't it?
- [34:51]
Jason Burke
More so there.
- [34:53]
Gordon Carrera
Would you see it as well in earlier groups?
- [34:55]
Jason Burke
Yeah, no, I see. I don't. I'm not so certain about that. I mean, there's this sort. There's a brilliant line. One of the things that convinced me to write the book was there's a line from a British, I think, security official in about 1972 where he says what this is when somebody. There's a attack in which some of the attackers who are Palestinian die and looks like they've just sort of given their lives for the court. And he says, no, that doesn't make sense. Arabs don't kill themselves, only the Japanese do. And. And it's. But it was a brilliant insight.
- [35:33]
Gordon Carrera
Interesting.
- [35:33]
Mia Sorrenti
Yeah.
- [35:34]
Jason Burke
And now, you know, 50 years later, nobody would say that. And so the question is almost sort of based on that idea. So the cult of martyrdom, I mean, it can be more explicit in the religious sense, and certainly it's more instrumentalized in the religious sense. And it's interesting how through the decade you get much more of the suicide rhetoric. A lot of it is to do with the Iranian revolution, which really foregrounds that, partly because of the Iran Iraq war. But the captain, Palestinian captain of the 1977 hijacking, that gets old treatment in there of a German Lufthansa plane from Mallorca. He calls himself Captain Martha Mahmoud. And almost every one of the. All the groups, they always call the next attack after the last killed member.
- [36:32]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [36:33]
Jason Burke
As a sort of memorial to them. So there's. There's certainly a lot. You know, there's a. Certainly a difference with the religious groups, but there's still an awful lot of the kind of commemoration, the rhetoric about death. I mean, the one key thing, though, just to go slightly anarchy, is there's a big difference between fidayeen and suicide attackers. So fedayeen are what the Palestinians call themselves and what lots of other Arab groups called themselves at the time. What my friend Faroq called his group the fedayeen in Ikhalq. Fedayeen of the people. And the fedayeen know that the death, the risk of death is high when they go out to fight and they are prepared to lay down their lives, but they don't actively know it's going to happen. And that may seem like a subtle difference, but it isn't It's a really important difference in terms of, you know, 90% of those, those attacks, the people who went out to do them believed they were coming back and wanted to come back. And the it's the latest really with the Iranians and Hezbollah and at the very end of the book and bin Laden that you start to get something interest in that.
- [37:48]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, it is a sensational book and I really did enjoy it because I just think the combination of analysis and just brilliant characters and storytelling, it just takes you there into this period of the 70s and brings it to life in an amazing way. Thank you also to Intelligence Squared for organizing this event and just leaves me to say thank you very much Jason. Thank you.
- [38:21]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, just head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Square Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [38:48]
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