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Jason Burke, "The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s" (Knopf, 2026)
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Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network. And today I am here with Jason Burke, who is the author of the the Story of the Extremists who hijacked the 1970s. Jason, thanks for being here with me today.
- [01:51]
A
Well, thanks for the invitation. It's fantastic to be here.
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B
Could you start out by sharing what this, sort of giving an overview of the book, what this. How this book sort of came to be and what it, you know, a little bit about, what it's about.
- [02:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, in simple terms, it is a narrative history of the first wave of international terrorism that really broke in the late 1960s and through the 70s. I mean, that was the original project and then it expanded quite rapidly and it now spans from around 1967 to the early 80s. And I look at international revolutionary extremism in its various manifestations, primarily in the Middle east and in Western Europe. But obviously I put it in a much broader context. One of the things I set out to do was to look at two major strands of extremism in the period. So that would be the radicalism that we immediately think of, which is largely nationalist, secular, left leaning on the whole. But also drawing on my previous work, I wanted to look at Islamism as it's really that period too, that extremist Islamism begins to emerge as a major force in the Middle east and then latterly elsewhere in terms of the attacks. And I wanted to consider the two in parallel, which I thought was a really useful exercise that hasn't been done before, as far as I know. And I thought that threw up some really interesting conclusions. I'd say that's the kind of serious framing of the book. The less serious framing which I really enjoyed was it's just a deep dive into an astonishingly interesting transitional period, one that has enormous resonance today, actually, but also consequences for today. Lots of extraordinary characters. And the book is built around the characters, partly because my interest is in what makes people commit acts of violence, whoever they are, but also because in and of themselves, they were just really fascinating people. And I spent a lot of time with them, in kind of archival sense, if you like, because many of them are now dead. But I was lucky enough to trace some of them who were still alive and spend many hours, indeed days, in some cases, talking to them about their experiences. And that was both a great help in terms of research, but also a really powerful experience.
- [04:37]
B
Yeah. You know, there's so many things you talked about that I want to ask you about. But one of. One of the things I thought or I wanted to know more about and hear about was that research process that you went through. Because this is a. It is a long book. It's a really. You have a large sort of endnote section which you say, I think at the beginning, like re. You know, go into those notes, go into the notes at the end of the book and you talk about the research you did. So can you talk about that process, like the work that you did? Because like, all of this is not in English, it's in multiple languages. Like lots of. Yeah. Can you talk about that?
- [05:13]
A
Yeah, on the languages, I mean, it kind of evolved as I was writing. I mean, I can do a few languages myself. But what was really amazing as I, you know, if it was a 10 year book project, but as I got about the midpoint, was you suddenly Got DeepL and Google Translate and other software that just enabled me to just access just a huge range of literature, secondary literature mainly that sources that would, you know, otherwise would have been untouched. So I was translating, you know, all sorts of academic research in sober Croat and Greek and Arabic. And I was also translating books that are only available kind of hard copy that I was picking up on various trips to the Middle east and then getting back and going through them literally on my phone using Google Translate and some absolutely fantastic material there that are just being buried and forgotten and really gave the other side of a lot of this because the narrative has really been dominated by US sources, Western European, English language, Israeli writers, obviously extremely partisan, some very good, some much less so. But. And so that was really useful. I was also using it on primary sources. So when I got hold late on of German language interrogation reports for militants or stars intelligence reports and that kind of material, I could just run them through deep or something and then just read them or it was slightly more laborious with the stuff that was. Can be scanned and I was kind of taking pictures of it and cutting and pasting and doing all sorts of kind of weird stuff. But I mean, I. I got there in the end Dutch interrogation reports, which is a straight, you know, untouched, pretty much primary sources from the 70s that were re. Again really useful and just people hadn't used. So. And that was the side. That was the kind of language element that added a lot. I speak good French and so I could do that myself. Italian I can get by. And so I was doing a lot of that. I had some friends help me there. But I mean, so it was. Yeah, it was. I deliberately wanted to make it kind of a global. And the other thing I did was I just cast my net really wide in terms of sources. So I mean, I was reading everything from standard histories of the Middle east, many of which I've already read, but just kind of rereading, looking for select quite selectively for stuff that was important to me through to, you know, really specific kind of academic monographs about Islamism or so forth. And then I, you know, pictures, postcards, archival documentaries, music that I felt was important to kind of conjure up the period. Just everything I could get my hands on, basically. I mean really it's a standard historical process if you start as wide as you can and then kind of narrow down to the more specifics. But one of the of it was it was just. I mean, it is a kind of big sprawling book. But the fun of it was I Could go any, I could take it anywhere I want it.
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B
Yeah, you mentioned like when you sort of talked about how this, you know, what this book is about, you mentioned that like we do see a lot of sort of more radical left leaning discussions of this, but you wanted to bring in sort of Islam with that. And so can you talk about that choice that, like that choice to bring them together and really sort of show this larger picture of what was going on during this sort of decade time frame?
- [09:03]
A
Yeah, I mean the, the point about the bringing in the ismus was it was really mainly the genesis of the book in some ways. So I, I mean I've written a lot about al Qaeda and ISIS and these other groups over the last sort of 20 years, 30 years. And I was commissioned in 2015 to write a book about ISIS and I drafted something, it wasn't terribly good, it was a kind of potted history of Islamic militancy and I dumped it, I wrote a different book. But what it did do was it took me back to the 60s, which is something I wasn't, hadn't really kind of grasped and that we all talk a lot about the 80s being the birthplace of modern jihadi radicalism, extremism, which is to an extent true. It's more than that was the kind of catalyst, the crucible, the war in Afghanistan and so forth in the 80s. But actually, you know, you go back to the execution of Saeed Qutb, the incredibly influential ideologue in 66 in Egypt and the impact of the 67 war, much else in the late 60s. And that's really where you see the beginnings to my mind of modern Islamic extremism, contemporary Islamic extremism. And that comes through quite fast in Egypt and in Saudi and elsewhere in the Sunni world. And you get the 79 Iranian Revolution obviously. And that creates an entirely new paradigm and wave of activism, much of it violent. And I was struck by the coincidence, the chronological coincidence of that moment for Islamists in the late 60s and the early 70s and how it was also a moment of revolutionary ferment all over the world for leftists of all types, whether they're new left, old left, you know, communist, socialist, just students out on the streets throwing bricks at a U. S. Embassy somewhere or the police or whatever it is. You know, this is 68, I mean, you know, whether we're talking about kind of everywhere from the US across to Japan and pretty much every place in between. And at the same time you have this extraordinary change happening in the Islamic world. And I thought that was really interesting and it struck me that, you know, the, the Islamism, extremist Islamism is a revolutionary project. And it, the more I looked at it, the more I could see how much it was drawing on the left wing ideas of the time. Tactically, some of the vocabulary, some of the world view, you know, the enemy for the Islamists, the local corrupt regime certainly, but also capitalism, often the US imperialism as they saw it, Zionism, Israel. There's a healthy dose of anti Semitism in both, sadly, that, you know, is impossible to avoid. And, and you know, the, the, that was, that was really striking and I thought that was interesting. So I wanted to tell that story in parallel through some of the individuals and it was that I felt would make an important point. And the book ends with Osama bin Laden up in the hills of Pakistan and Afghanistan. A child of the 70s. Actually. He was born in 57. You know, he was a teenager when all these seminal events were happening. The 73 war, the Captain David agreements later between Egypt and Israel. He was then just becoming interested politically. He was, you know, very much exposed to currents of thought within the Middle east at the time. Not necessarily leftism directly as such kind of radical communism or whatever, but he was certainly a pan Arab nationalism. What was left of it was around. And he was aware of them. It doesn't mean he was necessarily influenced directly by them, but it was part of his world. And he, you know, he was a child of the 70s. And I thought that was interesting and I wanted to make that point.
- [13:34]
B
Yeah, One thing I thought, you know, you talk about this being this moment in time or that moment in time being one where sort of revolution was happening kind of all over the world. And one thing I think for me was interesting is that you weren't. When you're looking at this and you're talking about people who were not just Middle Eastern descent, right. You have people coming in and being part of this sort of these revolutionists and being part of this from multiple countries. Right. In Europe, but South America. So can you talk a little bit about that too? And this idea. Because I think we often have this idea that it is just these people of Middle Eastern descent who are, you know, doing all this sort of extremist work in the Middle East. But that was not the case.
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A
No, it wasn't. Although, you know, the bulk of it certainly was, but they were. This was what I wanted to show was how. So in 1970, 71, 72 and even earlier, you have certainly this great surge of particularly Palestinian activism effort to highlight their grievances, the grievances of the Palestinians through what were long range attacks on aircraft hijackings, some bombings, various other violent acts, attempted assassinations of diplomats, bombings of an arson, attacks on oil refineries and such like. There's particularly the attacks on the planes that were really kind of highlighted at the time and afterwards, as well as the attack on the Olympics of 72. I mean these are all conducted by primarily Palestinian groups or they were the ones who were running the operations, particularly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and then Black September, it's cover organization. But you know, I was really interested to learn that there were Nicaraguans, for example, involved in the big hijacking of 1970, the big multiple hiker jacking then. And when I started looking at the, the training camps that people like the PFLP or other Palestinian factions were running in first Jordan and then in Lebanon, you know, they were, let's say they were full of foreigners would be wrong, but they had a significant contingent of foreigners who were coming, you know, not really to make any significant contribution to the Palestinian campaign. And the, the faction leaders certainly didn't see them as really making much of a overall military contribution, if you like, but they were well aware of their propaganda value and it was a propaganda effort after all all the violence. And so you had in these countries, you know, you had Dutch Maoists and you had British Communists and you had Nicaraguans sending their people over to be trained, particularly after Cuba stopped training them on the orders of Moscow, interestingly. And that whole Cold War dynamic is something else I wanted to get into in the book and do, but was an element I wanted to tease out. But yeah, so, so I wanted to put everything in its international context and show how the Palestinians, for example, were operating in that context of major post colonial or anti colonial guerrilla in inverted commas or whatever violence. So one thing that was really striking in the early period is how the example of the Algerian war of Independence is really powerful. The example of Vietnam is really powerful. Various other struggles and campaigns around the world, texts like those by Che Guevara or Che Guevara's example, he's killed in 67 is massively important. You know, you have Palestinian hijackers as late as 77 who go into action wearing Che Guevara T shirts. You know, that actually hides a lot of local differences. And there were lots of cultural clashes between these various international groups, but they all felt themselves to be part of a much broader movement. And the writing on this so far has really Just focused on one element and missed that broader global contact. So I have, you know, Japan, the jra, the Japanese Red army faction is a really important and really interesting and instructive example of what's happening. And I bring them into the story too, just to give it that kind of global spread.
- [18:41]
B
Right. And it, and it sort of, I don't know, it feels like they, there was a lot of learning from one another and figuring out how to, yes, make whatever cause you are fighting for stronger by coming together and like sort of learning and.
- [19:01]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I got a lot of declassified material from various, you know, three letter agencies around the world, various security agents. Some of it was, you know, kind of formally declassified. Other stuff I asked for, some of it was just kind of leaked to me or had been leaked to someone else and still is classified. And what was really interesting is how so much of it was these analysts trying to make sense of the various organizational connections and, and kind of how did these guys patch in with those guys and what are the Japanese doing here? You know, the whole, the whole thing with the Japanese is fascinating. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book as well actually. There's just one quote in a, a good book actually on Carlos the Jackal, so called real name Illiter Ramirez Sanchez. And in it they're talking about the. What appears to be a suicide attack and who might be responsible. And there's a security official is quoted as saying, I want it, you know, it can't be the Arabs quotes. They don't do suicide attacks. It must be the Japanese. They're the only ones. And it struck me it was such a powerful moment because now in the 2000s that would be completely nonsensical. In fact, it'd probably be the inverse for most ordinary people that there's now this kind of ineluctable or unbreakable connection, the kind of popular consciousness between Arabs and Muslims using the terms that someone else would use. But they commit suicide attacks, that's what they do, you know. And then you get into this whole discussion about how it's something essential in Islam or among, you know, the Arab character and all this stuff that people, particularly on the right will come out with and in. But this is the mid-70s and is actually, you know, the opposite in many ways. They're seen as that's not what the Arabs do. In fact, Moshe Dayan, the maverick famous Israeli defense minister and soldier, amateur archaeologist, says this explicitly and it's part of a kind of racist idea that the Arabs are all cowards in his view. But again, it's like this. And that really struck me as something that was worth saying or at least showing that this all comes later and things were very different in the early 70s.
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B
Well, yeah, and I. It's when you think about. And I was a like, child, child during this time. Like, my memories come from like the 1980s around con. Like, you know, what was going on with the hostage and all of that. But you think about a lot of these, like, high plane hijacks were not to hijack the planes to kill anyone. It was to hijack the planes to get them somewhere else to then re. Like do some hostage release, like that kind of thing.
- [22:02]
A
Certainly the latter. I mean, to get the hijacks to. To get somewhere else. It was really a kind of American thing with people flying to Cuba very often, actually. But you're absolutely right in that, as excellent commentator Brian Jenkins of the Rank operation said at the time, terrorists then wanted a lot of people watching and not a lot of people dead. And I mean, you know, there was Layla Khaled, who later goes on to be kind of the icon of the Palestinian nationalist cause and is famously involved in two major hijackings early on. After the first, she. She's handing. Which is successful. The second one isn't that she's handing out sweets and cigarettes to. To. To passengers on the tarmac after they've kind of been released in Damascus. And she's rather surprised that they're a bit frosty and. And, you know, her kind of bonhomie is really not very well received because she's just held up the plane at gunpoint and. But there's very definitely the sense that they. They're not there to kill people. They do, actually. I mean, there are fatalities, but. But many fewer than later. I mean, you know, I mean, by the time at the end of the decade or the early 80s, you're onto big attacks organized by Hezbollah and associated factions in Lebanon, which are targeting US Embassies and Marines at the airport and their base that kill hundreds. And there's also an attack in Kuwait that was aimed at Kuwait City's infrastructure, basic infrastructure, and that could have killed thousands if it was. Had gone as intended. Then you're into a completely different world. And tracing that was really interesting to me as well. This evolution in quite a short period from a moment where hijacking was scary and uncomfortable, but rarely lethal to this very different kind of violence later. Early on, they're handing out pamphlets with their cause and Their grievances and they're kind of justifying the attack. They're making speeches to passengers in 76 during the entire hijacking, where they go through this kind of long list of grievances and so forth. And you're absolutely right. A lot of it is directed at releasing hostages. Releasing. Well, actually prison, sorry, not prisoners that are in Western orphan or Israeli prisons. But they make a really explicit attempt to explain everything and to justify it and to set it in the context of this broader struggle against, as they say, injustice. Later, by the early 80s, these big bombs by Hezbollah, you don't get any of that. They're not interested. It's just, let's just blow up an embassy.
- [25:25]
B
So you're writing this. Some of these, like you said, are stories that many people write that they're historic people know. But as you're writing and as you're researching, were there things that you came across that you were really surprised? I don't know if surprised is the right word.
- [25:44]
A
Yeah, loads. No, no.
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B
Can you talk about, you know, some of that? Yeah, yeah.
- [25:47]
A
So this was one of the things that attracted me to whole period. These are that all. A lot of these events, we all think we know about the, the attack on the munich Olympics from 1972. A lot of people seen the Spielberg film and films play, a lot of it. The raid on and Tebbe, 1976, another one, loss of films, books, everything else. You know, these are. This is stuff that is kind of part collective popular culture. The Germans, Barda Meinhof gang, so called. I spent a lot of time writing about or researching and talking to some of them because they are fascinating, but very much kind of glamorous. Carlos the Jackal, you know, it's kind of iconic figure of kind of celebrity terrorist. And when I dug into all of them, I, I found that so much of what we think happened, we didn't or happened differently. And, and so much what's important we now, we've missed partly because the representation has been tilted one way or another or it's been just selected. So, you know, I was very lucky in that there's some brilliant scholars in Germany who are looking at the Munich attack again and have looked at it. And I went down to Munich and I spoke to a lot of them and I. There are lots of interviews now and lots of loss and lots of material. I went through a lot of it. And you know, the key moments during the day when these Palestinian attackers were holding these Israeli hostages in, In. In. In. In the Olympic village, Munich, in 72. The key things which are now so well embedded in popular culture that they've. They're in recent films as a kind of crux of it that the whole fact. And it just didn't happen. They just didn't happen. And I had to sort of excise them quite late from the book and do some quick rewriting because I read all the texts and all the sources and thought, oh well, it must have happened. It didn't. One of the things within TABE, the 76 raid, which is when the breakaway group of the Popular Front for Liberation Palestine take a Air France plane that's coming from Tel Aviv and fly it down to Uganda and the Israelis eventually go in and free the remaining hostages who are the ones who've been split away from the others and who are all Jewish. And what really interested me there was to put it in its much broader Cold War context because everybody talks about how amazing the Israeli operation was, which is absolutely true. It was pretty spectacular. I mean they flew from Israel to Uganda, landed at midnight, freed the people they needed to free, lost one guy killed who happened to be the brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, but that's another story and, and killed all the hijackers and left, flew back to Israel with the liberated hostages. And that's an amazing thing to have done. But they could not have done it without the support of the Kenyans because the Kenyans provided, allowed the Israelis to land at their Nairobi airport and refuel and put a hospital plane there as well actually. And without that it couldn't have happened. They wouldn't have been able to fly back. They would have to try and refuel there using the Ugandan pumps and stuff and it would just be very difficult and it wouldn't work. So it would have been a catastrophe without this little Cold War dynamic of leader of, the leader of Kenya, Jamie Kenyatta, saying, okay, I'm going to just finesse my little balancing game here between the Soviet bloc and the so called free world and I'm going to let the Israelis land, but just don't tell anyone. And the other thing that was brilliant about that was afterwards, you know, I could see in all the cables and all the UN debate I was looking at and the reaction now, you know, I say it's got this kind of massively celebrated reputation as this kind of Special Forces triumph. Everybody went mad in, in, you know, in the global south was, were just horrified. And Israel was attacked for being, you know, infringing the sovereignty of Uganda where it's landing load of soldiers There. And that was the kind of universal opinion it was even in Europe. You know, Le Monde was sort of hedging its bets and saying, well, it's, you know, it's pretty bad precedent, actually, that anybody does this. So this sort of thing putting in a broader context was, was really, really fascinating. And again and again I found myself finding stuff that I just didn't know. And other people I think are really unaware of, such as the role of the left in Iran. You know, the vanguard of the resistance, opposition, armed opposition, violent opposition to the shah in the 70s was the left. It was the fedayeen EHQ primarily, who were completely destroyed. They were Marxist Leninists. And I was very lucky in that I got to know their leader eventually by the 7980 who lives in London now. And I spent days and days talking to him about how they fought the Shah and what happened when Khomeini returned in 79. And it was amazing, but it was a complete window into something that's been totally obscured. I mean, I just assumed, like, I think most people that it was the Red Clerics who was the vanguard of that resistance movement to the Shah, right from the 60s through to 79. And they were certainly there and resisted to an extent, but really the people blowing things up and trying to launch a rural insurrection and this sort of thing and getting targeted by the savak, the security forces were the left. And, and that, that all of that was. It was new to me anyway. And I and other specialists will know it, but most of the readers, most of my readers won't.
- [32:11]
B
Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is I. What I appreciate about Nair, like what you're doing is like there's some humanity in every. Well, there's humanity in everyone. Right? And we often look at people as one thing or like these people are cold blooded killers and that's it. But there's romance, right? There's all of this. Yeah. Like, so, like you. What was that like? In trying to like tell the story and not glamorize it, but also really showing like multiple parts of who these people, right? They weren't. I, I think there's a quote in there from somewhere that Carlos the Jackal is like, I'm not like a killer. I, you know, I like cold cereal or whatever, you know, like that, like right there is this.
- [32:58]
A
He likes. He says this. He says this. Well, this is in an interview that he didn't actually. Well, it's a very interesting background to the interview, but the quotes are pretty much True, he never kind of denied it as such. He was just very angry when it came out. And that is he. Carlos the Jackal says, I like fine wines and I like clean pressed sheets and I like the theater. And he's clearly suddenly aware that he's making himself sound very bourgeois. And he then says, but my heart is, you know, dedicated to the revolution above all. Which is complete rubbish actually. I mean, and I, I mean talk about glamorization, so forth. I mean Carlos is a really good example, which is why I don't call him Carlos. I mean, I've got a rack of books on my shelf and they're all called things like Carlos the Carlos Complex. I'm looking at them now. The Jackal, Jackal, you know, his name is Illich Ramirez Sanchez. The Carlos the Jackal thing was invented by journalists in 1975 based on a completely spurious idea that which mixed a passport, a false passport that he was using in the name of Carlos Martinez. So the French press started calling him Carlos erroneously and the British press found a copy of Frederick Forsythe's Day of the Jackal in the home of a former lover. And they just sort of put it together and came out with Carlos the Jackal and a thousand headlines were born. His real name is Ilic Ramirez Sanchez and he's a really unpleasant man. I mean I was in touch with him, we corresponding. He's in prison but I can still get letters to him. And he was right about most of what he wrote about was just this sort of self aggrandizing, really distasteful rubbish basically. I mean some of it was quite interesting, some of it was useful to confirm other things that I had learned some details. But really he, he's a mythomaniac and a sociopath and someone who's been responsible for appalling suffering and pain inflicted on others to his own benefit. And it's great that he's been prison for a very long time, but because you can't get away from it. I mean he's been on album covers, you know, he was a media icon. And there's a great miniseries came out about 10 years ago about him by French director which is really good actually. It's really well, well researched and it's dialogue's good and the look they've got the 70s is brilliant, but he's much more handsome than he was in real life and he's much more kind of suave and he's much more effective. I mean actually he just made mistake after mistake after mistake. But he got away with it because he could lever this celebrity and use that as a weapon to stay alive, to procure resources, to manipulate people. He's very good, very charming, very good at seduction and. And getting people to do what he wants and, and even entire states, particularly in Eastern Europe. Very plausible. He's a con man, but trying to. And there's loads of material about him and I could get a lot. I got lots more because it was court transcripts and so forth that haven't been dug into before and lots of other stuff. People I tracked down, these childhood friends and that sort of thing. And one of the things that was interesting, though was part of the myths were actually coming from British or US intelligence propaganda, black propaganda at the time. They're saying, you know, he's a CIA, he's a KGB agent. He wasn't never claimed to be. KGB rejected him as a candidate for recruitment very early on. He spent a year in Moscow at university there. And they just looked at him and he's completely undisciplined. He's only interested in his own sort of sensual pleasure, basically. No way. We can't have him as an agent, to be ridiculous. And, and actually his, you know, half is the attacks he's involved would go badly wrong, but he gets away with it. And so trying to. I tried to show that. And I also made sure that I named victims and. And they weren't just anonymous and, you know, and that he is. He isn't. I don't call him Carlos a jackal. He's Ramiro Sanchez through the book. So it's that kind of thing I think is important. But yeah, it's a fine line. And, you know, as I often say, I mean, I'm interested in these people because I'm interested in what makes people create, you know, do violent things, do bad things. That doesn't mean I sympathize with them, but I think it, you know, it's no thine enemy. And. And I do think also that deglamorizing the whole thing is important. That goes for the Germans as well, actually, who, you know, they're quite cool in a way. They. They know that it's the 70s. Some of them are very striking looking. Andres Barda's very handsome man. He's an idiot, but he was a handsome man. They're young, they're committed, some of them anyway. Barda wasn't, but others in the group were. The women in that, in. In the Red army faction. Goodwin and Celine and Ulrike Minoff are pretty Impressive, actually. I mean, they're highly intelligent, articulate women. Just something in their heads flicks that switch and that kind of binary element kicks in, and they end up killing people, being involved in attacks, and a group that kills people that, you know, the look is great. I mean, it's 70s, it's leather jackets, it's, you know, denim flares. It's fast BMWs. They're young, they've got the looks, and they're kind of cool. So, you know, I was trying to puncture that to an extent. They're good characters, though, for a writer.
- [39:06]
B
Oh, yeah. Well, and it's interesting. Like, it. It's a. It is very, like, recent history. Right. Like, some of these people, like you said, are still alive, are still. Like, some are in, you know, in jail or in prison. Some are not. Some have passed away. But, like, it's very recent history as well. So you've got these people who were young at the time and so now are what, in their, like, 70s, 80s?
- [39:31]
A
A lot of them in the 80s, because they were. Most of them were in their early 20s back then. So I spoke to Layla Hallett at length, several hours talking to her, and she was really interesting because she's still active. I mean, she's a. You know, as I said earlier, she's an icon of the Palestinian cause. She still goes to conferences. And so talking to her was, As a historian, was an interesting experience. I mean, it was, you know, the same pitfalls of oral history that, you know, we. We all are familiar with. But there were some lovely moments when she was. We were talking about the big multiple attack that she was involved in in 1970, when the popular Front for Liberation of Palestine tried to take four planes in a day and hijack them all and fly them to the Middle East. And they got. They hijacked three successfully, one didn't make it to the Middle east, and they blew it up in Cairo after getting all the passengers off. The one that Khalid was meant to take was going from Amsterdam to London. It was an El Al flight, and had an air marshal on board, two security guards, and she was overpowered. And her colleague, her partner, Patricio Arguello, who was a Nicaraguan American, was shot and killed. Now, we were talking about this attack, and she was talking to me about the weapons, and she said, oh, I found them, and I. I went out for a walk from my hotel, and they were in the cupboard when I got back. And I know that's not true. I mean, I just know it is. I mean, I know how the weapons got in there, I've had, you know, I saw lots of intelligence traffic from the time cables, the reports that actually had it, the investigation, the French did, the Israelis did, all the others. Most of it hasn't been released, but I saw it. And the. The weapons. There was a delay, actually, it was a delay. That was what she was talking about. Sorry. She both showed the weapons didn't get left in her cupboard, but also there was a delay. And I said, why did you have the delay? And she came out with this story about, oh, it was because our Patricia Aguello couldn't get a ticket. It wasn't. It was because they hadn't got the weapons yet and they had. They needed to send a courier from Paris, actually, to Beirut to pick them up. And this courier was a very beautiful woman who strapped the bits of pistol disassembled all over her body and obviously just walked through customs, which you could do in those days. Nobody touched her. But the thing is, she's still around. Nobody, I mean, know who it was, more or less, but we don't know. You know, she's not been identified. She's never stood trial or anything. And so here you are, you know, 50 more years after the event, and you're still, you know, people are observing operational security. I had the same. I had long conversations on the west bank with. In Ramallah with. With former Black September people. And there was an awful lot. Oh, I could tell you things. I could tell you things. You know, that sort of style. Go on, then. But they, you know, and. And there was one really amazing conversation I had with someone about the various pacts that European governments concluded with PLO factions to, you know, nation's interests being attacked, which are all, like, you know, they've been rumored for a long time. We now know that, you know, the Swiss, the Italians, certainly, maybe others kind of did. Had some kind of arrangement at some moment or other with PLA factions. But. But the people I was talking to knew all about them because they negotiated the. And, you know, you could tell they really wanted to talk to me about them. They're in their 80s, you know, but still, it was like, yeah, I think, you know, this one's. This one's probably pushing it too far. They spoke about lots of other stuff. It was really fascinating talking to them, but they. They weren't, you know, so it was. That's. That was. That was great. I think we've bonded off this. Original question that you were.
- [43:31]
B
No, but. No, but that's it. Yeah, that was the funny.
- [43:34]
A
Right stuff. It was brilliant. I mean that, that, you know, and they. A lot of the time I spoke to these Mossad guys and you know, again, they're the same age because they were the people who were trying to track the. Bit older actually some of them, but trying to track the. The people. I was looking to remark or elsewhere. I spoke to the old CIA guys and. And you know, they're now in their most in 70s, 80s and various others and. And they, you know, they, they. They want the record to be set straight and they want to. And they just want to talk about their.
- [44:05]
B
They.
- [44:05]
A
When they were kids and it was, you know, and they believed in revolution and they were out, you know, hunting each other around the streets of wherever it was, Barcelona or Hamburg or, you know, Aman. I mean it was. That was a lot of fun. That was great.
- [44:27]
B
So you've written this. I have so two more questions, but like, what are you hoping this book. Like, what are you hoping people get out of it? Like where. How are you hoping it kind of informs folks about whether what's going on now or sort of historically? Like what do you. Yeah, what's your hope for?
- [44:46]
A
Okay, that's two ways. I would say there are two ways of looking at a book. I think one is, and there's a serious argument to it, and that is that why did left wing radicalism of the kind of revolutionary sort. I mean, the stuff that was aiming to really change the world. And I've had some criticism, people saying, but why haven't you got the Italian Red Brigades in there? Why haven't you got the IRA and the Irish publican extremism? And. And the answer is because they weren't international, Mrs. Booker. International terrorism. It's also already very long and you can't do everything. I haven't got lots of Latin American groups in there too, which would have been really interesting to look at and are important. I haven't got U. S groups that very much. I mean, you know, Weather Underground and so forth. But if you look at the left wing radicalism, it had of that nature. It had largely faded by the mid-70s. And there are reasons for that. And one is the revulsion of ordinary people, of violence. Another is kind of growing identity politics rather than ideological politics. But a good part of it is that democracy kind of worked. A lot of the measures that the protesters that those who are out on the streets, young people mainly in the late 60s and early 70s were demanding kind of happened. They won the cultural social battle in many ways. They didn't win the economic battle, but, you know, in terms of reproductive rights for women, in terms of lowering voting ages, in terms of kind of. Of dismantling the hierarchies of further education, better funding for further education, more youth or young people who are prominent in political, cultural life and so forth, a lot of these things were brought in quite rapidly. And certainly by the end of the decade, a lot of the grievances were addressed, and that sucked a lot of the anger out. The economy got better as well. But eventually, but still, democracy answered some of those grievances, and so there was less reason to protest. And certainly those who were going to use violence for a revolution, as they saw it, were first marginalized and then reviled or just mocked. I mean, I can remember in the early 80s, these people were a figure of fun. I mean, lots of British sitcoms about supposed revolutionaries, you know, they were just laughed at. Monty Python did sketches about them. You know, whereas in. In the Middle east, you don't get any of that. All you get is just brute repression. You don't even, you know, the. The. You get nothing. There's. It gets worse. And the left, moderate and extreme, is destroyed, completely eradicated. And now if you. If you don't address any of the grievances, you just destroy all the people who are calling for their address, what do you get? I mean, it's not rocket science. You get more people who want to address the grievances. They just use different vocabulary and different ideas and different tactics. In this case, they're much more intractable. I mean, there are plenty of cases in my book of people who were actually sitting down and negotiating on the left, talking to Western governments, just referred to some of them thinking of ways of compromising a political path that would move away from violence. You don't get that with the people who replace them as the main opposition across much of the Middle East. So there's a very clear lesson, and in a sense, it's very simple. You make your choice. And I go into how, as things moved rightwards politically in the west in the early 80s, there's a move away from what's seen as the kind of root causes argument, and that these root causes have to be addressed and looked at if you want to mitigate violence. And we've kind of stayed in that place ever since. So that's the serious part of it. The fun part of it is just listen. They're just amazing characters. It's an incredible period. And I just wanted that kind of technicolor epic kind of feel to it. And that really plunges the reader in that moment. And that the two. Both of them are important, I think, and they both sort of come together with the characters.
- [49:30]
B
So the book is out. And my final question is kind of a promo question, right? The book is out now. So anything that you want to promote either with this book, any other projects, what do people need to know?
- [49:44]
A
I think what I want people to think is that you can read this book in loads of ways. Yeah, it's long. Of course it's long. It's this big experience. I mean, it's like going to the cinema and you sit through three hours of, you know, Ridley Scott or Oliver Stone or someone. I mean, it's kind of. It's a big experience. It has got lots of big ideas in it. It covers a lot of ground. It's got lots of big characters in it. And I hope you finish it and you put it down or you listen to the audiobook and you take out your earplugs. Audiobook's very good, by the way. And you take out. You take up your headphones and you sit down, you go like light. You come out the cinema blinking and going, wow, that was intense. That's what I hope people feel.
- [50:34]
B
Awesome. Well, Jason, thank you again for talking with me on New Books Network. Jason Burke, who's the author of the Revolutionists, the story of the extremist who hijacked the 1970s.
- [50:45]
A
Thank you very much, Rebecca. It's been great. My dad taught me a lot, including.
- [51:00]
B
How easy it is to forget to cancel things.
- [51:03]
A
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