• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1033 0

the wars that destroyed the Lebanon, some of the more extreme Palestinian factions were joining Carlos the Jackal as freelance murderers working for the highest bidder, activities they combined with extortion. While Carlos, having broken with the PFLP, hired himself out to the Romanian secret service or the East German Ministry of State Security (the Stasi) to kill dissidents or to attack Radio Free Europe in Munich, Abu Nidal had switched his allegiances from the Iraqis to the Syrians. They saw him as a useful weapon against Jordan whose king was encouraging the Muslim Brothers against the Syrian Baathists while claiming that he could do the best deal with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians.

Commencing in the autumn of 1983, Nidal’s carefully constructed international terror network, which he directed while posing as a businessman based in Communist Warsaw, killed the Jordanian ambassador to India and wounded Jordanian officials in separate attacks in Athens, Madrid and Rome. Jordanian diplomats were also murdered in Ankara and Bucharest. Jordan responded with a series of hits against Syrian diplomatic and commercial interests until the two countries concluded a ceasefire of sorts. Abu Nidal also increased his formidable financial resources, having embezzled US$11,000,000 from the Iraqis in the course of an arms deal before they encouraged him to leave the country. Much of his activity was indistinguishable from criminality. He personally taped ‘requests’ to the rulers of the Gulf states for donations to the ‘true’ Palestinian revolutionary movement, giving them six months to comply. If they did not, then they received a shorter communication: ‘I will kill you! I will kidnap your children and your princes! I will blow you up!’ Shortly after that a Gulf Air jet was blown up in mid-air by a bomb as it landed at Abu Dhabi airport. When two UAE diplomats were attacked in Paris and Rome, the UAE ruler reluctantly transferred US$17,000,000 to Abu Nidal’s accounts. Similar extortion was focused upon Kuwait which agreed to pay Nidal a large monthly retainer. When the Kuwaitis showed signs of reneging on this deal, nine people were murdered and nearly ninety injured in simultaneous bomb attacks on cafes in Kuwait City. In 1985 Nidal used three of his assassins to kill his brother-in-law and five-year-old nephew when the former refused to acknowledge Nidal’s co-ownership of a substantial house in Amman. Meanwhile, Nidal quietly put out feelers to Libya’s colonel Ghaddafi, who had decided to employ him to kill exiled Libyan opponents of his regime and for strikes against his ‘imperialist’ Western enemies. Ghaddafi provided generous facilities for Nidal’s organisation in and around Tripoli, including free telephone calls and the transport of weapons through diplomatic bags. Like Carlos, the most feared international terrorist had become a hired gunman for a rogue state, the international revolutionary rhetoric starkly revealed as hollow words signifying nothing.

CHAPTER 6

Guilty White Kids: The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction

I IDEOLOGY ADDICTS

On the afternoon of Friday 12 December 1969 an unremarkable man entered the circular hall of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura on Milan’s Piazza Fontana. He slid two briefcases under a table where farmers and merchants from the rural hinterland were completing bank slips. A few minutes after the man left, eighteen pounds of explosives tore the hall apart, in a hail of glass, marble and metal office equipment. A twenty-seven-year-old clerk, Michelle Carlotto, said: ‘In the smoke I saw a body fly from the public section above the counter and fall one yard away from me. I was shocked, I couldn’t move.’ Other survivors noted stray shoes with severed feet still in them. Sixteen people were killed and another ninety wounded by the bomb, which was accompanied by simultaneous attacks on two banks in Rome.

Within hours the police had unearthed two anarchists, one a ballet dancer, the other Giuseppe Pinelli, a railway worker. Pinelli died after a mysterious midnight fall from a