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A few other things were modified too. The prisoners used their considerable electrical expertise to change a loud-speaker system (which they insisted be switched off) into a radio-communication network within the cell block. Amplifiers and stereo speakers enabled them to communicate, especially after they demanded that the electricity should remain on at night to power their electric blankets. Meanwhile in the courtroom, Otto Schily, a future German interior minister, who clearly favoured the long march through the institutions, revealed the shocking news that some of his conversations with his clients had been bugged by the secret service. In a further effort to convert the radical lawyers into victims, the new RAF commander Brigitte Mohnhaupt, by now released after Baader had spent eight months training her for her commanding role while in prison, organised a bomb attack on Klaus Croissant’s offices, which was deliberately attributed to neo-Nazis so as to stir up the ‘anti-Fascist’ cause. In March 1977 the defendants made their last appearance in court, refusing to participate any further until the question of whether or not their cells were bugged was cleared up.

On 7 April 1977 the federal prosecutor-general, Siegfried Buback, set off for work in his chauffeur-driven blue Mercedes. He was next to the driver while a thirty-three-year-old bodyguard sat in a rear seat. As the car waited at traffic lights, a Suzuki motorbike appeared alongside. The pillion passenger produced a submachine gun and riddled Buback’s car with bullets. All three occupants died. The attack was the handiwork of the Commando Ulrike Meinhof. The organisers of the attack, Boock and Mohnhaupt, were at the time ensconced with Wadi Haddad in Baghdad, finalising plans to spring the Stammheim inmates whose trial was coming to an end. The intelligence behind the attack was Baader; Siegfried Buback had signed off his indictment.

After more than 190 days in and out of court, on 28 April Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found guilty on several counts of murder or attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. They were not in court to hear the verdict. They were confined in what was supposed to be one of the most secure facilities in the Western world, so secure that a further five terrorist prisoners were moved to Stammheim’s seventh-floor maximum-security set. Outside their comrades continued their killing spree. In July 1977, Susanne Albrecht, the daughter of a Hamburg lawyer, repeatedly visited the Oberursel home of Jürgen Ponto, who was godfather to one of Albrecht’s sisters. Although the Pontos did not suspect it, Albrecht was scouting the security arrangements. They invited her to tea on the afternoon of 30 July. Strangely she arrived accompanied by two men and two women, well dressed and carrying a bunch of flowers. When Ponto went to fetch a vase, one man followed him into the dining room and pulled out a gun. There was a brief struggle until a woman, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, appeared and killed Ponto with five shots. They had been attempting to kidnap him and it had gone murderously wrong. After the failure of a plot to fire multiple homemade rockets into the federal prosecutor’s offices, in the late summer of 1977 Boock and Mohnhaupt finalised their next project at a meeting which they dubbed ‘our Wannsee conference’. Their target was the prominent industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, president of the West German employers association and a board member of Daimler-Benz. He looked the part of plutocrat, well upholstered and richly besuited in that German way. The group knew much about him after an intern at Klaus Croissant’s law practice pretended to be researching a PhD on business leaders at the Hamburg Institute for Global Economy and supplied a wealth of personal details.

On Monday 5 September 1977, Schleyer spent the afternoon in meetings in Cologne. After 5 p.m. he set off home in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes with three bodyguards following behind. As his car neared