Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [163]
VIII THE SECOND AND THIRD GENERATIONS
After the deaths at Stammheim, definitive command of the RAF passed to Brigitte Mohnhaupt - who shared Baader’s capacity to rave uncontrollably - together with Sieglinde Hofmann, Adelheid Schulz and Christian Klar. They had begun their terrorist campaign in 1973, and it would continue until 1982. They were initially based in Baghdad before relocating to Paris, a sort of ‘Parishof’ before ‘Londonistan’ was born. Thenceforth France was always their haven, which is why they undertook no active operations on French soil. Their depression and sense of failure in the wake of Mogadishu and Stammheim were compounded when a drug-addicted Peter Jürgen Boock despatched several RAF members to purchase drugs (and his favourite oat flakes) which he could not obtain in Baghdad. He imagined he was suffering from cancer; in fact he was a junkie. As a direct result of this mission, eight RAF terrorists were arrested in France, Holland and Yugoslavia, notably Stefan ‘the Fury’ Wisniewski who was detained at Orly airport using a false passport after French police compared his signature with terrorist handwriting specimens they had received from their German colleagues. He was intimately connected with the murder of Schleyer, and would spend the years 1978-99 in prison. Plans were laid, and aborted, to spring Wisniewski from jail using a chartered helicopter. Instead, as they brushed up their use of bazookas and bombs at a Palestinian camp in Aden, where several of the women terrorists had flings with their Arab hosts, the new RAF leaders resolved to kill US general Alexander Haig, who was now the commander in chief of NATO.
Several bank robberies were carried out to fund Operation Stallion. Following one such raid Elizabeth van Dyck was shot dead by the police when she revisited a safe house. The attack on Haig occurred a week before his retirement as he and five bodyguards drove from his house to NATO headquarters at Maisières in Belgium. Susanne Albrecht had conveyed explosives supplied by the Palestinians from San Remo to Belgium to dispel the widespread impression that she was not up to the job. These were buried in a hole dug under a road. As Haig’s three-car convoy sped over this spot, the road erupted, the explosion narrowly missing both Haig and his bodyguards. None of them was seriously injured. In the following months the RAF lost two members in a fatal car crash, while a third, Henning Beer, dropped out after suffering a nervous breakdown. Attempts to co-operate with the Red Brigades were not a success. In 1978 a member of the Red Brigades was sent to meet a representative of the RAF in a crowded Milan subway. The unknown contact would be carrying a crime novel. The Italian returned disconsolate as he had spotted no one looking like a German, and only young girls were reading crime novels. That observation did not amuse his feminist comrades. When the two groups did finally meet, the Italians’ insistence on knowing about the RAF’s ‘party structures’ were met with embarrassment. There were none. More successfully, a merger with the 2 June Movement restored the RAF’s depleted numbers, and made it less necessary to undertake bank robberies since their new partners had extorted 4 million DM from the family of a kidnapped German industrialist. A series of RAF robberies of Swiss banks had resulted in scenes worthy of the Wild West and the death of a shopper killed in the crossfire. When the RAF robbers made off on bicycles, with their loot in plastic bags, a pursuing Swiss motorist lost them as he dutifully insisted on stopping at the traffic lights.
As the attack on Haig indicated, by the early 1980s the second generation of RAF terrorists had decided to focus their attacks on the US military presence in Europe. On 31 August 1981 a huge car bomb exploded directly outside the headquarters of the US Air Force on Ramstein airbase, causing over 7 million DM worth of damage. On 15 September they attempted to kill general Frederick Kroesen, the commander in chief of US land forces in Europe.