Terrorism in Europe. Patrick Cockburn
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and Mr Cohn-Bendit belonged to the revolutionary "community" in Frankfurt. Mr Klein was all washed out, having failed to complete his apprenticeship as a car mechanic. He joined the Reds, many of whom would later become the Greens. "In the group I found solidarity and a bit of love," he told the court.
In 1974 the Red Army Faction terrorist Holger Meins died after a hunger strike in jail. Mr Klein was outraged and decided then that demonstrating was not enough. "It became clear to me that we must do something more than support people in prison. In an emergency, we had to participate in armed actions ourselves," he said. He switched to the Red Cells, a rival to the RAF.
In his testimony, Mr Klein claimed to have been recruited for the Vienna job by the co-defendant, Rudolf Schindler, a 57-year old man who insists he is the victim of mistaken identity. What is beyond dispute is that Mr Klein was a member of the six-strong commando unit that stormed into the Opec headquarters, killing a local employee, an Iraqi bodyguard and an Austrian policeman.
Two of the three fatal bullets have been traced. Carlos himself fired the first one, and Gabriela Tiedemann, alias "Nada", is believed to have fired the second. She died of cancer five years ago. Carlos says Mr Klein is responsible for the third.
After receiving emergency treatment, Mr Klein and the rest of the group were allowed to fly to Algiers with 35 hostages. The latter were freed, the perpetrators vanished.
Carlos went in one direction, Mr Klein in another. Two years after the Opec attack, the German magazine Spiegel received a parcel in the post, containing Mr Klein's handgun and a letter announcing his retirement from the urban guerrilla scene. The armed struggle, he confessed, had become "senseless". The package contained a list of Jewish targets that Carlos was allegedly planning to attack.
In 1979 came the full mea culpa. In a book entitled Return to Humanity, Mr Klein denounced Carlos as a "megalomaniac murderer" and spoke of his sorrow over his past actions.
But to humanity, he could not come back on his own terms. Living under a false name, in fear of Carlos's revenge and the long arm of the law, he wound up in France, dependent on Mr Cohn-Bendit's moral and financial support.
Mr Klein had conducted protracted negotiations with German agents over an orderly home-coming. The talks looked promising, yet two years ago French gendarmes abruptly picked him up from his hide-out and extradited him to Germany, perhaps to help discredit Mr Klein's friends, who were then in opposition. But at least this way he will get the chance to meet Carlos for one last time.
Imre Karacs
Sunday, 6 November 2011
ON TRIAL FOR TERRORISM
The "celebrity terrorist" Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – known as "Carlos the Jackal" – will go on trial for terrorist activities for the first time in Paris today.
The Venezuelan-born Sanchez, 62, who became a symbol of the "cruel but cool" international terrorism of the 1970s, is already serving life sentences in France for murdering two policemen and an informer.
Now, for six weeks from today, he will be tried for his alleged role in organising four terror attacks in France in 1982 and 1983, including an explosion aboard an express train in which five people died. It will be the first time that Sanchez, a self-styled "professional international revolutionary", has been tried for terror activities in an alleged 20-year career that began with the wounding of the Marks & Spencer boss, Joseph Sieff, in London in December 1973.
Sanchez was kidnapped from Sudan in 1994 by French intelligence agents and jailed for life in 1997 for three murders committed in Paris in 1975. The trial beginning today is the result of a ponderous investigation by French anti-terrorism magistrates, which included getting hard-won access to the archives of former Soviet bloc intelligence agencies.
A special assize court in Paris, with seven judges sitting instead of a jury, will hear evidence that Sanchez planned four terrorist attacks on French soil in 1982-83 in which 11 people were killed.
Prosecutors will say that Sanchez masterminded the four attacks as part of an attempt to blackmail France into releasing his German wife, Magdalena Kopp, and a Swiss associate, Bruno Bréguet, who were arrested in Paris in 1982 for possessing weapons and explosives. The hearings are expected to reveal publicly for the first time evidence of links between Sanchez and Soviet bloc intelligence.
The round face and the Che Guevara beret of Carlos the Jackal became the symbol of a kind of rootless, international terrorism linked to the Palestinian cause from the mid-1970s. On 21 December, 1975, he led the attack on a meeting in Vienna of the oil producing cartel Opec in which 70 senior politicians and officials were taken hostage. This operation is now believed to have been sponsored by the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. An attempt by Austria to extradite Sanchez from France to face charges for the Opec attack was refused by a French court of appeal in 1999.
The true motivation and ideology of "Carlos" has always been open to doubt – a confusion encouraged by Sanchez himself. Leaders of the radical Palestinian cause are reported to have lost patience with his jet-set lifestyle in the late 1980s. He spent some years in the eastern bloc before taking refuge in Syria and then Sudan.
Even from prison in France over the past 17 years, he has managed to keep alive his image as an enigmatic charmer. In 2001 he "married" his lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, 58, in an Islamic ceremony which has no status under French law. Ms Coutant-Peyre will be one of two defence lawyers at his trial. His lawyers are expected to argue that evidence of his involvement in the French attacks is sparse and based on "unreliable" archives of Soviet intelligence.
John Lichfield
Friday, 29 October 2010
EAST GERMANY SANCTUARY
In the West he was for decades one of the world's most wanted leftist terrorists, but in communist East Berlin, Carlos the Jackal was given a headquarters with 75 support staff and allowed to walk the streets with an automatic pistol slung from his belt.
The extraordinary life of Illich Ramirez Sanchez – the internationally renowned terrorist now serving a life sentence in Paris for triple murder – behind the Iron Curtain began to emerge yesterday from a mass of torn East German Stasi files that are slowly being put back together by the German authorities.
Sanchez, who was nicknamed "Carlos the Jackal" when it became known that police once found a copy of Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal among his belongings, is reported to be responsible for the deaths of at least 80 people during a terrorist career spanning 25 years. Carlos, an acclaimed film about his life, went on general release this week.
For decades he worked as a hit man for the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leading a murderous if spectacular raid on the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' Vienna headquarters in 1975. Sixty hostages were taken and three people were shot dead.
But a year later the Venezuelan-born Sanchez, who was given his first name Illich by his Leninist lawyer father, found himself expelled from the PFLP and tyring to form his own guerrilla group, the Organisation of Armed Struggle. It was then that Sanchez turned to East Germany. As the Stasi's reconstituted secret police files revealed yesterday, the hardline communist regime afforded Carlos hitherto unimagined levels of assistance.
According to Germany's Focus magazine, which gained access to the files, Sanchez formed a pact with East Germany in the late 1970s. The communist authorities allowed him to run a headquarters in East Berlin which was staffed by 75 helpers hand-picked by the Stasi.
"While the West's security forces were feverishly trying to track down and arrest him, Sanchez remained completely at ease in East Berlin," said one of the Focus journalists. "His Stasi minders wrote reports about how he used to ride around in West German cars with his friends and walk across the city's main square with a pistol attached to his belt," he added.
Sanchez's support staff included East German university lecturers, actors, trade union functionaries, nurses, mechanics and even a doctor. They helped furnish him with safe houses, apartments for conspiratorial meetings, "secure" telephone lines and ensured