I arrived in Stuttgart, West Germany in October of 1977. It had been seven years since I left Germany and I had some reorienting to do. Just as I got there, the Red Army Faction was cranking up a new campaign to get one of their leaders out of prison. The plan was to kidnap a pretty big industrialist and trade him for Andreas Baader. To say the plan went awry is like saying the Titanic had a little mishap on her maiden voyage.
First of all...I never bought the idea of the "Red Army Faction" ...when I left Germany in the late fall of 1970, Andy Baader and his sweetie, Ulrike Mienhof, were a couple of bankrobbers who had been compared to Bonnie and Clyde. They, and their buddies, were a gang of thugs...not political. When I got back to Germany they were communist terrorists. Anyway, Andy got himself caught, then Ulrike got herself caught, then their buddies hatched a plot to get them out.
To make a long story short...the Germans don't negotiate with terrorists. They wouldn't play along. Baader, in an effort to confuse the issue of his suicide, shot himself in the back of the head with a 9mm pistol...in the highest security prison in Germany. I couldn't make this up...research it, kids. So the Palistinians in sympathy with their German Brothers, hi jacked an airliner and parked it in Mogodishu. The Germans went and got it back. The industrialist, Hans Martin Schluyer, was killed and stuffed into the trunk of his car. It marked the end of any kind of effectiveness for the RAF.
Here's what the Germans did. First, the made a poster of wallet sized photos of all the known members of RAF and collaborators. They posted these posters in stores and shops and bus stops and markets and train stations, on streetcars...just about anywhere people gathered...there was this poster. Next they blitzed the radio and TV stations with information on these people. Then they started making road blocks where the posters were displayed and every occupant of every car was examined by police. (This included pinching autobahns down to one lane and examining every car). Roaming patrols went through every bar in town to insure the posters remained prominantly displayed.
Then...as these measures and others they didn't talk about began to show some success...the Germans would reissue a new version of the poster...not removing any faces but instead they put a big red "X" over the faces of RAF personnel that had been killed or captured. After a few months, the posters carried a lot of red "X"s. Why did so many die? Let me illustrate:
Peter Willie Stohl was one of the most wanted of the RAF. He was spotted in a cafe in a city in Northern Central Germany. When surrounded by a large number of police, Peter Willie pulled out his pistol and decided to shoot it out. Peter Willie didn't make it. In the firefight, several "suspected Terrorists" were wounded. Peter Willie was buried and a week or two later a small report was issued stating that all of the suspected terrorists in the cafe had been cleared and released.
In less than a year the poster was mostly covered in red...a serious deterant to Red Army Faction recruiting, I am sure. And within a year the Red Army Faction ceased to be the big bad entity it had been. They claimed to be around still. When the wall came down and the two Germanys reunited, several exiled RAF members were captured and put in prison.
The last big thing I remember them attempting was September of 1981 when they launched a couple of RPG's at the US Army Europe's commander. An act which cranked up security to new heights and gave me opportunities to do some real fun stull on the Army's dime...I tell you about that later. The attempt on General Kroesen was so poorly executed it just showed off how lame RAF had become. Their intelligence sure fell short...Kroesen had just switched to an armored Mercedes a few days before the attack. The first rocket missed completely, the second hit the trunk with little affect on those inside.
Anyway, the Germans came up with a plan and worked it and it worked. They got caught short in '72 at Munich. They vowed that would never happen again.
It seems there should be more to say or some better point to make. I just think that if the Germans can fix their problem, surely we could do better than we are.