Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

got into the I Ching and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: if they couldn’t change the world they could at least change themselves by fleeing from it and raising their own consciousness – or, just as likely, falling into a blissed-out trance. For others, however, the lesson of 1968 was that they hadn’t been militant enough. Rampaging through Grosvenor Square made for exhilarating street theatre, but the authorities would always win any such confrontation because of their superior force and firepower. A long-haired, denim-clad, unarmed student had no chance of victory against a baton-wielding policeman on a horse, still less a posse of National Guardsmen firing real bullets. Fanaticism, it has been well said, consists in redoubling your efforts when you have lost sight of your objective; and this was the route they now followed. ‘Doubts about the cause were not allowed,’ says Astrid Proll, one of the few founder members of the Baader-Meinhof Group to outlive the decade. ‘You were either with them or not … We idealised the resistance of the Vietcong and the liberation movement in Latin America and Palestine: we wanted to act like them so we got hold of guns. As we didn’t know how to use them we went to a training camp of El Fatah in Jordan, where we crawled in the sand and climbed over barbed wire fences – which was pretty useless as we were urban guerrillas. We’d only gone there to learn how to shoot a gun.’

      By the early 1970s, the cities of the non-Communist world were alive with the sound of explosions and police sirens. ‘The terrorist activity is worldwide,’ Time magazine reported, ‘and most of it is carried out by a new type in the history of political warfare: the urban guerrilla.’ From Naxalites in the alleys of Calcutta to Provos in the streets of Belfast and Derry, underground armies were everywhere. The all-comers’ record was held by Mexico, where student demonstrations in 1968 had been savagely crushed by the army. Young Mexican radicals now abandoned protest and took up the gun; and whatever your political affiliation (so long as you were either a Maoist or a Fidelista) there was sure to be a battalion that suited you – the Armed Brigade of Workers’ Struggle of Chihuahua, perhaps, or the Armed Forces of National Liberation, the Armed Commando of the People, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Revolutionary National Civic Association, the 23 September Communist League, the Zapatista Urban Front, the People’s Union, the Revolutionary Student Committee of Monterrey, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, the Nuevo Léon Group, the Revolutionary Student Front of Guadalajara, or the Spartacist Leninist League. Much of their violence was directed against one another, the narcissism of small differences assuming far greater significance than such trifles as campaigning for democratic reform. ‘In three years the student movement adopted a discourse that had nothing to do with what was upheld in 1968,’ said Gilberto Guevara, the leader of the ’68 protests. ‘It was the inverse discourse: democracy was persecuted … Whoever demanded elections was satanised.’

      In Washington DC, senior members of the Nixon administration were advised to vary their routes to work. ‘I’m sorry,’ a top-security official explained, ‘but we’ve got to think paranoid.’ In London, Cabinet ministers had to check for bombs underneath their cars before starting the engine. Even placid, harmless Canada wasn’t immune: in October 1970 the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped the province’s labour minister, and then strangled him when the Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, refused their ransom demands – the release of twenty-three ‘political prisoners’, safe conduct to Cuba or Algeria, and $500,000 in gold bullion. The Canadian parliament voted by a majority of 190–16 to invoke the 1914 War Measures Act, which had never before been used in time of peace. A government spokesman informed reporters that the FLQ was planning further urban mayhem, of a kind ‘so terrible that I cannot even tell you’.

      Low-level terrorism swiftly became such a familiar background hum in everyday life that much went unreported, to the chagrin of those who perpetrated it. In a cover story on urban guerrillas published in November 1970, Time magazine reassured its readers that ‘events in the US still seem relatively tame’, a remarkably sanguine assessment given that there had been three thousand bombings in the US since the start of the year, and more than fifty thousand bomb threats – mostly at police stations, military facilities, corporate offices and universities. In Cairo, Illinois, only a few days before Time’s report appeared, twenty rifle-toting black men in army fatigues attacked the police station three times in six hours. ‘You hate to use the word,’ said a police chief in San Jose, ‘but what’s going on is a mild form of revolution.’

      Unlike fortified medieval towns, the besieged cities of the Seventies were threatened not from without but from within, by battalions that were seldom seen and often had no more than a few dozen combatants. Like the bomb-making Professor in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), they understood that the anonymity of a modern metropolis makes it both the most vulnerable target and the safest refuge. As the Tupamaros had said in their first official manifesto, published in 1968: ‘Montevideo is a large enough city with enough social unrest to shelter many commandos.’

      In the same statement, they explained the essential difference between themselves and parties such as the Communists. ‘Most of the other left-wing organisations seem to rely on theoretical discussions about revolution to prepare militants and to bring about revolutionary conditions. They do not understand that revolutionary situations are created by revolutionary actions.’ An abducted ambassador or minister was worth a thousand political pamphlets or speeches – but it had to be the right sort of ambassador or minister.^* In April 1970, the Guatemalan government balked at freeing twenty-five jailed terrorists in exchange for the life of the West German diplomat Count Karl von Spreti, who had been kidnapped by the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the Rebel Armed Forces). Colonel Arana, president-elect of Guatemala, thought the price too high. ‘We would have considered, say, six guerrillas a fair exchange,’ one of his staff said. ‘But twenty-five! It was a robbery!’ What could the FAR do, after such a rebuff, but kill von Spreti?

      Well, it could have let him go. Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party, chided the Guatemalan revolutionaries for ‘preaching the armed struggle to the exclusion of all other considerations’, adding that the assassination of a German ambassador ‘does not appear to us to be a method worthy of a legitimate struggle’. This earned the French comrades a scornful rebuke from Tariq Ali, the moustachioed Pakistani toff who had made his name in London as a flamboyant soixante-huitard, Britain’s nearest equivalent to Rudi Dutschke or Dany Cohn-Bendit. ‘Such is the new morality of the Stalinists, whose hands are not exactly pure,’ his newspaper Red Mole said of their misgivings.

      For Tariq Ali and his chums in London, there were many reasons to celebrate von Spreti’s murder. ‘Now that the comrades in Latin America have started capturing diplomats, we have had some headlines about them in the bourgeois press,’ Red Mole exulted in its May Day edition in 1970. ‘In fact, the executing of the German ambassador has given us a whole page of quite interesting material on Guatemalan history and politics from the Sunday Times.’ And Red Mole devoted a whole page to explaining why the tactics of kidnapping and execution were ‘definitely useful’. First, they sometimes won the release of ‘valuable comrades’; secondly, they exposed and humiliated governments which were ‘powerless to ensure security in the cities or to catch the kidnappers’; thirdly, they confirmed that revolutionaries could attack safely in the heart of capital cities. Red Mole’s only regret about the murder of the German envoy was the ‘amazingly distorted set of values’ displayed by the British press: ‘Count von Spreti’s life is minutely and harrowingly described, and he gets an obituary in the London Times’ but why was nothing said of the ‘heroism and sacrifice’ of those who killed him?

      Red Mole was not alone in wishing to lionise these heroes. In the summer of 1972 the Oval House in London staged Foco Novo, an agitprop drama by Bernard Pomerance celebrating the struggle of Latin American guerrillas against military oppression and US imperialism, which kept its audience in a state of thrilled terror with occasional armed raids through the theatre’s street doors. (The Times’s critic, spoiling the fun as ever, pointed out that the play was rather ineffective as agitprop since the only characters to emerge as human beings were the villainous Americans, while the guerrillas remained plaster saints. ‘I doubt whether the Tupamaros or any other such group would recognise themselves