Ten years ago, representatives from three of the world's most feared terrorist organizations gathered in Damascus to reaffirm their commitment to global revolution. Dedicated Marxists with an abiding faith in the efficacy and necessity of violence, the delegates from West Germany's Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group, Italy's Red Brigades and the Japanese Red Army unanimously agreed to establish a new terrorist international front in order to champion more effectively what they described as the 'anti-imperialist struggle'.
However, by 1986 the global conditions that had produced and nurtured, no less endowed, the three organizations with their fundamental raison d'être were already changing and thus threatening to render these same terrorist movements hopeless anachroni sms. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Red Brigades shortly afterwards fell into complete lassitude. The 50-year revolutionary struggle they had once so proudly proclaimed for the Italian people had run out of steam before even a generation had passed.
In Germany, meanwhile, the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group disconsolately carried on despite the national reunification in 1989 that deprived them both of their ideological resiliency as well as their cross-border sanctuary. Politically marginali sed and bereft of either patron or safe haven, the group finally collapsed in 1992 under the weight of its own exhaustion and the indifference of precisely those 'people' whom it purported to represent.
Thus, of the three radical movements that long ago met in Syria to promote the revolution that they believed was inevitable, today only one - the Japanese Red Army (JRA) - remains to carry on the struggle. How has the JRA managed to survive and what in deed accounts for its continued resiliency? The answer perhaps may be found in what can best be described as the group's long-standing 'cosmopolitan' revolutionary outlook as well as its leader's perennial preoccupation with ensuring the JRA's financi al security.
The JRA, by contrast, has always embraced a more internationalist orientation. Indeed, it was precisely this commitment to world revolution that led to the schism in Japanese radical circles that resulted in the JRA's creation 25 years ago. In 1971, a young former student of Meiji University named Fusako Shigenobu broke with fellow radical Tsuneo Mori - the leader of the Japanese Red Army Faction (JRAF), of which Shigenobu was a member - over the group's predominantly national perspective. Their di spute centered on Shigenobu's desire to further global, not just Japanese, revolution.
Convinced that conditions in Lebanon offered the most fertile ground for her crusade, Shigenobu left Japan and founded the JRA.
Once in Lebanon, she established close contacts with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), perhaps the most Marxist and internationalist of the various terrorist movements within the Palestine Liberation Organization's umbrella. Sho rtly afterwards, a small cadre of fellow radicals followed Shigenobu from Japan and, comfortably ensconced in Palestinian-provided terrorist training camps in Lebanon's Bekka Valley, the expatriate revolutionaries formed the nucleus of the new organiz ation.
Cut off by both conscious choice and physical distance from the support and assistance that might have been provided by their larger but now estranged 'parent' organization back home in Japan, the JRA became almost entirely dependent on the PFLP for fu nding, arms, training, general support and, indeed, their very sustenance. This was a condition of dependency, however, that Shigenobu was keen to reverse. Central to her plan to encourage the JRA's self-sufficiency was the development of the JRA's c apabilities as terrorist 'guns-for-hire', available to perform various clandestine tasks or undertake violent attacks on behalf of other terrorist groups or those prospective governmental patrons who shared the group's ideological orientation and comm itment to global revolution.
Accordingly, within a few years of its creation, Shigenobu had succeeded in getting the JRA on its feet both in terms of its finances and its reputation as an ideologically reliable and ruthlessly efficient terrorist spearhead. Moreover, the JRA's 'ca sh-for-hire' activities were further supplemented by the impressive ransom payments the group was able to wrest from the Japanese and French governments in particular. In 1973, for instance, the group extorted a US$4 million payment in exchange for re leasing a hijacked Japanese Airlines flight and its passengers and crew. The following year, the JRA absconded with a US$1 million ransom paid by France in return for freeing the hostages seized at its embassy in The Hague; the group later gave US$300 ,000 back to France. And, in 1977, the grouped netted US$6 million following the hijacking of another Japanese Airlines passenger jet, this time to Dacca in Bangladesh. From these three operations alone, the group amassed an impressive US$10 million-p lus war-chest.
In 1986, Shigenobu diversified the JRA's income stream still further, cutting a reputedly lucrative deal with Libya's Colonel Mu'ammar Ghadaffi. Only a few months earlier, US aircraft had bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for Libya's alleged involvement in the terrorist attack on a West Berlin nightclub popular with US troops. Two people had been killed and 200 others injured in the blast. Desperate for revenge, but fearing further US retaliatory air strikes, the Libyan leader turned to th e JRA for help. The group was only too happy to oblige, adopting the name anti-imperialist International Brigades (AIIB) as a cover for those operations specifically executed on Libya's behalf.
The JRA mounted the first AIIB attack in June 1986, targeting the US and Japanese embassies in Jakarta, Indonesia, with remote-controlled mortars positioned in a nearby hotel room. The group 'commemorated' the air strike's first anniversary the follow ing year with an identical attack on three US diplomatic facilities in Madrid, Spain. Then, in June, the JRA/AIIB detonated a car-bomb outside the US Embassy in Rome and shortly afterwards launched rocket attacks against the same site as well as the B ritish Embassy a few streets away. In between the Madrid and Rome operations, the group also kidnapped a Mitsui executive in Manila, netting a further US$1 million ransom payment.
In 1988, the JRA/AIIB initiated its most ambitious plan: simultaneous attacks against US military targets both in the continental US and Europe designed to mark the second anniversary of the US air strike. The American arm of the plan, however, went s eriously awry in March when veteran JRA terrorist Yu Kikumura was arrested by a New Jersey State police officer while en route to New York on his mission. In the back seat of Kikumura's car, the police officer found several anti-personnel bombs that we re to be placed outside a US Navy recruiting station in lower Manhattan's Wall Street financial district and timed to explode precisely at the crowded noon-time lunch hour. The carnage that would likely have ensued almost certainly would have dwarfed the six persons killed in the World Trade Center bombing five years later. Kikumura was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment.
The other JRA/AIIB attacks scheduled for that day in Europe went off almost as planned. In Naples, Italy, a car-bomb exploded outside a US military club, killing five people and wounding 17 others, while in Spain the group bombed a US air base. The at tacks, however, suddenly ended in July, with a failed remote-control rocket attack on the US Embassy in Madrid.
Thereafter, the JRA mysteriously ceased active terrorist operations, its 20 or so members returning to the group's bases in the Bekka Valley or to its sanctuary in North Korea. A period of unexplained quiescence ensued as the group either settled back to enjoy the fruits of its labors and the income that it had reaped from more than a decade of hijackings, kidnappings and bespoke terrorist attacks or began to marshal its resources for an offensive that may have been derailed by the unexpected end o f the Cold War in 1989.
The group would have drifted back into obscurity again had it not been for a series of events that occurred within six months of one another this past year. The first occurred last March, when Thai police stopped a car bearing North Korean diplomatic p lates from entering the country from Cambodia. A search of the vehicle uncovered a considerable amount of meticulously crafted, counterfeit US $100 bills, known as 'Super K' notes because of their genuine appearance. Among the passengers were three No rth Korean diplomats and a man carrying a non-diplomatic North Korean passport in the name of Kim Il-Su. Kim was detained and his fingerprints sent around the world as part of a standard Interpol identification request. Word came back from Japan that Kim was in reality Yoshimi (Gizou) Tanaka, who, at age 47, is a long-time JRA member and one of a group of eight radicals who had hijacked a Japanese Airlines passenger jet to North Korea in 1970.
Then, two months later, Peruvian authorities apprehended a 49 year-old woman traveling on a false Japanese passport. Accused of 'consorting with local guerrillas', a fingerprint check subsequently revealed that the woman was actually Kazue Yoshimura, one of the members of the JRA team that had engineered the aforementioned French Embassy seizure in The Hague in 1974. Like Tanaka, Yoshimura was deported to Japan to stand trial for crimes dating back more than 20 years.
Finally, this past September a modest-looking, middle-aged Japanese man named Tsutomuni Shirosaki appeared before a US federal district court in Washington, DC. Aged 48, Shirosaki had been apprehended in Kathmandu, Nepal, from where he was extradited to the USA and charged with five counts of assault with intent to murder, attempted murder and other crimes in connection with the 1986 mortar attacks on the US and Japanese embassies in Jakarta, Indonesia, and a car bombing that had occurred outside t he Canadian Embassy a few months before the mortar attacks. His fingerprints had been found in the hotel room from which the remote-control devices were fired. Based on that evidence, a US federal grand jury indicted Shirosaki in 1990.
Indeed, according to US intelligence officials, Shigenobu and company have been reduced to holding court in the sun-drenched Bekka Valley for visiting Japanese radicals, who have traveled to Lebanon to pay homage to these doyens of the revolution.
On the other hand, the JRA has long shown a remarkable instinct for survival and an ability to rebound from set-backs, marshal its resources to continue the struggle that it first embarked on a quarter of a century ago, and, if only as a thorn in the s ide of both the West and the democratic Japanese state, to continue to work for the global Marxist-Leninist revolution it has never abandoned. Indeed, as this revolution is regarded by the group as inevitable, there is reason neither to give up nor to hasten a struggle whose time they believe will surely come.
Failures, in the JRA's mind, simply cannot occur as ultimate success is assured and ultimate triumph guaranteed. "Unless we have the firm 'wish to win' and the firm conviction that 'we will win'," Shigenobu once said, "I think that no one will follow us." Given its prudent financial strategy, presumed vast monetary reserves and enduring patience, the JRA doubtless is still not ready to surrender the cause. Hence, the prospect of geriatric terrorists in their fifties and sixties cavorting around th e world, waging revolution - much as their comrades aged in their late forties so recently have done in places as diverse as Nepal and Peru and Thailand and Romania - no matter how farcical or amazing, cannot be entirely dismissed.
Dr. Bruce Hoffman is Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.