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BLOOD
AND RAGE

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TERRORISM

Michael Burleigh

Contents

EPIGRAPH

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

I FRIENDS ACROSS THE OCEAN

II HEWING THE WAY

CHAPTER 2

I DOING GOOD

II BOLSHEVIKS AND BANDITS

CHAPTER 3

I ‘SHOOT, STAB, BURN, POISON AND BOMB’

II THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL

CHAPTER 4

I HOLY LAND, HOLY WAR

II THE BATTLE OF THE CASBAH

III RELUCTANT TERRORISTS

CHAPTER 5

I ‘A GRAVEYARD FOR PLOTTERS’

II MUNICH

III WAR OF THE SPOOKS

CHAPTER 6

I IDEOLOGY ADDICTS

II YEARS OF LEAD

III THE MORO AFFAIR

IV BERLINER LUFT

V ‘THIS JOB THAT WE’RE DOING IS SERIOUS.

VI DESERT DAYS

VII THE MYTHS OF STAMMHEIM

VIII THE SECOND AND THIRD GENERATIONS

CHAPTER 7

I ‘SHARP LIKE AN AXE AND QUIET LIKE A SNAKE’: ETA

II STATES OF SIEGE

III DELIVERING CHAOS

IV SECTARIAN STRATEGIES

CHAPTER 8

I MOB HYSTERIA

II THE BROTHERS AND PHAROAH

III THE RISE OF ISLAMISM IN ALGERIA

IV MUSLIM SOUTH ASIA

V HOLY WAR: THE AFGHAN JIHAD

VI ANGER, RAGE AND TV

VII TARGETING AMERICA BEFORE 9/11 AND IRAQ

VIII AFTERMATHS IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY

NOTES

PICTURE CREDITS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ALSO BY MICHAEL BURLEIGH

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

EPIGRAPH

In their basic relation to themselves most people are narrators … What they like is the orderly sequence of facts, because it has the look of a necessity, and by means of the impression that their life has a ‘course’ they manage to feel somehow sheltered in the midst of chaos.

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

PREFACE

This book’s starting point is the moment when recognisably modern terrorist organisations emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, dubious precedence being accorded here to the Irish Fenians. We could venture back to the medieval Assassins of Syria or the early modern British Gunpowder Plot, but my knowledge of both has faded with age and I do not regard either as especially helpful in understanding contemporary terrorism. The book’s working assumptions are evident throughout. There are well over a hundred definitions of terrorism and it is possible to aggregate those elements that recur most frequently. Terrorism is a tactic primarily used by non-state actors, who can be an acephalous entity as well as a hierarchical organisation, to create a psychological climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess. It can be distinguished from, say, guerrilla warfare, political assassination or economic sabotage, although organisations that practise terror have certainly resorted to these too.

That modern states, from the Jacobins in the 1790s onwards, have been responsible for the most lethal instances of terrorism, including self-styled counter-terror campaigns, is taken as a given, which does not absolve non-state actors through repetition of this historical truism. State violence is currently on the defensive, as various rabble armies run amok under the guise of Islamic or liberation or people’s revolution or whatever they call themselves. Nor does the cliché that yesterday’s terrorist is tomorrow’s statesman really get us very far. If you imagine that Osama bin Laden is going to evolve into Nelson Mandela, you need a psychiatrist rather than an historian. The Al Qaeda leader does not want to negotiate with us since what he desires is for all infidels and apostates to submit or be killed.

This book focuses on life histories and actions rather than the theories which validate them, roughly in accord with St Matthew’s precept ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’. This is not because I am dismissive of ideas and ideology – quite the contrary – but because these seem a relatively neglected part of the picture. Ideology is like a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode. Terrorists make choices all along their journey, and it is these I am most interested in. Hence the book is about terrorism as a career, a culture and a way of life, although obviously one involving death, for the terrorists’ victims and sometimes for the terrorists themselves, unless they deliberately court this through suicidal operations like Hamas, Hizbollah or the Tamil Tigers. Terrorism is violent, which is why there is much detailed discussion of violence in the book, as well as material intended to demystify and deglamorise terrorist operations. Some terrorists do indeed kill people; many others spend their time laundering money or stealing vehicles. Since much of this material is in the public domain, it is of no operational use to would-be terrorists.

As the book tries to make crystal clear, especially to anyone who might appear to harbour a sneaking admiration for those who wish to change the world by violence, the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal. That is especially evident in the chapters below on Russian nihilists, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and both loyalist and republican terrorists in Northern Ireland. The unexpressed goal of bringing about transformative chaos becomes the element in which terrorists are most at home. Destruction and self-destruction briefly compensate for some perceived slight or more abstract grievances that cause their hysterical rage. As endless studies of terrorist psychology reveal, they are morally insane, without being clinically psychotic. If that affliction unites most terrorists, then their victims usually have one thing in common, regardless of their social class, politics or religious faith. That is a desire to live unexceptional lives settled amid their families and friends, without some resentful radical loser – who can be a millionaire loser harbouring delusions of victimhood – wishing to destroy and maim them so as to realise a world that almost nobody wants. That unites the victims of terror from Algiers, Baghdad, Cairo, via London, Madrid and New York, to Nairobi, Singapore and Jakarta. They all bleed and grieve in the same way.

If this book were to be absolutely comprehensive, it would be doubly long, losing its human focus. That is why such subjects as terrorism in Latin America from the Tupamaros to FARC, the US itself, and the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka have been omitted, although there is passing allusion to them all. Alert readers will realise that buried in the history are suggestions about which past policies work, and which didn’t, regarding, for example, how to deal with imprisoned terrorists who routinely try to convert jails into universities or how to derange terrorist financing by encouraging organised crime. In this I have learned a great deal from studies and programmes in such varied places as Italy, France, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, whose existence and importance are routinely ignored. Since this is not a counter-terrorism manual, any prescriptions are highly tentative, such as disaggregating terrorist movements along their inner fault lines, while emphasising the commonality of suffering that terrorism produces in all our respective civilisations. As long as people hardly react to the news that x number of people, remarkably like ourselves in longing for life, have been killed by a bomb in Egypt or Malaysia, there will be no effective global response to this current epidemic. A properly funded police, intelligence and military response is essential; but so are improved public diplomacy and efforts to deradicalise potential terrorists, for the Hot and Cold Wars are now parallel. They have to learn not only that they cannot win, with even 9/11 merely affecting the operations of Wall Street for a few days, but that they are fighting precisely those societies that can most help their own societies overcome their wounding intellectual and material dependency on the West. When the cause is discredited, Islamist terrorism, like that of anarchists or Nihilists, will significantly abate, although die-hards will never stop.

Nothing would be gained in these pages by attempting to impose uniformity on the spelling of Muslim names. Many Western Muslims have their own preferred forms; French transliterations from the Arabic, for example, differ from English; and there is even debate about the most respectful way to spell the Prophet’s name. My policy is to aim for consistency with each person’s name and not to worry that one is Mohammed, another Mahomed, a third Muhammad and so on. I have similarly left it to my sources to determine whether measurements are imperial or metric.

I would like to offer warm thanks to Heather Higgins of the Randolph Trust and Director John Raisian of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University for making it possible for me to research and write this book under the aegis of a leading US think-tank. Self-evidently it is not one that espouses the sanctimonious ethos of the New York Times and is all the better for that. Andrew Wylie, Peter James and several friends at HarperCollins have made producing this book a pleasure despite a subject matter that frequently lowers one’s spirits. Among the people who have afforded insight and encouragement from within the counter-terrorism milieu, I would especially like to thank Shmuel Bar, Paul Bew, Adrian Weale and Dean Godson as well as others who wish to remain anonymous.

Michael Burleigh

August 2007

CHAPTER 1 Green: The Fenian Dynamiters

I FRIENDS ACROSS THE OCEAN

Irish grievances against the British in the nineteenth century were many. The British had garrisoned Ireland with troops, and favoured the industrious Protestant Scots-Irish of the North, because they suspected that its predominantly Roman Catholic inhabitants would rebel with the aid of a foreign foe at the first opportunity. In addition to the Ulster Presbyterians, there was an established, that is privileged, Protestant Church of Ireland, even though most of the population were Catholics. There was a fine Protestant university, Trinity College, Dublin, but none for Catholics. Ireland was part of a global empire, but was often treated as an offshore agricultural colony where labourers and poorer tenant farmers lived in chronic insecurity at the whim of absentee English landlords. Millions had left for the US (and industrialising Britain) where they adopted radical views that were far in advance of those of most people in Ireland itself. Confronted by virulent strains of American Protestantism, they compensated for discrimination by becoming more aggressively Irish, caricaturing the English as latter-day Normans and sentimentalising the old country with its ancient barrows, bogs, castles and mists. That these were historically authentic was partly due to their being noted, from 1824 onwards, on detailed Ordnance Survey maps, while another British intrusion – the national census – ironically contributed to a growth of Irish cultural nationalism. Successive censuses had startling revelations. Whereas in 1845 half the population spoke Irish (or Gaelic), by 1851 this had fallen to 23 per cent, and below 15 per cent forty years later. The Gaelic League was born of a desire for an Irish-Irish patriotic literature at a time when the brightest stars in that firmament were Anglo-Irish Protestant nationalists like J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey or W. B. Yeats.¹

Many complexities about the real, as opposed to imaginary, Ireland were lost in the Atlantic translation as fond hearts filled with hatred. Irish volunteers for the British army, replete with their own Catholic military chaplains, won a disproportionately high number of Victoria Crosses during the Crimean War. English and Irish liberals, led by the High Anglican prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, combined with British nonconformists to disestablish the anomalous Church of Ireland in 1869. Partly due to the disruptive ingenuity of a caucus of Irish MPs in the House of Commons, notably under Charles Stewart Parnell, and endemic rural criminality, Land Acts alleviated the insecurity of the smallest class of tenants. Finally, more and more British politicians, led eventually by Gladstone himself, were persuaded that Ireland’s future lay in some degree of Home Rule, with separate legislatures benefiting both England and Ireland, the two countries joined at a more exalted level for defence or foreign policy by an imperial parliament continuing to sit at Westminster. That prospect, which became real enough on the eve of the First World War, was sufficient for the Protestant majority in Ulster to seek German arms to preserve their membership of a more developed Belfast-Glasgow-Liverpool industrialised axis, if necessary detached from the benighted clerical South.²

Irish terrorism grew out of a venerable insurrectionary tradition that was manifestly failing by the mid-nineteenth century, only to return with a vengeance after an intervening lull in the late 1960s. The older history created many of the myths and martyrs of the more recent Troubles, as well as patterns of behaviour and thought that have survived in armed Irish republicanism within our lifetimes. There were many malign ghosts.

On 17 March 1858 an organisation was founded in Dublin by a railway engineer called James Stephens. It was St Patrick’s Day. Within a few years this mutated into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, although that name was never employed as widely as ‘Fenians’. This referred to a mythical band of pre-Christian Irish warriors, or the Fianna, roughly similar to romantic English legends about the Knights of King Arthur. For the English it meant a dastardly gang of murdering desperadoes. Fenianism encompassed a range of activities, with harmless conviviality and labour activism at the legal end of the spectrum, through to rural disturbances, insurrection and terrorism on the illegal margins. Incubated in the political underworld of Paris, or the rough-and-ready slums of North America’s eastern seaboard, the culture was heavily indebted to that of secret societies, with arcane rituals, masonic oaths and signs, a major reason why the Roman Catholic Church was largely unsympathetic. The general goal was the ‘disenthralment’ of the Irish race and the achievement of an Irish republic through violent struggle, all this within a broader context of Gaelic cultural self-assertion to which there has been some allusion.³

The strategy, ultimately derived from the 1798 Wolfe Tone rebellion, was to transform British imperial difficulties into Irish opportunities. The imperial difficulties included the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the Zulu, Sudan and Boer Wars, as well as crises in British relations with France in the 1850s, with the US in the 1860s, and with Russia in the 1870s, for a war with any of these would enhance the prospects of an independent Irish republic. While the number of Irish heroes in the Crimea seemed to suggest that this strategy had failed, the Fenians took courage from the war’s exposure of Britain’s military deficiencies and the barely concealed rift with its French ally. In addition to trying to arm the Zulus, even the mahdi’s ‘swarthy desert warriors’ became objects of Fenian interest, a trend that would continue into the late twentieth century in the form of Irish Republican Army links with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Libya.⁴

The Fenians drew upon the wider Irish emigration, whether in mainland Britain or the United States of America. They included refugees from the conditions that had produced the mid-nineteenth-century famine, of which many Irish-Americans had raw memories. Life in the urban Irish ghettos of the US (or industrial Britain) was primitive. The Irish were also heartily disliked by the Protestant aristocracy that dominated the US, a fact which may explain their flight into a vehement Irishness which had much purchase in Boston or ‘New Cork’. The American Civil War marked an important turning point since Britain was perceived to have supported the Confederate South, at a time when 150,000 Irish-Americans were fighting predominantly for the North. The Irish-Americans would inject Fenianism with money and military expertise.

The US government was culpably indulgent towards Fenian terrorism, as it would be for the next hundred years. Despite British government protests, nothing was done by the American authorities to stop the Fenians openly soliciting money in the US for anti-British outrages, notably through the so-called Dynamite Press. The Fenians were even allowed openly to use riverbank yards to develop a submarine whose sole object was to harass British shipping. US authorities rejected all British attempts to extradite Irish fugitives. All of which is to say that the Fenians had discovered an important terrorist tactic, that of using a benign foreign base for fund-raising and launching terrorist operations. British protests to Washington might have been taken more seriously had England, and especially London, not itself been a welcoming haven for every species of foreign radical. The French, who reacted with alacrity in detecting and deporting Paris-based Fenian supporters, chivalrously overlooked the fact that the bombs used by Orsini in his 1857 bid to kill Napoleon III had been manufactured in Birmingham.

Within six years, the Fenians had over fifty thousand supporters in Ireland. There, Fenianism was often little more than an assertive badge of identity and an opportunity for politicised recreation, in which young men joined a parallel society based on military drill, picnics and the adoption of non-deferential American manners towards priests, policemen and squires.⁵ The movement had its own newspaper, Irish People, and in James Kickham at least one writer of note. Across the Atlantic it enabled demobilised veterans of the Civil War to defer their return to civilian normality and to act on behalf of an Ireland that assumed mythical proportions through greater distance from its complex realities. In February 1867 a Civil War veteran and Fenian, captain Thomas J. Kelly (he promoted himself to colonel when he entered the service of Ireland), ordered a series of risings in Ireland, to be accompanied by diversionary supporting incidents in England, and two invasions of Canada, in the name of the US, which were frustrated by a British secret agent and the US government itself.

One escapade involved the capture of Chester Castle, which contained an arsenal with thirty thousand stands of rifles. The Fenian plan was to commandeer a train to take the arms to the port of Holyhead where a steamer would ship them to Ireland. Telegraph wires would be cut and rail track ripped up in the train’s wake so as to stymie pursuit. Fires in the city and interference with the water works would create even greater chaos, the first manifestations of future co-ordinated terrorist campaigns. The raid on the castle involved a hard core of American veterans, supported by several hundred ruffians who infiltrated themselves into Chester by rail from Liverpool and other northern cities with large Irish minorities.

The raid was halted before it started. Tipped off by spies, and concerned about the convergence of large groups of young Irishmen on Chester, the British authorities poured troops and police into the city, the mere sight of whom led to the dispersal of the Fenians. They dropped their cartridges, clubs and revolvers into the River Dee or the nearest ditch. The rising in Ireland was crushed as a result of the suspension of habeas corpus and the arrest of prominent nationalists; increases in troop numbers; and deployment of ships to watch the Atlantic approaches. It coincided with the worst snowstorm in fifty years, which put paid to national deliverance by Irish-American soldiers on Erin’s Hope. Fifty thousand British troops and police mopped up a few thousand Fenians, although not before they had issued their proclamation:

We therefore declare that, unable to endure the curse of Monarchical government, we aim at founding a republic based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour. The soil of Ireland in the possession of an oligarchy belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored. We declare also in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and complete separation of Church and State.⁶

Colonel Kelly, who in the interim had created an assassination unit to deal with agents and informers, and captain Timothy Deasy were initially picked up in Manchester under the Vagrancy Act. News of their arrest spread throughout Manchester’s substantial Irish minority, and eventually reached the ears of two Irish-American officers, Edward O’Meagher Condon and Michael O’Brien. Together they assembled a team of ten to rescue Kelly and Deasy as they were being transferred in a Black Maria for remand hearings at another city prison. Six policemen rode on top of the horse-drawn box, in which a sergeant Brett sat with the keys to the prisoners’ locked cage. Four more officers followed in a carriage behind. None of the ten policemen was armed.

The carriage was ambushed as it passed beneath a railway bridge. Once shots were fired to kill the off-side horse, the escort ran for cover. The rescuers then fired at the lock on the prison van, contriving to hit sergeant Brett in the head as he peeped apprehensively through the ventilator grille. Kelly and Deasy seized his keys and joined their rescuers, who made a run for it across Manchester’s criss-crossed railway tracks. Neither man was captured – although Deasy in his dark pea jacket, grey trousers, deerstalker and handcuffs might have been thought conspicuous. They resurfaced as heroes in America.

The authorities had more luck in apprehending the rescuers and their penumbra of supporters. Twenty-eight people appeared in the dock of Manchester magistrates’ court, of whom five were then sent for trial by judge and jury for murder, felony and misdemeanour. As an indication of how seriously the government regarded the trial, the prosecution case, which was one of common cause due to uncertainty about which individual had murdered sergeant Brett, was put by the attorney-general, the Crown’s leading law officer. After a five-day hearing, all of the defendants were found guilty of murder and sentenced to execution by hanging. The British press managed to have one of the convictions quashed, because the convicted man had a cast-iron alibi, an anomaly that might have affected the sentences handed down on the four found guilty. While The Times opined that terrorism ‘must be repelled by lawful terrorism’, twenty-five thousand sympathetic working-men demonstrated for royal clemency on Clerkenwell Green in London. Domestic and foreign middle-class radicals drew attention to the paradox whereby the British lionised the Italian radical Garibaldi while treating his Irish equivalents as common or garden murderers, an early manifestation of the claim that yesterday’s terrorist is tomorrow’s statesman. Petitions were drawn up by such progressive celebrities as Charles Bradlaugh, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Two days before the executions were to be staged, the single American convicted – Condon -was reprieved so as to avoid diplomatic complications with the US.

Meanwhile, a thirty-foot section of the prison wall was dismantled, on which arose a cross-beamed gallows shrouded in black drapery. Next morning, five hundred soldiers and two thousand constables interposed themselves between the gallows and a large crowd of spectators. Other army units took up positions throughout the city. There was dense fog as the three men were led up the thirty-five to forty steps of the scaffold for their rendezvous with William Calcraft, the alcoholic white-haired executioner, whose sinister forte was to leap on the backs of men whose necks had not been instantaneously broken. All three men were hanged together. Allen died instantaneously. Calcraft descended to finish off Larkin, but was prevented by a Catholic priest from performing a similar service for O’Brien, who duly choked to death three-quarters of an hour later.

Friedrich Engels, whose wife was a Fenian, wrote that ‘The only thing the Fenians lacked were martyrs. They have been provided with these.’ Outrage at the executions was evident in America, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, as well as across Europe. In Ireland itself, huge mock funeral processions were held, which suggested that the Catholic hierarchy had modified its earlier condemnations of godless Fenian ‘socialists’ in favour of endorsing the sentimental Irish nationalism often espoused by its priests. The death of Brett was regarded as merely collateral damage in such circles.

The Fenians at large in England resolved to redouble their violence, in anticipation of which they stepped up their arms procurements. Crucial to these endeavours was another Civil War veteran, Ricard O’Sullivan Burke, who had fought from Bull Run to Appomattox, before going on to become a Fenian arms procurer in Birmingham, where as ‘Mr Barry’ or ‘Mr Winslow’ he purchased arms allegedly on behalf of the Chilean government. Burke was identified to Scotland Yard detectives while staying in Bloomsbury in central London. After a scuffle he was arrested together with his confederate Joseph Casey in Woburn Square. Burke was remanded to the Clerkenwell House of Detention, one of two prisons in an area favoured by English artisan radicals, Welsh milk suppliers and many Irish, Italian and Swiss immigrants. The area was known for clock-making and printing, as well as demonstrations on its Green. The House of Detention, which included an exercise yard, was ringed by a wall that was three feet thick at the base and twenty-five feet high. Tenement houses ran parallel with the wall along one side of respectively Corporation Lane and Corporation Row.

Aided by sympathetic female visitors, who included his sister, the imprisoned Burke was in contact with Fenians in London with whom he exchanged messages written in invisible ink. He devised his own escape plan. In the yard he had noticed that the outer wall had been weakened by men repairing pipes buried under the road. The escape bid was led by another Civil War veteran, James Murphy, formerly of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, who together with a Fenian from Fermanagh called Michael Barrett misused the proceeds of a collection for a new church to assemble enormous quantities of gunpowder. These purchases alerted the police to what was afoot, although they also had agents within the Fenian conspiracy.

On 12 December 1867 Murphy and two helpers wheeled a tarpaulin-covered barrow through the darkening winter streets of Clerkenwell. Underneath was a thirty-six-gallon kerosene barrel filled with gunpowder. They lobbed a white ball over the wall, the signal for Burke -who was circling the yard on exercise – to halt as if to remove a stone from his boot. Outside, Murphy lit the initiatory fuse, which spluttered and went out. Undertaking one of the most dangerous things to do with gunpowder, whose main drawback as an explosive is that it easily becomes damp, he returned twice more to relight the increasingly short fuse. Eventually the three called it a day and left; inside the walls Burke was returned to his cell.

On Friday the 13th at 3.30 p.m. the barrow and barrel reappeared alongside the prison. Some of the children playing in the street were co-opted into what became a game of fireworks. One of the bombers, dressed in a brown overcoat and black hat, even lit the squib used to ignite the barrel by taking a light from a boy smoking a cigarette. Although a low rather than a high explosive, which creates what experts call a burning event, gunpowder delivers a prolonged and steady propellant push useful for quarrying rocks or expelling projectiles from cannons. When the bomb went off, most of the explosive force hit the tenements opposite rather than the prison wall, although an inverted wedge was blown out of that, sixty feet long at the top and narrower at the wall’s thicker base. The breach in the wall was irrelevant since, as a precautionary measure, the suspicious prison authorities had relocated Burke and Casey to cells in a remote part of the jail. The explosion was heard in suburban Brixton south-east of the Thames, and even, according to a man who wrote to the Standard, some forty miles away. Fifty firemen arrived to pick their way through the rubble, while hundreds of policemen milled around. Guards units took up station in and around the prison. Gas mains were excavated to provide light for rescuers combing through the rubble. Three people were dead, a seven-year-old child called Minnie Abbott, a thirty-six-year-old housewife, Sarah Hodgkinson, and a forty-seven-year-old brass finisher, William Clutton. Terrible injuries were inflicted, many involving fractures to the facial bones, although an eight-year-old girl coming home with a jug of milk sustained terrible lacerations to her knee. An eleven-year-old boy had to have eight fingers amputated. The death toll of local residents rose to twelve over the following weeks, while hundreds more had sustained injuries. Four hundred houses had been damaged. Rumours flew about Fenian plots to blow up the Arsenal at Woolwich, the Tower of London and York Minster. Fifty thousand special constables volunteered to patrol the streets and civil servants went about armed. There was dark talk in the Spectator of the need for bayonets to be deployed, although the magazine had been sympathetic to the demotic nobility of the Fenian uprising in Ireland. More practically, a local clergyman organised a Clerkenwell Explosion Relief Fund that dispensed aid and pensions to the victims and their rescuers.⁷