The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History (13 page)

Having lost their gambit of winner-take-all, the combatants were now among the most wanted fugitives in Europe. Once again, they sought refuge abroad, regrouping in Iraq, where the PFLP (EO) maintained autonomous bases, and from which they could easily travel in and out of South Yemen, still a safe haven the recent contretemps notwithstanding.
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The first arrests occurred in Holland. Christof Wackernagel and Gert Schneider were in Amsterdam, unaware that their safehouse had been identified and was under constant observation. On November 11, the two men were followed as they left the apartment; when they realized that they had been surrounded by police, they drew their weapons and began to fire, even throwing a hand grenade. Sharpshooters took them out: one guerilla was hit in the chest and stomach, the other survived a bullet to the head.

Schneider was being sought in connection with the Schleyer kidnapping, Wackernagel in connection with firebombing a courthouse in the city of Zweibrücken, in Rhineland-Palatinate. Along with Knut Folkerts (arrested just weeks earlier), there were now three RAF members in Dutch prisons.

Next, on January 21, 1978, Christine Kuby was captured following a shootout with police in a Hamburg pharmacy. The circumstances
surrounding this arrest—she had been attempting to use a forged prescription to buy narcotics—pointed to a problem that had been festering in the RAF for some time: the drug habit of Peter-Jürgen Boock, a man who had played an important part in organizing and carrying out the ‘77 campaign.

As Boock, and his addiction, would play an important part in determining the RAF's fortunes in 1978, as well as in the historiography that would be built up around the group, and even in legal proceedings taking place as this book was being written over thirty years later, it is worth reviewing his history with the guerilla in some detail.

Boock's connection to the RAF was both personal and longstanding. He had first met Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in Frankfurt back in 1970—he was a teenager who had just run away from reform school, and at the time the future guerilla leaders were trying to organize young delinquents along antiauthoritarian lines. Boock had wanted to join them when they went underground, but his involvement had been rejected: not so much on account of his age (some other members were also in their teens), but rather because of his drug habit, a curse which only worsened with the passing years.

Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s the original leadership was largely removed from the field, and the fact that Boock had known them on the outside and remained committed to seeing them freed made him a particularly valued supporter. As Monika Berberich would put it years later, pulling no punches: “There was a hierarchy in the support scene, with the prisoners or the people the prisoners particularly trusted at the top. P. Boock and V. Speitel
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are examples of supporters that the prisoners had a privileged relationship with in spite of widespread outside criticism.”
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Peter-Jürgen Boock

In August 1972, Boock moved into a collective house with Klaus Dorff and Waltraud Liewald, both
of whom had contact with the guerilla. In 1974, the three went underground. The group, which Rolf Clemens Wagner and Jürgen Tauras later joined, intended to free Baader, and entered into contact with both the RAF and the Revolutionary Cells with this plan in mind. Dorff and Tauras were arrested in 1976, at which point the RZ broke off contact, and Boock, Liewald, and Wagner joined the RAF.
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Within a short time, Boock was in South Yemen preparing for the upcoming offensive.

Boock would tell his comrades that he needed drugs to cope with pain from intestinal cancer, which he claimed to be dying from. While some had their doubts about this story, initially he was sheltered from criticism by the prestige he enjoyed for having known Baader and Ensslin, and also due to the relationship he had begun with Brigitte Mohnhaupt, at the time one of the senior guerillas in the field. Yet the situation was becoming untenable, especially when drugs became scarce and he began going through withdrawal. Kuby's arrest underscored the perils of sending combatants to procure narcotics, and so the decision was made to seek medical treatment.
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Meanwhile, the arrests continued: next was Stefan Wisniewski, apprehended on May 11, 1978, at Orly airport in Paris, as he attempted to board a plane to Yugoslavia. Not only was Wisniewski in possession of a large quantity of painkillers, he was also found to be carrying a letter from Karl-Heinz Dellwo that had been smuggled out of prison. The fact that Wisniewski had been picked up on his way to Yugoslavia was an indication that there might be other guerillas in that country. A fact that was confirmed the next day when Boock and three other RAF members—Mohnhaupt, Wagner, and Sieglinde Hofmann—were arrested transiting through Zagreb. As the French newspaper
Libération
reported:

The arrests in Yugoslavia were the result of close cooperation between German and Yugoslav police. The movements of the four were being closely watched by West German secret agents, who subsequently informed the Yugoslav authorities. According to Agence France Presse, these arrests are related to the arrest of Stefan Wisniewski… carried out by French police at Orly airport, as he was boarding a plane to Yugoslavia.
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The West German agents involved were likely members of a
Zielfahndung
unit, the “target search” squads that tracked—and where possible, apprehended—members of the RAF. With the help of Ulrich Wegener, head of the GSG-9, the
Zielfahndung
had been established as a direct consequence of the RAF's ‘77 offensive, just one week after Mogadishu. It incorporated agents from various LKAs, operating under the aegis of the BKA and relying heavily on the latter's state-of-the-art computer system. As detailed elsewhere:

The new unit, formed by the [BKA], was initially composed of 90 investigators operating in small teams on Zielfahndung (Target Searches). Its working method is for each team to take one terrorist and immerse itself in his life, using the Wiesbaden computer, whose data banks contain ten million pages of information about terrorist suspects, to provide information about a target which even he doesn't know. No item of information is too trivial for the target search teams. If they know that a suspect always telephones his mother on her birthday, her telephone is tapped, if he supports a certain football team, investigators will travel to the team's matches inside and outside Germany.
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The
Zielfahndung
learned what kind of cigarettes their target smoked, his or her sexual proclivities, relationships, blood type, dental records, and much more. Acquaintances, relatives, and former friends were all contacted for background information. If tape recordings of the target's voice existed, they were studied. The target's schoolwork from university or high school was reviewed and compared with movement documents—something as trivial as a recurring grammar mistake, a spelling error or favorite catchphrase would be filed away as evidence.
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Such targeted manhunts and data mining are the stuff of everyday repression today, but in 1978 they represented a new, hitherto unheard of, level of sophistication on the part of the state. Yet, while the BKA's enormous computer files were a cause for ongoing concern on the part of civil libertarians, the existence of the
Zielfahndung
teams and their activities would remain largely uncontroversial.

It was not only in terms of police science, though, but more importantly as an example of improved East-West cooperation, that the Zagreb arrests were touted as a breakthrough by the state. For the guerilla, this was a bitter pill indeed, as the Eastern zone suddenly appeared not quite so safe as had been previously assumed.

It was an alarming situation; nevertheless, it all soon proved less damaging than was initially feared, for the Yugoslav government would not deliver the captured combatants without receiving something in return. Talks were initiated with Bonn, and it was proposed that the four RAF combatants be exchanged for eight Croatian nationalists being held by the FRG.
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The West German government balked, and there followed a lengthy period of negotiations. It took six months, but finally the FRG made it clear that there would be no trade, dismissing the evidence against the Croats as inconclusive. In a convenient case of tit for tat, on November 17, Belgrade announced that it found the evidence against the RAF prisoners similarly inconclusive, and allowed the guerillas to depart to a country of their choosing.

According to a joint statement made ten years later by several RAF members including Hofmann, Mohnhaupt, and Wagner, the four had only been passing through Yugoslavia en route to a hospice where Boock's “cancer” could be properly treated.
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Although Boock had made it clear that he didn't like this idea, he could not refuse outright without making his comrades suspicious. While in captivity, however, they made an interesting discovery, as they were all required to undergo mandatory medical examinations—examinations that revealed that Boock was not in fact suffering from cancer but was simply a junkie stringing his comrades along. The revelation obviated any need for a hospice, and so upon their release the disillusioned guerillas returned to the Middle East.

During the period of their detention, however, the other guerillas had not been idle, and there are indications that an action was being
planned for later in 1978.
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In August, Christian Klar, Heidi Schulz, and Willy Peter Stoll narrowly escaped after chartering a helicopter to fly over the Odenwald mountains. It has been alleged that they were carrying out reconnaissance for an action to break Stefan Wisniewski out of the prison where he was being held in Frankenthal. It was apparently the second time the three had chartered the helicopter, and the pilot had contacted the police after becoming uneasy with the photos his passengers were taking, all the more so when they asked him about landing in the prison yard for a scene in a film they claimed to be working on.
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Not long thereafter, on September 6, one of the three was recognized while dining in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Düsseldorf. The police were called, there was an exchange of fire, and Stoll was shot dead. A guerilla who had participated in the ‘77 campaign, Stoll had initially studied as a tax advisor before being drawn to join the RAF through prisoner support work in 1976.
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A few days later, thanks to a tip from neighbors, police identified the apartment Stoll and the others had been using. Apart from a coded diary, a small arsenal (including an improvised rocket launcher), and fingerprints of six suspects,
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police also claimed they found evidence of a plot to kidnap a business magnate from the Ruhr area.
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Indeed, it would later be said that Stoll had been carrying out surveillance on Deutsche Bank president Friedrich Wilhelm Christians, with just such a plan in mind.
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Willy Peter Stoll

Hundreds more tips poured in, and a second safehouse was soon located. According to police, Klar, Schulz, and Silke Maier-Witt's fingerprints were identified, along with papers that included the name of Wolfgang Grams, a student who would now be accused of acting as a courier between the guerilla and aboveground supporters. Grams was
promptly arrested under 129a
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and would spend 153 days in remand.
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He was not the only one picked up in the sweeps occurring at this time: Christine Biehal and Leila Bocooc would be arrested in September, and Biehal's husband Harald would be arrested in November, charged with membership in a terrorist organization under §129a.
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Later that month, police surprised three RAF members engaged in target practice in the woods outside of Dortmund. The guerillas opened fire, killing officer Hans-Wilhelm Hansen and wounding his partner, who nevertheless managed to get off one long burst from his submachine gun as he fell. Angelika Speitel was shot in the leg and Michael Knoll received gunshot wounds to the head, lower abdomen, and liver, while Werner Lotze managed to get away unharmed, grabbing the dead cop's submachine gun as he escaped.
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While Speitel would recover from her wounds,
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Knoll would not. He died in the hospital on October 7.