The Red Army Faction, a Documentary History by J Smith Read Free Book Online

remained muted.
    Indeed, despite this major declaration, nothing more would be heard from the RAF for several months, during which time the movement continued to grapple with its own challenges and build its own momentum.
RESISTING REAGAN IN 1982
    The Revolutionary Cells seemed unstoppable in 1982, but tabulating their activity poses a methodological problem, as anybody could carry out an attack—from breaking some windows to planting a bomb—and claim it as an RZ action. Limiting the account to major actions is both arbitrary and unavoidable in a study not itself devoted to the Cells; nonetheless, readers should keep in mind that these major attacks were accompanied by a much greater number of low-level actions, even if most of these are now largely forgotten.
    The main left mobilization in 1982 was provoked by Ronald Reagan’s first presidential visit to the FRG, to attend a two-day NATO Summit in downtown Bonn. Initially, with the previous September’s Haig protests still fresh in everybody’s mind, there were questions as to whether the trip would include West Berlin, but the symbolic importance of the divided city made it impossible to avoid. 15 Indeed, not visiting would have undone the real purpose of the exercise, which was to create a show of unity behind the Double-Track decision to station new short-range Pershing and Cruise missiles in the FRG.
    To prepare the ground for the June visit, the West Berlin police began to terrorize the city’s squatters. The first raid since Rattay’s death occurred on April 28, in the midst of negotiations to legalize the occupied houses. A peaceful demonstration that night was met with tear gas and a baton charge, with the excuse that the protesters had not sought a police permit. The next day a “legal” demonstration with a permit attracted five thousand people—it too was met with tear gas and billy clubs, as two thousand police engaged in what has been described as an “orgy of violence.” 16 Over the next six weeks the raids continued, anti-Reagan leaflets and banners were confiscated, as police took to painting over anti-American graffiti. 17
    This preemptive clampdown was accompanied by a public relations charade, meant to paint the Western powers as the true peacemakers. At the Bonn Summit, just before Reagan’s West Berlin appearance, NATO issued a hyperbolic “Program for Peace in Freedom.” As one historian has noted, “The program, which referred to NATO as ‘the essential instrument of peace’ and which vowed that NATO’s nuclear weapons would never be used except in response to attack, pointedly set out to contrast NATO to the Warsaw Pact in an unsubtle effort to offset the growing influence of the peace movement…” 18
    NATO’s public relations ploy did not go unchallenged. One week before the Bonn Summit, the Revolutionary Cells carried out its most ambitious offensive to date: on June 1, in the middle of the night, different RZs bombed the U.S. Army Headquarters in Frankfurt, the U.S. Army radio station in West Berlin, ITT in Hannover, IBM and Control Data in Düsseldorf, and the U.S. Army Officers Clubs in Hanau and Gelnhausen. Timed to avoid injuries, 19 and involving militants from across the FRG and West Berlin, it was a night of attacks that cemented the RZ’s position at the center of the West German resistance movements. Less obviously, it also did nothing to contradict the RAF’s recent call for a strategy built around common attacks against NATO and the U.S. military. Further bombings—which similarly avoided any casualties—continued throughout the week leading up to the Bonn Summit. 20
    On June 10, the second day of the summit, over one hundred thousand people descended on Bonn to demonstrate their opposition to NATO’s war plans. Border police locked down the city, and riot cops easily turned back several thousand who broke away and attempted to