World: The City as a Battlefield: A Global Concern

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1968, but there are signs that they are stirring under the influence of the new terror. In Paris, police credit a Maoist group called the Proletarian Left with 82 terrorist acts in the first five months of 1970. This summer, its "No Vacations for the Rich" program featured sabotage attacks on Riviera resorts. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre belongs to the 2,000-member group and edits its newspaper, but his efforts have gone unnoticed; the police have confiscated every issue since Sartre took up his pencil.

The world's most visible guerrillas are probably the Palestinians. They can hardly be described as "urban" in the desert camps from which they attack Israeli border settlements, and their attempts at sabotaging Israeli cities have been notably unsuccessful. But the fedayeen have scored a major triumph of sorts with the airline hijackings. They now seem to have concluded that such tactics are counterproductive; George Habash, leader of the extremist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is reported to have "considerably cooled down" on skyjackings. Nevertheless, they inspired other terrorists by seizing the very symbols of modern technological power and holding the world at bay for a harrowing week of blackmail. They also serve as models and instructors for other terrorist groups.

Global Cross-Pollination

One reason the new terror often appears to be epidemic is that the tactics are so similar. The guerrillas all study the same texts—by Mao or Che or Carlos Marighella (see box, page 20). Instant communications, moreover, guarantee a sort of global cross-pollination of radicalism. Harvard Professor of Government Seymour Martin Lipset tells of the time he "asked a revolutionary in South America whether he kept in touch with developments in the U.S. He replied, 'We watch television. We saw everything at Berkeley.' "

Though the similarities among guerrilla groups seem less a matter of conspiracy than a kind of contagion or psychological empathy, there is evidence that organizations like the Panthers, in the U.S., and Palestinian guerrillas exchange not only ideas and moral support but also financial backing. There is no lack of spots where guerrillas of several continents can get together. In Cuba, Fidel Castro's Sierra Maestra Guerrillero camps have taught more than 5,000 foreign recruits such techniques as sabotage, bomb making and murder since 1961. Most of Castro's trainees have come from Latin America, but he has had numerous callers from the U.S. Among the American Weathermen visiting Cuba have been Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn. and two would-be city-busters who were killed when the Greenwich Village town house that they were using as a bomb factory blew up last March, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold.

Black radicals, too, have made the Havana circuit. It was at a conference in Cuba in 1967 that former S.N.C.C. Leader Stokely Carmichael declared: "America is going to fall, and I only hope to live long enough to see it." Angela Davis, now fighting extradition from New York to California on charges of murder and kidnaping, called on Castro in July 1969.

Selective Assassination

Algeria is becoming an ever more popular meeting ground. The 44 Brazilian terrorists who were released from jail and flown to Algiers after the kidnaping of West German Ambassador Ehren von