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Security experts agree and have warned Schmidt to expect what they call a "spontaneous reaction for the freedom of other jailed terrorists." Even though the Baader-Meinhof gang has been largely destroyed, an estimated 120 hard-core terrorists remain at large in Germany; many of them claim affiliation with the Red Army Faction, the country's most dangerous guerrilla group. An additional 1,200 to 5,000 committed radicals provide them with food, money and safe houses, and occasionally join in acts of violence. The terrorists and their sympathizers "are standing, rifle by foot, waiting to go into action," says Dr. Hans-Joseph Horchem, chief of the Hamburg division of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. In the near future, he predicts a rash of explosions and arson and at least one attempt to assassinate a leading politician or judicial official.
Although the roots of terrorism reach back to ancient times, violence for political ends was not systematically used until the middle of the last century. Then it became a favorite weapon of radical nationalists; the Irish used terror against the English, and the Armenians and Macedonians against the Turks. Perhaps the most notorious and brazen of the 19th century's terrorists were Russia's Narodnaya Volya, ruthless bands of nihilists who lobbed bombs at the Czar's officials.
Anarchists killed U.S. President William McKinley, not to mention a host of European royalty. Even seemingly contemporary techniques of terror have been tested by time. Rebellious Bedouins seized French planes in the 1920s. The first in-flight skyjacking took place in 1931, when a plane was commandeered by antiregime forces during a coup in Peru.
Perhaps the most devastating of terrorist tactics, skyjacking has been in and out of favor with urban guerrillas. It crested in 1972, when there were 62 attempts. The total dropped as nations began instituting tough airport inspection procedures, but seems to be on the rise again.*
With their skyjackings, bombings and assassinations, terrorists are dangerous, desperate people. Repellent as their use of often indiscriminate behavior is, they are, undeniably, heroes to some. That may be understandable—though scarcely excusable—in the case of revolutionaries who claim to represent the aspirations of persecuted or neglected minorities. But many West Germans are furious that leftist papers in Europe have glamorized Baader and other gangsters of the Red Army Faction as selfless radicals acting on behalf of an ideological cause.