For West Germany, rolling up a terrorist underground that eluded them for more than a decade is the latest dividend from the collapse of East German communism. Previously, West German investigators spent a lot of time looking for the RAF in the Middle East; the idea was they had I connections with Palestinian groups. But it I wasn’t until former agents of the East German secret police, known as Stasi, began to I talk–and a new noncommunist East German government began to cooperate–that the hunt made headway. With their own intelligence suddenly augmented by inside information from Stasi agents and by tips from East German citizens who recognized neighbors or co-workers in WANTED pictures on West German television, West German detectives found that rounding up the fugitives was a simple matter of jotting down addresses and knocking on doors. “The Near East turned out to be a lot nearer than we thought,” said Christian Lochte, director of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Hamburg.
The revelation that known terrorists lived in comfortable exile right next door angered West German officials, who are considering bringing criminal charges against Erich Honecker and his former Stasi chief, Erich Mielke. The new East German government said harboring West German terrorists had been Honecker’s “personal hobby,” in part because the young guerrillas reminded him of his own salad days in the communist resistance. Honecker last week broke an eight-month silence to deny the charges. But other former Communist officials said refuge for former RAF members was a Stasi project. Interviewed on East German television, former Stasi official Gunther Nieber conceded that the regime had harbored the suspected terrorists–although he claimed that the exiles had promised not to use East German territory as a base for new attacks.
In the years from 1980 to 1983, RAF dropouts traveled from Iraq to South Yemen and then East Germany, with the help of a loose network of Stasi agents and sympathetic Palestinian commandos. In an unobtrusive holiday camp outside East Berlin, members of the Stasi’s top-secret “anti-terrorist” Division XXII provided the former revolutionaries with new East German identities-and new bourgeois lifestyles. Susanne Albrecht, wanted in the West for the 1977 murder of her own godfather, a prominent Frankfurt banker, became “Ingrid Becker,” married a local Communist official, had a son and became a foreign language specialist. Inge Viett, wanted in connection with the murders of a judge and a policeman, developed photos for a living. She drew neighbors’ attention by getting a new car every two years; most East Germans have to wait 12. One RAF member felt so safe in his new identity that he went to West Berlin after the wall opened up last November to collect 100 Deutsche marks’ “greeting money” from West Germany.
Although the arrests are a major breakthrough in the fight against the Red Army Faction, West Germans are quick to point out that the threat of terrorism has hardly ended. A third RAF “generation,” estimated at 12 to 15 people, is still active in West Germany, and believed responsible for a rash of bombings and other attacks against industrialists, government officials and U. S. soldiers and military bases. “You can’t say this is the end of the RAF,” cautions former West German attorney general Kurt Rebmann. “The commandos of the third generation are as dangerous as they were before and they still threaten the internal security of the Federal Republic.” Last week one or more callers claiming to speak on behalf of the RAF phoned threats to officials and journalists throughout West Germany. They threatened to direct their rage against East Germany, too. The fall of the wall meant two-way traffic for terrorists and their hunters alike.
