In the late 1960's, the popular conception of guerrilla war as a conflict between peasant irregulars and standing armies changed to one of sophisticated `urban guerrillas' fighting security forces inside the modern city, and then to small groups of `transnational terrorists' whose battlefield was literally the entire world. The intense urbanization, rapid and efficient means of physical communication, and the pervasiveness of modern media in the developed world multiplied the opportunities and effectiveness of guerrillas. The purpose of this article is to discuss the development and evaluate the achievements of the urban guerrilla movements, predominantly those of Latin America, that operated in the 1960's and 1970's.
Sidebars
In the years following World War Two, the predominant form of armed conflict was the rural insurgency, with most of the actual fighting conducted outside of major cities. Nuclear weapons had made large-scale conflict among nations unworkable. In the fifteen years after VE-Day, guerrilla wars in ten separate countries were fought, with wins (China, French Indochina, Laos, Cuba, Algeria) and losses (Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya) for the insurgents involved. By comparison, only two `conventional' wars were fought during this period: one to a stalemate in Korea, and two brief campaigns in Israel. Even then, guerrillas were an important addition to the Communist forces in Korea, and pressure by Zionist guerrillas contributed to the British decision to withdraw from Palestine in 1948.
Mao Zedong, the main theorist of guerrilla warfare in the 20th century, wrote that a guerrilla war should follow three phases:
* creating `liberated areas' free of government control, where the guerrilla army could train, rest and organize;
* accumulating personnel through widening these liberated areas, weakening the enemy's army through attrition, and gathering materiel for its own army; and
* open warfare and the Final Offensive to take the cities.
This method worked in China, and became the standard blueprint for rural insurgency. Vo Nguyen Giap tried to follow the same pattern when fighting the French in Vietnam. After nine years of attrition and several premature attempts to start the Final Offensive, he won by inflicting a major psychological and military defeat on the French at Dien Bien Phu, almost the only case in which a rural insurgency has won a major single battle against an industrial power.
Mao and Giap stressed the rural aspect of their guerrilla wars because at the time the bulk of the Chinese and Vietnamese population lived outside of major cities. Under the right circumstances, though, the area of fighting could be shifted to the cities profitably. The Zionist guerrillas of the Irgun Zvi Leumi and the Greek Cypriots of EOKA (1954-59) fought the British almost exclusively with the tactics of urban terrorism: bombings, sniping, ambushing police and military patrols, etc. As both movements had a large amount of popular sympathy and were directed against an occupying army, the conflict continued long enough to become a factor in the British decisions to withdraw from these countries and give them their independence. Castro won in Cuba by eroding popular support for the government and sapping the will of Fulgencio Batista's army to fight. Cuba was a much more urbanized country than China and Vietnam. Strikes, sabotage, and rioting were estimated to have kept up to 15,000 of Batista's troops, about half the army, busy in the cities (especially in Havana) while Castro's guerrillas defeated their countryside garrisons in detail. The contribution of the guerrilla effort in the cities was downplayed by Castro after victory to magnify his personal contribution to the struggle. The story of the landing in Oriente province and the campaign launched from the Sierra Maestra is as enduring a legend to Cubans as Valley Forge is to Americans.
Ernesto `Che' Guevara, an Argentinian who had fought with Castro, was looking for a way to export the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America. Based on a selective understanding of what had happened in Cuba, Guevara and his friend Regis Debray, a French philosopher then working at the University of Havana, worked on a model of revolutionary warfare that would export easily. They made three basic assumptions:
* that popular forces can always defeat a regular army in a guerrilla war;
* that the main arena of action will be the countryside; and
* that it is not necessary that all conditions for making a successful revolution exist. The professional revolutionary cadre group can either create these conditions itself or simply do without them.
Debray, in his book Revolution within the Revolution?, proposed that by staying in the mountains and doing a good job of fighting, small groups of professional guerrillas could evade the government, inspire the people to a general revolt, and create the military power that would deliver power into the hands of the people. Revolution could be built from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Small cells or focos of professional revolutionary cadres, placed in the countryside, would act as seeds or nuclei of future revolt. They could strike at will to defeat the government forces in detail and yet be small and mobile enough to avoid their counterstrikes, recruit more and more peasants to their cause as their notoriety and perceived potency spread, and widen the area of struggle eventually to include the cities prior to the ultimate seizure of power. Debray also stated that the only struggle with any meaning would take place outside the cities. He had a romantic view of life in the hills, asserting that `the mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, and the city can only bourgeoisify the proletarians,' and a fascination with violence often found in frustrated intellectuals.
Attempts to export revolution based on this model to Latin America were made from 1959 to 1966 in Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia. They all failed miserably due to several faults in their strategy:
* Lack of external support. No guerrilla war can be won easily without significant material and financial support from outside the involved country: the only successful guerrilla wars won without this support were China and Cuba. Initially, Cuba supplied instructors and arms to guerrilla groups in Latin America. However, Castro's policy of aiding continental revolution in the South by giving help to any guerrilla group that asked for it conflicted with the conditions attached to the economic aid he received from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's developing policy of `coexistence' (and their wish to see that only guerrilla groups they approved of or controlled might succeed) led him to reduce and finally eliminate support for the rural guerrilla movements by 1968.
* Lack of a political base. Debray's theory did not follow the orthodox Leninist line of military action controlled and directed by political considerations and organizations. In imitation of what had happened in Cuba, he also asserted that the guerrilla army was the `vanguard party' in embryo, not the other way around. He believed that political party structures, susceptible to factional infighting, indecision, bureaucratic inertia, and ignorance of the military situation, could only fritter away what military advances the small guerrilla bands in the countryside had made. A valuable source of intelligence, coordination, and support was lost.
* Lack of popular support. Debray had forgotten some of the most basic rules of guerrilla warfare: that a guerrilla soldier is also a political fighter, with the specific mission of organizing the people with whom he comes into contact; that guerrillas belong where the majority of the population resides; and that a guerrilla struggle cannot remain viable if it does not have an understanding of the needs of the people or their cooperation. His theory that the peasants would be inspired to revolt just by being presented with a good military example on the part of the focos was false. A majority of the people to be found in the focos were middle-class intellectuals, recruited from universities and offices in the cities, who appeared in the countryside talking about matters (and often in a language) that the peasants could not understand. Not surprisingly, the peasants simply ignored them, turned informer, or treated them as foreigners who only brought the unwanted attentions of the police and army.
* Improvements in counter-insurgency techniques. At the beginning of this period, most Latin American armies were equipped with World War Two American castoffs and led by officers who might have been American-trained but had learned only how to fight Germans in Europe. About 1960 there was a shift in emphasis in the training and equipment furnished these countries by the US, in belated recognition of the effectiveness of and threat posed by guerrilla warfare. The formation of the Special Forces and their introduction as training advisors, the use of napalm and defoliants (permissible and effective in the remote, sparsely populated places recommended as guerrilla bases by Debray), the development of airmobility, advances in communications technology, the willingness of the United States to intervene militarily when conditions required it (as was demonstrated in the Dominican Republic in 1965), and the first serious attempts at civic action programs were all factors in the frustration and defeat of every attempt to export the `Cuban' pattern of revolution to Latin America.
The last act in this drama of the agrarian guerrilla was in late 1966 when Che himself and a small band of Cubans entered Bolivia. The peasants there failed to be suitably impressed and less than one year later Che was captured and killed by the Bolivian army, to be enshrined forever on the bedroom walls and T-shirts of student revolutionaries everywhere.
After Che's death the preferred strategy for insurrection in the developed and semi-developed world changed. From 1968 on, the main area of revolutionary effort was to be in the mushrooming urban areas of the developing world, as people flooded into the cities in search of work. In all cases, the urban infrastructure broke down almost immediately and spawned huge expanses of cardboard and tin shacks on the perimeters of the swelling cities.
Debray's foco theory, which had failed so thoroughly in the isolated rural areas of South America, was reexamined by revolutionaries in South America. It seemed possible to remedy many of its faults by simply transferring it to an urban setting. Lack of support from outside the country could be remedied by stealing the wherewithal to build the struggle, primarily money and arms, from the state itself. Operating where the bulk of the population was, especially the more educated and politically aware segments of society, would theoretically allow them to build the political organization and popular support that had not been forthcoming in the countryside. It would also be possible to demonstrate the strength and ubiquity of the urban guerrilla with a minimum investment of personnel and equipment by using the spectacular tactics of `armed propaganda.' Finally, the government would find it very difficult to use its new counter-insurgency techniques against guerrillas operating in such difficult terrain as the city. Airmobility is of little use inside a city, and governments do not get re-elected by napalming their urban constituents.
A simple analysis of the terrain makes the large modern city a logical choice for a guerrilla campaign. Large cities are densely populated by faceless crowds of mutual strangers, where guerrillas can pass unnoticed in a way they never could in the countryside. They can be visible or invisible when, where, and how they wish. The outlying slums offer the urban guerrilla sanctuary and anonymity. Pursuing soldiers and policemen find themselves cut off from each other, out of command, and liable to be ambushed or defeated in detail. Most importantly, they are too close to the guerrillas to use their massively superior artillery and air power. There is also a much larger selection of nearby targets, with more witnesses, than in the countryside. A city has banks to rob, police stations and army garrisons to raid for arms, radio and TV stations to occupy or destroy, and administrative centres to disrupt. The city centre is where the media sources --pipelines of information to the outside world - are. The city is also serviced by an intricate traffic system that is easy to jam, whether to cause disruption or assure a clean getaway. The modern city is where the people are, and it is a cardinal rule of guerrilla warfare to stay near the people. A revolutionary movement needs people to survive -- people as a source of food, money, or recruits; people to hide behind, kidnap, or threaten; people to propagandize and wean away from the influence of the government.
The tactic of choice among the new `urban guerrilla' groups of Latin America was to be terrorism. Terrorism, here defined as the systematic use of violence and intimidation by clandestine groups in pursuit of a political goal, has been with us as long as we have had organized opposition to governments. It is not a revelation to state that terrorism is one of the basic techniques of guerrilla warfare. Terrorism is free of ideological content, is remarkably cheap and cost-effective in terms of lives and equipment, and is very difficult to defend against. Its true power lies not in the actual material damage it can cause, but rather by the immense psychological effect it can have. This is especially true in the city, where there are simply more witnesses and each terrorist action can be vastly amplified and often grossly distorted by modern methods of mass communication.
Terrorism cannot make a revolution by itself, but the theorists of urban guerrilla warfare thought that under the right set of circumstances it could make a revolution possible. Only those who use terror as a tactic in conjunction with a campaign of strikes, riots, and political activity aimed to lead eventually to a revolutionary war can properly be described as guerrillas, but terrorism was almost the only technique available to nascent guerrilla groups -- and the weaker the movement, the greater the necessity and temptation to resort to terrorism.
The legitimacy and credibility of the national government, its ability to evoke compliance and credence without the use of force, was a crucial target for the guerrillas.. Acts of `armed propaganda,' which included raids on military and police installations, brief occupation of public buildings, random bombing, instigating riots, and demonstrations of firepower or popular support, were all methods used to discredit the existing government.
The guerrillas' logic ran this way: when a government appears unable to solve major national social or economic problems, represent the public interest equitably, or even keep order in the streets, then it is possible to use this impotence (and note that it need only be a perceived impotence) to lever public support away from the government. Every action the government undertakes will point up their inability to control the situation and drive certain sectors of the public towards the rebels or into neutrality. Eventually the patience of other elements of society will be exhausted. Some groups will start taking the law into their own hands, or the possibility of a militarist backlash may arise. This will make the situation worse for established society and better for the rebels. In the end, the urban guerrilla only has to make things fall apart; but the government must both repair the damage done and protect society without turning it into an armed camp.
From 1968 to 1976, various revolutionary organizations throughout South America tried to put the foco theory into practice in the cities. The best examples were the Montoneros of Argentina, the Tupamaros of Uruguay, and the Action for National Liberation (ALN) of Brazil led by Carlos Marighella himself. These organizations sought to overthrow their respective national governments and fight the incursion of foreign capital, which they regarded as a form of economic imperialism, through violence and provocation. They did not rely for support on ethnic or religious groups in society, but referred to themselves as weapons of class struggle.
Each of the three organizations named above managed to start the first few dizzy spins of the provocation-repression cycle, but in each case the government's reaction (or rather, overreaction) blew the group out of existence. In Argentina the escalation by the Montoneros from bank robbery and kidnapping to company and battalion-size raids on military bases contributed to a disintegration of society and political culture that ended with a seizure of power by the military in 1976. The ensuing domestic repression, called `the Dirty War,' swallowed up thousands of innocent people whose only crime had been mild criticism of the regime, as well as most of the Montoneros. In Brazil the existing military dictatorship, which had not been weakened in the slightest by the actions of the urban guerrillas, filled the streets of the cities with soldiers, made mass arrests, used torture, and passively encouraged the formation of vigilante `death squads' among off-duty policemen, soldiers, and landowners. Uruguay was the most liberal and tolerant country in South America, with a strong tradition of democracy, before the Tupamaros came. An economic downturn weakened the government and placed severe strains on the social fabric of the nation that the Tupamaros were careful to exploit. Although they won some popular support at first, and even scored a number of tactical victories over the inexperienced security forces, their chance of success waned as people tired of the violence. A coup d'etat in all but name by the revamped Uruguayan military in 1972 smashed the Tupamaros but demolished the structure of democracy in Uruguay in the process.
Because the urban guerrillas in all three countries were committed to violence and their tactics forced them to act in secrecy, they could never get more than a tiny amount of public sympathy or organized public support. The Montoneros had some backing in the organized trade-union movements, but this was also swept away by the government's response. In 1972 the Tupamaros managed to create a link with the Frente Amplio, a left-wing political party, but they scored a bare fifth of the votes in the presidential elections held that year. The only opportunity left to these groups was to make internal conditions so bad that the people would be galvanized into revolt against a government that had, by its heavy-handed repression, lost its legitimacy. This popular revolt never materialized. In each case the guerrillas overstepped the `tolerable limits of violence,' shoving the people onto the side of the government as the only agency that could maintain order, and managed to provoke a crackdown so harsh that it destroyed their organization -- thus making it impossible to exploit any public unrest that might have resulted from the government's reaction.
Not one attempt to overthrow state power by insurrection conducted in the cities met with success. Governments were overthrown, but only in a draconian reaction to the urban guerrillas. In most cases, the only concrete result was the death or imprisonment of the revolutionaries and the destruction of what advances democracy might have made in those countries.
Just as generals are accused of being prepared only to fight the previous war, so also are revolutionaries often prepared only to conduct the previous revolution. It was a simplified, mechanistic view of how revolutionary wars had been conducted in the past that killed Che Guevara and thwarted Castro's attempts to gain influence in Latin America. A similar, unthinking transposition of the foco theory from the countryside to the cities virtually guaranteed that the urban-based guerrilla groups would also fail. Why was this?
The simple answer can be found in Lenin's dictum that `a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation.' He defined a revolutionary situation as one with the following symptoms:
* When it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule
without any change...for a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient
for the lower classes not to want to live in the old way; it is also necessary
for the upper classes to be unable to live in the old way. This did not
come to pass in any country in which urban guerrillas operated. Even though the
extreme pace of urbanization associated with industrialization placed societal
strains on the developing countries, a major result was the expansion of the
middle class -- a social group that actually had a stake in society and little
to gain from backing revolutionary causes. Meanwhile, the rich stayed rich and
saw no reason to change the existing social order.
* When the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute
than usual. The Tupamaros in Uruguay managed to exploit the insecurity and
discontent caused by the general economic downturn in South America from 1969
to 1972 to a small degree, but `suffering and want' is a relative term. Uruguay
was one of the few countries in Latin America that had anything like a
functioning welfare state, and before the economic decline Uruguay had the
highest standard of living in South America. Similarly, the Brazilian economy
was in a state of chaos in 1967, the year that saw the formation of urban
guerrilla groups. By 1970 the economy had fully recovered, and this was a
factor in the loss of support for the urban guerrillas.
* When, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable
increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to
be robbed in `peacetime,' but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the
circumstances of the crisis and by the upper classes themselves into
independent historical action. In general, this did not occur in any of the
affected countries. Revolutionary activity remained at the stage of low-level
urban violence, and while the urban guerrilla theorists all acknowledged the
value of mass support, they were never well placed or inclined to work on
obtaining it.
On a more practical level, a book published by the Comintern in 1928 with the helpful title Armed Insurrection added the following requirements for an urban uprising:
* the need to subvert and demoralize the armed forces. Although some
army officers and servicemen did work on the side of the urban guerrillas,
there was never the widespread desertion and disaffection found in government
security forces in the closing phases of a successful uprising (e.g. 1979
Nicaragua, 1959 Cuba). Although South American armies rarely go to war, they
are often the main power-brokers in their respective governments and tend to be
well looked after (if they are not, then the usual result is a coup d'etat, an
infinitely less bloody and troublesome way for members of the armed forces to
change a regime). It also proved difficult for the urban guerrillas to entice
members of the armed forces over to their side when they were simultaneously
bombing their barracks, robbing their paymasters, and sniping at their patrols.
* to build up a strong clandestine military organization and a system of
workers' councils (that is, political control structures) to prepare for
a general strike. Again, the urban guerrilla movements usually did not
manage to reach this level of numbers and organization. The Montoneros of
Argentina were notable for the extent to which they had penetrated the
trade-union movement, giving them a certain ability to conduct a campaign of
industrial sabotage and subversion -- but their agents in the trade unions were
eliminated in the massive repression following the military takeover.
* to have a carefully thought-out plan of action, taking into account the
probable response of the security forces; and once the preceding three steps
have been completed, to ensure that the masses are drawn into the conflict at
the same time as the military organization moves into action. In short,
with a proper amount of preparation general strike plus armed insurrection
equals a successful revolution. Again, the urban guerrillas never reached the
point where they could make serious plans for this.
Put simply, the Latin American guerrilla groups had a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding. As violent and unstable as South America in the 1960's and 70's may have seemed, no real `revolutionary situations' arose. Urban guerrilla warfare in Latin America foundered on this simple fact.
The theory of urban guerrilla warfare was soon seized upon by terrorist groups in other parts of the world. Some groups, usually representing self-conscious minorities, used the tactics of urban terrorism in their fight against an `internal colonial' situation. These groups worked from a sense of deprivation, economic disadvantage, political repression, or even of unfulfilled expectations, exploiting a natural discontent with the established order. Examples of this type of guerrilla movement are the French-Canadian FLQ, the `Black Power' groups in the USA, the Irish Republican Army, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (these last two portray themselves as fighting a guerrilla campaign against a `foreign army of occupation'). Most of them were extremist factions that had split off from larger, more moderate political movements. All too often their demands were politically impossible to accommodate -- for example, the demands of certain Black Power movements to form separate Negro-only enclaves within the United States, and the FLQ's ultimate aim of a sovereign Francophone Quebec. Groups of this type often consumed themselves in a welter of internal squabbles, purges, and counter-purges. For example, the IRA has split and split again over the years of their struggle against the British, and hardly anyone can make sense of the kaleidoscope of Palestinian splinter groups operating in Lebanon today. In the last two examples, the violence of the struggle itself supplies the dynamic for its apparent endlessness -- the war continues because someone always has to get in the last blow.
Another type of urban terrorist group is the `Trotskyite.' These groups were found in the highly developed free-market economies of the First World. Countries which had experienced a long period of peace and prosperity without wrenching structural changes found themselves host to a variety of tiny home-grown terrorist groups. Examples include the Red Brigades of Italy, the Red Army Fraction of Germany (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang), the Angry Brigade in England, the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army in the USA, and the Japanese Red Army. These groups did not seek to overthrow any single government -- rather, their aim was to provoke governments, fray the social fabric, and create the widespread unrest that would end in a popular revolt against a fascist state. They drew their recruits from upper and middle-class, educated young people who can only be described as maladjusted, bored, and self-alienated -- the extremist fringe of the waves of campus dissent that swept through the West in the late 1960's. All these groups were ludicrously tiny, had no mass support, and no promise of ever obtaining any. They posed no political threat as they offered no coherent program and advanced no cause besides nihilistic destruction of the existing economic and social order. Considering their background, ideology, methods, and prospects, these groups are better analyzed from the standpoint of abnormal psychology than political science.
Though these groups could not `win' in any sense of the word, they could take advantage of the mobility afforded them by modern technology (cheap air travel) and liberal democracy (relatively porous borders) to cause trouble in other areas of the world. Finding a commonality of motivations, methods, and material requirements, terrorist groups began to cooperate with ease and efficiency across national borders. Thus began the period of `transnational terrorism' in the early 1970's.
The first stage of cooperation was logistical support. For example, members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army received basic training in PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Weapons stolen by the Italian Red Brigades were later found in Red Army Fraction safe houses. The next stage saw terrorist groups striking targets anywhere in the world on each other's behalf. Perhaps the most involved example of this international cooperation was the Lod Airport Massacre in 1972. After training at a PFLP camp in Lebanon, four members of the Japanese Red Army flew to Rome, armed themselves with Czech automatic rifles and Soviet hand grenades, flew to Tel Aviv, and killed 29 people (none of whom, incidentally, were Jewish) in the arrival lounge at Lod Airport. It was alleged that one of the kidnappers of Aldo Moro was a German loaned to the Italian Red Brigades from the Red Army Fraction. The final stage of this period, one somewhat outside the scope of this article, was marked by the actual participation of sovereign nations in coordinating, planning, and supporting transnational terrorism. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, terrorist organizations could find places to train, arm, and rest in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and the USSR. This culminated in the use of terrorist groups by radical governments as an instrument of coercive foreign policy. A good example of this was how Colonel Qaddafi used PLO members to train and carry out missions with Libyan terrorists aimed at Egypt, Italy, and American targets in Europe.
The Latin American urban guerrillas were unable to rally popular support and were crushed in turn by heavy-handed, basically military responses that showed up the frailty and ephemeral nature of democracy in South America. In the more developed countries of North America and Europe, all of whom had long traditions of political liberalism, individual freedom, and faith in democratic processes, it was inconceivable to respond the these groups in this way. Nevertheless, the citizens of a democratic society will still look to their government as a guarantor of their physical security, no matter how remote the threat to their personal safety may be. Some areas in which democratic governments were able to strike back at terrorism included:
* Cooperation in intelligence and legal matters. A coordinated structure for gathering and disseminating intelligence on terrorist groups, both among the various branches of the internal security establishment and with other countries, is one of the most important assets a government can have. It is now routine for government security agencies to share information on the membership, movements, capabilities, and intentions of such groups through TREVI (Terrorism, Radicalism, and Violence International, a structure developed in the late 1970's by the Ministers of the Interior of the various countries of the EEC) and NATO. Progress was also made during the 1970's towards a strong body of international agreements and laws against terrorism. The Hague Convention of 1970 (which defined hijacking of aircraft as a crime and allowed for the extradition of hijackers), the Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism in 1977, and the Bonn Summit of 1978 (which advocated sanctions against countries aiding and abetting hijackers) were all examples of this type of cooperation.
* Preparedness. As hijacking of aircraft became endemic in the 1970's,
many governments introduced tighter security at airports and on the aircraft
themselves (for example, passport checks, X-ray and body searches, locking the
door to the plane cockpit, armoring the plane's vital areas to minimize the
damage from luggage bombs, and so forth). Such preventive measures made it much
more difficult to hijack an aircraft, but hijackings still occurred.
Faced with the inevitability that terrorist incidents would continue to happen, specialized anti-terrorist units were created by many governments. These units were often converted from existing military or police units. The British had a ready-made anti-terrorist force in the 22nd (Special Air Service) Regiment, and a bomb squad of the London police force was converted to an anti-terrorist unit, the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group. After the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in Munich in 1972, the West German government created Grenzschutzgruppe 9, a special military unit that was trained in anti-terrorist methods by the Israeli Intelligence and Reconnaissance Unit 269. MOSSAD, the Israeli secret service, also became famous during the 1970's for its ability to `take out' individual terrorists anywhere in the world in revenge for the 1972 Munich Massacre. The French created Gigene, a special subunit of the Gendarmerie (a rural police force under the control of the Minister of Defence, equipped and trained as motorized light infantry). Holland reorganized one company of marines for counter-terrorist duties. In Italy, the urban police and the Carabinieri (a paramilitary body organized for internal security duties, more heavily armed and under stricter discipline than the police) cooperated against the Red Brigades. In the United States, almost every police force and branch of the armed services has some form of counterterrorist unit. President Carter initiated Project Blue Light in 1977, in which two hundred men were chosen to form an elite unit that became known later as the Delta Force. Other countries, such as Egypt, gave additional training to some members of their elite commando units and left it at that.
These specialized units scored some spectacular successes (the SAS raid on the Iranian embassy in London, the German raid on a hijacked aircraft at Mogadishu, Somalia, and the Israeli rescue mission at Entebbe, Uganda are the most famous). There were also some outright failures such as the overly complicated and ambitious American effort in 1980 to rescue hostages held in Tehran, or the abortive rescue mission in Larnaca, Cyprus in 1978. On the latter occasion, 72 Egyptian commandos landed at Larnaca airport to storm a hijacked airliner held by Palestinians who had murdered a friend of President Anwar Sadat. No one had informed the Cypriot National Guards who were surrounding the airplane of this attempt, and they opened fire on the Egyptians as they launched their attack, killing 15. These botched missions underscored the requirement for close international cooperation and careful planning.
* Media responsibility. Few things in modern society have more power to change minds and influence events than mass media, especially television. Terrorists know this full well, and often plan their attacks with media effect in mind. Journalists, whose livelihood depends on attracting large numbers of readers and viewers, are themselves attracted to the spectacular nature of terrorist attacks. The media can therefore play into the hands of the terrorists themselves in giving their cause free publicity to a wide audience, providing other terrorist groups with ideas and techniques, and occasionally compromising the plans of the security forces (for example, in a siege situation). The governments of democratic countries, with a definite interest in protecting a free press, find themselves in a quandary. They do not want to aid the terrorists in any way, but neither are they well placed to control the media. The policy that most governments followed in the 1970's was not to interfere with the media, since the viewing and reading public was not sympathetic in the slightest to the terrorists' aims and attempts to censor the media usually backfired.
Nevertheless, it can be argued that a steady diet of televised violence and furor over terrorist activity can create a certain amount of psychic numbing or an attitude of powerlessness before terrorism, by making the viewer identify with the unfortunate few who are victims of it. In this sense, the real target of many highly visible terrorist actions is the mind of the beholder, and the desired product is not direct material destruction but feelings of confusion, fear, insecurity and impotence, which can be a much more effective generator of social malaise and mistrust. Odds are low to the point of exclusion that an ordinary individual will be personally involved in a terrorist incident except as a spectator. But during the early 1980's, overseas tourism by Americans dropped sharply, with `fear of being kidnapped or hijacked' often given as a reason for not going abroad. The image of Americans being hunted down like wild animals if they so much as ventured out of the local Holiday Inn was one created almost entirely by media commentary and did not represent the actual state of affairs.
The Latin American urban guerrilla groups failed to overthrow their respective governments because it was politically impossible for them to do so. As repressive as the governments they fought might have been (or become), true revolutionary situations did not exist for the guerrillas to exploit and all they succeeded in doing was creating more repression.
As futile as the armed struggles conducted by the Latin American urban guerrillas may seem today, they nevertheless inspired dozens of other groups to forego peaceful political methods and seek governmental change through violence. It is reasonable to expect that violence will continue in the urban areas of the world, just as people will continue to find causes to kill and die for.