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Faculty and Researcher Publications Faculty and Researcher Publications Collection

2016-10

Terrorist Learning: A Look at the Adoption of

Political Kidnappings in Six Countries, 1968–1990

Rasmussen, Maria

Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group

Maria Rasmussen (2016): Terrorist Learning: A Look at the Adoption of Political

Kidnappings in Six Countries, 1968–1990, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2016.1237226 http://hdl.handle.net/10945/50944

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Terrorist Learning: A Look at the Adoption of Political

Kidnappings in Six Countries, 1968–1990

Maria Rasmussen

Department of National Security Affairs, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA

ABSTRACT

This article studies the epidemic of kidnappings across six countries between 1968 and 1990. The goal is to identify those factors that determine the operational decisions made by terrorists. Why and how do terrorists decide to engage in certain types of actions but not others? The article discusses a number of scholarly approaches, and the variables these studies have put forward to explain the decision-making processes within terrorist organizations. The argument made here is that the groups’ ideological preferences, strategic analysis, and need to attract media attention did not appear to exert much influence in the terrorists’ decision to kidnap. Organizational resources and the nature of the security environment in which the terrorists operated had some bearing. However, kidnappings became attractive when terrorists made a pragmatic evaluation of the reaction by governments and the public and consequently of the costs or benefits of a particular course of action. The decision to carry out a campaign of kidnappings, or to abstain from kidnapping, should be interpreted as clear evidence of terrorist learning. Two types of learning appear to have influenced the adoption of kidnappings: learning by observing others and learning by doing.

In December 1973, the Basque Euskadi ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty, or ETA) assassinated the Spanish prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. This was a spectacular feat that eliminated any possibility of a continuation of Francoism after General Francisco Franco’s death, greatly eased the advent of democracy, and therefore colored the Spaniards’ views on ETA for a decade. ETA was quite candid in its book-length account of this operation:

ETA was given a secret news report that in Madrid Luis Carrero Blanco went to mass every morning at 9 in a Jesuit church on Serrano Street … it appeared that there wasn’t much guard-ing of Carrero. It might even be possible to kidnap him. That’s the real way the idea of kidnap-ping Carrero came about. It would have been more logical for us to have planned to kidnap Carrero and then find the means of doing it. But life is always a little topsy-turvy, and in this case, we did it backwards.1

Without that tip on Carrero’s church attendance, which ETA obtained by chance, the operation might not have been conceived. Surveillance convinced ETA that the kidnapping

CONTACT Maria Rasmussen mrasmussen@nps.edu Department of National Security Affairs, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943, USA.

This article not subject to US copyright law.

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would be easy, as the Admiral never varied his routine, only had a couple of bodyguards, and always followed the same route to the church and then to work. However, in June 1973 Carrero was appointed prime minister, his security was upgraded, and his church attendance became less regular. He was still taking the same route to and from church. So ETA changed the plan from a kidnapping to an assassination.2The group was lucky to find a basement flat for rent overlooking the admiral’s route. ETA dug a tunnel from the flat to the middle of the street, placed a bomb there, and killed the prime minister as he drove away after mass.

ETA went on to practice the art of kidnapping assiduously after Carrero. However, Irish terrorists, who shared with the Basques a common ideology, secessionist goals, socioeco-nomic base of recruitment, and organizational structure, did not. The same can be observed if one compares the campaigns of violence in Germany and Italy: Italian terrorists consis-tently carried out kidnappings, and the Germans did not, in spite of the fact that during this period the resort to kidnappings worldwide was frequently described as an “epidemic.” This article investigates why.

The next section discusses a number of scholarly approaches, and the variables these stud-ies have put forward to explain the decision-making processes within terrorist organizations. I then provide my own explanation, emphasizing a more immediate, pragmatic, short-term analysis by the terrorists of the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in particular tac-tics. The article then analyses the spread of kidnappings across six different countries between 1968 and 1990. Following Brian Jackson, I argue that the decision to carry out a campaign of kidnappings, or to abstain from kidnapping, should be interpreted as clear evi-dence of terrorist learning.3

Explaining the Adoption of Kidnappings

What factors determine the operational decisions made by terrorists at any given time? Why and how do terrorists decide to engage in certain types of actions but not others? Some scholars have viewed these puzzles as a terrorist targeting question, or as one of choices from within a repertoire of actions.4Others talk about the logic of terrorism.5Following the

September 2001 attacks, many turned their attention to innovation in terrorism—the ques-tion of why terrorists decide to do something they have not done before.6Finally, scholars

have discussed why terrorists decide to emulate what other terrorists have done. Evaluating and applying this last body of literature is somewhat problematic because the terms are con-tested. Some scholars use the terms “contagion” and “diffusion” interchangeably, and as mere synonyms of other terms such as “emulation,” “mimicry,” or “fad.”7Others differenti-ate between “contagion,” viewed as conscious, direct imitation among units that are con-nected and “diffusion,” meant to describe a random occurrence of events among independent units of analysis.8

What these authors and perspectives have in common is that they have identified a set of variables that helps explain the problem at hand. The output of terrorism, that is to say the operations, is primarily interpreted as the result of the group’s ideological preferences and/or strategic analysis.9A second argument is that operational decisions may be driven by the need to attract the attention of the media and ultimately to recruit and/or obtain support.10Finally, there is the argument that the terrorist repertoire will be influenced by organizational resources (size, money, structure), competition with other groups, and/or by the nature of the security environment in which the group operates.11

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Ideology is a very poor predictor of terrorist behavior. If terrorist ideology consistently informed terrorist action, there should have been some congruence in the types of victims sought by the Italian Red Brigades and the German Red Army Fraction (RAF), given that these are both Marxist organizations but, as C. J. M. Drake’s study of target selection shows, there is not.12If ideology were an important factor guiding operations, we would not witness the fact that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was responsible for such a large proportion of Catholic civilian fatalities in Ireland after 1969, or that Muslim terrorists are largely responsi-ble for the killing of other Muslims in the last decade.

We should also discount the notion that terrorist violence “resulted from an overall politi-cal strategy designed in the light of domestic contextual circumstances.”13The implication is

that the correct strategy will lead to victory, while in reality terrorism seldom wins. In addi-tion, as J. Bowyer Bell once famously quipped,

Very few revolutionary organizations invest much time in strategic planning or organizational analysis. There may be an investment in ideology or internal propaganda under various guises, but the compelling concerns of the anti-insurgency experts are not found in the underground. Any day-long analytical conference focuses deeper and longer on rebel strategy and tactics than do rebels over a year. There is little time for contemplation during an armed struggle and that is spent on the faith, survival and operations.14

The notion that ideology or strategic analysis will guide terrorist action can be rejected for a number of reasons. The distribution of beliefs among members of a group is always uneven. The work of Jerrold Post, Ehud Sprinzak, and Laurita Denny, who interviewed Pal-estinian terrorists in Israeli jails, is instructive. Confronted by concrete questions about strat-egy and tactical options, the terrorists provided very different answers grounded not in ideology or religious belief but in personal preferences and/or their immediate life circum-stances. More important, these men provided very different answers, even though they all belonged to the same terrorist group.15In addition, anybody who has interviewed terrorists

knows that their grasp of ideology is faulty at best. In fact, terrorists tend to denigrate ideol-ogy—as the Uruguayan Tupamaros said, “words divide us, action unites us.”16The case of

Mohammed Nahin Ahmed and Yusuf Zubair Sarwar, who purchased Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies once they had decided to fight in Syria, suggests that on occa-sion ideological justifications are post facto.17ETA’s account of how they came to murder their own prime minister was a frank admission of the role of pragmatism and chance in ter-rorist planning. We also know from a variety of studies of terter-rorist life histories, from Donatella della Porta’s groundbreaking edited volume to Marc Sageman’s study of global Salafi jihadists, that terrorist behavior is better explained by recourse to group psychology. Friendship and kinship ties, revenge, and survivor guilt are all variables that explain terrorist behavior much better than ideology does.18Finally, Martha Crenshaw taught us that

organi-zational dynamics play a huge role in the development of terrorist behavior.19

The perennial terrorist desire for publicity is another factor that can be discounted as an explanation for the mimicry of particular tactics. The late 1970s and 1980s witnessed a wealth of articles and books about the relationship between the media and terrorism. The bulk of the writing was done in the 1980s, and comparatively little was published after 1992–94. Much of this writing was heavily influenced by two events, the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and the hijack-ing of TWA flight 847 to Beirut in 1985. Writhijack-ings on the media and terrorism tend toward over-generalizations about the behavior and expectations of terrorists. Comparatively few

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studies involve careful analysis of actual media coverage. In addition, few studies emphasize key differences between print and electronic media, and between the evening news and docu-mentaries, though the focus now is almost exclusively on the Internet. In any event, the CNN factor, as well as the commercialization of news divisions in the United States that has been described as “news as public drama”20means that all terrorism will receive blanket coverage. This still does not explain why some operations are undertaken and others are not.

If ideology, strategic analysis, and the desire for media coverage do not help explain the adoption of kidnappings, what does? The argument made here is that organizational resour-ces and the nature of the security environment have some bearing. However, kidnappings become attractive when a terrorist organization perceives that the tactic is efficacious in achieving desired aims in the short term. As has been remarked, “behaviour is more likely to be imitated if it is seen to be rewarded.”21Who provides those rewards? Governments and the public. The reaction by governments and civil society will determine whether a group adopts a given tactic as part of its repertoire.

When he discusses insurgent kidnappings, Jon Elster distinguishes between the govern-ment’s response to a kidnapping and the governgovern-ment’s response to the practice of kidnap-pings.22 This is an important distinction and applicable to all terrorist tactics. Target

hardening and/or the adoption of specific countermeasures may decrease the overall appeal of a given tactic. An example is that of the drop in hijackings after metal detectors were introduced. On the other hand, the belief that the government has suffered a decisive blow (in prestige, capabilities, legitimacy) after an individual attack may indicate to the terrorists that the tactic is worth pursuing. This may happen even if the terrorist group needs to expend significant resources in pursuit of a given tactic. As David Kilcullen has recently argued, “guerrillas and terrorists can gain strategic advantage just by demonstrating skill, daring, and tactical competence: the ‘style points’ they acquire, and the shock value of show-ing they’re a force to be reckoned with, can outweigh tactical failures.”23

As far as civil society is concerned, there is a widespread belief in academic and policy circles that loss of support from the terrorists’ own constituency will have the effect of decreas-ing the appeal of a tactic, while an increase in popular support might indicate that the action is worth pursuing. There is some evidence to back this up—witness the Palestinian civilians’ sup-port for suicide terrorism in spite of the terrible price they have paid in the form of Israeli retal-iation. However, the relationship between public support for terrorism and terrorist operations is more nuanced. If the group is flush with funds and recruits, it does not need societal support. In addition, Christopher Hewitt carried out some work on public opinion views on terrorism in five countries that demonstrated that civil society’s approval of terrorism is fairly inelastic, to use economic jargon.24But the acceptance by civil society does impact the group’s ability to

operate in direct and indirect ways. Mao’s metaphor about fish and water was indeed apt. Testing the Argument

A kidnapping is defined here as the illegal seizure of an individual who will be held in secret locations, frequently until demands have been met. Not discussed here are barricade and hostage incidents, in which individuals are seized but kept in a public location, or hijackings, in which a large number of individuals are seized in a very public manner in addition to an aircraft or ship.25The essential characteristic of a kidnapping lies in the fact that the victim

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incident will quite likely (but not always) happen outside the public eye. The modern era of kidnappings started in Latin America in the late sixties, spread to Europe in the seventies, and to the Middle East in the eighties. This period is widely considered the heyday of kid-nappings, which declined precipitously in the nineties, but became important once again in the new millennium, this time in South Asia.26

Although it is customary in the field of terrorism studies to decry the absence of consen-sus on definitions and typologies, most take as an article of faith the distinction expertly drawn by Peter Waldmann between ethnic and sociorevolutionary terrorism.27Ethnic

terro-rists recognize themselves as members of a given community that they purport to defend from outside attack. Mobilization in this case emerges out of membership in a collective. By contrast, sociorevolutionary terrorists are mobilized by an ideology into defense of a group (frequently, the proletariat) to which they do not belong. Therefore, this section will com-pare the spread of kidnappings in Spain and Ireland, both cases of ethnic terrorism, Italy and Germany, and Argentina and Uruguay, all cases of sociorevolutionary terrorism. The period to be considered is 1968–1990. In all six countries, terrorist campaigns were launched in 1968–70. By 1990, terrorist groups in Argentina, Uruguay, and Italy had been defeated. Although terrorist groups in Ireland, Spain, and Germany remained active after 1990, only ETA continued kidnapping. Between 1991 and its dissolution in 2011, the group carried out an additional five kidnappings. AsTable 1suggests, the two most widely used databases on terrorism incidents are incomplete when it comes to kidnappings.

Table 1 compares the total number of kidnappings in the RAND and START data-bases for the six countries under consideration with the figures collated for this article. Until 1998 the RAND database only recorded incidents of international terrorism, where the perpetrators and victims came from at least two different countries. START inherited the data collected by Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services, which included domestic incidents but relied on open sources, mostly in English. This might have produced a bias toward international incidents.28 We know that in any given context incidents classified

as international terrorism are a fraction of the total volume of violence witnessed. Focus-ing on international incidents alone would distort the picture. The START data on Ire-land are also deceptive because in 32 out of 34 instances recorded, the victim was seized only to be almost immediately killed. START counts these as kidnappings, but the most authoritative account of all deaths in the Irish conflict does not.29 It therefore became

necessary to build a database of kidnappings for the six countries concerned. The results are presented inTable 2.

Table 1.A comparison of kidnapping incidents across three databases, 1968–1990.

RAND! GTD!! Current study!!!

Spain 61 81 Ireland 2 34 7 Uruguay 2 10 15 Argentina 4 26 239 Italy 4 13 26 Germany 2 4 Total 14 144 372

Sources.!“Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents 1968–2009,” RAND Corporation. Available athttp://www.rand.org/nsrd/

projects/terrorism-incidents/about.html;!!“Global Terrorism Database,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and

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Table 2builds on recent efforts to create a database on kidnappings in Spain, and on ear-lier data collection in Argentina.30In order to compile the data on Germany, Italy, Uruguay, and Ireland, I surveyed key texts on terrorism in those countries. Table 2 includes every instance of a kidnapping whose details (date, victim, authorship) are corroborated by three independent sources. Incidents mentioned and described by less than three sources were not included.31

The most significant contrast inTable 2is that between Ireland and Spain, two countries where ethnic terrorist organizations viewed themselves as existing in a neo-colonial situation and being exploited by the Madrid central government and by London. In addition, Irish and Spanish organizations occasionally exchanged know-how. According to Francisco Llera and Rafael Leonisio, ETA resorted to kidnappings fairly consistently after 1970. Roughly 51 percent of all kidnappings were for profit: the family was asked for a ransom, or the abductee was a bank manager or chief financial officer who was then forced to open a bank or com-pany safe and provide ETA with its contents. One of ETA’s consistent sources of funding was the “revolutionary tax,” the extortion of funds from businesses in the Basque Country.

Table 2.Kidnappings in selected countries, 1968–1990.

Year Uruguay Argentina Italy Germany Spain Ireland Total

1968 1 1 1969 1 1 1970 6 13 1 2 22 1971 7 27 34 1972 16 2 1 19 1973 63 3 1 1 68 1974 60 3 2 65 1975 35 4 1 1 41 1976 22 2 4 28 1977 3 2 3 1 9 1978 2 8 10 1979 13 13 1980 1 18 19 1981 5 9 1 15 1982 1 8 9 1983 6 2 8 1984 1 1 1985 3 3 1986 3 1 4 1987 1 1 1988 1 1 1989 1 1 1990 Total 15 239 26 4 81 7 372

Sources. Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group. The Inside Story of a Phenomenon (London: The Bodley Head, 1987); Carol Edler Baumann, The Diplomatic Kidnappings. A Revolutionary Tactic of Urban Terrorism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children. The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (London: Michael Joseph, 1977); Pablo Brum, The Robin Hood Guerrillas. The Epic Story of Uruguay’s Tupamaros (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Publishers, 2014); Richard Clutterbuck, Kidnap & Ransom: The Response (London: Faber and Faber, 1978); John C. Griffiths, Hostage. The History, Facts & Reasoning Behind Hostage Taking (London: Carlton Publishing Group, 2003); Paul Howard, Hostage. Notorious Irish Kidnap-pings (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004); Alison Jamieson, The Heart Attacked. Terrorism and Conflict in the the Italian State (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989); Brian M. Jenkins and Janera Johnson, International Terrorism: A Chronology, 1968–1974 (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1975); Francisco J. Llera and Rafael Leonisio, “Los Secuestros de ETA y sus Organi-zaciones Afines, 1970–1997: Una Base de Datos,” Revista Espa~nola de Ciencia Pol!ıtica 37 (2015): 141–160; Robert C. Meade, Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Mar!ıa Jos!e Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol. Armed Struggle, 1969–1979 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995); Michael Newton, The Encyclopedia of Kidnappings (New York: Facts on File, 2002); Vittorfranco S. Pisano, The Dynamics of Subversion and Violence in Contemporary Italy (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987).

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Businessmen would receive a letter from the group demanding a fixed monthly sum, but some refused to pay. An occasional kidnapping served to warn those potential rebels of the cost of refusing to pay the “revolutionary tax.” Another 20 percent of kidnappings were meant to weigh in on labor conflicts. These tended to be “express kidnappings” where the victim, usually a management representative, was held only for a day. Once the management acquiesced to labor demands, the abductee was freed. A third major cause of kidnappings (17 percent) was the desire to exert political pressure; for example, by abducting a prison official to demand better conditions for ETA prisoners.32

ETA’s willingness to resort to kidnappings for a variety of motives may have been deter-mined by the success of its early endeavours. The first abductee was Jos!e !Angel Aguirre, a bank manager held overnight so that he could open the bank safe early the next morning. That operation netted four million pesetas. Two months later, ETA kidnapped Eugene Biehl, honorary West German consul in San Sebasti!an, with the goal of pressuring Franco into clemency for the Basque terrorists on trial at Burgos. Although the government never acknowledged it, a deal was made. ETA released Biehl on Christmas Day, and Franco used the holiday period to appear magnanimous and commute all death sentences. The case attracted massive press attention all over Europe.33 One year later, ETA kidnapped Lorenzo

Zabala, manager of a factory immersed in a labor conflict. He was released after four days, once the factory acquiesced to labor demands and freed all imprisoned shop floor activists.34 ETA only suffered setbacks in 1976 and 1977, when in the course of kidnappings negotiations broke down, the families did not pay a ransom, and the victims, businessmen !Angel Berazadi and Javier de Ybarra, were assassinated.35 The group then switched focus and concentrated

on “express kidnappings” for economic gain, and only undertook more kidnappings when it felt the need to apply political pressure. In 1979, for example, ETA kidnapped conservative politician Javier Rup!erez and obtained better prison conditions for group members.36

While both wings of ETA (ETA politico-military and ETA military) carried out 81 kid-nappings, Irish terrorists carried out seven. During the 1973 Christmas season, an IRA unit kidnapped Thomas Niedermayer, manager of the Grundig plant and also West German con-sul in Belfast. The kidnappers opened negotiations with Grundig possibly to demand pay-ment of a ransom, although the real motive seems to have been to pressure the British government into stopping the forced feeding of Marian and Dolours Price, two IRA women on a hunger strike in British jails. Niedermayer attempted to escape and in the attempt to control him, he was suffocated. This was a major embarrassment for the IRA, which buried Niedermayer in secret.37 However, in June 1974 another unit kidnapped Lord and Lady

Donoughmore, British residents in the Irish Republic, once again in support of the Price sis-ters. The sisters came off their hunger strike, not because of the kidnapping but thanks to back-channel negotiations by a moderate Catholic politician, and the Donoughmores were released unharmed.38A year later, some members of this gang kidnapped Dutch industrialist

Tiede Herrema in the Irish Republic and demanded the release of three IRA volunteers from jail. The Irish government refused to negotiate and also devoted significant police resources to finding the gang. After a two-week siege, the kidnappers surrendered. Herrema was unharmed.39 The last four kidnappings had a purely economic motive. In 1981 and 1983, the IRA kidnapped businessmen Ben Dunne and Don Tidey, both in the Republic. Ransoms were demanded and paid for both, although the government tried to prevent it.40 Also in 1983, the IRA kidnapped the racehorse Shergar. It became uncontrollable in captivity and had to be shot well before negotiations could lead to ransom payment—another major

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embarrassment for the IRA.41 Finally, in 1987 the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA)

kidnapped dentist John O’Grady but failed to obtain a ransom, even after severing and mail-ing two of O’Grady’s fingers.42

The contrast between Spanish and Irish terrorists’ kidnapping record is stark. Attempting to explain why the latter had not and would not show much interest in kidnappings, “North-ern Ireland Future Terrorist Trends” argued the terrorists recognized that the targets were well guarded and the British and Irish governments would not give in to blackmail.43 The government of the Irish Republic (where most of the kidnappings took place) had taken an increasingly harder line. By the time Dunne and Shergar were kidnapped, the taoiseach (prime minister), Garret FitzGerald, involved the upper echelons of the Irish police service to prevent any ransom being paid.44 The Irish government had already “made a death pact”45in the autumn of 1973— faced with the epidemic of kidnappings all over the world, the cabinet decided that they would never bow to demands, even if their own families were affected. The IRA’s own analysis was also fairly pragmatic:

The biggest issue we had with kidnappings is that they paralyse the whole country. They put all kinds of things at risk—arms dumps, planned operations, safe houses. You’ve got guys on the run who are put at serious risk of capture because all of a sudden there’s this heightened state of security. There’s roadblocks, searches. It makes it impossible to operate. And it gives the police a perfect excuse to round republicans up.46

Uruguay’s Tupamaros took a different view. Among sociorevolutionary terrorists, the Tupamaros popularized a tactic that had originated with the Guatemalans and Brazilians, and were in turn imitated by Argentine, Italian, and German groups, among others. As the Tupamaros explained in the book-length analysis of their best operations,

The most notorious kidnappings are but modest evidence of the infinite possibilities offered by a people’s prison where one can detain for indeterminate time: regime personalities, minions of repression, foreign personages, and men who are key to the survival of the regime. With those men in the hands of the guerrillas, we can ensure the physical well-being of the imprisoned comrades. … Kidnappings and people’s jail can also be used, for example, against managers who refuse to budge during workers’ disputes. Revolutionary prisons … have become in prac-tice one of the most efficacious ways of upsetting the regime’s plans.47

Consistent with this analysis, the Tupamaros conducted three kidnappings in 1968–70 in support of labor struggles, during which they conveyed an aura of invincibility, obtained some cash, and managed to get their manifestos widely published in the press. Subsequently they concocted Plan Satan, involving a number of high-profile kidnappings of foreigners over two years in order to exchange them for political prisoners. David Ronfeldt calls this “the most deliberate kidnapping campaign ever undertaken.”48Polls showed that a third of

the public thought these kidnappings were legitimate.49 However, two of the abductees escaped, and the government refused to negotiate so that Daniel Mitrione, an American advisor to the Uruguayan police, could be released. After holding an organization-wide vote on Mitrione’s fate, the Tupamaros killed him. This brought about significant disagreements among the group’s leadership.50 The Mitrione kidnapping also facilitated repression: “The

President described the situation as ‘the greatest attack this country’s political institutions have faced in this century,’”51and there was massive deployment of security force personnel

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In 1970–1971 the Tupamaros conducted a second wave of kidnappings. Except for British ambassador Geoffrey Jackson, the victims were all Uruguayans. The terrorists’ objectives were mixed. In some cases, the Tupamaros demanded and obtained ransoms. State prosecu-tor Guido Berro was kidnapped so that he could be interrogated about his handling of Tupa-maro legal cases. He was released unharmed and the TupaTupa-maros published a transcript of his interrogation. In some cases including that of Jackson, who spent nine months in captivity, the motives were unclear.52 In any event, thanks to the betrayal of two police informers within the Tupamaros, the relentless police and military operations in the wake of the Mitrione and Jackson kidnappings, and possibly the internal disagreements over the murder of Mitrione, the group was “no longer a viable fighting force” by late 1972.53

In Argentina, the practice of kidnappings may have originated partly in admiration for the Tupamaros. In their early years, when Argentine terrorists wanted to praise an operation for its precision and economy of effort, they called it “a very pando operation,”54turning

into an adjective the name of the town the Tupamaros briefly occupied in 1969. But although the Uruguayans popularized the tactic of kidnappings, asTable 2indicates the Argentines took it much further. Ransom was by far the most important motive—48 percent of all kid-nappings in Argentina led to ransom payments.55Six different terrorist groups that

eventu-ally merged into two very large ones, the Peronist Montoneros and the Marxist People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), all engaged in kidnappings. Those abducted for ransom were executives in multinational corporations such as Exxon or Coca Cola, or in large Argentine businesses. The sums demanded were increasingly larger, and when one lists dates and ran-som payments as reported in the press, the entrepreneurial quality of the terrorists becomes clear. To this day, and according to the Guinness Book of Records, the 61.5 million dollar ran-som paid for brothers Juan and Jorge Born in 1975 remains the highest ever paid for a politi-cal kidnapping. A second motive behind kidnappings (16 percent of total) was that of obtaining concessions or exposing certain conditions in businesses, schools, or other institu-tions. In 1973, for example, the terrorists kidnapped Hugo D’Aquila, a psychiatrist working at Devoto prison, in order to expose prison conditions. D’Aquila was eventually released, but the terrorists then published the transcript of his interrogation in book form.56

When officers in the armed or security forces and politicians were abducted, the objective was to make a statement or a show of operational precision. This goal accounts for 13 percent of kidnappings in Argentina over a nine-year period. Interestingly, this objective became para-mount after 1976 and once the “Dirty War,” the campaign of illegal repression leading to thousands of “disappearances,” was launched. Half of all kidnappings after 1976, while the “Dirty War was wiping out the terrorists,” were against the most heavily guarded set of poten-tial victims.57It is possible that the success of their first abduction loomed large. In 1970, the

Montoneros officially launched their campaign of violence by kidnapping a former president, retired General Pedro Aramburu, and putting him on “people’s trial.” Aramburu was accused of leading the coup that deposed Juan Per!on in 1955 and of repressing the Peronist masses. He was sentenced to death after his “trial” and executed. The Aramburu kidnapping turned the Montoneros into heroes in certain circles and acted as a significant recruitment tool. In fact, most Montoneros considered the Aramburu operation ultimately responsible for their organization’s ability to attract thousands of followers.58

Admiration for the Tupamaros, and possibly a desire to emulate their actions, extended well beyond Argentina. According to Alison Jamieson, Latin America occupied “a position of honour in Italian revolutionary mythology.”59 The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla

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was published in Italy in 1970 to wide acclaim, and there was great admiration among Italian revolutionaries for the kidnapping of British Honorary Consul Stanley Sylvester in Argen-tina in 1971.60More importantly, the Red Brigades had studied the operations by the

Tupa-maros and concluded that kidnapping was an invaluable tactic, given that it had propaganda, political, and financial value.61 Vittorfranco Pisano describes 26 kidnappings by different sociorevolutionary terrorist organizations in Italy, which he groups into clus-ters.62 The first cluster (1972–74) evolved around labor conditions. Kidnappings were of short duration and the victims were forced to make symbolic gestures such as having their picture taken with a Red Brigades banner. Slowly, the terrorists introduced the concept of “people’s trial” where the victim would be interrogated about working conditions at his fac-tory. The last kidnapping of this cluster had a political motive. The victim was Mario Sossi, assistant prosecutor in Genoa. He was held for 35 days and subjected to trial. The Red Bri-gades attempted to exchange Sossi for their imprisoned comrades. The state initially agreed, but the decision was reversed in the courts on appeal. The brigattisti released Sossi unharmed, and also released a record of his “trial” for propaganda purposes.63

The second cluster (1975–77) was the work of the second-generation terrorists, since the founder generation was by then in jail. The objective here was monetary gain. During this second cluster, two smaller organizations, the Armed Proletarian Nuclei (NAP) and the Communist Combatant Units (CCC) joined the Red Brigades and conducted a total of four kidnappings. A third and eminently political cluster (1978–80) was dominated by the kid-napping and subsequent murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, although it included the abduction of Supreme Court Justice Giovanni d’Urso. Both men were subjected to “peo-ple’s trial.” D’Urso was released after the terrorists obtained significant concessions in prison conditions.64 A final cluster in 1981, which took place against the backdrop of renewed

counterterrorist efforts in the wake of Moro’s death, involved several concurrent kidnap-pings. There was no unifying theme—some kidnappings were designed to intervene in labor disputes, one had a profit motive, and one (U.S. Army General James Dozier) was political.65

There is evidence that West German terrorists also greatly admired the Tupamaros. The Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, from which both terrorist organizations in Germany emerged, called itself “West Berlin Tupamaros.” In addition, as early as December 1970, the Baader-Meinhof group (the alternative and more popular name given to the RAF) consid-ered kidnapping a publisher or a politician in order to get better prison conditions for their comrades. The group entertained the idea of kidnappings again in late 1971.66However, it would not be until 1975, by which time the founding generation was in jail, that German ter-rorists kidnapped conservative politician Peter Lorenz and asked for the release of impris-oned comrades. Once the comrades were flown to the Middle East, the group released Lorenz unharmed.67This was unquestionably a victory for the terrorists, but a pyrrhic one, because it cost the left votes at the next election, and the left blamed the terrorists.68

German terrorists attempted another kidnapping in July 1977, in order to demand the release of comrades once again. The victim, chairman of Dresdner Bank Jurgen Ponto, resisted and was killed on the spot.69 Three months later, they kidnapped Hans-Martin

Schleyer, president of the German Industry Association in Cologne, demanding the release of eleven comrades from jail. This venture ended in a colossal failure. In support of this demand, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a Lufthansa plane and diverted it to Mogadishu. German commandos stormed the plane and killed the terrorists. The imprisoned terrorist leaders, on whose behalf the whole operation was staged, then committed suicide in

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Stammheim prison, and the kidnappers then murdered Schleyer.70 Interestingly, ten days

after they killed Schleyer, German terrorists kidnapped a Dutch millionaire in Amsterdam and extracted four million dollars—an operation almost certainly planned before the debacle at Mogadishu. However, they never attempted a kidnapping again.71

Analysis and Conclusion

What can we conclude about the resort to kidnappings across the six cases considered? It is clear that ideology did not play a part in the decision to engage in the tactic in a systematic way. Basque and Irish terrorists shared a similar understanding of the opponent and the nature of their struggle, but while ETA factions undertook kidnappings consistently, the IRA and INLA did so infrequently. The four sociorevolutionary cases discussed above also shared an ideology, but in spite of a deep admiration for the Tupamaros, German terrorists had little interest in copying their tactics. It is also clear that the epidemic of kidnappings did not originate in any strategic analysis by the groups. Except for the Argentine case, where kidnappings were consistently undertaken as a major source of terrorist funding, it is impos-sible to discern clear goals behind the resort to the tactic. When employed, the tactic of kid-nappings was used in a multiplicity of contexts and to serve purposes that were not always clear. However, Italians and Argentines were so attached to kidnappings that they insisted on conducting them even in the face of increased counterterrorist action. At that stage, com-mon sense would have dictated a change away from operations of such complexity, which require greater organizational resources and expose the terrorist group unnecessarily.

There are three additional factors that may explain some but by no means all of the vari-ability among the cases. Some scholars argue that the security environment in which the ter-rorists operate will influence the types of operations they undertake.72This may help explain the difference between Italian and German terrorists when it comes to kidnappings. The Ital-ians enjoyed something of a legal safe haven, because they initially faced an opponent (the police, gendarmerie, and judiciary) that was not up to the task, whereas the German police and intelligence services, whatever the weaknesses displayed at the Munich Olympics in 1972 or during the Lorenz kidnapping in 1975, eventually recovered. However, the Argen-tine and Uruguayan police and military made up in brutality what they lacked in expertise, and in spite of this very hostile security environment, in both countries the kidnapping industry flourished. It should also be pointed out that the Garda S!ıoch!ana, the Republic of Ireland police, was much more sympathetic to Irish terrorism than the Spanish National Police could ever be toward ETA. The security environment was not necessarily more con-ducive to kidnappings in Spain.

Others have explained terrorist preferences through a discussion of group capabilities and resources or intergroup rivalry.73Organizational resources matter when it comes to

explain-ing organizational outputs. Italian terrorist organizations were always much larger that their German counterparts, and therefore better positioned to conduct kidnappings, which are labor intensive operations requiring several surveillance teams prior to the abduction, a sig-nificant contingent of operatives during the abduction, and also different teams of jailers if the victim is to spend days or weeks in different safe houses. Similar arguments could be made when one compares Uruguay and Argentina. The ERP and Montoneros were much larger and wealthier than the Tupamaros so the Argentines were better positioned to con-duct such complex operations.

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However, terrorist organizations do not necessarily adjust their output to their resources. The Tupamaros launched an ambitious kidnapping campaign in 1968 when their organiza-tion had approximately fifty members, and the Red Brigades did likewise with only fifteen adherents.74 The Montoneros kidnapped former President Aramburu, when the organiza-tion was in its infancy and had approximately twenty recruits. Almost every member of the founding group was involved, and in spite of the success of the operation, the group almost perished in the repression that followed. In fact, if terrorist resources always determined ter-rorist output, the IRA should have conducted significantly more kidnappings than it did. The IRA was as strapped for cash as ETA; at least until Muammar Gaddafi showered his generosity on them in the mid-1980s. But the IRA, a group committed to innovation in a number of areas, showed little interest in perfecting the art of abduction.

Organizational competition for adherents did not seem to play a significant role either. In Spain, ETA split into a politico-military and a military wing in 1974. The two factions were in competition until 1981, when the ETA politico-military renounced violence. How-ever, between 1968 and 1980, ETA politico-military was the only faction engaged in kid-nappings. In Uruguay, Italy, Ireland, and Germany, the terrorist landscape involved one dominant group (Tupamaros, Red Brigades, IRA, Baader-Meinhof, respectively) but also smaller organizations that did not present a serious challenge. Finally, organizational dynamics in Argentina led not to the usual splintering typical of terrorism, but to mergers and fusions. The kidnapping epidemic started when there were six groups in competition, but continued unabated after only two groups were left. These groups did not compete for the same supporters—Montoneros was Peronist, subscribed to a nationalist agenda, and aimed to recruit among the working classes, while ERP was Marxist and recruited in uni-versity circles.

Although the security environment and the organizational resources of the terrorist groups may have contributed to the decisions, the argument presented here was that the tac-tic of kidnapping spread within and across countries because terrorists made a pragmatac-tic evaluation of the reaction by governments and the public and consequently of the costs or benefits of a particular course of action. Once the terrorists perceived the tactic to be effica-cious, they persisted in it. ETA understood early on that a kidnapping could achieve some-thing as momentous as the reversal of a judicial verdict in a historic trial. In addition, it became clear to the group that kidnappings were a major source of funding, and by interven-ing in labor disputes through kidnappinterven-ings ETA could also win popular support. The Argen-tines, who had reversed fifteen years of their country’s history with the kidnapping of Aramburu, moved quickly to amass well over one hundred million dollars through abduc-tions. In addition, the Argentines knew that national and international press coverage describing them as modern day Robin Hoods made evident the total incompetence of the forces of law and order. The Italians managed to publicize prison conditions, influence the outcome of labor disputes, and obtain funds. The killing of Moro also led to significant recruitment for the Red Brigades.75Finally, Plan Satan brought to the Tupamaros significant popular support, and the ability to embarrass the regime in the international arena; at least while the security forces were in disarray.

The Irish and Germans had no such sense of achievement. The Niedermayer kidnapping ended up in embarrassment. The Donoughmore abduction proved unnecessary, as Marian and Dolours Price came off their hunger strike, and with the demise of the racehorse, the IRA looked like brutes. Once the Irish government started a policy of trying to prevent the

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families from paying ransom, the IRA cut their losses. The German experience was equally ambivalent. The Lorenz incident ended in a draw—the terrorists freed their comrades and lost the election. The Ponto and Schleyer kidnappings were abject failures, resulting in the deaths of those comrades they were seeking to liberate.

In other words, the terrorists’ decision to engage (or not) in a campaign of kidnappings could be described as “the outcome of a learning process.”76Such learning could occur in a

number of contexts. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of training camps.77 We know that some in the first generation of Tupamaros, Montoneros, and ERP trained in Cuba, although the short trips seemed something of an exercise in public relations. We also know that German terrorists trained briefly with the Palestinians in Jordan, although the Germans thought their hosts were too focused on rural guerrilla tactics. Stefan Aust, who knew all the terrorists well, described the experience as “revolutionary tourism” to highlight how trivial the actual training was. The Red Brigades turned down an offer of training at Pal-estinian camps, partly due to the danger of exposure that travel would present, but also because the Italians thought they were learning valuable lessons at home from their own experience.78

Transfers of terrorists from one unit to another and informal meetings could also lead to learning. At least three Argentinians joined the Tupamaros before returning home to join Montoneros and ERP.79 We also know that ERP leaders met Tupamaros and members of other Latin American groups in Havana and held discussions there, that the Red Brigades met regularly with groups in Germany and with the Palestinians, and that ETA and the IRA had frequent contacts and exchanged know-how, especially in the area of bombmaking.80

Books, pamphlets, and other documents can be conducive to learning. The Tupamaros’s Actas Tupamaras and Marighella’s Minimanual have already been mentioned as the “practi-cal text book for the emerging militant organisations.”81 There were also 1970s versions of “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom,” the Inspire article that caused such a stir in Summer 2010.82 In addition, we should not underestimate the impact of popular culture.

Just as several Montoneros told me that “we all saw The Battle of Algiers five or six times,” it is conceivable that State of Siege, Costa-Gavras’s 1972 film on the Mitrione kidnapping, served to publicize the tactic through its sympathetic portrait of the Tupamaros.83

Two types of learning appear to have influenced the adoption of kidnappings: learning by observing others, and learning by doing. We know that Mario Santucho, leader of the ERP, was very impressed by and knowledgeable about the kidnapping of the United States ambassador to Brazil in 1969. We also know that the Red Brigades developed the idea of kid-napping to intervene in factory struggles after studying the Sylvester kidkid-napping in Argen-tina; and that they studied various Tupamaro kidnappings and the Schleyer kidnapping before concluding that the most effective way to seize Moro was during transit to his office.84 Jon Elster has argued that once a group succeeds at kidnapping for ransom, it is more likely to want to engage in kidnapping for political concessions, or vice versa, suggesting that skills may influence decisions.85Once the Red Brigades put together the team that eventually kid-napped Aldo Moro, they kept the team together for subsequent kidnappings. The Monto-neros, who had entrusted the Born kidnapping—a large operation involving forty people, months of practice, and several dry runs—to their North Column, increasingly left kidnap-pings in the hands of the same team.86

Arguments presented here for six organizations active during the Cold War period are consistent with analyses of hostage-taking in Iraq since 2003. According to James Tyner, the

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taking of hostages in Iraq could not be explained by ideology, given the bizarre selection of hostages, or by strategic analysis, since governments have been inconsistent, and media cov-erage has not been extensive. Rather, hostage-taking is designed for short-term and prag-matic gains.87 However, even though James Forest has argued that the study of terrorist decision making on kidnappings “can contribute to our understanding of terrorism in gen-eral,”88 the arguments presented here may not necessarily apply to other terrorist tactics.

Kidnapping is labor intensive and complex. For this reason, it generally represents a small share of the total volume of violence by any terrorist organization. By contrast, bombings involve little risk and require few resources, which is why half of all terrorist attacks have his-torically involved bombs.

However, precisely because kidnappings are rare occurrences and require a significant commitment of resources, case studies such as the present one, incorporating journalistic accounts, terrorist memoirs as well as secondary sources, can do much to uncover decision-making processes within clandestine groups. There are a number of further avenues for research. If the decision to kidnap or not to kidnap comes through a pragmatic analysis of the efficacy of the tactic in a given context, we can assume that the terrorist group learns from its environment by incorporating the preferences and choices of different group lead-ers. We do not know how those preferences are aggregated. We also know that the main les-son the Montoneros drew from the Aramburu kidnapping was that a fuite en avant was the right option. “We will come out of this by fighting,” is how that lesson was explained.89The

Montoneros’s ability to survive the heavy repression that followed Aramburu’s kidnapping in 1970 became the group’s foundational myth. They attempted to repeat that feat in 1976, without recognizing that it was a suicidal response, given the nature of the new military regime. This suggests that there are psychological influences at play in the tactical decision-making process, an area where more work could be done. Finally, we know from the IRA experience that kidnapping was attractive to the members in one particular geographic area, South Armagh. More work could be done to account for regional differences in the tactical options chosen by a given group.

Acknowledgments

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I am also indebted to colleagues who have provided feedback: Naazneen Barma, Christopher Darnton, Mohammed Hafez, Covell Meyskens, Rodrigo Nieto, Jessica Piombo, and especially to Diego Esparza.

Notes

1. Julen Agirre, Operation Ogro. The Execution of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (New York: Quad-rangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975), p. 3.

2. Ibid., pp. 6–73.

3. Brian Jackson, Aptitude for Destruction. Vol.1: Organizational Learning in Terrorist Groups and its Implications for Combatting Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005), pp. 9, 65 n 6.

4. C. J. M. Drake, Terrorists’ Target Selection (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1998); Donatella della Porta, “Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy,” in Martha Crenshaw, ed., Terrorism in Context (Uni-versity Park: The Pennsylvania State Uni(Uni-versity Press, 1995); Laura N. Bell, “Terrorist

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Assassinations and Target Selection,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2016). doi:10.1080/ 1057610X.2016.1184060.

5. Martha Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism. Causes, Processes and Consequences (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Jos!e Mar!ıa Calleja and Ignacio S!anchez-Cuenca, La Derrota de ETA (Madrid: Adhara, 2006); Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win. The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).

6. Adam Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Maria J. Rasmussen and Mohammed M. Hafez, Terrorist Innovations in Weapons of Mass Effect (Ft. Belvoir, VA: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 2010); Mohammed M. Hafez and Maria Ras-mussen, Terrorist Innovations in Weapons of Mass Effect, Phase II (Monterey, CA: Naval Post-graduate School, Center on Contemporary Conflict, 2012).

7. Magnus Ranstorp and Magnus Normark, “Introduction: Understanding Terrorism Innovation and Learning— Al-Qaeda and Beyond,” in Magnus Ranstorp and Magnus Normark, eds., Under-standing Terrorism Innovation and Learning (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2015); Jon Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars,” paper presented at the conference “Techniques of Violence,” Oslo, 2004; Michael C. Horowitz, “Non-State Actors and the Diffusion of Innovation: The Case of Sui-cide Terrorism,” International Organizations 64 (2010), pp. 33–64; Lawrence C. Hamilton and James D. Hamilton, “Dynamics of Terrorism,” International Studies Quarterly 27 (1983), pp. 39– 54; Kurt Weyland, “The Diffusion of Revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America,” Interna-tional Organization 63(3) (2009), pp. 391–423.

8. Rodger M. Govea and Gerald T. West, “Riot Contagion in Latin America, 1949–1963,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 25(2) (1981), pp. 349–368; Manus I. Midlarsky, Martha Crenshaw, and Fumi-hiko Yoshida, “Why Violence Spreads. The Contagion of International Terrorism,” International Studies Quarterly 24(2) (1980), pp. 262–298; Robert T. Holden, “The Contagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking,” American Journal of Sociology 91(4) (1986), pp. 874–904; Gary LaFree et al., “Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Terrorist Attacks by ETA 1970 to 2007,” Journal of Quantitative Crimi-nology 28 (2012), pp. 7–29.

9. Drake, Terrorists’ Target Selection; della Porta, “Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy”; della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State; Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation; Pape, Dying to Win; Horowitz, “Non-State Actors and the Diffusion of Innovation”; Holden, “The Con-tagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking”; Midlarsky, Crenshaw, and Yoshida, “Why Violence Spreads.”

10. Richard Clutterbuck, Kidnap & Ransom: The Response (London: Faber and Faber, 1978); Richard Clutterbuck, Living with Terrorism (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1975); Drake, Terrorists’ Target Selection; Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars”; della Porta, “Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy”; della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State; Pape, Dying to Win; Horowitz, “Non-State Actors and the Diffusion of Innovation”; Holden, “The Con-tagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking.”

11. Bell, “Terrorist Assassinations and Target Selection”; della Porta, Social Movements, Political Vio-lence, and the State; Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation; Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars”; and on the question of competition, Mia M. Bloom, “Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share, and Ethnic Outbidding,” Political Science Quarterly 119(1) (2004), pp. 61–89.

12. Drake, Terrorists’ Target Selection, p. 33.

13. Fernando Lopez-Alves, “Political Crises, Strategic Choices, and Terrorism: The Rise and Fall of the Uruguayan Tupamaros,” Terrorism and Political Violence 1(2) (1989), pp. 202–241, at 207 and 218.

14. J. Bowyer Bell, “Revolutionary Dynamics: The Inherent Inefficiency of the Underground,” Terror-ism and Political Violence 2(2) (1990), pp. 193–211: Footnote 1, 211.

15. Jerrold M. Post, Ehud Sprinzak, and Laurita M. Denny, “The Terrorists in their OwnWords: Interviews with 35 Incarcerated Middle Eastern Terrorists,” Terrorism and Political Violence 15 (1) (2003), pp. 171–184.

16. Richard Gillespie, “A Critique of the Urban Guerrilla: Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil,” Conflict Quarterly 1(2) (1980), pp. 39–53, at p. 44.

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17. Tom Whitehead, “British Jihadists Jailed for Twelve Years after Parents Inform Police,” The Daily Telegraph, 5 December 2014. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11274711/British-jihadists-jailed-for-12-years-after-parents-inform-police.html (accessed 29 June 2015).

18. Donatella Della Porta, ed., Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organi-zations (Greenwich, CT and London: JAI Press, 1992); Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Net-works (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

19. Martha Crenshaw, “Theories of Terrorism: Instrumental and Organizational Approaches,” in David Rapoport, ed., Inside Terrorist Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). See also Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism, pp. 69–87.

20. Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2010), chapter 2.

21. Holden, “The Contagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking,” p. 886.

22. Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars,” p. 19.

23. David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains. The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 65.

24. Christopher Hewitt, “Terrorism and Public Opinion: A Five Country Comparison,” Terrorism and Political Violence 2(2) (1990), pp. 145–170.

25. For sources that differentiate between kidnappings, barricade and hostage incidents, and hijack-ings, see Ronald D. Crelinsten and Denis Szabo, Hostage-Taking (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979), pp. 14–15, 78–85; Ann Hagedorn Auerbach, Ransom (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), p. 21; Clutterbuck, Kidnap & Ransom, pp. 20–22; Michael Newton, The Ency-clopedia of Kidnappings (New York: Facts on File, 2002), pp. 155–156; Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars,” pp. 4–6. One author who does not differentiate between the three tactics and treats all seizure of persons as “hostage-taking” is John C. Griffiths, Hostage. The History, Facts & Rea-soning Behind Hostage Taking (London: Carlton Publishing Group, 2003).

26. See James J. F. Forest, “Global Trends in Kidnapping by Terrorist Groups,” Global Change, Peace and Security 24(3) (2012), pp. 311–330.

27. Peter Waldmann, “Ethnic and Sociorevolutionary Terrorism: A Comparison of Structures,” in della Porta, ed., Social Movements and Violence. There is much less consensus when it comes to the existence (or not) of a “new” terrorism defined primarily by a religious motivation. See Peter Neumann, Old and New Terrorism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009) and Martha Crenshaw, “The Debate Over ‘Old’ vs ‘New’ Terrorism,” in Rik Coolsaet, ed., Jihadi Terrorism and the Radi-calisation Challenge (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011) for opposing views.

28. On RAND see “Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents 1968–2009,” RAND Corporation. Available athttp://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/about.html(accessed 24 May 2015); and Brian M. Jenkins and Janera Johnson, International Terrorism: A Chronology, 1968– 1974 (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1975). On START see “Global Terrorism Database,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). Available at http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/ (accessed 23 May 2015); and also Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “Introducing the Global Terrorism Database,” Terrorism and Political Violence 19 (2007), pp. 181–204, which explains how Pinkerton collected data.

29. David McKittrick et al., Lost Lives (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2007). None of the fol-lowing sources counts the Irish abductions followed by murder as cases of a kidnapping: Clutter-buck, Kidnap & Ransom; ClutterClutter-buck, Living with Terrorism; Paul Howard, Hostage. Notorious Irish Kidnappings (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004); Newton, The Encyclopedia of Kidnappings. See also Brigadier Sir James Glover, “Northern Ireland Future Terrorist Trends” (London: Ministry of Defense, 1978). At the time he wrote this report, Glover was the most senior Intelligence officer in Northern Ireland. The IRA managed to steal the report and publish it in 1979. I should like to thank the staff of the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, for providing me with a copy.

30. On Spain see Francisco J. Llera and Rafael Leonisio, “Los Secuestros de ETA y sus Organizaciones Afines, 1970–1997: Una Base de Datos,” Revista Espa~nola de Ciencia Pol!ıtica 37 (2015), pp. 141– 160; and Kepa P!erez, Secuestrados. S!ımbolos de Libertad. Cr!onica de Todos los Secuestros de ETA (Bilbao: Asociaci!on para la Defensa de la Dignidad Humana, 2008). For Argentina, I relied

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heavily on my earlier work [Mar!ıa Jos!e Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol. Armed Struggle, 1969– 1979 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995)], which was based on an exami-nation of ten years of Argentine daily newspapers.

31. For example, Jack Holland and Henry McDonald, INLA: Deadly Divisions (Dublin: Torc, 1994), pp. 122 and 148, mention two additional kidnappings by the group in 1977 and 1984. No other source mentions these incidents, so they were not included. Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group. The Inside Story of a Phenomenon (London: The Bodley Head, 1987), p. 266 claims Judge G€unter von Drenkmann was killed by the June 2 Movement during a kidnapping attempt and Peter H. Merkl “West German Left-Wing Terrorism,” in Crenshaw, ed., Terrorism in Context, says the same. However, the June 2 leader’s autobiography [Michael Baumann, Terror or Love? Bommi Baumann’s Own Story of his Life as a West German Urban Guerrilla (New York: Grove Press, 1979), p.15] states von Drenkmann was murdered and makes no mention of a kidnapping attempt, so the incident was not included. I thank Morgan Sweeney, who helped compile the sta-tistics on Uruguay and Italy, and John Yeager, who assisted with the stasta-tistics on Germany.

32. Llera and Leonisio, “Los Secuestros de ETA,” pp. 151, 48.

33. P!erez, Secuestrados, pp. 3–16, reproduces a number of newspaper front pages. See also Carol Edler Baumann, The Diplomatic Kidnappings. A Revolutionary Tactic of Urban Terrorism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 86–89.

34. P!erez, Secuestrados, pp. 17–25. 35. Ibid., pp. 45–52, 57–68. 36. Ibid., pp. 99–119. 37. Howard, Hostage, pp. 79–81. 38. Ibid., pp. 87–100. 39. Ibid., chapter 3. 40. Ibid., chapters 4–5. 41. Ibid., p. 42.

42. “‘Border Fox’ Allowed out of Prison,” 19 November 2004. Available at Irish Times.com

43. Glover, “Northern Ireland Future Terrorist Trends,” p. 10, paragraph 37. See also Clutterbuck, Living with Terrorism, p. 43.

44. Howard, Hostage, pp. 32, 191–192.

45. Ibid., p. 76.

46. Ibid., p. 78.

47. Tupamaros, Actas Tupamaras. Una Experiencia de Guerrilla Urbana (Madrid: Editorial Revolu-ci!on, 1982), pp. 16–17.

48. David Ronfeldt, The Mitrione Kidnapping in Uruguay (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 1987), p. 3. On Plan Satan see also Pablo Brum, The Robin Hood Guerrillas. The Epic Story of Uru-guay’s Tupamaros (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Publishers, 2014), Kindle Edition, pp. 139–163.

49. Ibid., p. 150.

50. Lopez-Alves, “Political Crises, Strategic Choices, and Terrorism,” p. 229.

51. Baumann, The Diplomatic Kidnappings, p. 27.

52. Brum, The Robin Hood Guerrillas, pp. 189, 191, 261, 281.

53. Gillespie, “A Critique of the Urban Guerrilla,” p. 45. Brum, The Robin Hood Guerrillas, p. 274, quotes Ambassador Jackson: “more than one of them winced when I took my courage in my hands and asked them how they could live with the ghost of Dan Mitrione.”

54. Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol, p. 56.

55. Ibid., pp. 57–60, 181–182.

56. Ibid., p. 58.

57. Ibid., p. 59.

58. Interviews, not for attribution.

59. Alison Jamieson, The Heart Attacked. Terrorism and Conflict in the Italian State (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), p. 55.

60. See Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black, 2008). Sylvester was kidnapped by the ERP. The episode inspired Graham Greene, who was on

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holiday in Argentina at the time, to write The Honorary Consul (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986).

61. Jamieson, The Heart Attacked, pp. 55–56, 77.

62. Vittorfranco S. Pisano, The Dynamics of Subversion and Violence in Contemporary Italy (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), pp. 59–60.

63. Ibid., pp. 60–62; Robert C. Meade, Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 43–52.

64. Pisano, The Dynamics of Subversion, pp. 67–68. On Moro see Meade, Red Brigades, pp. 102–174.

65. Pisano, The Dynamics of Subversion, pp. 69–74.

66. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, pp. 66, 126–127.

67. Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (London: Michael Joseph, 1977), pp. 260–261.

68. Griffiths, Hostage, p. 68.

69. Clutterbuck, Kidnap & Ransom, p. 38.

70. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, pp. 423–542.

71. Newton, The Encyclopedia of Kidnappings, p. 52.

72. Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State; Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation; Bell, “Terrorist Assassinations and Target Selection.”

73. Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State; Dolnik, Understanding Terrorist Innovation; Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars”; Bloom, “Palestinian Suicide Bombing.”

74. Brum, The Robin Hood Guerrillas, p. 120; Jamieson, The Heart Attacked, pp. 78–79.

75. Meade, Red Brigades, pp. 168–169.

76. Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism, p. 113.

77. Paul Cruickshank, “Learning Terror: The Evolving Threat of Overseas Training to the West,” in Ranstorp and Normark, eds., Understanding Terrorism Innovation. On learning, see James J. F. Forest, “Introduction,” in James J. F. Forest, ed., in Teaching Terror (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); and Jackson, Aptitude for Destruction.

78. Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group, pp. 92ff; Baumann, Terror or Love? p. 55; Meade, Red Brigades, pp. 219–222; Brum, The Robin Hood Guerrillas, pp. 76, 100, 129; Eugenio M!endez, Confesiones de un Montonero (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana/Planeta, 1985), pp. 48, 75; Mar!ıa Seoane, Todo o Nada (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 1992), pp. 147–148.

79. M!endez, Confesiones de un Montonero, p. 40; Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol, p. 187, n. 9; Andrew Graham-Yool, A Matter of Fear. Portrait of an Argentinian Exile (Westport, CT: Law-rence Hill & Company, 1981), p. 18.

80. Meade, Red Brigades, pp. 219–222; Seoane, Todo o Nada, pp. 147–148; Florencio Dom!ınguez, La Agon!ıa de ETA (Madrid: Esfera de los Libros, 2012), chapters 1–2.

81. Jamieson, The Heart Attacked, p. 55. See also Juan Gasparini, Montoneros: Final de Cuentas (Bue-nos Aires: Puntosur, 1988), p. 36.

82. “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom,” Inspire, Summer 2010. Available athttps://azelin. files.wordpress.com/2010/06/aqap-inspire-magazine-volume-1-uncorrupted.pdf (accessed 29 June

2015). See also M!endez, Confesiones de un Montonero, p. 99.

83. Moyano, Argentina’s Lost Patrol, p. 118; Clutterbuck, Kidnap & Ransom, p. 58 also hints at the film’s potential impact on future action.

84. Julio Santucho, Los !Ultimos Guevaristas (Buenos Aires: Puntosur, 1988), pp. 179–180; Jamieson, The Heart Attacked, pp. 56, 112.

85. Elster, “Kidnappings in Civil Wars,” pp. 26–27.

86. Jamieson, The Heart Attacked, p. 188; Marcelo Larraquy and Roberto Caballero, Galimberti (Bue-nos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2000), pp. 216–231.

87. James A. Tyner, The Business of War. Workers, Warriors and Hostages in Occupied Iraq (Alder-shot, England: Ashgate Publishers, 2006).

88. Forest, “Global Trends in Kidnapping,” p. 312.

References

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