Given the number of TV documentaries on the subject, one could be forgiven for thinking that terrorism began on 9/11. The use of airliners to attack the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington represented the most lethal terrorist attack in recent history. But few remember the avalanche of deadly attacks between 1968 and 1980 when terrorism was in the news regularly. Various groups in sympathy with the Palestinian cause conducted at least 331 operations, an average of over 2 per month (p.61). If one adds Irish and Basque terrorism and the attacks by ‘boutique’ revolutionaries such as Baader Meinhof and the Italian Red Brigades, it’s surprising the western world was not as obsessed with terrorism as it has become since that awful day in 2001.
Many of the early attacks were spectacular and lasted days or weeks as aircraft were hijacked, hostages swapped, and ransoms sometimes paid. The purpose was primarily to draw public attention to the plight of the Palestinian people or other groups. Only a few have remained in the public consciousness, like the notorious attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 conducted by Black September, the hijacking of the OPEC oil ministers’ conference in Vienna in 1975 by Carlos ‘the Jackal’, the blowing up of five airliners at Dawson’s Field in Jordan by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1970 and the hijacking to Entebbe in 1976 by PFLP which ended with a spectacular Israeli rescue operation. The response of Western security and intelligence services to all these attacks was woefully slow. As Daniela Richterova’s marvellous book, Watching the Jackals: Prague’s covert liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries explains it was only in 1981 that U.S. General Alexander Haig started accusing the Soviet Bloc countries of being complicit in supporting the terrorists. At the time the West’s security focus was overwhelmingly against ‘The Main Enemy’, i.e. the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. There was little bandwidth to spare for terrorism except for the domestic variety such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) campaign against the UK for Irish unity. Furthermore, these were the days when computers were laughably rudimentary; this was long before people’s movements could be tracked by their mobile phones and financial transactions, let alone biometrics.
According to Richterova, a specialist in intelligence studies at King’s College London, there was an understanding that the Soviet Bloc was involved but no real detail about which countries were the main culprits or the degree to which they cooperated. A terrorist using a South Yemeni diplomatic passport might be observed taking a flight from Beirut to Bucharest but would disappear from view before emerging several months later in a different name on a Lebanese passport travelling by ferry out of Rostock in East Germany to Scandinavia. There was no mechanism for connecting the two events because the activity behind the Iron Curtain was completely opaque.
Richterova’s compelling study is about the degree to which the Czech security and intelligence service, the StB, engaged with and supported the various Palestinian groups during the Cold War. She has been greatly assisted by the vast quantity of records released to the Czech archives in Prague in recent years. She has produced a meticulous piece of research which manages to achieve academic rigour whilst remaining highly readable.
The picture that emerges is of a wish to avoid scandal or reputational damage. In 1959 the French had intercepted a consignment of Czech arms destined for the National Liberation Front (FLN) militants in Algeria (p.37). Most Soviet Bloc countries would have shrugged off the incident; after all they were in favour of anti-colonial liberation movements. But Prague was embarrassed. So, on the issue of the Palestinians, it took an early decision to engage with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Richterova says the PLO was seen as safe with its main focus on international recognition. The Czechs allowed the PLO to open an office and provided a limited degree of support and training.
However, the PLO was not entirely free of terrorist associations. The violent Black September movement emerged from its ranks as did Force 17. Later on, the PFLP and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) rejected Arafat and embarked on all-out terrorism. According to the Czech archives, members of all these groups visited Prague including Abu Daoud who had taken part in the Munich Olympics attack but had managed to survive Israel’s lethal response. The author reveals that the StB were surprisingly timid about these visits They were fearful of arresting and expelling such figures in case they should upset Moscow and the oil-producing states of the Middle East. Only when faced with the erratic Carlos the Jackal and the psychopathic Abu Nidal Organisation did the StB start to be more assertive. But by then the Cold War was almost over.
The West would have been reassured by the innate conservatism of the Czechs. However, Richterova explains that there was very little collaboration between the Warsaw Pact countries on terrorism until just before the 1980 Moscow Olympics. We know, thanks to the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of handwritten notes by KGB agents made by a KGB archivist, that the Soviet Union backed the more violent PFLP and kept Arafat at arm’s length. East Germany also flirted with the more radical terrorist groups.
For all their caution, the Czechs were more helpful to the terrorists than they may have realised. The sanctuary they provided was invaluable. Most of the terrorists seem to have lived well in Prague at the Intercontinental Hotel, albeit under constant surveillance from StB agents among the hotel staff and Arab student community. Czech weapons were also in high demand. The Czech Skorpion sub-machine gun was small and ideal for terrorists. Semtex became the chosen explosive for terror. Prague was too timid to supply Semtex to its Palestinian visitors but its ‘commercial’ sales of 700 tons to Libya in the mid-1980s went ahead unchallenged leading to its use by international terrorist attacks probably including the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988. (pp. 141-2)
Daniela Richterova. Watching the Jackals: Prague’s covert liaisons with Cold War terrorists and revolutionaries. Washington. Georgetown University Press. 2025.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor of War Studies at King’s College London and a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI. He was formerly a senior British diplomat. From 1996 to 1999 he was senior advisor to the British government on overseas counterterrorism.
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