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The accusation of ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’ no longer has the negative meaning it used to have. It has acquired a new clothing, a new colour. It does not divide, it does not discredit; on the contrary, it represents a centre of attraction. Today, to be ‘violent’ or a ‘terrorist’ is a quality that ennobles any honourable person.

Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969)

Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay, checked his watch just after 9 a.m. on 8 January 1971. If he waited for his wife to finish her morning bath he’d be late for a meeting at the Embassy, and Jackson was a stickler for punctuality. He dashed into the bathroom to kiss her goodbye (‘I remember that her lips were wet’), promising to be home for lunch. More than eight months passed before they saw each other again.

Although the action began on 8 January, when Jackson was kidnapped en route to the Embassy in Montevideo, the mise en scène had been quietly playing out for almost a year. From early 1970 he began to sense that unknown enemies were observing him, as odd coincidences and anomalies multiplied. On leaving for work he often noticed a young couple on a motor-scooter, ‘skirmishing round the vicinity of the residence, then showing up as my car was parking by the chancery offices’. In the public park across the street from his residence, families suddenly seemed to be having picnics almost round the clock. They looked normal enough: the husband dozed or played with the baby while the wife listened to her radio. ‘But they were too recurrent, and their pattern of identity too identical, even though their apparent normality was such that I could not possibly denounce them.’ At the golf course, even on the remotest fairways, a small gaggle of young spectators would congregate to study his technique.

This subtle change of mood – ‘the intensified whiff of invigilation’ – coincided with an upsurge of urban-guerrilla violence by the Tupamaros, a self-styled Movement of National Liberation, and a spate of diplomatic kidnappings elsewhere in Latin America. Count Karl von Spreti, the German ambassador to Guatemala, was abducted and murdered in April 1970. Similar attacks closer to Uruguay – the successive kidnappings in Brazil of the American, German and Swiss ambassadors – heightened Jackson’s foreboding, as the unseen menace seemed to draw ever nearer. There was a narrow escape by the American consul in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, not far from the Uruguayan border; and then a daylight hold-up of the Swiss Embassy offices in Montevideo itself. In July, the Tupamaros abducted a Uruguayan judge, a Brazilian diplomat and an American security expert, Dan Mitrione, whose bullet-riddled body was found in the boot of a car a few days later.

Until the late 1960s, Uruguay was for many decades the calmest and most democratic state in the region, often cited by Fidel Castro in his speeches as the one Latin American country that could never experience a violent revolution on the Cuban model. That all changed in 1968 after the installation of a new president, Jorge Pacheco Areco, who ordered a freeze on wage and price rises to halt Uruguay’s rampant inflation and economic decline. When trade unions threatened a general strike, the President imposed martial law. The Tupamaros had been around for a while, mostly organising sugar workers in the north of the country, but now they emerged as a fully-fledged political movement, announcing their presence by kidnapping the President of the State Electricity and Telephones Service, who was forced to read books by Che Guevara for a few days before being released unharmed. Suspecting that students must have been responsible, Pacheco sent the army into Montevideo University to root out subversives, thus beginning a long cycle of action and reaction in which every kidnapping or murder prompted the suspension of yet more civil liberties – which was just what the Tupamaros wanted, believing as they did that official brutality would incite popular discontent and, ultimately, revolution.^* It was an article of faith among urban guerrillas in the 1970s, from West Berlin to San Francisco, that intensified repression worked in their favour by exposing the true and hideous face of the state and winning new converts to their thesis that official violence could only be defeated by force. Although they called themselves Marxists they owed at least as much to Marx’s old enemy Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, who held that ‘the urge to destroy is really a creative urge’.

On the morning of 8 January 1971 the main road into Montevideo was unusually quiet: the President had just left for a seaside holiday, taking many of the usual security forces with him. Geoffrey Jackson felt relieved once his driver left the open highway for the bustling side streets that led to his office. Surely no sane person would organise a hold-up here, with hundreds of shoppers and hawkers as witnesses. Reaching a point where his driver often had to wait for delivery trucks to finish unloading, he paid little attention to a large red van until it edged out from the kerb and bored into his car’s left wing. Even this was not unusual amid the jostling chaos of Montevideo’s streets. With a weary shrug, the Embassy chauffeur opened his door to inspect the damage. A young man suddenly appeared from nowhere and smashed him over the head. There was a simultaneous rattle from a sub-machine gun, hidden in a basket of fruit carried by a bystander. Moments later, four Tupamaros were driving the ambassador away.

Jackson never discovered why he had been taken: no ransom was demanded, no execution threatened. Two months later the Tupamaros issued a photo of their prisoner in his ‘people’s jail’, heavily bearded, reading Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In an accompanying letter to his wife, he urged her to ‘have faith and confidence’, and to remember that their car insurance needed renewing.

His release, in September, was as sudden and unexplained as his capture. During his eight months locked in a tiny cage in a Montevideo basement he studied his jailers closely, trying to fathom their aspirations. For all the Marxist slogans, he concluded that their motivating force was as much psychological as political. ‘Could it be,’ he wondered, ‘that the violence, the ferocity of clandestinity have no intellectual let alone ethical component, but instead are just another symptom of a deranged body-chemistry, just another mechanistic function of mankind’s alienation from a world and a society with which he is ever more incompatible?’ He noticed that they preferred music and books which ‘tended to the sad, the negative, the empty, the melancholic, the frustrated’. A burly guard known as ‘El Elefante’ often listened to John Lennon singing ‘Across the Universe’, though he understood none of the words. One day he asked his English prisoner to translate an insistent phrase from the chorus. In Spanish, Jackson replied: ‘Nothing’s going to change my world.’ After a short pause for reflection, the guard barked with laughter. ‘That’s what he thinks!’

For the Elephant and his comrades were now the vanguard of the revolution, and not only in Latin America. ‘The Tupamaro solution’ was the phrase used by members of the far-Left Weatherman group in the United States when, at the end of 1969, they elected to go underground and take up arms, having decided that confronting the police at street protests was wimpishly ineffective. ‘We understood that to say we dug the Viet Cong or the Tupamaros or the Black Panthers and yet not be willing to take similar risks would make us bullshitters,’ a Weatherman explained. A former soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army, another gang of American guerrillas, recalls that they also took their inspiration from Latin America: ‘One of the groups that I really liked – and I guess it’s back to the old Robin Hood and Zorro thing – was the Tupamaros down in Uruguay.’ In West Germany, the anarcho-terrorists who formed the 2 June Movement – bombing police stations and US army bases, murdering public officials – originally called themselves the West Berlin Tupamaros.

In January 1971, the month of Geoffrey Jackson’s capture, the Tupamaros were the subject of a reverential twenty-page article in International, the journal of Britain’s International Marxist Group. A year after Jackson’s release Penguin Books published an English translation of Alain Labrousse’s The Tupamaros, which included the full text of their proclamations and revolutionary songs, with an introduction by the British journalist Richard Gott. ‘The Tupamaros are unquestionably a very special kind of revolutionary,’ Gott raved. ‘In spite of a fierce counter-attack, their staying power seems inexhaustible.’ One reason for their huge impact, out of all proportion to their numerical strength, was that they had ‘tried to adapt the “foco” theory of Guevara and Debray to urban conditions’.

As Gott’s awestruck tone suggests, this theoretical breakthrough was exciting news for impatient insurrectionists. Traditional revolutionaries believed that the necessary prerequisite was a mass movement of urban workers, painstakingly nurtured through organisation and education. The French Marxist Régis Debray, animated by the example of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba, had proposed a short-cut in his book Revolution in the Revolution: in Latin America, the revolution could be made by small groups of guerrillas in rural areas, recruiting peasants to their cause and fighting bush warfare against the army, without the tiresome preliminary chore of building a political party and raising the consciousness of the urban proletariat. Alas for Debray and Guevara, their attempt to put this into practice during the 1967 Bolivian guerrilla uprising ended in the death of Che (it was Richard Gott who identified the body) and the detention of Debray in a Bolivian military jail. By the time he was freed, three years later, he’d had ample time to reconsider. From his new base in Chile, where he had taken a job as press officer to Salvador Allende, he announced in January 1970 that there could be ‘various ways for Marxist movements to take power in Latin American countries, depending on varying national circumstances’. Through standing for election, for instance, like his friend Allende; or through ‘direct action’ in cities, as practised by the Tupamaros and advocated by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella in his influential Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969), which gave useful tips on cell structure, the selection of military and corporate targets, and even the need for regular exercise. ‘Other important qualities in the urban guerrilla are the following,’ it advised. ‘To be a good walker, to be able to stand up against fatigue, hunger, rain or heat. To know how to hide, and how to be vigilant. To conquer the art of dissembling. Never to fear danger. To behave the same by day as by night. Not to act impetuously. To have unlimited patience. To remain calm and cool in the worst of conditions and situations. Never to leave a track or trail. Never to get discouraged.’ Very like Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, but with a rather different purpose. ‘The urban guerrilla’s reason for existence, the basic condition in which he acts and survives,’ Marighella wrote, ‘is to shoot.’^* Metropolitan malcontents loved the book. Why should peasants bear all the burden, or have all the fun?

Come to that, why only Latin Americans? By the end of the 1960s there were plenty of itchy young urban radicals in North America and Western Europe who yearned for deeds rather than words – and deeds rather more incendiary than simply joining a protest march or hurling insults and cobblestones at ‘police pigs’ – but they jibbed at the idea of abandoning their basement flats and trying to radicalise yokels. Hadn’t Marx himself sneered at the idiocy of rural life? The Tupamaros and similar armies elsewhere in South America had shown what could be done without either peasant soldiers or a political party, so long as one had no qualms about planting bombs, assassinating politicians and kidnapping diplomats.^* What mattered was making a noise, seizing attention, scaring the wits out of the ruling class; and where better to do it than in a big city? As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin wrote in Do It!, his handbook for modern revolutionaries: ‘The street is the stage.’ America’s Weathermen, Italy’s Red Brigades and West Germany’s Red Army Faction (aka the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof Group) all read Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla in preparation for taking to the stage. (Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Marighella’s Italian publisher, was so enthused that he promptly went underground into a ‘Partisan Action Group’; in March 1972 the poor ninny blew himself to smithereens while planting a bomb under an electric pylon.) Small is Beautiful, the title of Erich Schumacher’s best-selling book, was their credo too: even the tiniest band of desperadoes could paralyse a nation. In a public plea for clemency on behalf of Ulrike Meinhof in 1972, the German novelist Heinrich Böll described the struggle of her group as that of ‘six [people] against sixty million’, and he wasn’t far wrong: the entire Baader-Meinhof membership at the time numbered no more than thirty, and fourteen of them were in jail.

Although these Western guerrillas differed in style and intensity – the Red Brigades killed scores of Italians, the Angry Brigade killed nobody – the common feature is that they took up arms at the same time, between the spring of 1969 and the autumn of 1970. All, in short, were gestated after the defeats of 1968, when for a few weeks the New Left convinced itself that the revolution had begun. ‘London, Paris, Rome, Berlin,’ soixante-huitards chanted. ‘We will fight and we will win.’ They didn’t, though Paris was a close-run thing, and when the tide receded the revolutionary street actors and situationists were left high and dry. Where next? Some knuckled down to their accountancy exams, or tiptoed away into mainstream politics. Some withdrew from the barricades to rural communes where they grew vegetables, smoked dope, got into the I Ching and listened to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: if they couldn’t change the world they could at least change themselves by fleeing from it and raising their own consciousness – or, just as likely, falling into a blissed-out trance. For others, however, the lesson of 1968 was that they hadn’t been militant enough. Rampaging through Grosvenor Square made for exhilarating street theatre, but the authorities would always win any such confrontation because of their superior force and firepower. A long-haired, denim-clad, unarmed student had no chance of victory against a baton-wielding policeman on a horse, still less a posse of National Guardsmen firing real bullets. Fanaticism, it has been well said, consists in redoubling your efforts when you have lost sight of your objective; and this was the route they now followed. ‘Doubts about the cause were not allowed,’ says Astrid Proll, one of the few founder members of the Baader-Meinhof Group to outlive the decade. ‘You were either with them or not … We idealised the resistance of the Vietcong and the liberation movement in Latin America and Palestine: we wanted to act like them so we got hold of guns. As we didn’t know how to use them we went to a training camp of El Fatah in Jordan, where we crawled in the sand and climbed over barbed wire fences – which was pretty useless as we were urban guerrillas. We’d only gone there to learn how to shoot a gun.’

By the early 1970s, the cities of the non-Communist world were alive with the sound of explosions and police sirens. ‘The terrorist activity is worldwide,’ Time magazine reported, ‘and most of it is carried out by a new type in the history of political warfare: the urban guerrilla.’ From Naxalites in the alleys of Calcutta to Provos in the streets of Belfast and Derry, underground armies were everywhere. The all-comers’ record was held by Mexico, where student demonstrations in 1968 had been savagely crushed by the army. Young Mexican radicals now abandoned protest and took up the gun; and whatever your political affiliation (so long as you were either a Maoist or a Fidelista) there was sure to be a battalion that suited you – the Armed Brigade of Workers’ Struggle of Chihuahua, perhaps, or the Armed Forces of National Liberation, the Armed Commando of the People, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Revolutionary National Civic Association, the 23 September Communist League, the Zapatista Urban Front, the People’s Union, the Revolutionary Student Committee of Monterrey, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, the Nuevo Léon Group, the Revolutionary Student Front of Guadalajara, or the Spartacist Leninist League. Much of their violence was directed against one another, the narcissism of small differences assuming far greater significance than such trifles as campaigning for democratic reform. ‘In three years the student movement adopted a discourse that had nothing to do with what was upheld in 1968,’ said Gilberto Guevara, the leader of the ’68 protests. ‘It was the inverse discourse: democracy was persecuted … Whoever demanded elections was satanised.’

In Washington DC, senior members of the Nixon administration were advised to vary their routes to work. ‘I’m sorry,’ a top-security official explained, ‘but we’ve got to think paranoid.’ In London, Cabinet ministers had to check for bombs underneath their cars before starting the engine. Even placid, harmless Canada wasn’t immune: in October 1970 the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped the province’s labour minister, and then strangled him when the Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, refused their ransom demands – the release of twenty-three ‘political prisoners’, safe conduct to Cuba or Algeria, and $500,000 in gold bullion. The Canadian parliament voted by a majority of 190–16 to invoke the 1914 War Measures Act, which had never before been used in time of peace. A government spokesman informed reporters that the FLQ was planning further urban mayhem, of a kind ‘so terrible that I cannot even tell you’.

Low-level terrorism swiftly became such a familiar background hum in everyday life that much went unreported, to the chagrin of those who perpetrated it. In a cover story on urban guerrillas published in November 1970, Time magazine reassured its readers that ‘events in the US still seem relatively tame’, a remarkably sanguine assessment given that there had been three thousand bombings in the US since the start of the year, and more than fifty thousand bomb threats – mostly at police stations, military facilities, corporate offices and universities. In Cairo, Illinois, only a few days before Time’s report appeared, twenty rifle-toting black men in army fatigues attacked the police station three times in six hours. ‘You hate to use the word,’ said a police chief in San Jose, ‘but what’s going on is a mild form of revolution.’

Unlike fortified medieval towns, the besieged cities of the Seventies were threatened not from without but from within, by battalions that were seldom seen and often had no more than a few dozen combatants. Like the bomb-making Professor in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), they understood that the anonymity of a modern metropolis makes it both the most vulnerable target and the safest refuge. As the Tupamaros had said in their first official manifesto, published in 1968: ‘Montevideo is a large enough city with enough social unrest to shelter many commandos.’

In the same statement, they explained the essential difference between themselves and parties such as the Communists. ‘Most of the other left-wing organisations seem to rely on theoretical discussions about revolution to prepare militants and to bring about revolutionary conditions. They do not understand that revolutionary situations are created by revolutionary actions.’ An abducted ambassador or minister was worth a thousand political pamphlets or speeches – but it had to be the right sort of ambassador or minister.^* In April 1970, the Guatemalan government balked at freeing twenty-five jailed terrorists in exchange for the life of the West German diplomat Count Karl von Spreti, who had been kidnapped by the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, the Rebel Armed Forces). Colonel Arana, president-elect of Guatemala, thought the price too high. ‘We would have considered, say, six guerrillas a fair exchange,’ one of his staff said. ‘But twenty-five! It was a robbery!’ What could the FAR do, after such a rebuff, but kill von Spreti?

Well, it could have let him go. Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party, chided the Guatemalan revolutionaries for ‘preaching the armed struggle to the exclusion of all other considerations’, adding that the assassination of a German ambassador ‘does not appear to us to be a method worthy of a legitimate struggle’. This earned the French comrades a scornful rebuke from Tariq Ali, the moustachioed Pakistani toff who had made his name in London as a flamboyant soixante-huitard, Britain’s nearest equivalent to Rudi Dutschke or Dany Cohn-Bendit. ‘Such is the new morality of the Stalinists, whose hands are not exactly pure,’ his newspaper Red Mole said of their misgivings.

For Tariq Ali and his chums in London, there were many reasons to celebrate von Spreti’s murder. ‘Now that the comrades in Latin America have started capturing diplomats, we have had some headlines about them in the bourgeois press,’ Red Mole exulted in its May Day edition in 1970. ‘In fact, the executing of the German ambassador has given us a whole page of quite interesting material on Guatemalan history and politics from the Sunday Times.’ And Red Mole devoted a whole page to explaining why the tactics of kidnapping and execution were ‘definitely useful’. First, they sometimes won the release of ‘valuable comrades’; secondly, they exposed and humiliated governments which were ‘powerless to ensure security in the cities or to catch the kidnappers’; thirdly, they confirmed that revolutionaries could attack safely in the heart of capital cities. Red Mole’s only regret about the murder of the German envoy was the ‘amazingly distorted set of values’ displayed by the British press: ‘Count von Spreti’s life is minutely and harrowingly described, and he gets an obituary in the London Times’ but why was nothing said of the ‘heroism and sacrifice’ of those who killed him?

Red Mole was not alone in wishing to lionise these heroes. In the summer of 1972 the Oval House in London staged Foco Novo, an agitprop drama by Bernard Pomerance celebrating the struggle of Latin American guerrillas against military oppression and US imperialism, which kept its audience in a state of thrilled terror with occasional armed raids through the theatre’s street doors. (The Times’s critic, spoiling the fun as ever, pointed out that the play was rather ineffective as agitprop since the only characters to emerge as human beings were the villainous Americans, while the guerrillas remained plaster saints. ‘I doubt whether the Tupamaros or any other such group would recognise themselves in these boy scout patriots.’) A few months later cinema-goers could enjoy State of Siege, Costa-Gavras’s account of the abduction and murder of Dan Mitrione by the Tupamaros, which presented Mitrione as a CIA agent who deserved his fate. ‘I went to see that film,’ an Argentine guerrilla recalled years later. ‘Before entering the cinema I was an imbecile. I left the cinema as a revolutionary.’ Its American premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC was cancelled by the director of the American Film Institute, George Stevens, on the grounds that Costa-Gavras had ‘rationalised an act of political assassination’. In California, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army watched State of Siege like students poring over a crib sheet before an exam, hoping to learn the secret of the Tupamaros’ success. The SLA’s first widely-publicised action – the assassination of a ‘fascist’ public official in Oakland, California – was the result, though it seems unlikely that their Latin American tutors would have awarded many marks for the choice of victim: the local schools superintendent, Dr Marcus Foster, whom they shot with hollowpoint bullets dipped in cyanide, was not only popular with liberals and the black community but also happened to be an African-American himself. The Black Panthers denounced the SLA’s psychopathic commander, a petty crook named Donald DeFreeze, as a police agent working to discredit the entire underground.

While Tariq Ali and the International Marxist Group drooled over the exploits of Latin American guerrillas or republican fighters in Northern Ireland (one pamphlet advertised by the IMG in 1973 was simply titled Freedom Struggle by the Provisional IRA), they seemed strangely reluctant to take up arms themselves.^* Ali was once approached by someone claiming to represent the Angry Brigade, London’s only home-grown terrorist group, who suggested it might be a good idea to plant a bomb at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. ‘I told them it was a terrible idea,’ he says. ‘They were a distraction. It was difficult enough building an anti-war movement without the press linking this kind of action to the wider Left.’ The logic is hard to fathom, given that his newspaper would applaud similar attacks elsewhere in the world.

The Angry Brigade’s brief but spectacular war began on 30 August 1970, with a bomb at the house of the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Waldron. A week later they targeted the home of Sir Peter Rawlinson, the attorney general. Over the next year there were twenty-three more bombings – against targets as diverse as the Miss World contest, the Home Secretary and the Spanish Embassy – but no fatalities. This was perhaps the only guerrilla band of the early 1970s which never killed anybody – a point of enduring pride for Hilary Creek, one of the surviving Angries. ‘Basically, I’m not ashamed of anything I have done,’ she said more than thirty years later, breaking her long silence in an interview with the Observer. The only flash of anger occurred when the man from the Observer mentioned bombs:

You use the word ‘bomb’, but be careful about using it because nowadays that’s such a value-loaded term. You think of Omagh, you are not thinking of half a pound of gelignite that causes small structural damage. It is important to put things in perspective. What nobody picked up on was that it wasn’t the bombs themselves that they were worried about. It was the fact that it exposed the vulnerability of the system. How could someone go and do in the back door of a minister? It wasn’t so much the criminal damage, it was the fact that it made them look stupid.

Karl Marx said that change comes not from the weakness of the powerful, but from the strength of the powerless. The urban guerrillas in Europe and America sought to exploit both at once – asserting their own strength by demonstrating the impotence of the state – though they were scarcely the people Marx had in mind: like the Tupamaros, most of them were university-educated youths from the middle class. Hilary Creek, whose father worked in the City, attended Watford Grammar School and Essex University. Almost every soldier in the Angry Brigade – and there were probably no more than half a dozen – had studied at either Essex or Cambridge. ‘We were not that serious,’ says John Barker, who ripped up his Cambridge finals papers as a protest against the Vietnam War. ‘Yeah, man, we never took it seriously anyway: what I mean is that like many people then and now we smoked a lot of dope and spent a lot of time having a good time.’ The proletarian odd-man-out in this troupe of strolling minstrels and wastrels was Jake Prescott, who had been an orphan at the age of seven and a convicted burglar by the time he entered his teens. While serving a jail sentence for possessing a firearm, in the late 1960s, he read about the Black Panthers and their belief in armed resistance. ‘I took it all to heart. I had no objectivity. So when I got out of jail I thought, “London here I come.” I wanted to live it.’ He fetched up in an Islington commune with several members of the Angry Brigade, who asked him to address three envelopes for them one day in January 1972. What he didn’t realise, until he heard a news bulletin the next morning, was that the envelopes, sent to national newspapers, contained a communiqué claiming responsibility for an attack on the house of Robert Carr, Ted Heath’s secretary of state for employment: ‘Robert Carr got it tonight. We’re getting closer. The Angry Brigade.’

Hunting down the Angries suddenly became the top priority for the police and security services. Scotland Yard seconded thirty officers from Special Branch and the Flying Squad into a new unit known as the Bomb Squad. The Daily Mirror offered a £10,000 reward for information which led to an arrest. The Times warned that the Angry Brigade ‘cannot now be dismissed as a group of cranks. Some senior officers credit the group with a degree of professional skill that has seldom been experienced.’ All most flattering for a handful of dropouts whose technical expertise was limited to lighting a fuse on a stick of gelignite, and who used a child’s John Bull printing set to typeset their communiqués. Naturally, the Angries basked in the flattery, issuing ever more extravagant bulletins about the might of their invisible regiments. ‘We have started the fight back, and the war will be won by the working class with bombs … Our attack is violent – our attack is organised. The question is not whether the revolution will be violent. Organised militant struggle and organised terrorism go side by side. These are the tactics of the revolutionary class movement … The Angry Brigade is the man or woman sitting next to you. They have guns in their pockets and hatred in their minds. We are getting closer.’

Did they expect British workers to find this threat seductive? Probably not. Some terror groups that emerged in the 1970s had clear and specific objectives – the PLO fought for a Palestinian homeland, the IRA for a united Ireland – even if their violence sometimes seemed to become an end in itself rather than a means. But what did the Angry Brigade want? Like other, more ruthless gangs in the developed world – the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Japanese Red Army – they roared defiance at the existing order but had nothing to propose by way of an alternative. The slogan that ended every communiqué from the Symbionese Liberation Army, ‘Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people’, could have served as a complete and sufficient manifesto for them all. Nihilist hyperbole and exaggerated fury filled the analytical void. It wouldn’t do to admit that they were suffering from little more than existential angst, bourgeois guilt and a nagging discontent at the soullessness and shallowness of consumerist society. ‘As the only working-class member, I was not surprised to be the first in and last out of prison,’ says Jake Prescott, who was arrested and convicted a year before his compadres. ‘When I look back on it, I was the one who was angry and the people I met were more like the Slightly Cross Brigade.’ They were, in short, very English revolutionaries, closer to Monty Python than Che Guevara. The clinching proof is surely the John Bull printing set, a cherished possession of any middle-class child of that generation. (I had one myself, with which I typeset news-sheets in my bedroom, imagining myself a Fleet Street editor.) A dead giveaway: they might as well have used Meccano to build a bomb-holder, or ended each communiqué with a whinge about the weather.

One Friday afternoon in August 1971, following a tip-off, the Bomb Squad raided an upstairs flat at 359 Amhurst Road in East London. There, according to the police, they found sixty rounds of ammunition, a Browning revolver, a sten gun, thirty-three sticks of gelignite, detonators, a knife and a John Bull printing set. Eight people stood trial at the Old Bailey, in a case that lasted from May to December in 1972; four were jailed for ‘conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property’; the other four were acquitted. What excited the tabloids was the revelation that two of the defendants were young women. A story in the Sun, headlined ‘Sex Orgies at the Cottage of Blood’, alleged that these degenerates had ritually sacrificed a turkey while enjoying ‘bizarre sexual activities’ and ‘anarchist-type meetings’. Although defence lawyers claimed that the evidence had been planted by police officers, it was noticeable that after the trial there were no more stunts by the Angry Brigade.

By then, however, the Bomb Squad was grappling with a far more serious and lethal guerrilla army, one to which the self-aggrandising hype of the Angry Brigade – ‘We are getting closer’ – seemed genuinely applicable. On 22 February 1972 a car bomb exploded outside the officers’ mess at the Parachute Regiment base in Aldershot, Hampshire, killing seven people. The IRA’s ‘publicity bureau’ in Dublin immediately admitted responsibility, describing the explosion as justified revenge for the Paras’ slaughter of Catholic civilians in Derry the previous month, on Bloody Sunday. It also claimed that the victims were all senior officers; in fact they were a Catholic priest, a gardener and five women who worked in the kitchens.

Until the republicans extended their war to the British mainland in 1972, the English paid remarkably little attention to what was going on in that other island just across the Irish Sea. Of course they had seen the news footage: violent attacks on Catholic republicans in Derry by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Special Constabulary (better known as the B Specials) in August 1969, which led to the hasty dispatch of British troops, initially welcomed as protectors by many beleaguered Catholics and greeted with tea and sandwiches. They were also aware that the honeymoon hadn’t lasted long, because army commanders soon identified republicans rather than unionists as the real enemy – an attitude that hardened in January 1970 with the formation of the Provisional IRA, which regarded the troops as ‘forces of occupation’. From their armchairs in Godalming or Gloucester, the English had watched the swelling strife, known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’, with its riots and curfews, gun battles and barricades. But they observed all this with a curious detachment, as if it were a faraway conflict in a land of which they knew little rather than a civil war in the United Kingdom. ‘Ulster is not just another country. It is another planet,’ a Sun columnist wrote, echoing Reginald Maudling’s exasperated verdict: what a bloody awful country!

The republicans, to English eyes, were stereotypical thick Micks and Paddies with sawdust for brains and an insatiable appetite for milk stout: three ‘official Irish joke books’ published in England during the mid-1970s sold 485,000 copies in two years. Reviewing them for New Society, the anthropologist Edmund Leach found that the prototype Irishman who emerged ‘is not so much a figure of fun as an object of contempt merging into deep hostility. He is a drink-addicted moron, reared in the bog, who wears his rubber boots at all times, cannot read or write, and constantly reverses the logic of ordinary common sense.’ His female counterpart had much the same qualities, except that she was sexually promiscuous rather than perpetually drunk.

As for the unionists, despite their protestations of loyalty to Queen and country they seemed just as alien, with their bowler hats and Orange Lodges and Apprentice Boys’ marches. Gun-waving, balaclava-wearing Protestant paramilitaries from groups such as the UDA looked much like the IRA, and every bit as bloodthirsty. Their language, too, was from another planet – demotic and demagogic, with no trace of English understatement. In the pulpit of his Martyrs’ Memorial Church, the Rev. Ian Paisley occasionally interrupted his thunderous tirades against ‘the Antichrist’ (the Pope) and ‘the devil’s buttermilk’ (alcohol) to proclaim the virtues of the circumcised – ‘pronouncing each syllable,’ a visitor noted, ‘with a measured and sibilant relish, shircumshished, while his women worshippers shuddered beneath their hats and silently groaned at his repeated references to the male organ’.

If Ulster Protestants and Catholics wished to pursue their ancient grievances by killing one another, why worry? Let them fight it out, while the uncomprehending English contented themselves with watching the edited highlights – youths throwing petrol bombs, troops firing rubber bullets – on the evening news. Few of them knew, or wished to find out, what might have caused these pyrotechnics; and the authorities were happy for them to remain in ignorance. When the Sunday Times reported that British soldiers had tortured republican internees, in October 1971, ministers advised broadcasters to leave the story alone. The Independent Television Authority banned a World in Action documentary a couple of weeks later on the grounds that it was ‘aiding and abetting the enemy’. If the torture victims were IRA members, their voices should not be heard. ‘The soldier or the policeman who never knows where the next shot will come from deserves support in a hazardous and desperately difficult task,’ the Daily Express commented. ‘The snide remark which undermines his morale is almost as bad as the sniper’s bullet.’ Even if the snide remark exposes illegal behaviour by soldiers of the Crown? Yes indeed. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said the ITA chairman, Lord Aylestone, ‘Britain is at war with the IRA in Ulster and the IRA will get no more coverage than the Nazis would have done in the last war.’ His BBC counterpart, Lord Hill, assured ministers that ‘as between the British army and the gunmen, the BBC is not and cannot be impartial’.

Many viewers probably shared the sentiment, when it was put like that. But how could television reporters explain the conflict if they were forbidden to say – even in the most impartial style – what motivated the gunmen? As the Tory journalist Peregrine Worsthorne pointed out in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘patriotic censorship’ might be acceptable when there was a national consensus, as in World War II, but that didn’t apply to Northern Ireland in the 1970s: an opinion poll in September 1971 showed that 59 per cent of Britons wanted the troops brought home. ‘There is no patriotic line to cling to, no national ethos governing what should be said or done,’ Worsthorne wrote. ‘Against this confused background only one point stands out with absolute clarity: no form of political censorship, either overt or covert, is either desirable or even possible, since any attempt to apply pressure on the media will have exactly the opposite effect from that desired.’ Just so: when the BBC banned Paul McCartney’s song ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ soon afterwards, I went out and bought it immediately in a spirit of anti-authoritarian solidarity, blowing several weeks’ worth of pocket money. Alas, it turned out to be ghastly doggerel – ‘Give Ireland back to the Irish,/Don’t make them have to take it away./Give Ireland back to the Irish,/Make Ireland Irish today’ – sung to a plinky-plonk nursery-rhyme tune. If only the BBC had allowed me to hear it on the radio first, I’d have saved myself ten shillings. Such is the price of censorship.^*

Although English listeners were spared the ex-Beatle’s political analysis (‘Great Britain, you are tremendous/And nobody knows like me./But tell me, what are you doing/in that land across the sea?’), English politicians could no longer shut their ears to the explosive din from across the sea. Even Ted Heath eventually decided that he ought to talk, and listen, to the Provos. His Northern Ireland Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, held a secret meeting at a house in Chelsea on 7 July 1972 with six leaders of the Provisional IRA, including two young hardliners – Gerry Adams, who was released from Long Kesh internment camp to attend the conference, and Martin McGuinness, the Provisional commander in Derry. (Before McGuinness set off for London, aboard an RAF plane, he insisted that two officers from British military intelligence be handed over to the IRA in Derry as a guarantee of his safe return.) The Provisional delegation made demands which they must have known Whitelaw couldn’t accept: a public declaration of British intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland, an immediate amnesty for all IRA prisoners and the removal of all troops by January 1975. Any prospect of further negotiations was shattered two days later when a riot erupted in the Lenadoon area of West Belfast, where the Housing Executive had been relocating displaced Catholics, to the fury of local Protestants. It swiftly turned into a gun battle between armed Provisionals and British soldiers. The brief truce had ended: this was now all-out war. The army launched ‘Operation Motorman’, a massive onslaught which destroyed the republican ‘no-go areas’ in Belfast and Derry; the IRA bombed the heart out of Belfast’s city centre, killing nine people and injuring dozens more; Protestant murder squads retaliated by slaughtering scores of randomly chosen Catholics. By the end of 1972 the year’s death toll from violence was 467, the highest at any time during the Troubles. But was it enough? Meeting in Dublin that December, the Provisional IRA army council agreed that Heath might tolerate even this level of violence rather than resume negotiations – as long as the carnage was confined to Northern Ireland. But would he be so stubborn if they took the fight to England? ‘If there was one thing that fixed the minds of the Brits in dealing with us it was the bombing campaign in England,’ a senior IRA man told the Northern Irish historian Martin Dillon years later, after the signing of the Anglo-Irish agreement. ‘We knew they could continue to have an acceptable level of violence in the North, but when it was killing people on their soil it concentrated the mind wonderfully in seeking a deal with us. We were politically naïve at the time. We demanded too much, but we learned from that.’