Lighting Up a Dark Corner of Cold War Terrorism
"Watching the Jackals" explores how Prague harbored and helped the world’s most infamous, dangerous terrorists
WELL BEFORE AL-QAEDA, ISIS AND THE HOUTHIS ARRIVED on the terrorist scene, it was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal that grabbed headlines. In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, such groups — most of them championing an independent Palestine — hijacked airplanes, took hostages and killed thousands, including 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
On one day alone in 1970 — Skyjack Sunday — the PFLP hijacked two American planes and a Swiss one. Several days later they commandeered a British airliner. Three of the planes, by then empty, were blown up in the Jordanian desert.
Americans, especially conservatives, assumed that the groups behind these deeds were directed and supported by Moscow and its satellites, given their shared hatred of the West.
But as intelligence historian Daniela Richterova shows in her new book, Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons With Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries, published this month by Georgetown University Press, the Eastern bloc’s relationships with the groups she calls “Cold War jackals” were anything but simple. Neither Moscow nor any other Warsaw Pact nation could control them.
As an excursion into a sideshow of the Cold War, Watching the Jackals may not be for everybody, but it’s an invaluable new addition to the history of the East vs. West intelligence world, not to mention the endless strife in the Middle East.
Using never-before-seen documents, Richterova, an associate professor at King’s College London, describes efforts by communist Czechoslovakia’s secret police — the StB — to keep tabs on the terrorist diaspora, a collection of non-state actors that came and went across its borders in the final decades of the Cold War.
The Czechs were cautious about engaging with the mercurial, enigmatic, shape-shifting groups.
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