Revival of Japanese Red Army Terrorism Feared

After lying low for a decade, the Japanese Red Army shows signs of springing back to life, unnerving law enforcement officials who recall the organization’s desperate acts of violence in the 1970s.

Expatriate members of the group slaughtered 26 people with machine guns and grenades at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport 16 years ago and hijacked several airliners before leaving the international stage in 1977. Now they are back, Japanese police say, possibly plotting a new wave of terror with the Seoul Olympics as one of its targets.

The main faction of the Red Army is emerging from its long-time hide-out in the Middle East, where it has been associated with extremist groups fighting for the Palestinian cause, and is attempting to establish a united front for revolution in Asia, police and security analysts say.

After the arrest in Tokyo last November of the Red Army’s No. 2 leader, Osamu Maruoka, on false passport charges, the group’s handprints have surfaced around the world.

Toronto Security Tightened

Security was heightened during the June economic summit in Toronto, partly because an alleged member of the group, Yu Kikumura, was arrested April 13 while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike with three pipe bombs in his car. U.S. and Canadian authorities suspected the Red Army had its eye on the gathering of world leaders. The summit concluded without incident.

The day after Kikumura’s arrest, a car bomb exploded at a night club in Naples, killing five people, including a U.S. Navy woman. Italian police are seeking the female leader of the Japanese Red Army, Fusako Shigenobu, and her brother-in-law, Junzo Okudaira, in connection with the incident.

A member of a related organization based in North Korea was arrested in Tokyo on May 6 and accused of sneaking into Japan on another man’s passport after helping hijack a Japan Air Lines plane to Pyongyang, North Korea, in 1970, when he was 16 years old. Yasuhiro Shibata told a court later that month, “I am a revolutionary by occupation,” although he has otherwise remained silent.

On June 8, Philippine authorities concluded a seven-month manhunt by arresting and deporting Hiroshi Sensui, a Red Army associate they believed was a “sleeper agent” operating an underground cell in Manila. Sensui was caught at a hospital where he had undergone radical cosmetic surgery.

“It’s not clear what kind of organization they have in the Philippines,” said Nobutaka Kato, an inspector at the National Police Agency. “But it’s certain that the Red Army is up to something. We don’t know exactly what their aims are.”

In 1981, the Marxist-inspired Red Army circulated a pamphlet in which it renounced terrorism as a means of achieving the goal of world revolution.

“Our early policy of placing utmost importance on the issue of armed struggle was mistaken,” it said. “It is important to unify all anti-imperialist forces and consolidate the movement to build a bigger base.”

But Red Army leaders, headquartered in Lebanon’s Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, were spurred into reconsidering violence by the United States’ 1986 retaliatory air raid on Libya, said Tsutomu Takenaka, a journalist and security analyst who has close personal contacts with the organization.

“They haven’t been dormant so much as the circumstances just haven’t been right for action,” Takenaka said. “They’ve been biding their time.”

Takenaka said Red Army operatives started “practicing with fireworks” in 1986. Police suspect the group had a role in bomb and rocket attacks against Western embassies in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Rome in 1986 and 1987, in which no one was hurt.

More important, the Middle East contingent of the Red Army has re-established contacts with comrades in Pyongyang and with sympathizers inside Japan and has dispatched members to the Philippines, Takenaka said, in an attempt to establish a global network under the guise of the “Anti-War Democratic Front.”

Skeptical of Support

But he is skeptical of the group’s ability to cultivate genuine support outside the Arab world. The guerrillas are nearly all middle-aged, ideologically rigid and “out of touch” after living underground for more than 16 years.

“When they think of contemporary Japanese society they recall the old baseball comic books they used to read when they were college students in the 1960s,” Takenaka said. “If they don’t understand what’s going on in Japan, how can they possibly grasp the complex political realities of places like the Philippines or South Korea?”

Japanese police estimate that the Red Army has a core of about 20 members operating out of Lebanon, 15 of whom remain on Interpol’s wanted list. The seven hijackers who have remained in Pyongyang since 1970 deny links to the Middle East group, but members of both groups emerged from the same radical, underground organization--the Red Army Faction of the Communist League--before leaving Japan.

Takenaka, who said he last met and interviewed Red Army leaders a year ago at an undisclosed location outside Japan, believes as many as 100 trained guerrillas are under their command in the so-called Anti-Imperialist International Brigade, including Arabs, Chinese and Koreans. What they plan to do with this manpower, though, is a mystery, he said.

Much speculation has centered on whether the Red Army would attempt to disrupt the Summer Olympic Games scheduled to be held in Seoul in September.

The group reportedly issued a statement last October denouncing Seoul’s hosting of the Olympics and saying the event would be “buried in the struggle of South Koreans for democracy.”

When Maruoka, the No. 2 leader, was arrested in November on his return to Tokyo from Hong Kong, he was carrying a plane ticket to Seoul and a hit list of politicians, including South Korean President Roh Tae Woo and former President Chun Doo Hwan, to be sunk “in a pool of blood,” Japan’s Kyodo News Service has reported.

Olympic terror, however, would invite a backlash of negative world opinion, Takenaka said, adding that a more likely scenario would be an assassination attempt on Roh if he carries out his expressed interest in visiting Japan later in the year. A hijacking or hostage-taking act aimed at freeing radical comrades from Japanese prisons is another possibility.

In any event, Takenaka thinks the group still has the potential for fanatical violence. “I think the Red Army today is extremely dangerous,” he said. “They’re in a mid-life crisis, and they’ve got to do something to salvage their manhood, so to speak. It’s a matter of face.”