We Can’t Keep Hydra From Growing Heads : Terrorism: It may be a condition, not a problem, of modern times. If so, there is no ‘solution.’

Could it be that the recent high-tech assassination of German banker Alfred Herrhausen is further evidence that the terrorist “problem” has no “solution”? That terrorism is a condition rather than a problem?

When the leaders of the German Red Army Faction terror organization--Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar--were arrested in the fall of 1982, Bonn’s anti-terrorism unit celebrated its greatest triumph since rescuing 96 passengers aboard a hijacked Lufthansa airliner in Somalia. But the terrorist group was not finished.

For a while, the it did cease its activities, thus giving some credence to the official obituaries. But then it re-emerged with a vengeance. During the past three years, the terrorist group has assassinated four prominent--and heavily guarded--Germans. Almost as disturbing, the perpetrators have eluded what is perhaps the most sophisticated anti-terrorist machinery in the world.

Where did these new assassins come from, and where are they hiding? After Andreas Baader and Brigitte Meinhof, Red Army Faction founders, both committed suicide in prison, Mohnhaupt took control of the organization and asserted that “the guerrilla is a Hydra, it keeps growing new heads.” Indeed, it does.

In 1978, the German chief of anti-terrorist forces told me that the “RAF has between 20 and 30 hard-core members and about 200 active sympathizers, who are a pool of future recruits, and a supply of cars, money, safe houses.” When I spoke to his successor five years and several terrorist arrests later, he said the “RAF has between 20 and 30 hard-core members and about 200 active sympathizers.” Last week, the official estimate of the organization’s strength was identical. Moreover, a sort of Darwinian principle of selection seems to be operating here--every new Red Army Faction generation is tougher and smarter than the last.

The dilemma is that if the terrorists are caught and imprisoned, their companions will kidnap and murder to free them. If they are killed in a firefight, their friends will avenge them. In the Herrhausen case, for example, the killers identified themselves as the Wolfgang Beer commando, that is, the avengers of an RAF member killed in 1980. And in either case, replacements for casualties will be drawn from the pool of sympathizers. It should be noted that, contrary to the widespread view that the organization is a tool of some communist conspiracy, its members are, at bottom, German super-nationalists, albeit with a radically leftist orientation.

West German Chancellor Hemlut Kohl has offered a $2-million reward for the apprehension of Herrhausen’s killers. By making the bounty so large, he presumably wanted to demonstrate his anti-terrorist determination and to tempt RAF sympathizers who know the assassins to come forward. Since similar reward offers have led to arrests, it is not inconceivable that the two men seen at the site of the Herrhausen murder will be betrayed by “sympathizers” and captured. But that will not give German bankers, industrialists or politicians peace of mind: The two terrorists, if apprehended, will be hot potatoes. Bloody rescue attempts or retaliatory murders can be expected.

Is there no upside to all this? There are two positive factors.

Throughout the world, large-scale, organized revolutionary activity has given way to “instant violence” that is limited in scope and effect and poses no danger to governments. And, the chances (as Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corp. has pointed out) of being hit by a terrorist act are ever so much smaller than being the victim of an accident in our technological world. Perhaps the best that can be done, other than refining protective and damage-limitation measures, is for politicians to avoid high-sounding phrases that they will be forced to eat later for the benefit of terrorists everywhere.