OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Germans' Response to Terrorism Offers Tough Lessons for U.S. : Violence: Former official says that some civil liberties had to suffer to combat a frightening trend. But others say West Germany went too far.

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

May 4, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BONN —

Eighteen years after helping to organize a commando raid on a hijacked Lufthansa jetliner in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, Hans-Juergen Wischnewski has a sense of deja vu listening to the debate in the United States over whether to expand police powers following the Oklahoma City bombing.

Wischnewski, who was the former West Germany’s top anti-terrorist official during a wave of Red Army Faction kidnapings, murders and bombings, heard just such arguments in his own country in the 1970s.

“The people on the left said, ‘The way the government is handling this will destroy the liberal state of law,’ ” Wischnewski says. “The conservatives said that the state was too weak and democratic to handle terrorists. We were being criticized from both sides.”

Wischnewski says he logged about 50,000 miles of air travel over six difficult weeks in 1977 when the West German government was trying to bring the Lufthansa passengers home safely and free a kidnaped industrialist at the same time.

The Red Army Faction killed the industrialist after a five-week ordeal, but the hijacking ended with all but one of the 91 passengers and crew members freed. The pilot was killed. Red Army Faction bombings and slayings continued for several more years in West Germany but then died out. Today, what is left of the group’s leadership has officially renounced assassinations.

Although his ideas have been much criticized by German liberals, Wischnewski suggests that his government’s experience with terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s may hold useful lessons for U.S. policy-makers as they struggle to strike a balance between preventing terrorist crimes and preserving the civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s essential to have all the necessary anti-terrorist laws in place beforehand rather than being forced to try to pass new laws in the middle of a crisis,” he says. “This is one of the most important points that I learned from this time.”

Other countries have confronted terrorists with shows of force:

* Nobody gets into the Rome airport today without being surveyed by police officers in bulletproof vests wielding machine guns.

* In London, a barricade called the Ring of Steel funnels all financial district traffic through eight crossings, where high-resolution cameras photograph cars, license plates and drivers.

* In Peru, President Alberto Fujimori shut down Congress and the courts in 1992, saying the legislature was thwarting his efforts to reform the economy and fight the bomb-wielding Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, guerrillas.

* In Israel, a law that requires parents to perform guard duty at their children’s schools has been in effect since 1974, when a schoolhouse hostage-taking led to the deaths of 22 children. (Officials say no parent has ever objected.)

For Germany, Wischnewski does not favor high-profile police deployments, roadblocks, trunk searches or armored-car patrols. “These give rise to a fearful, nervous situation. We had too many police in Bonn with armored cars. When the newspapers published pictures, people started thinking we had a civil war.”

Where West Germany succeeded, Wischnewski maintains, was in creating a special anti-terrorist police unit after the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 and in passing a controversial law in 1976 that made membership in a terrorist group a punishable offense--whether or not the member actually threw a bomb, pulled a trigger or drove a getaway car.

Analysts have roundly criticized the law because it does not precisely define what constitutes a terrorist organization, allowing political biases to influence who gets arrested. The law has been applied solidly against left-wing extremists, the critics say, but less so against the far-right fringe that has plagued Germany in the years after unification--and which, coincidentally, has important ties with the United States’ far-right underworld.

Despite such concerns, West Germany built an imposing high-security prison solely to house those charged with membership in terrorist groups. There, it could keep them in complete isolation, watch them 24 hours a day and try them without taking them out of the building. Amnesty International protested the severity of the place, but the Bonn government was undeterred.

In 1977, during the hijacking crisis, the Bundestag (the lower house of Parliament) even rammed through special legislation forbidding prisoners in this jail to have any contact with their lawyers.

“We passed it in less than one day, in just a few hours,” Wischnewski says. “It was very, very difficult for me to agree to such a tough law, limiting people’s rights in such a harsh way, in less than 24 hours. Normally, a bill goes through three readings in the German Parliament and this takes weeks or months.

“But there was no other way to fight terrorism.”

The Red Army Faction got its start as the Baader-Meinhof group in 1968 after police shot a student demonstrating against a visit by the Shah of Iran. Fatal police shootings have been almost unheard of here since World War II, and in the emotionally charged atmosphere of the Vietnam War years, the killing prompted some students to go underground and seek the overthrow of the state.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the terrorists set fire to department stores, blew up the German Embassy in Stockholm, bombed U.S. Army facilities in Heidelberg and shot a number of business figures, along with bodyguards and drivers. In 1975, they kidnaped a city politician in what was then West Berlin and used extortion to gain the freedom of six jailed comrades.

In September, 1977, they tried the kidnaping-and-extortion gambit again with Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the German Employers Assn. They demanded the release of 11 jailed terrorists in exchange for his freedom.

Wischnewski pretended to negotiate, but the Red Army Faction realized he was playing for time. Working with a small Palestinian group, members of the Red Army Faction hijacked the Lufthansa plane to show they were serious and landed it in Mogadishu after flying to various airports in Europe and the Middle East.

Wischnewski persuaded the Somalis to admit the German commando squad that was organized after the 1972 Olympics and let it storm the airport. Three of the four hijackers were killed, and the passengers were freed. On his return flight to West Germany the next day, Wischnewski was told that Schleyer’s body had been found in a car in France.

In West Germany, three of the 11 jailed terrorists were mysteriously found dead in their high-security jail cells the same day. The government insisted they committed suicide; few Germans believe they were told the whole story.

Today in Germany, the Red Army Faction lingers mainly as a troubling memory. Their well-executed bombings, bank robberies, kidnapings and killings have stopped.

Some smaller and less expert groups, however, have recently bombed a lawmaker’s house, a number of Turkish-owned businesses and other targets. On Wednesday, a mail bomb packed with nails exploded in the sorting room of a suburban Frankfurt post office, killing one woman and injuring 11 other postal workers.

Stefan Aust, editor of the newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the author of a well-received book on the Red Army Faction, argues that the West German government could have prosecuted the Red Army Faction members successfully without the controversial 1976 terrorism law, “since everything they did was a crime anyway--throwing bombs, killing people.” He thinks the disappearance of the Red Army Faction was connected more to the end of the Cold War and the declining allure of communism than to special laws and jails, and he urges the United States to think twice before strengthening its police powers as Germany did.

“To move toward some sort of police state is the biggest mistake you can make in fighting terrorism,” he says. “You have to fight the ideas that are behind it, and in this area, the police can’t do very much.”

Walsh was recently on assignment in Bonn. Times staff writers William D. Montalbano in Rome, Mary Curtius in Jerusalem, William Tuohy in London and William R. Long in Santiago, Chile, contributed to this report, as did Christian Retzlaff of The Times’ Berlin Bureau and Fleur Melville of The Times’ London Bureau.

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Combatting Terrorism

Industrialized democracies in Europe and Japan have faced home-grown terrorist threats.

Japan

Japanese Red Army. Founded 1969. Goal: to overthrow Japanese government, foment world revolution.

Britain/Northern Ireland

Irish Republican Army. Formed 1969. Seeks British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and unification with Irish Republic.

Ulster Defense Assn. Formed 1971. Largest loyalist paramilitary group.

France

Direct Action. Formed 1979. Leftist

Germany

Baader-Meinhof Gang. Founded 1960s.