Terrorist or Model Citizen?

Of the thousands of Germans whose lives were turned upside down by the fall of the Berlin Wall, certainly one of the most jarring fortune-warps must have been visited upon Monika Haas, a.k.a. “Pretty Woman.”

The average East German went from socialist worker bee to overwrought free-marketeer when communism ended; Haas, a West German, went from working mother to accused terrorist moll.

To the German state, Haas is believed to be the mysterious woman who, on Oct. 8, 1977, packed up her infant daughter and a stolen passport, flew to the Spanish island of Majorca and later tucked pistols and hand grenades into a baby carriage, pushing her lethal cargo right past security guards at the international airport.

Once inside, prosecutors say, she handed the weapons to Palestinian guerrillas, who used them to hijack a Lufthansa flight filled with Germans on holiday. The hijackers took their airborne hostages on an agonizing five-day excursion around Europe, the Middle East and Africa. They killed the pilot and were halted only by bullets and stun grenades from German commandos in Mogadishu, Somalia.

For more than a decade, German police had wondered who had supplied the Palestinians with their guns. They found the first hints that it may have been Haas--until then, a seemingly unexceptional Frankfurt hospital employee--in confiscated files of the East German secret police. If only she would tell her story, prosecutors now say, questions that have preoccupied European crime fighters for almost two decades might be answered.

But Haas isn’t confessing. Far from it. On the opening day of her trial, now underway in Frankfurt, the tired-looking woman denied not only any involvement in the hijacking but that she had ever set foot on the holiday haven of Majorca.

“The charges against me are wrong. I didn’t deliver any weapons,” she told the court. She then dissolved into tears and left the room to compose herself. Her trial has since been delayed while she recovers from a slipped disk, but she remains in custody. She faces a maximum life sentence if convicted.

The many friends who came out for the opening of her trial describe the 47-year-old not as an ideologically mixed-up gun-runner but as a quietly heroic single mother, a model citizen who drove a taxi to feed her children, finished her schooling at night and would certainly have lived out a harmless, productive life if only the Berlin Wall hadn’t collapsed and those apparently incriminating files come tumbling out.

True, Haas devoted herself to radical politics in the 1970s, friends say. But so did seemingly half of young West Germany. True too that her name comes up in connection with the hijacking in those secret-police dossiers. But why should anybody take the word of the ruthless Communist spy-meisters, now known to have squirreled away all sorts of hearsay, disinformation and outright fabrications?

Whatever the verdict in this trial, the case has absorbed the nation, bringing back ultra-vivid memories of the “German Autumn”--fall 1977, when tides of terrorism breaking over Europe finally crested in a rampage of kidnappings, assassinations and the Lufthansa hijacking.

Even if Haas never tells the confessional tale her prosecutors claim she has held back, her story--as it can be pieced together so far--offers a surprising glimpse of what can lie just under the surface of a seemingly ordinary German life. It offers a look at just how far love and political passion might push an idealistic young woman in the turbulent 1970s. She may well be innocent of any role in the hijacking. But she had a ringside seat for some of the most disturbing events of her generation.

The mid-1970s found Haas not in prosperous Frankfurt but in socialist South Yemen. Even as young Americans were experimenting with free love and LSD in the late 1960s, their hardest-core German brethren were washing up in good numbers in the Middle East, seeking training from Palestinian guerrillas in the fine arts of bomb-building, weapons-handling and safely jumping out of moving cars.

What drove young West Germans to such extremes?

“It’s hard to convey, in just a few words, the atmosphere of those times,” Haas told a German newspaper in a long interview. American radicals had the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon to hate; young West Germans, by contrast, had their own parents. Painfully aware that they were the offspring of the generation that had embraced Adolf Hitler, they felt a unique obligation to stamp out “fascism” wherever they found it--and in those times, they believed they had found it in the industrial society their parents had labored to build.

So, forget about peace, flower power and marmalade skies. West Germany’s young hard-liners preferred to smash society with firebombings, bank robberies and kidnappings. They enjoyed surprising levels of public sympathy. They seemed to see no bothersome contradictions in fighting Hitler’s legacy with the assistance of anti-Israeli Palestinians.

And when Bonn responded to their campaign with roadblocks, warrantless searches, restrictions on the media and other infringements of civil liberties, it only confirmed the fears of sympathizers such as Haas that the West German youth movement was dealing with the remnants of Hitler’s Reich.

“For me, in those times, the point was above all: never again. Stop fascism before it starts,” Haas recalls.

And so to South Yemen. There, the spartan life of a desert-based freedom fighter seemed at first to agree with her. Having left her firstborn--Frank, 7--with friends in West Germany, she learned to shoot, won the nickname “Pretty Woman” from the Palestinians and fell in love with Zaki Helou. He was a guerrilla trainer who would later be accused of teaching West Germans how to build the type of bomb used in an unsuccessful 1979 attempt to assassinate U.S. Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., then commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Europe.

By 1976, according to the records of the East German secret police, or Stasi, Haas had even won enough of her comrades’ trust to be sent on a risky mission to Kenya.

That year, Palestinian guerrillas had been planning to blast an airliner of the Israeli carrier, El Al, out of the sky on its approach to Nairobi with the help of a pair of West Germans armed with Soviet-made rockets. But Israeli agents apparently got word of the operation; in January 1976, the West German rocketeers were apprehended in the Kenyan capital.

Back at the Palestinian training center, it fell to Haas to travel to Nairobi to learn what had happened to them. She never found her missing compatriots in Kenya, however--the Israelis found her first. Their famously effective intelligence service, the Mossad, nabbed her in Nairobi. As Frank Haas, now 28, puts it today, in a long telephone interview, the Israeli agents interrogated her “very undemocratically.”

Monika Haas will not say what happened to her; Frank Haas says she hasn’t even told him. But she says the experience so terrified her that she realized she wasn’t cut out for guerrilla life, and decided to drop out of the underground for good.

After the Israelis released her, she returned to South Yemen, she says, told her lover her decision, and asked to be told nothing more about his doings: She didn’t want to have tales to tell if ever again detained and, perhaps, tortured.

Haas married Helou, fetched Frank from West Germany, moved into an apartment in the Yemeni capital of Aden, bore her husband two children--and in all ways, she says, she lived “the most middle-class and apolitical” life, with no room for political violence.

Back home, the German Autumn had erupted.

In September 1977, terrorists from West Germany’s Red Army Faction kidnapped leading industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer to try to extort the release of their leadership from prison. When the government wouldn’t deal, the terrorists decided to ratchet up the pressure with a hijacking.

It was at this point, prosecutors charge, that Haas made the daring baby-buggy mission that she so emphatically denies.

On Oct. 13, 1977, the Lufthansa plane was hijacked as it flew from Majorca to Frankfurt with 82 passengers and five crew members.

The Palestinian hijackers demanded the release of the Red Army Faction leaders, as well as two of their own jailed in Istanbul, Turkey. By the time the plane had landed in Mogadishu five days later, the original pilot was dead and passengers had been bound with pantyhose and doused with alcohol, the better to burn when the terrorists blew up the jet.

German commandos stormed the aircraft, freeing the hostages and killing four of the hijackers but one: Suhaila Sayeh, who was badly wounded. She was tried in Somalia and sentenced to 20 years in prison. But after just one year, the Somalis quietly freed her and she vanished.

Back in West Germany, the events that would bring the German Autumn to its close unfolded in rapid succession. In prison, the Red Army Faction leaders heard that the airplane had been stormed, understood that they had no chance of being freed and committed suicide. Schleyer, no longer of any use to his captors, was shot in the head.

West German joy at the airline hostages’ breathtaking release was severely tempered by dismay over these deaths. Only later did it become clear that the government’s tough handling of the German Autumn--its refusal to negotiate with terrorism--had been a success. The back of the Red Army Faction had been broken.

By 1980, 10 unhappy Red Army Faction members, sick of their lives as fugitives, were casting about for a safe place to surface from underground. They quietly petitioned East Germany, and the Communist state gave them refuge--in exchange for long debriefings with the insatiably curious Stasi.

That same year, Haas was also looking for an out--out of her now-unhappy, traditional Middle Eastern marriage. She left Helou, moved her children to Frankfurt and began what her supporters describe as her brave struggle to build a normal life.

And there it might all have ended: with Haas living in anonymity in the West; the dropout Red Army members safe behind the iron curtain; the bloodstained trauma of the German Autumn a fading memory.

Instead, the German Democratic Republic flew apart. The Stasi files were seized. When western German police detectives began combing through the papers, trying to learn how much help East Germany had given the Red Army Faction, what should they find but a dossier on Haas. The Stasi, as it happens, had suspected her not as an accomplice to the hijacking, but as a possible “imperialist” spy in the Middle East.

When the Stasi had laid its hands on those 10 Red Army dropouts, it had asked them all about the Palestinians’ “Pretty Woman.” It was told, typically, lots of useless gossip about her marital spats and shopping lists--but one former boyfriend told the East Germans that Haas had been the mystery woman with the baby carriage.

This revelation has left today’s German authorities with a problem. Is incriminating material gathered by the greatly discredited East German spy agency worthy of admission as evidence in the open, democratic courtrooms of today’s united Germany?

A federal judge initially ruled that it isn’t. But then, in 1994, police in Oslo announced that they had found Sayeh, that sole surviving Lufthansa hijacker. Like Haas, she had traded in her desert boots and was living as a workaday northern European mother, under the name Suhaila Andrawes. After a year of court battles, Andrawes was extradited to Germany.

When authorities dangled the possibility of a plea bargain before the accused hijacker, Andrawes grudgingly picked Haas’ photo from a group of shots and said she had seen the “Pretty Woman” in Majorca before the hijacking, pushing a baby carriage.

But later, as Haas’ trial began, Andrawes withdrew the testimony. This has left Germany with a tainted star witness and a case built on dubious Stasi files--not exactly the stuff of which unassailable convictions are made.

The prosecution is pushing ahead anyway. Haas claims that by putting her on trial, the authorities are trying to pressure her to spill her whole story, snitching on other former urban guerrillas in the process--perhaps even naming somebody else as the Mystery Woman of Majorca in hopes of saving her own neck. Haas swears that she will never name names, even at the price of her own freedom.