You Meet One Barefoot Terrorist, You’ve Met ‘Em All

I met a terrorist once. Only he wasn’t so terrifying. He asked me for my shoes.

He was bearded and greasy-filthy, and I couldn’t even guess his age. He rode a squeaky, lopsided bicycle and wore a cloak of rags. You would have mistaken him for a beggar. And you wouldn’t have been wrong. It was 1994 in Havana, Cuba. He was begging for a pair of shoes.

I recall this encounter because this man is the only evidence I’ve ever come across that terrorists can be defeated.

We did not exchange names. He approached me on the sidewalk outside Havana’s Partagas cigar factory. From my appearance, it was evident that I was a visitor. He asked how long I was staying. Would it be too great an imposition if, when I departed, I left behind my shoes? He pointed to his dirty feet. He said he had been without shoes for a couple of years.

He was surprisingly well spoken as he told his story: He had been in Italy’s Red Brigades. Then the brigades were defeated. A decade or so ago he had taken refuge in Cuba, the only hideout left for Europe’s bloodthirsty and once-mighty communist terrorists. He fought in the cause of Marxism, he said bitterly, but Cuba did not honor him. He was left to scrabble, shoeless, on the fringe of an isolated culture.

It was altogether a creepy encounter, and my traveling companion and I brushed the ex-terrorist off. We kept our shoes.

When I got home, I read up on the Red Brigades, which terrorized Italy in the 1970s through the early 1980s. Its adherents killed scores of people. They kidnapped public officials, including a U.S. Army general and Italy’s former prime minister, Aldo Moro--ironically the country’s chief voice for making peace with the terrorists. They crippled newspaper editors and business executives, often by shooting them in the knees. In 1978, Newsweek magazine described Italy as “the lawless society ... trapped in a cycle of endless violence.”

Although members of the Red Brigades were driven by ideology, not religion, they bear comparison to the Al Qaeda terrorists now waging a jihad against the U.S. They wanted to punish and destabilize democracy for its many perceived sins. Their leaders were from the prosperous class. They were as rigidly authoritarian as they were fanatically utopian. Somehow in their fuzzy minds, mayhem would lead to a grander world. It was presumed they received financial support and shelter from anti-Western nations.

My files on the Red Brigades make for interesting reading again now. In 1986, the director of London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote about the effect of terrorists on Italy and West Germany during the previous 15 years: “I do not say that we have become used to terrorism, but rather that we have had to learn to live with the pain, the grief and the damage caused by indiscriminate violence.”

He added: “We have learned, too, how difficult it is to act against terrorism, and there is a sense of weariness when simple solutions are proposed that are intended in one glorious stroke to ‘solve the problem.’ ”

How did Italy ultimately triumph? Inch by bloody inch. The government let the kidnapped Moro be killed rather than negotiate. Italian citizens endured massive police crackdowns, including one instance in which 30,000 soldiers and police sealed off Rome to conduct house-to-house searches for terrorists. Arrests were met by more assassinations and still further crackdowns.

For many years, the cycle seemed unbreakable. But gradually, the Red Brigades in Italy and their comrades in West Germany and France came to an unhappy recognition: For all their efforts, the systems they were trying to destroy only grew stronger.

The Berlin Wall came down and East Germany was no longer a refuge for terrorists. The Soviet Union collapsed, closing the checkbook on the USSR’s campaign of global communist domination.

Back then, terrorists set out to change the world. And in ways they never expected, the world did change. Those who rallied to violence are now themselves dead, or in prison, or barefoot in Havana. Behind them have come a new group of violent utopians with different doctrines but the same bloody methods.