Part One: The Golden Age of Terrorism

in the mean streets of Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show. To two of the people, I get repeatedly tear gassed and grenaded and threatened with firearms, sometimes with being a lane. Hello, Hi, how are y'all doing tonight? I'm doing okay. I'm not getting threatened with grenades or tear guests. Yeah, that's some always a fun thing to do, especially since probably some of our friends will get threatened with grenades into your

guest tonight more likely than not. Yeah, that's most most night. So, uh, you want to you want to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself since you're not you're not comming into this as as as as a big time stand up comedians like most of our guests, or is local youths like Garrison. Oh um, Yeah, So my name is b Um and I am half of Surtists were journalists collective that started as a ship posting account and then there was a curfew and our friend Robert wanted some backup,

so we went and started reporting on stuff. And now three months later we're still reporting on stuff and we've been shot with a lot more tear grass and grenades and pepperballs since then. Yeah, and an amount that seems almost impossible when you try to take stock of it. I have now Vintier guest with you more times than I can count. Yes, yes, that is very accurate, but certainly I can confirm north of a hundred times. Um.

So yeah, that's that's be in a lane. And today we're going to talk about the Golden age of terrorism? Do you do you know? What? What do do you do? You know anything about the golden age of terrorism? Is that a term you've heard prior to tonight? I assume it involves bell bottoms and just massive quantities of cocaine in a K fort Yes to everything, but the A

K forty seven. So this is a fascinating period because when when you were talking about the golden age of terrorism is like the sixties up through the late seventies, and some people would say into the eighties. One of the things that's fascinating about it is that modern body armor didn't really exist. Like you you had some you know, some flak vests and stuff. You had some stuff that can maybe stop some pistol rounds, but like it was

very uncommon and it didn't work well. So fucking everybody in terrorism uses machine pistols so like, which are like like little handguns the fire a bunch of rounds really fast, so you can just jam in like the door of a building and just spray it down with gunfire. So it's like a lot of fucking scorpion machine pistols and stuff. Nine Mills and Toko ReBs. Yeah, all of the all of the eighties action movies and every good James Bond

and every good. That's why I'm excited to talk about today because like terrorism real bummer these days, right, Like it's mostly you're gonna kill a lot of innocent people. You're gonna specifically try to just kill innocent people most of the time. And usually if you're a terrorist now, like one way or the other, you want to kill everyone in the world, pretty much like your isis and you want to kill all the people who aren't Muslims.

You're some Nazi and you want to kill everybody who's not like you're kind of white like whatever, whatever kind of terrorists you are, it's a bleak ass kind of terrorists. Whereas in the sixties and seventies there were some fun terrorists, Like, I mean, they killed a lot of people, Like, but did any of them want to drown Silicon Valley to make France the new hub of technology? Not no, but that that would have been That would have been fun. There is there, there is. There is a pretty good

attack on OPEC though. Um. Yeah, so it was like you you've got in this period of time, number one, the world wasn't quite so bleak, so terrorism was like a lot more fun, um and it's a lot cooler. Everybody's like walking random machine pistols. They got like fucking bell bottoms, great great outfits. You've got all these cool like different you know, liberation movements that aren't all religious

extremists and stuff. It's a fun time to talk about terrorism. Um, and the main thing people do isn't just suicide bomb others too and fire randomly into businesses full of people. Um. Yeah, we're gonna talk a lot about plane hijackings, skyjackings. Yeah, I just keep thinking of now Saturday Night Live episodes from my childhood. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of those eighties episodes make jokes, and there's like the movie Airplane, there's a joke. But we'll talk about We're

all that in a second. So we're gonna talk abou the Golden Age of terrorism, and that's mostly gonna be part one. We're mostly going to talk about sky jackings and the Japanese Red Army, which is a fun group. And then part two was going to be all Carlos the Jackal, who used to be the most wanted terrorists in the world and is a neat guy, I mean, a monster. Maybe he was definitely the one in the

Day of the Jackal. Well that's actually where his name came from, but when they made the movie about it, it it was pretty inspired. But anyway, Yeah, Carlos the Jackal, um who as you can tell by his incredible nickname, um one of the coolest terrorists. A lot about it probably and sucks out the morrow somewhere he was he was, he was one of the guys who was like there for all of Black September. So he may have had to eat a couple of bones out in the deserts

of Jordan's. This is lots of things I'll be new to me. Yeah. So, but before we get into anything else, I want to start by talking about the phenomenon that most defined the golden age of terrorism, which is skyjacking. And no, that does not refer to masturbating on an aircraft, because masturbating on an aircraft isn't a crime, and in some cases it's actually mandatory. I don't know they're aware of that, Um, I've seen a very specific movie from

the seventies that implies that. Right. Oh yep, yeah, I don't opening INVESTI Beethoven. There's a lot of mandatory sex on airplanes. Well, I'm very supportive of skyjacking. That kind of skyjacking and the other kind of skyjacking. Actually both kinds of skyjacking. So the kind of skyjacking that we're talking about today involves the hijacking of planes, which was a thing that used to happen back in the day

before al Qaeda kind of ruined it forever. Um, nobody gets to enjoy an air It used to be fun. Hijacking airplanes used to be a joyful affair. Um, and they ruined. That's really the crime. Okay, I probably shouldn't. So the first recorded skyjacking occurred on February eighteen thirty one and are to keep up Peru when a group of passenger plans they were really like one of the crazy things when you study aviations, like how fucking quick. It was like, well, now we're just flying these things

all over the damn place. Yeah, it was paying hijacking and now we're sky skyjacking, skyjacking, very hijacking. So the first one, yeah, a keeper our equippa whatever. Peru, when a group of rebel soldiers accosted two American pilots and tried to force them at gunpoint to drop profit propaganda leaflets over Lima. Um. So the pilot said no, and so the rebels occupied their plane and kind of sat around for two weeks. Basically, Um, no one was good at it yet flying no they were just kind of

sitting there on the tarmac being like fly drop. These pamphlets flu around and the pilots were like no. And then we were like okay, yes, yeah, they weren't dicks like they were going to murder them, but they really like less of a skyjacking and more of a sit in. Yeah, it was an attempted skyjacking. Um, no one was good at it yet, but yeah, that was the first attempt at a skyjacking anywhere in the world that that is on record as far as I can, as far as

I can find um. And yeah, they didn't get what they wanted in the end. The pilots were just kind of like no, and like, no one else knows how to fly planes because it's nineteen thirty one, so you really have no other options right now. I'm just also in that two weeks, they weren't like how else can

we distribute pamphlets? You know how it is when you kind of like get your heart set on something, Yeah, and you're already there with a gun pointed at the pilot and you're Timac and bro there's like military surrounding you at the airport or something, it's never mind. Yeah, I I don't know how much attention it drew, but um, yeah, that's the first one. Now, the first US no SA,

someone would have to know about it. And it's the thirties. Yeah. Um. The first U S skyjacker was a failed carney named Ernest Pledge um and in nineteen thirty nine he he shot his flight instructor in the back of the head during a during a training flight while in mid air and very nearly crashed because he shot his instructor in the head it was flying at Also what a career trajectory. Yes, failed Carny to sky jack to first American sky jack.

I'm no good at operating this ferris wheel. Perhaps I'll try stealing at airplane. I mean, you know, we all that's life. I'm just saying, there's one lever on the ferris wheel. It's a little bit more complicated with the airplane. So the Yeah, so Ernest, yeah, shoots his flight instructor, manages to like I think, throw his corpse out of the plane and like take control. Um, and then he kind of goes on the run with this stolen plane. Um. But almost immediately before he can really get into being

on the run, he stops for Hamburgers. I'm sorry, but he stops for hamburgers. Like he lands the plane, lands the plane. No, he lands the plane outside of a town, and then he walks into town to get hamburgers. Well, if you're going to go on the run, you need to be fortified. He should have packed a lunch. Yeah, So he gets caught by police immediately because he's covered in blood, and the people at the Hamburger restaurant are like, this guy seems like he might have done something. I'm sorry,

where was this? Um, let's see the I forget exactly where Pletch was when he put some like some in the middle of America, Right, So yeah, you know, sheriff was like, hey, there's a plane and that guy is covered in blood. Caper solved. That's good police work. Yeah. So the Pletch case essentially invented a lot of early legal codes for air piracy, which is what it's called when you commit crimes like this in the air, and

it's the coolest crime you can get charged with. Right, Like, if I had to go commit federal crimes that we're going to put me in prison, I would want it to be air piracy because then people like, what are you in here for well, I was an air pirate and you wear a little leather hat and monocle. Yeah, I have a scar one Oh yeah, yeah, you gotta get a scar on one cheek. That's something you request

from law enforcement during the standoff. Now, I'll let these people live, but you need to wound me so in such a way that I have exactly one Rakish scar on my right cheek. That way, twenty years from now, when Nicolas Cage comes to get me released on prison in a special deal with the federal government because I need to hijack a plane in order to get an alcatrat. Whatever. Wait, that's just my pitch for about Nicolas with Nicholas Cage. Isn't that the rocks like the rock but in the

air the time? Oh yeah, it's all it's a sky prison. All the ground prisons are full, so they have sky prisons. So it's like escape from anyway. Yeah. So uh yeah. So the Pledge case invents a lot of the early legal code for sky crime air piracy um. But by the time the federal government started to oversee aviation in nineteen fifty eight, hijacking a plane that still was not technically a crime nobody really thought they'd need to put that in the lackers. So as long as you're not

on the ground or the water, it's fine. Yeah, it was fine. There were no laws in the sky in nineteen beautiful time. It must have been perfect. So airports had no security measures in place. There was just nobody did anything about airplanes. Everyone was like, well, why would we why would we even think for a second about airports security. It was it was, it was like an

aggressive disregard for wanting to take like any precautions. You're saying, it's like when we drive past the National Guard car lot, Yeah, drive tanks and they just leave all the tanks sitting there and they're just push button ignitions, which, yeah, we shouldn't talk too much about that, but it's a thing you should know. And Tullio Ortiz is the first guy uh to hijack a plane successful, And he gets on a flight bound for Key West and he locks himself

in the bathroom. Then he slips a note underneath the door and he warns everyone he's got a bomb and he says he'll detonate it if the flight isn't rerouted to Havana. Now, Ortiz timed his attempt, well, because the Bay of Pigs had happened just a couple of weeks earlier, tensions were high between the United States and Cuba, and Castro basically was like, oh, ship, Like this is a great opportunity to say funk you to the United States, um,

and not actually risk anything. So he offers Ortiz political Sanctuary's super romantic though, because he's locked in the bathroom, he is threatening the plane. He's locked in the back with the bomb. Right. Yeah, you wonder like a number of things about this, um okay, And my only other question is it he just want to lift to Cuba or was he taking the plane there for some reason or because he just wanted to lift to Cuba. He just wanted to go to Cuba the way way he

could kind of worked at that point. Really yeah, I mean the Bay of Pigs had just happened. But you go to another country and like just round a little bit. I don't know if it was that easy in that time. You could lock yourself in the bathroom and slip whatever the reasoning or Teaz decides this is the way he's going to Cuba. Um, and he doesn't like it there. He actually tries to leave and then gets put in prison in Cuba. It takes him like fifteen years to

get back to the United States. Um, So he regrets his decision very soon quickly. Sometimes you make your bed and then you lie in it. Yeah, and then you gotta live in Cuba, which I don't know right now, maybe not the worst bed in the world. So yeah, so or tease. It doesn't work out well for him. He's not super happy with the decision that he made to hijack a plane and get to Cuba. UM. But a lot of people suddenly realize once he's done it, like it's that easy, Like, well, all you gotta do,

I want to go to Cuba. So three more US planes were hijacked and taken to Cuba over the course of nineteen sixty one. UM And afterwards it becomes it becomes a meme. UM. In the next like eight years, a hundred and seventies seven skyjackings were committed worldwide, and more than seventy percent of them involved an attempt to

divert a plane to Cuba. So Cuba is the place to the place to go if you are jacking a plane, if you're an airline or government maybe just let people fly to Cuba, right, Yeah, that might have been an option. Um you know, there's a number of reasons. It's free essentially, like you can get a real cheap ticket and then just demand it go to Cuba because you've got a gun. But also, it was the seventies. It was real cheap to fly do everything. It was the Golden Age, and

you could smoke on airplane. You could smoke. Everybody's smoking the like a hundred percent of the people involved in all of these hijackings are smoking the entire time. That is something we have to keep in mind. Um. So, yeah, Cuba comes like the motherfucking place to go if you're hijacking a plane, and the reason to hijack a plane. So how Cuba's got like a pretty decent airport set up, right, Like, because otherwise I could see this being a problem. I've

ever heard that it was a problem. I think they I don't know much about the Cuban Cuban airport. Just imagine air traffic controller in Cuba and like the nightmare of like, oh god, we got another one. Not a lot of other traffic into Cuba. I don't think in this period of time. So I just have one more question, though, what did Cuba do with the planes afterwards? They just give them that getting to that. So, the reasons why people would hijack sky jack planes and take them to

Cuba were very varied. Everybody had like a different purpose behind it. Um, But the del Castro kind of helped Um make his country a more desirable destination by letting everyone in the world know that Cuba just kind of would take in anybody who stole a plane. Like, if I'm steal a plane, you can land in Cuba and live here. Was like essentially what he told everybody Um. And there were a lot of ways in which he benefited from the situation. For one thing, it was good propaganda.

All these people leaving the decade and West like traveled to this socialist paradise of Cuba. Um. But more than anything, it meant hard currency for Castro. See airlines had to pay to get their planes returned, and eventually Cuba settled on a standard fee of seventy five hundred dollars per plane, So every time a plane got skijacked, they got a pile of cash to return it. Um. Yeah, So that's

that's their little industry develops. I mean of this, you build your own commercial airline one plane at a time. But I guess that works. And just to crunch the numbers here for you said, so there was about a hundred and twenty or so, well know about like a hundred and thirty years something like that trips to Cuba. Yeah, okay, so that's not bad money. Up. I do it for

a living. So uh yeah, Now a number of people. Um, there were a lot of reasons people ski jack planes for Cuba, including like some folks were just kind of mentally ill and decided to do it. Um. Other folks chose Castro's capital because they were true believers in communism. They convinced themselves that they would be greeted as revolutionary heroes if they success. We got a ransom from, you know,

some government and took it to Cuba. One skyjacker recalled thinking, at the start of his endeavor, in a few hours, it would be that dawn in a new world. I was about to enter paradise. Cuba was creating a true democracy, a place where everyone was equal, where violence against blacks and justice and racism, where things of the past. I had come to Cuba to feel freedom at least once.

There are a number of non white people whose skyjack planes to Cuba because they're just kind of like, fuck this bullshit and the United States in the seventies, I'm going to Cuba in the Black liberation struggle. There's a lot of people who get broken out of jail and get to Cuba somewhere another, so better place than jail, that's what people say. Um, yeah, So the reality of the situation, UM, I don't know. It differed for everybody, but it was less rosy than a lot of skyjackers

had anticipated. Um. For one thing, just as a general rule, governments that put a lot of value on law and order don't like people who hijack planes, even if those people believe the same fixed they do. So like, thanks for the plane, we get dollars out of it, but I forgot it was still like at some point two hundred thousand dollars or something. But now that you brought us this plane, you're also the kind of person who steals planes by pointing guns and moms out of them.

So we don't really trust you, is what we're saying. Kind of person who's not one of our highly trained doctors in our very good medical system. Yeah, um so. According to Wired quote, Castro had a little bit disdained for the hijackers themselves, whom he considered undesirable malcontents. After lying landing at Jose Martie, which I guess is the airport, hijackers were whisked away to an imposing Spanish citadel that served as the headquarters of G two Cuba secret police.

There they were interrogated for weeks on end, accused of working for the CIA, despite all evidence to the contrary. The lucky ones were then sent to live at Cassa de Troncitos, the hijackers house decrupt dormitory in southern Havana, where each American was allocated sixteen square feet of living space. The two story building eventually held as many as sixty hijackers, who were forced to subsist on monthly stipends of forty pesos each skyjackers who rubbed their G two interrogators the

wrong way. Meanwhile, we're dispatched to squalid sugar harvesting camps where conditions were rarely better than nightmarish. At these tropical goologs, inmates were punished with machette blows. Political agitators were publicly executed, and captured escapees were dragged across razor sharp stocks of sugarcane until their flesh was stripped away. One American hijacker was beaten so badly by prison guards that he lost an eye. Another hanged himself in his cell. So it's like, wow,

kind of a mixed bag. Yeah, he stole a whole plane just for that, because sixteen feet of living space, that's that's two feet by eight feet. That's like a cop back to talking about career trajectories of hijackers. You really got to have an end goal in mind. Better, jacking itself is not cannot be the end goal. Better to be the broker who's arranging the transfer of the planes back to their that's the growth industry. Maybe it's also funny that a communist country would take the people

who put in the hard labor and you know, expropriate that. Yeah, yeah, you know, all governments are kind of the same when you get on the other hand, depending on where you lived before, at least you're warm now, Yeah, you're warm now. It works out for some of them, right, Like, there's got to be some people that like getting good with the G two folks, and I don't know. I assume it worked out for some people, but it's it's a

rough it's a rough situation for most of them. Now, the stories that kind of came out about how not ideal it was to become a skyjacker and go to Cuba didn't stop people from jacking. One of the jackers was a thirty or four year old Cuban exile who simply couldn't live any longer without the taste of his mother's free holes. He'd apparently like left as a kid like the yeah, and like one of his mom's soup, which is I hope he got a lot more soup. I don't know. A plane, so we had to steal

a plane. Really, that was That was a decision you can make because there were essentially no risks, Like it was not dangerous to hijack a planets. Also, I don't know what their relationship was like, but after that he and his mom got along pretty good, you would have to hope, so right. Yeah. Another was a sociology student who wanted to study communism. Uh. And of course there were non Cuba related jackings. Twenty eight year old Trust fund kid hijacked a Delta Airlines flight well dressed as

a cowboy. He received fifty thou dollars and parachuted out. He horribly injured himself upon landing and was immediately caught. Yeah, way to go trust fund kids. Yeah, I just got into Cuba, buddy. So skyjackings represented a problem for the airline industry, but not really a big one. Most ski

jackings would cost the airline between twenty and thirty thousand dollars. Uh. And since passengers were basically never harmed, like, there wasn't really a lot of desire among like the people buying flights for it to be stopped, like it wasn't it wasn't a horrible issue from most because to doing business. Yeah, got a detour to Cuba. Yeah, yeah, that was the thing. Like a skyjacking meant like some excitement for everybody on the plane. You might get a free night in Havana

or something, you know. I assume it wasn't great for everybody, but it wasn't Like, it wasn't a big problem. And again people basically never got hurt. Proposals were made to add X rays to airports and begin scanning passengers but this was shot down as an unreasonable violation UM. Basically, like airlines were like, people will never submit to this. Fortunately we never did, and nobody ever changed about that.

So kind of one by one, all of the airlines like looked at this problem of hijackings every year, many many of them, and we're like, I guess we'll just kind of right it out. Fuck it. I mean, what's the worst outcome you can imagine from people hijacking planes? It's fine, No one's gonna like fly them into buildings. Uh So the federal government had a little bit more on the line and was kind of less willing to

let this keep happening, being the federal government. All these jackings were international embarrassment, and they also helped fund because a lot of times people would like the jackers would ransom, you know, the passengers and stuff, and this funded terrorist organizations around the world, including particularly a lot of like Palestinian liberation organizations and stuff. So that was a real issue for the State Department UM and a real issue for the US government. In a nineteen sixty eight a

Senate hearing was held on the matter. Irving rip who represented the f a A, told the assembled Congressman, it's an impossible problem short of searching every passenger. If you've got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana and he has got a gun, that's all he needs, and there's no way to figure out that he has that gun. And certainly wouldn't search every single passenger before they boarded a plane. That would be madness. Yeah, well, yeah,

that's actually the what I'm about. Yes, quote from Wired. Senator George Smathers of Florida countered Rips Gloom by raising the possibility of using metal detectors or X ray machines to screen all passengers. He noted that these relatively new technologies were already in place at several maximum security prisons

and sensitive military facilities, where they were performing admirably. I see no reason why similar devices couldn't be installed at airport checking gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns or other weapons, just prior to implaning, Smithers said, But Rip dismissed. The senator's suggestion is certain to have a bad psychological effect on passengers. It would scare the pants off people, plus people would complain about invasion of privacy.

No one made any further inquiries about electronics. If you someone asks you if you have guns before you get on, to take a single solitary action to make sure people aren't carrying whatever gun they want onto a plane, like people will not fly, It will ruin the industry. And I think history that I won't get on a plane without my scorpion machine pistol. You know, occasionally I think about how people believe in this idea of the forward

progress march of history. This is a solid education that we have headed because they were right in the seventies by god um so two about absolutely everything, especially cigarettes and cocaine, which is not addictive here it's not addictive. Mix as well with cigarettes in a way that again

absolutely not addictive. That's what everyone and smoking. You know, it feels really good everything jacking a plane, Yeah, really, gripping tightly the handle of a scorpion machine pistol as you scream wildly the word havana over and over again to the flight attendants. I assume, yeah, huge, yeah, and enormous. A leather vest like you wouldn't believe such a leather vest called medallion that I could use as a coaster. Oh yeah, medallion's where you keep the extra bullets too.

It's like a pez thing. So two weeks after the Senate inquiry, a forklift operator named or In Richard's hijacks at Delta Airlines flight from a forklift upgrade from a forklift. He springs his trap over West Virginia a gun on the first man he meets in the aisle after leaving a seat, and the first man he met in the aisle after leaving a seat wounded up, wound up being

a sitting senator from Mississippi. Who at that. So the whole situation got resolved peacefully in Miami, but it spooked the federal government, who suddenly realized that elected officials could very easily be skyjacked over like political issues. And like we she probably had this motherfucker off at the past, right, this might not end well for us, I suppose. Yeah, So the State Department, like again, no one knew what to do because you couldn't search people. Look, it's the air,

there's no laws. The State Department actually seriously proposed offering all Americans free one way trips to Cuba in order to stop it. Like again, if we just say any American can go to Cuba for free once forward is a lie because there was a point where we all could have just taken a free trial Cuba. Castro actually said no to that, with the US just offloading all,

you know, sucking shitty people. I've never had any reason to critique anything Photol Castra has done, but right now, this is this is the first thing that I'm aware of. I mean, okay, stripping people's flesh off the sugar cane, and that was not that, it was a little bit of that. I mean, if you're gonna strip people's flesh, and if you've got to strip off people's flesh, you

might as well use sugar exactly. I've always said that. Yeah, yeah, it's like it's basically the same thing that like those fancy salons do when they make they use the sugar to make the thing for depilating here. But but it's your muscular chair off of your skeleton. Okay, well we don't need to be like, you know, nobody's perfect. Is kind of the point here, and that's really what we're

talking about um today. So yeah, Castra is like, no, I'm not going to just take all of the Americans who want to go to cute think they might like Cuba. Um that there's an alternate timeline where Cuba becomes the absolutely like Cuba becomes Silicon Valley because they went with that plan. Could it could have could have been pretty sweet, actually right? Um? Yeah, So he refuses to accept them, so the f a A forms an special Anti Jacking

task Force instead. Um, and they're I don't understand. They are deeply, deeply confused about what their job is from.

So uh, for reasons I will never understand, they solicit American citizens for suggestions on how to solve the problem, and they're immediately buried in just awful awful suggestions like thousands of letters that are all stupid as shit, including installing trapdoors outside cockpits, army stewardess is with tranquilizer darts, making passengers wear boxing gloves so should they couldn't grip guns, and playing the Cuban national anthem before takeoff, and arresting

anyone who knew the lyrics. I mean, I have no problem with that last one. That's think boxing gloves would be fantastic. That would be very funny. I'm also just now imagining the movie Airplane, but everyone is wearing boxing gloves the entire time and what a bit that would be quite funny. Well, they would have to rework some scenes, but they wouldn't fly to Cuba. That woman would still

be hysterical in the lineup waiting for it. So not all of the suggestions were immediately rejected by the government. The most popular one among the f A was the idea that they could just build a scale mock replica of the airport in Cuba in South Florida, so that they could trick skyjackers into thinking they'd reach out, um right next to where they staged the moon lie right right, yeah exactly. But yeah, which, which, of course isn't they put in Florida. That's where you put your fake moon.

They're such similar anyway. Um yeah, So the the f A was like, seriously, like what if we just build a fake airport, But then they decided it would be too expensive. So the airlines meanwhile just decided to make like policy be to completely comply with skyjackers. In always, they actually banned employees from taking any act and whatsoever to scott to stop a sky jack It's like if

you work in a retail store. The policy about shoplift. Yes, and this actually winds up having an impact on nine eleven. Happens the way it does because at that time there had not been like a plane hijacking where that sort of thing had been done, and the wisdom was still you know in two thousand one, Oh, they're gonna ransom us or take us somewhere. They're gonna fly us somewhere,

like they want to get money or something. Um. So that's part of why people didn't really fight back until they started, you know, that last plane kind of realized what was happening. On the other hand, no one was like, they're not using a gun. Well you couldn't, you know, they put some security measures. I'm pretty sure that you could no longer do the fish called Wanda and just flip the gun around. But it did used to be that easy, is it is. It isn't like you just

would carry a gun onto a plane. Um. So, I know, Simonon Lawton ruined it for everybody. He really did that. That's his want. No, okay, so the airlines, yeah again, decide like everybody's just gotta do whatever the the hijackers say. So all plane cockpits in the United States were for a period of time equipped with charts of the Caribbean c regardless of the flights destination, because it was just known like you might have to fly to Cuba, like any flight in the country, you might wind up going

to Cuba. Like you just accessorized that a little bit. You get like some palm trees and everybody's got like some coconut drinks. Yeah, you could keep a special set like yeah, rum like Cuba. Well probably not Cuba libres because those won't go over well once you're in Cuba. Um. Yeah, anyway, uh so, Yeah, skyjacking. It was a viral meme right for eight years or so, and really the year in

which it hit its height was nineteen sixty nine. Yeah, eleven US flights were commandeered in the first six weeks of the year alone. Was really excited by the number. Yeah, they really were. They wanted to make it count. One plane was taken by released mental patient in his three year old son, which which the gun. I'm sure it's a less fun story than it is think. I think saying that a plane was hijacked by anyone and their three year old son maybe gives the three year old

son too much credit. I don't know, have you met in those three year olds in the midst of a tantrum? They could totally hijack a plane. Because also that sounds like a movie. That sounds like a movie with Tom Hanks in the eighties where like, you know, he gets out of the middle institution and like his kid wants to teach him a lesson about had in. I don't know, you could make a fun, feel good movie about it. Then he falls in love with the stewardess. Yeah. And

then they go to Cuba. Yeah. Yeah, Then they go to Cuba, um and help ignite a communist worldwide revolution like Tom Hanks has always wanted to do. So yeah. One plane in nineteen sixty nine was diverted by a college student who was armed with bug spray, so you didn't really have to be all that well equipped I'm sorry, armed with but I think he did like a flamethrower thing, but I'm not really sure. Um. And another was commandeered by a retired Green Beret whose plan was specifically to

beat Castro to death with his fists. So this was this is nine six nine, Yes, so this was before any of the Rambo movies would have given him that idea. Yeah, I think the best part of this idea he had on his own. I think the best part of that is that you've already described what happened once people landed in Cuba. Yeah. So, uh, speaking of landing in Cuba, you know what Cuba loves rum Yes, not America, but broader than that. Cuba. If anyone knows anything, it's that

they love products and services. Huge fans of corporations, and several of those things that I've just listed are in facts and services. There might be an ad for rum or for cigars, or for having a lot of doctors, like a really tremendous amount of doctors, and really good hurricane response and just very response. It could be an ad for any of those things. Um. So here we go. All right, we're back so um. In this period of time, there was exactly one reasonable person who worked in the

entire US government. Uh, and he was a guy named John Daily. He was the f a a's chief psychologist, and he decided that we should probably do something about this problem. And the thing that we should do, rather than search every passenger or all that stuff, was trying to analyze like all of the different hijackings in the past, and particularly all of the people who had committed them, to try and determine if there were certain key behaviors that might like give away the fact that to hijack

a plane. So his research convinced him that all these people had done things that had marked them out as potential hijackers while they were checking in. Uh So, these behaviors weren't uniform. But Daily believed that if you trained airline employees to watch for a certain range of suspicious behaviors and then search the people who seemed like might be a plane hijacker, the fact that some of these folks would be innocent wouldn't piss anybody off too much

if it meant less skyjacking. So you like repeatedly checking your gun and asking if anyone knew how to get to Cuba. Instead of saying that guy is repeatedly checking his gun, better better let him get on this plane, you say that guy's repeatedly checking his gun, I'm gonna ask him if he plans to hijack the plane, but not prevent him from bringing the gun onto the plane. Well,

they tried to, so it actually worked really well. Um, mainly it was just the fact that there was now a possibility of being searched by the law before a flight. That scared off most h that was that was great. There was actually there were reports from airports around the country in this period of time. For weeks after these plants, Like after airports started doing this of like airport security finding guns and knives and bombs stashed in the bushes outside,

they realized and dumped it out. We got to hide it in the bushes. They're never gonna let us take this to Cuba. Yeah, by nineteen seventy, the skyjacking epidemic was mostly over, so it really worked. This is part of why, like dB Cooper, that guy in seventy one, who I think part of why it was so noteworthy is that like they've really gotten a handle on hijacking for the most part, and then he managed he does

it jack um. But this like that, it turns out like a lot of people were just hijacking planes because there was literally no barrier to hijacking plane. I gotta say, if we were playing Minecraft and you were able to hijack planes and there was nothing in the game to prevent you from hijacking planes, I think a lot of people playing Minecraft with a hijacking plane. I think a lot of people would in Minecraft hijack a plane, which is not a thing that anyone in the real nobody

should ever do. Yeah. Um so yeah, by nineteen seventy, they've kind of gotten a handle on the jackings in the sky. Now up to this point, uh on us skyjackings because they were very silly, but there were skyjackings all around the world, and a lot of them were like like I was saying earlier, like a lot of different This is kind of like the height of of kind of international solidarity with a lot of like Palestinian

liberation movements. So there are a lot of different groups kind of allied with different Palestinian groups who would do it to like help fund them and stuff. And this is a big deal. They happened in the US, but also like all around the world. Um, and it was you know, a thing that other groups would do to kind of fund their activities or to make political points. Um. And this kind of brings me to the story of one of the most successful and interesting jackings in all

of sky history, the story of the Japanese Red Army. Yeah, and there's a lot to this story. This is this is a fun one. This is one of the funnest stories in all of terrorism. Um. And there's a lot of fun stories terrorism. It's really just laughs all the way down, um, but this is all the way yeah, like that like that falling Man on nine okay. Um. So to tell this story, we have to talk a

bit about Japan in the nineteen sixties. Japan was just fifteen years out of World War Two at the start of the decade, and thus only fifteen years out of like literally centuries of rule by emperors and shogun and they didn't have a lot of experience with democracy. It had not been an open society. Um. And you know, then there's a bunch of nukes going off and Douglas MacArthur is in charge for like five years that nothing

could go wrong. Douglas MacArthur, by the way, a few years later would suggest so strenuously that he was fired for it putting it into the Korean War by nuking all of China basically, so not they didn't go with that option, huh no, no, not a not the most

even tempered guy. But he opens Japan up and it's his job to like make sure that they democratize and stop being authoritarian, so like overnight, Japan's a democracy and people who had once lived or died on the words of a single man suddenly had the right to go and protest the government in the streets. MacArthur also freed all political prisoners in Japanese jails. Despite the fact that he himself was like a right wing radical, McArthur's hard right.

He frees all of Japan's in prison left wing radicals, including communists. Um. And this is part of why the Japanese Communist Party during this period of time is kind of known for being more pro democracy than in the other party in the country and very different from like other communist parties in that part of the world at the time. And there's there's some very famous authors from from the postwar Japanese period. Uh oh A I know is one of them who Yeah, it's like hardline anti

capitalist communism and also really excited about the post war constitution. Yeah. Yeah, it's clearly there's a lot of cool stuff in it, exactly. Um. And it's one of the reasons MacArthur is such an interesting dude to like look at his because he's like he has a big impact on the constitution. He's a monster also, but like for there's a brief period of time where he's like doing what you'd broadly say are

the right things. And so the Communist Party in Japan actually goes from about a thousand members pre war because it was illegal, to a hundred and fifty thousand members by nineteen fifty, just five years. Another major major change in Japan was the education system. The new government extended the possibility of higher education to everyone, not just a

privileged few. The fact that there were now more students on campus and more possibilities for political involvement led to an explosion in Japanese activist culture, and MacArthur supported this too, under the belief that even left wing activism on campus would help flush out Japanese instructors who still held lingering nationalist beliefs. So that's kind he lets the left rises, He's like, so this will flush out the nationalists. He

hates communists, but he's but he hates the guys. He was just fighting and anti fascism, anti told holitarian first kind of he was pretty he was. It was more he specifically hated the old Japanese government, and he knew that they really hated the left, and letting these kids march in the street would kind they're not going to be able to shut up about exactly. That's more the reason, Like McArthur's not doing this because he's a nice dude.

And and there's there's certainly things to bear that out because you have like Maschima and his Shield Society, and there's there's some really wild right way uprisings that happen in post or Japan, just irate about the idea and that like a switch. Yeah, the emperor can't order everyone to die anymore, and that is unacceptable, the worst thing

that's ever happened. Um So, yeah, students self governing associations pop up at campuses across Japan, and they functioned kind of like unions, um, giving kids a voice on their campus. In a bunch of these associations formed up into a national league. They called themselves Zenga Kurin, which is short for All Japan League of Students Self Government. Now, most of these people were communists, but there's you know, you know communists, there's a whole lot of different kinds of communists.

It's like skills there, right, there's there's Lenin, and there Trotsky Stalin. At this point most Stalin. Yeah, those are all the kids that I know. And at this point, you know, even the people who are like Stalinists aren't really Stalinists by what we'd call them, like, because if you're a Stalinist, then you don't really know most of what Stalin did. Being a Stalinist now and denying everything, Yeah, well and he hadn't done some of that stuff. He had not done all of that stuff. You've done a

lot of it. Have a goldfish pond, um, Yeah, I think so, probably, Yeah, so, yeah, these guys started, these these students start protesting. Like a big one is US bases on Japanese soil, and like the no base movement. You'd still see when I was over there, you'd see a bunch of graffiti for that, Like that's a big thing, um, because the US military presence in Japan is it's massive, Yes,

absolutely on Okinawa. And have a lot of a lot of fond memories of driving class past like missile silos that are just like in the countryside I have Okanawa, and my impression is that there's not much too Okinawa other than military. Oh no, Okanowa fucking rules. Like there's a lounch of cool sh sorry, that's what is Like. The bases are big, like it's it's it's a it's big and it has a major impact on the local

culture for sure. Um but there's a like there's a lot of cool ship going on another um so yeah, so they start protesting US bases on Japanese soil. And this is where Douglas MacArthur stops being on board. He wasn't, wasn't it wasn't, but yeah, why not? But it won't won't the fascists be upset that? Oh they won't be upset about that, will they know? That's when MacArthur stops

being okay with the students speaking their minds. Uh So in nineteen forty nine he backs a bill the like the the Japanese government puts out that specifically, the Ministry of Education pushes introduces this bill that would curtail the right to protest. So this really pisses off studentship in Japan, who are again able to protest best and organized for the first time, and more than two hundred thousand of them take to the streets and shut down universities across

the country. Uh. It was so shocking that the government was forced to back pedal and scrap the bill, But more attempts followed. In nineteen fifty two, the government tried to pass an anti subversives bill that was basically Japanese style McCarthy ism. Twenty students attempted to storm the Royal Palace, hurling stones that lines of armored riot police, who eventually beat them back with such violence that two students died in the fighting. Um yeah, heck of a riot. Uh

So soon mass street battles become the norm. The Japanese government's refusal to do anything as a result of these protests caused the formation of a new movement in Japanese politics, the New Left, who believed that electoral politics were hopeless and only revolution could bring progress. Um, which doesn't sound like anything that's ever ever come to that. Conclusions based on police violence certainly not only happened this one time in this one country. Um yeah, I'm gonna quote now

from a write up in the Asia Pacific Journal. New Left street demonstrations steadily escalated into violent clashes resembling medieval battles. The students wore color coded crash helmets and blasted with the names of their organizations, carried long fighting polls, and

through stones or fire bombs at the police. They confronted squads of riot police wearing medieval style helmets, who battled the students with tall aluminum body shields and police batons, supported by water cannon trucks that spread fire hoses of water laced with tear gas at the students. At the peak of the protest cycle in nineteen sixty nine, Japanese authorities suddenly cracked down with mass arrests and prolonged incarcerations of thousands of students. This turned the tide and in

part by producing splits within the new left groups. So there's part of a reason why Japan is kind of so famously disconnected from like politics and and people don't like do ship like this anymore. To a large extent, arrested because they arrested and beat and yeah that does

sound cool, and the long sticks and the hurling. Okay. So, by the early nineteen seventies, the Zenga Kuran, which are again these like student self governing organizations, it started turning away from the Japanese Communist Party and mass largely so that they could have a chance of influencing electoral politics. So like, yeah, they decide they don't want to be they're not new left right. They want to try and actually like make things happen at the ballot box, and

the radical left is increasingly being like, that's bullshit. It's all about fighting cops in the streets and the kind of more moderate people are like, but that has horrible consequences and I don't want to do it. Um, this sounds like a summary of the entire seventies after nineteen

sixty yep Son, it's a thing that keeps happening. So uh yeah, the larger number of moderate liberals broke away from the radical left and stopped protesting, and the radical left did what the radical left nearly always does and devoured itself. Yeah. Yes, is this specific to Japan or is this just this is literally any movement that's ever happened, and also that's ever happened in the seventies after sixty eight occurred. It's the thing that keeps happening. That's why

the earth will soon be an uninhabitable anyway. Communist radicals in Japan decided that non violent resistance was no longer practical. Japanese riot police were too good at their jobs, and less committed members of the left were no longer trust were the allies. The communist chunks of the left began to split between those who wanted to continue the old methods of protest in propaganda and those who wanted to actually wage global war against capitalism, I mean a literal

war in that sense. Now, these types wound up in a number of different groups, the most influential of which came to eventually be known as the Japanese Red Army. Now, my understanding from the latter twentieth century is any time that something's called the Red Army, everything is good from there on. Red Army, faction, re army cards, those are all reds. Yeah, So Japanese Red Army, everything that's coming up, the Soviet Red Army famously no war crimes committed. Um,

that's why the Polish people we're so happy anyway. So I'm gonna quote now from a fascinating rite up an Unseen Japan that really goes into these guys, and they do. Actually a great multipart essay on the whole history of the Japanese Red Army. That's very cool. The leader in ideological master of the newly minted Red Army faction was one Shiomi Takaya, an avowed Trotskyite for whom a violent

international revolution was the goal. In Shiomi's eyes, any attempt at coexistence with the imperialist West, as was then being professed by Soviet Premiere Kruschev following his shocking repudiation of Stalinism, where a corruption of true Marxism, world revolution required unflinching required unflinching action. Imperialism needed to be purged from the world. In Japan was the place to start. If they joined hands with other revolutionary forces in Cuba, Palestine, Korea, and Vietnam,

soon the entire world might glow red. The struggle first took the form of an internesting battles with their within their parent organization, the Communist League. Hostages were taken and the headquarters stormed. One Red Army soldier died after he slipped and fell from a high window will escaping being held hostage at the League headquarters at Nihon University. Death death had become a part of the Red Army mythos from its very first days. So so they're they're taking

hostages from their own in their own headquarters. Yeah, how it's going. Well, how can you go and fight the capitalists if you cannot even properly purge your own ranks? Exactly? Yeah, if there you're going to clean the house, you got to clean your cloth. This is a story with a real pergy ending to enjoy. The Red Army differed from many of its fellow lefties by stating openly their desire

to commit violent actions against the state. They're propaganda heavily sighted ly on Trotsky to make the case that violent tactics would help spark a worldwide socialist revolution, which would inspire a global revolutionary army to rise up an armed

revolt with bombs and guns. This is the part that I always find delightful is you have all of these guys throughout history who keep being like, so, we're gonna do this thing, and then when we do this thing, a global army is going to materialize, and all of a sudden, the thing we want is going to happen. I mean as opposed for like, hey guys, you mask for like four weeks and it basically being the seat of a civil war. Yeah, Like, if there's one thing

that seems to be true. It's doing one thing doesn't lead to unified action across the planet. If there's one people thing people hate, it's doing things they really do. I don't like it. And this was before Netflix. Yeah, yeah, this is before Yeah, so you had a chance, but it still wasn't great. So yeah, they started publicizing this. The Red Army faction starts publicizing their desire to spark a global armed socialist revolution before they even hold their

first meeting. And this created a lot of buzz around the new organization. Where do you publicize that, by the way, is that okay? I'm just wondering if that's like the back page of the newspaper and like the help want to the ads revolution wanted. Uh yeah, a lot of people. There's a lot of a lot of buzz around them.

As this quote from an article in the Journal of Asian Studies by Patricia Steinoff makes clear, the organization's first public meeting, held at a public hall in Tokyo in early September nineteen sixty nine, featured a massive display of state authority. In addition to the ring of uniformed police surrounding the building, plain closed police photographed the three hundred people who entered, and more police stood around the back

of the hall watching on stage. Gonna make you maybe a little bit less excited about openly calling for violent interaction again. They loved this ship. They loved this ship. They all made speeches wearing like ski masks and stuff, so they couldn't be um. And they didn't get arrested that day because it's not people say that stuff. But everyone knew they were saying, we're going to break the

law very soon. Um and so yeah, and they're all masked up, and it's pretty good, pretty good propagandic coup because people hadn't done anything like that at that point. Yeah. So, the various cells of the Red Army ran a handful of mass gatherings protesting US bases and that sort of thing, but the fiery young men and women in the Red Army faction proved to have very little patients for such things. They moved almost immediately to hijacking vehicles, bombing police stations,

and robbing banks. Once they hit a few months of this under their belt, the leadership cadres of different Red Army chapters decided to attempt to spark uprisings in three different cities, and keeping with their international revolution obsession, they timed this with the Days of Rage planned by the Weatherman and a Black Panther rally in Chicago, which is, yeah, it'sn't not bad, not necessarily bad. I think that news cycle you're gonna you know, you're gonna dominate, You're going

to dominate in the news cycle. Yeah, maybe a very busy year. It was a year to try that sort of thing. You gotta give them that. So I'm gonna quote from Patricia stein Off again, uh Seguin, which is like was what like? The Red Army factions Japanese name organized its fall uprisings with only slightly more secrecy than

it would have used for a public demonstration. Prior. Publicity about the events prompted a series of riot police raids on univer Firsty campuses, where local Sekegun chapters were stockpiling poles and iron pipes for street fighting and glass bottles for making Molotov cocktails. The Osaka and Kyoto raids involved over two thousand riot police and resulted in nearly a

hundred arrests and sixty four indictments. These raids contributed directly to a huge increase in student weaponry confiscated by police in the second half of nineteen sixty nine. In the end, the uprisings turned out to be relatively minor skirmishes in which secgun members ran around the streets throwing fire bombs at police stations. One area of sekigun innovation. Weaponry was

handled secretly. From the beginning, Sakegon threatened publicly to use more powerful weapons, but the specific details were restricted to those directly involved. A small sake Gun research and development group composed of physics, chemistry, and medical students quickly invented a hand grenade made by packing dynamite, pachinko balls and a fuse into round metal containers in which Peace brand

cigarettes are sold. Soon after, a more powerful hand grenade was devised, using a length of iron pipe as the casing. Both weapons were designed to be thrown with a lit fuse. Small groups of Sakegun members were taught the new technology manufactured the bombs as a cottage industry. Yeah, they they they get really going so and they I like that there's a specific brand of cigarettes where they're like, this

is this is the grenade. Brandy called him Peace bombs. Yeah, Yeah, they did, and if I don't know, If you don't, this won't mean much if you don't know a lot about Japan. But if you know Japan, the fact that their grenades had pachinko balls in them is the most

Japanese thing they could have possibly done. Like that's um, it's uh, it's like what it's like, you know what old people in America do when they go to gamble in vegas, like Pachinko's that, but like countrywide, it's just like a it's like a it's like a like a I don't know how to describe it. If they've never seen people play pachinko. Yeah, it's kind of like beingo. Um, it's kind of like bingo, and they use it to

make grenades, which is very fun. Yeah. So, whatever else you can say about the Japanese Red Army, they didn't act lack Kutzba Shiomi, the leader and his top officers next launched a plan to raid the Prime Minister's home and kidnap him in the dead of night in order to stop him from reading meeting with Richard Nixon and finalizing the are in of Okinawa to Japan. This action was disguised as a mass training event in the mountains

where members would learn to use explosive steering assaults. Now sorry, they disguised their plan to kidnap the prime minister as we an organization that has repeatedly said that we are going to violently overthrow the government. Are going to get all our people together up in the mountains to practice making bums our cover story. Have you noted an error in in their thinking, a tactical shortcoming. I have not, but I'm excited to see how it goes. And everyone

was like, you should go do that. That seems like a really good plan. The way you'll be out of the way during what and and this was in nine sixty nine. I think I can't imagine that less than you know, less than thirty years out from World War Two, the Japanese government is going to have any problem with

this whatsoever. Well, you're going to be shocked then, because they send hundreds of riots police to bust their loss training drill um and enough Uh enough of the group gets arrested at this point that the Red Army goes underground. Their founder himself got arrested and he lost control of the movement. Shortly thereafter, uh and I'm gonna continue quoting

from that right up in Unseen Japan here. Ironically, the discovered materials reveal that the Red Army faction had functioned on higher on a hierarchical structure that was anything but revolutionary. Those from the most elite universities, such as Tokyo or

Meiji were selected for the highest level of authority. Secondary authority went to those from major public universities, with the next level being local establishments, those without a college education or those who were in vocational school or high school with the grunts of the organization. So this is like such typical like yeah, business firm, company man, bullshit, Like I don't know, you went to a state school, so

you get for violent communist insurrection. And you can tell that like the people who went to those good schools are the ones capable of making the really important good decisions, like to disguise kidnapping the Prime Minister as an legal bomb building party. Look, when I went to my elite university, we did an entire class, and how the Prime Minister doesn't care if you say you're going to make bombs

for a massive insurrection. Now, you did go to Brown so I mean I'm just gonna put out there, considering that you went to a fancier college than I went to. I get to be in charge of the communist insurrection, and you have to be a lieutenant. Get because I dropped out of college. But you definitely recount to me way more ridiculous conversations with people you went to college with,

as though they were normal. I'm sure that's true, and I am equally sure that I have been so broken by higher education that I don't know which conversations you're talking about. Good country, consistent. We all. So, as time went on, the Red Army drew in smaller and smaller numbers of very committed communists. Those who were left after the disastrous raid attempt were desperate to carry off something big and so successful to wash away the townership defeat.

So they launched another series of bank robberies. And these weren't the haphazard affairs from earlier in their history, but actually well planned actions whose perpetrators would like switch multiple train lines as they fled and disappeared into these networks of safe houses. Uh. They they they kind of like stuck the landing after a real bad, real bad I

don't know, I don't know enough about gymnastics. The Red Army kept a careful watching the police, you know, whenever the law caught onto one of their properties, and they would like became famous for like right as the police were about to raid them, they would like close out their lease and leave and they would just be the spotless apartment behind and they they yeah, that's like if you've if you've seen the departed, then like that's the little booties on your shoes at the end of just

just nailing it. Yeah, like we were so ready for the fact that we cleaned. Yeah. Um so yeah. The switching tactics actually enraged most of the imprisoned founders of the group, which saw theft that harmed normal working people is and a revolutionary But the remaining but I don't know if their banks were, like I don't know what any Japanese banking this is. They don't have. This is the issue that people had that like that some of

the imprisoned founders had. Maybe the imprisoned founder should have advocated for the fdi C in Japan and then they could have been fine. I don't know. So the remaining free members of the Red Army saw it more as a question of survival. They used the money to buy samurai swords and pipe bombs and plane tickets for nine men on a March thirtieth, nineteen seventy flight from Tokyo

to Fukoa. I realized, but you did just say a matter of survival and then moved straight to samurai swords and pipe bombs, which having taught the necessities, having having taught something about survival over the course of my life, and I understand that, Yeah, you're going out in the woods, first thing, you need samurai swords and pipe well, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's how how else are you gonna start a fire? Right? And are you gonna hunt that rabbit without a samurai sword?

I thought you were going to hunt it with the pipe. You can hunt anything with whatever. That's the beauty hunting. Um. So yeah, they buy, they buy tickets for this flight to Focca, And as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude, the members of the Red Army stood up and grabbed the weird tube, blank pieces of luggage they all stowed under their seats. Uh, and they pull out samurai swords.

I thought it was just really starts searching things. But at least one time, under no circumstances should we search things, because that way lies totalitarianism. People will get angry, unlike these nice young men with other tubes, Let me help you, sir. So they pull out samurai swords and bombs, and their leaders screams to the other passengers, raise your hands. We're going to North Korea, which is not what you want

to hear on a flight. So in in nineteen this is yah, I think seven is we're going to North Korea as bad a thing to hear in seventy as it is, it's not a great thing to hear. Okay, that's not a great thing to hear, not as bad for sure. I think that like the mass starvation and

stuff hadn't really be still around. This is actually kind of like what a lot of North Koreans would call like a Golden Age sort of period, so like it had many tracked any of this people from Japan, part of the Korean diaspora that was in Japan, not that I'm aware of, no, Yeah, but I you know maybe, um but I think these are all like specifically kind

of like Japanese middle class and upper middle class kids. Um. So the problem and problem immediately arose as soon as they announced that the destination was North Korea, which is that the flight didn't have the fuel necessary to reach North Korea. I mean details. Yeah, the pilot pointed this out, and he convinced the skyjackers to let him land as scheduled and refueled. They took this bait, and of course the police had a shipload of people in the tarmac

there to meet them. H. So there's a bunch of tense conversations, uh and a you're like negotiations. They released twenty three people from the plane, women, children and the elderly, and then the flight takes off again. Um, and the pilot starts getting like navigational instructions from a source that's like loudly claiming to be from Pyongyang, and so he lands the plane again in what is supposed to look like the North Korean tarmac with like a bunch of

soldiers in North Korean uniform. It's a fake airport that the Japanese very quickly threw together, which so after the US is like, no, we can't depend which says everything. Yeah, we could have just had a fake Havannah airport in Miami instead of the t s antly. We could have had the normal Miami airport look like the Havannah airport. Just Miami lives under Cuba law now, like whether or not Cuba wants it, and the US is washing its hands of the matter. Let's see what happens. Um. So

the Japan builds an airport in an hour. Yeah, they built a fake airport real quickly. Um. And yeah, it's pretty good they're fake airport. But they forget to cover up the tail markings of a Northwest Airlines flight. Um. Yeah, so the hijackers Northwest Airlines not flying. You know, they didn't do a lot of not a lot of not a lot of Seattle to Pyongyang flights at this point. You know, it's a big it's a big route now. But if it had just been Panama, everything would have

been fun. Yeah. Um. So yeah, the hijackers realize something is wrong because they're pretty smart cookies. Um and yeah, they refused to let anyone leave the plane before the airport officials show them a massive portrait of Kim Il sung, like they demand to see. We want to see the biggest fucking portrait of Kimmel Song you have, because there's no way that a big picture of the leader of

North Korea could possibly exist outside of North Korea. I think more of what it was is that there's no way that a picture big enough for it to like I think they all knew that, Like if if we say a big picture of Kim Il sung in picture they bring out if this isn't North Korea, isn't gonna be big enough to believably be what North Korean. So

you want the big picture, it's gonna take. It's actually a pretty smart thing to do because they're gonna bring out like what normal people would think is a big picture maybe, and anyone who knows anything about North Korea's gonna be like, that's not a big picture. If Kim suck, that's we're not flying right. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually a pretty smart move. Um. So yeah, they they realize what's happening and they refuse to let the passengers off. Um.

And yeah. So eventually the Japanese government is forced to compromise with him, and it's actually like kind of an impressive compromise, like this is the one member of government maybe ever that I'm I'm I'm proud of Japan's Vice Minister of Transportation comes out and he's like, what have you let everybody else off? And you just take me prisoner and you fly me to North Korea. Um. And the hijackers are like sure. Uh and that's a good thing to do. You say, a politician putting themselves on

the line in the constituents, Yeah, it happened once. Well, this exact time is the one tis well that in the Jonestown Congressman. Yeah, yeah, well there's you also said this is the guy who's in charge of transfer, vice Minister for transportation. So he's also like, this is my this is my duty. Yeah, that's better. Yeah and yeah, and to their credit, the Red Army guys are like, oh yeah, that works great. Um. And so yeah they all fly to North Korea. Um. Didn't did Harrison Ford

do that in that movie where he was the president? Yes? This was actually he did that during the period of time where he was the vice Minister of Transportation for Japan. That's what I remember about that movie. There's an entire problematic anthropology book about this about Harrison Ford being the vice Minister of because that was why so many Japanese planes crashed that Okay, Um, Harrison, he's not a good pilot. No, he's terrible. He's one of the worst. Um So, Yeah,

the Red Army, Uh, they succeed. It's a big caper, it's big international news. They jack a plane and take it to North Korea makes it sound real whimsical. Now they're pretty much all miserable in North Korea. So the like there. The North Korean government didn't really want them, because again North Korea doesn't really trust people who hijack planes are from not North Korea, are from not North Korea,

or are from North Korea. Um And the hijackers, like a lot of them wound up wanting to return to like they all kind of they all wanted initially to return to Japan. Like their goal was to get arms in military training from the North Korean military and then fly back and launch an insurgency. And North Korea was like, we have all these surplus resources which we will give to you to take out of the country. Yes, have you met us, We're North Korea, We're in North Korea.

We love to do this. Um So, North Korea didn't really like the idea of giving these guys military training, and they keep telling them maybe later. Um and a bunch of These dudes wound up in Japan decades later, so they gave interviews and stuff, and I found a really funny article about their experiences. Here's one guy abe Kimi Hero discussing their desire to be trained as soldiers in how North Korea responded, quote, military training, military training,

always military training. If we didn't get military training, then we had no reason for coming. Because one of our motives for coming to North Korea was to receive military training. Our daily routine also included running in the mornings. It felt very good to run in the fresh early morning air, far away from the city. We agreed that we shouldn't just run but what but we should run in the

spirit of activism. So we shattered the still of the early Korean mornings by shouting our Red Army slogan of achieved the uprising victory in war. However, they were immediately obliged to stop this demonstration. They received a message from the Workers Party, you can be heard in all the neighboring farms. Wouldn't be best if you stopped shouting your slogan.

So like North Korea is like okay, guys, we get but maybe not um And they're all so like the Red Army again, their their whole thing is simultaneous worldwide revolution and North Korea's get their own things. That's very different from that, which is we have a sort of semi yea. They seek to be completely autonomous. Yeah, that

like jucha stuff. So considered leaving us the funk alone? Yeah, we would like, well said, they have all these guys shouting, So what they do is they forcibly indoctrinate them for years until they all agree that jucha is the way to go. Fortunately, I have never heard anything bad about the detention facilities in North Korea. It was fine for those guys. Two of them were trying killed trying to flee. Um. Yeah. And a couple of they'd stopped their training, running every

day yeah uh yeah. And if a couple others made it out under the guys of continuing the revolutionary activity, four members remained in North Korea, where they spent years faking a conversion to Juche philosophy. UM. In two this and four they announced their desire to return to Japan. Um And yeah, it's it's a it's not a perfect

story and pretty good hijacking. I do like that, you said, spent years faking their conversion to juj philosophy, which puts them in good company from what I understand with most people in North Korea. Yeah yeah, uh so you know who doesn't fake their commitment to the ideas of Kim Il Sung? I could it possibly be products? It is products and service. Yeah, this we're entirely supported by the North Korean defense industry. Yeah yeah, so, uh, I don't know,

here's the ads. Uh, We're back. Oh my gosh, how good was that? That was all very silly, but it was a pretty good hijacking. And it shows that like there was some steel in the Japanese Red Army, right, Like they did some silly ship but like there's color. There's some hardcore motherfucker's in that group. Uh. And then they didn't all go to that plane caper. In fact, there were thousands and thousands of kids left over in Japan.

Um and Yeah, the Red Army kind of splintered in the absence because like the folks who went to North Korea, a lot of them were like the intellectual leaders of the movement. UM and one fragment, yes, one fragment of the remaining movement decided to really commit to the international nature of their political philosophy. They fled to Lebanon, where they met up with members of the Popular Front for

the Liberation of Palestine. UM. So, you know, for people who might not know as much about that history, we're not gonna do it nearly the justice that it deserves. But uh, you know, Israel became a thing. Uh. And kind of the term that's used to refer to that as the Nakba or catastrophe by the Palestinian people. Um. And that word refers to the refers to the forced expulsion of Palestinian people from the land that's now the

nation of Israel, about seven eight hundred thousand people forced out. Um. And that had happened about twenty years ago at this point, right, So it's really fresh, and the revolutionary movement dedicated to taking it back is also really fresh. Um. There's no way to talk about this where I won't uh make a lot of people angry. UM. So I think I'm just gonna say, I think what was done to Palestines

a real bummer. Uh. And a lot of Palestinians agreed, which is why they formed organizations like the Popular Front, which was a Marxist Leninist organization in addition to being you know, liberation and stuff. We'll talk more about them tomorrow because Carlos the Jackal is all real tied up in this ship. Um. But the Red Army here about like you know, they they they're paying attention to what's

happening in Palestine. It's like a big cause, particularly on the international left at this point, and they're like, well, if we're gonna do this international revolution thing, here's a great place to do it. Like there's a bunch of other armed people. They all want us to go fight for them. Let's go leave Japan and go fight in the Middle East where the Japanese Red Army and that's what we're gonna do. And that's exactly what they do. Uh. They cannot see how this plan would go wrong at all.

They're actually kind of great at it, actually going to say this is I don't yeah, I'm curious to see how this plays out. So they go and like unlike you know, North Korea, like the Popular Front is like we're fucking trained, you guys, we need like we're so short on people to go like Palestine, yeah, before like before the narc but Palestine is like the size of New Jersey. It's not giants. Yeah, they need if they're gonna need people, they need not actually a ton of

people there. Yeah. And these communists, you know, the Japanese Red Army guys are all like really smart and really dedicated and like they so they might up been Lebanon and they get trained by the Popular Front and then they go out and they start they start doing shit. In May of nineteen seventy two, three Japanese Red Army members open fire with automatic rifles at the Tel Aviv airport. They fire at random, killing twenty four people in wounding

seventy six. So not yeah, some pretty serious terrorism right out that fucking gate. It's also could you imagine how many planes they could have stolen with this? They could have stolen it, They could have stolen hundreds of plans with us three people when for ever, not great tactics there. I don't think that was their goal. I think it was more of of what we were, kind of modern terrorism. They're kind of like, more this is terrible terror instead

of yeah, hey look we got a plane. And the Japanese Red Army went on to rack up like a pretty terrifying pedigree of violence over the course of the next few years. They seized foreign embassies, they hijacked aircraft, they massacred civilians, kidnapped form dignitaries. On several occasions, the government of Japan was forced to release imprisoned Red or

Red Army members in order to free ransom captives. Um. And there's still some Red Army folks out there today, although they're all pretty old at this point and not super active. Um. But it would be fair to say that the chunk of the Japanese Red Army who went to Lebanon were like pretty terrifying people. Yeah, and we'll get we'll talk about them more tomorrow. But they're like a big deal in terrorism this time, Like the Japanese Red Army, Um, pretty scary motherfucker's outside of Japan. Now.

The folks who remained behind in Japan, on the other hand, they less committed. No, they were actually more committed, but in a real dumb way. Yeah, we're gonna get like the dumbest. Some of these people abscribed to slightly different versions of communism than other versions of this and just just kind of imagine it being the B list. Yeah, yeah,

you get your B list kids. So they're behind in Japan, and you know, they don't really have a leadership CADRA anymore because those people have all gone on to like do better things than you know, in hierarchical communist organizations do fine with leadership vacuums. Yeah, like really just great. So all of the leadership to the Red Army in Japan kind of falls on one dumb kid named Maurice Sunio. He was not a great master of communist political theory,

nor was he an inspiring leader. Um, but he'd done his time, and once all of the cool people were arrested or in North Korea, he was just kind of the guy who was was there, so he just kind of aged into it like vice snority. Yeah. I mean, also, this doesn't bear any similarity to any other dictators or leaders that you have ever mentioned ever before. This is a thing that only these specific communists did, and no

other groups or political preferences in history. You know, there's a lot to be said for standing quietly in the background and just letting everyone else go into the adventurous thing. Would call it taken to Kennedy. Yeah, um, I was speaking about the most recent Kennedy. He just lost his election, because that's true he was trying to do anyway, not the ones who got shot by Bernie Sanders. Um so, yeah,

the did both of them. Yeah, oh I thought it was I thought it was just j Han sir Han, like same number of letters as Bernie pull off his face from Tom Cruise style. So uh yeah, the guys, Yeah, we're going to tell that this is probably honestly, probably the dumbest story in the history of terrorism. Um And that's that's hard because there's a lot of fun videos of like militant groups accidentally shooting each other and like, yeah, um so yeah, after all the smart people left. Yeah,

Morey Suno winds up on top. I know, I know it's a different name, but I love that his name is Maury. Yeah, it is kind of funny. Um So, the Red Army at this point is the most wanted militant organization in Japan. Um So, Morey kind of has his work cut out for him. And again they go to the ground, carrying out small scale bombings and robberies and tiny isolated cells. This limits, this limited domestic focus causes a lot of grumbling within the ranks, as did

Maury's undeserved ascent. There were vicious struggles within the organization, and those made some members leave and others flee to Lebanon. Morey knew the Red Army needed a new caper to keep their name in the news, so he hooked up with another radical group who had recently pulled off a daring gun store robbery, which obviously made the valuable because it's not real easy to find guns in Japan, so

these kids have guns. Um. Also, it sounds like the start of a western, one of the sad western kind of Yeah, you get pretty good Quentin Tarantino movie out of this store. Um. So, yeah, they they hook up with this group that's just robbed a gun store because the Red Army has got like money and fame and this group has guns. Um. But both differential organizations differed significantly in their political beliefs um. So you know, it's not easy mashing them together. So the two groups formed

an organization called the United Red Army. So like that's that's what happens when they merge. Um And the leader of this organization that had stolen the guns, a woman named Nagata Hiroku, becomes like co leader with this guy Mori. Um. So Nagata, who was just about as competent as Marie, knew that the right first move once she was in power was to order the brutal executions of two former members of her organization who had chosen to dessert. And dessert is a word here that means like go back

to college. So they were like dragged out of their dormitories and strangled to death brutally by men and women who had once been their best friends. Then they were buried in shallow graves outside of town. Now when more hears about this, he gets jealous because he'd always been

too jealous. It's not the word I expect. Okay, you know, if your organization joins with my organization and I go, oh good, in order to show how good our organizations are together, I'm going to have some deserters brutally murdered by their best friends. I appreciate you as a comrade, but I don't think I want to be in your organization anymore. And if you don't show that you're nearly as strong and powerful as me, I might not think

that either. I might be about to take a trip to the United States and then slip a note under a plane door, so that we don't have to hang out anymore. I bet you that's not the choice he made, so well, no more. Actually this like he feels he'd never had the guts to have deserters executed. Um, but he now that a girl had kind of beat him to doing it, he decided he had to do something in order to like exert his power. He throws a leadership training camp for the top leaders of the new

organized group. Camp. Don't go to that camp. It seems like a bad camp. It was a bad camp. So it was going to be like a leadership summit and a bonding experience for everybody, but most have already know like, yeah, I don't know any other context. Um. Most importantly, it was going to be a chance for Mori to flex his power on a captive audience by corrupting an essential tool of many leftist revolutionary groups, self criticism. Um. Yeah, I'm gonna quote here from a write up and unseen Japan.

The sort of group self criticism Mori had in mind has long been practiced by various Japanese corporations and has become quite common among Japanese. Amongst Japanese new left groups who called the process, so Katsu operations, once completed, would become the subject of group discussion, where criticism of others and of ones self was used to find whatever weakness had led to any form of failure during the planning of the next operation. They would then seek to overcome

whatever internal problems had been discovered. Within leftist groups, any such failures were often seen as ideological errors. However, the United Red Army was forced. As the United Red Army was forced further underground and up, interaction became limited. Criticism increasingly became aimed towards the personal weakness of individual members

rather than the failures of group ideology. In the first days of December nineteen twenty nine, people consisting of nineteen men and ten women made their way to the san Sangaku Base lodge deep in mountainous rural Gunma Prefecture. For days, they lived and strategyized and engaged in sessions. So, yeah, they start doing these big self criticism sessions isolated alone

in the mountains um and things don't go well. Members of like the group that had stolen the guns, have all these criticisms of the Red Army and the Red Army members have all these criticisms of the other group. Um. And then there's punishments when people are found out when

enough of the group agrees that like someone did something wrong. Um. So it starts with like forcing people to go days without eating or sitting for long periods of time and like this really uncomfortable position, like a yoga position that hurts after a while. Um. And Mari and Nagata are kind of like the judges at all of this and determine like what people have to do to be punished properly before they get to rest. Um. So not a

levelhead starting out in a healthy place. So until you got to the punishment part, I was going to say sarcastically that I've never ever been part of any leftist group that engaged in this type of behavior, or for that matter, any you know business the engasion that kind of behavior. It's a thing that only happened to this one time. So but actually this actual thing maybe did only happen this one time because it gets way really out of hand very quickly. Um. Like that's a kind

of situation. You expect people to be petty and bitchy and cruel to each other, but you also are talking about a underground communist instructionary group and the group they teamed up with for no other reason than that they stole a ton of guns. Yeah, and we already know that somebody got straggled buried shallows. I think a group self critique session that also involves arbitrarily designated punishment. You don't think that that's going to end? Well, yeah, it doesn't.

I know, yeah, I do so. By like, after twenty days of this up for three weeks, people still aren't getting along. Um, Like the two groups haven't come together well enough. They don't feel good about everything. Yeah, And so more in Nagata are like, we've gotta we've got to be more brutal about our punishments. That's how you get people are not don't have the right amount of revolutionary fervor, right, so we have to punish the more.

It's like when when you get in enough fight with your buddy and you're like, let's retreat to the mountains for three weeks and be brutally punished for our disagreements. Did they not have drugs? I don't think they did. See,

there's there's the problem really drinking a bit. I don't know. Um, yeah, and I'm gonna the right up and Unseen Japan does a really good job of kind of laying this all out beautifully and terribly, so I'm going to read that It all began with Ozaki Mitsuo, a twenty one years old the Tokyo University of Fishery student, had joined the United Red Army as part of the merger with that

other group. The crimes for which he stood accused by his fellow comrades during the self criticism session were of discussing the whereabouts of Red Army hideouts and weapon stashes with unauthorized persons. Additionally, he was seen as lacking the correct amount of revolutionary zeal. More's collective punishment for these offenses was to have Ozaki face off and a no holds about and a no holds bout with a much

bulkier co revolutionary. The others encircled the two fighters, ensuring Osaki could not run away, and then the larger man began wailing on Ozaki. Beaten to the ground, time and tinam again. Ozaki, bloodied, still rose for more punishment. He knew the only way out was to accept his physically imposed chastisement. Finally, the badly beating. Ozaki was allowed some rest. He then made a fatal mistake. He thanked Maury for the chance to allow himself to become a better revolutionary.

There was murmuring from the surrounding group. Was Ozaki trying to flatter his way out of proper training? Surely this represented more spiritual weakness on his part. The solution was to have Ozaki spend the night standing at attention outside the mountain in the mountainous subzero temperatures. After some hours of this, Ozaki, shaking in injured, asked to be allowed to lay down. This was the last draw did his

weakness no no bounds. He was brought back into the warmth of the lodge, only to face another intense beating. His comrades then karried Osaki's broken body back outside, where he was tied to a post that, in lieu of ideological metal, would keep him standing. He hung there for hours and hours as his comrades ignored his increasingly weak christ for help. Occasionally members were sent out to beat him again. By next morning, he was dead and they

didn't get along after that. It didn't help. This did not bring them together as an unlikely family it's also just such textbook cult ship, right that you're like, oh, we're we're gonna make people do horrible things to the only other people they are close to in the world. Yeah, to demonstrate their allegiance to what I have told them

is our ideological commitment. And Mori spends this pretty much immediately and tells everybody that Ozaki had chosen to die because he'd like seen that he was fundamentally flawed and bring the revolution down because of his weakness. So he had to kill himself in order to suicide for he knew they beat him to death for you know. Yeah, so they decided to like celebrate this guy's death because he'd made the movement stronger. Did they have a little party?

A little party? Yeah, So the self criticism sessions continue, um, and self criticism is a strong I'm just gonna put out there that like some people calling outside consultants and kind of look like they really are taking a deep die down this one hole. They could have done a ropes. Course, they could have They did strangle some of them. They could have played paintball to make a really horrible story a little bit shorter. They this keeps happening every night

to someone new. Um, they just keep murdering each other for ideological Uh, three left the most pure. Well, by the time it's over, fourteen of the twenty nine people who went out there had been killed. I thought, yeah, yeah, and the remaining fifteen get along really well. They do get into a gunfight with the cops. I mean, you haven't lead with that, probably would have formed trauma bonds. Yeah,

so they purged like half of themselves. You know, everyone will get along really well if you just kill everyone that doesn't agree with you. All right, I've always said that, And that's why Stalinist Russia I had no backstabbing at all. Zero Prussia, the place where everyone got along. Yep, that's what they call it. Um. So that's the podcast episode. Uh being a Lane. You want to tell people where

they can find you. Um, yeah, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram and medium at svist, and you can find me in the mountains twenty eight of my closest friends, where we all try to make each other into better, better people, better people not going on that camp and get a pile of rocks for self improvement purposes. A post and a post for self improvement. I wanted to teach you that day. Yeah, you know, mom. We'll

see where that's the episode go um oh yeah. You can find us online and behind the bastards dot com, but we'll have all the sources for this episode. You can buy one of our FDA approved to cure all diseases or prevent all diseases. I forget which illegal claim we're making on the masks that we sell. Um, you buy