Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Golden Age of Terrorism

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Robert talks to two of his friends, Bea and Elaine about the Golden Age of Terrorism which mostly included people getting free airplanes in exchange for threatening strangers with guns. FOOTNOTES: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/13/carlos-the-jackal-tells-french-court-he-is-a-professional-revolutionary  https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2018/10/20/carlos-the-jackal-would-use-genocide-to-run-for-president/  https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjd-vK1_rfrAhXKvZ4KHRAhCHc4ChAWMAN6BAgDEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwikileaks.org%2Fgifiles%2Fattach%2F33%2F33292_Carlos%2520the%2520Jackal.docx&usg=AOvVaw0VcCFqAXqsLrBYo6qGD-yJ  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/08/pictures-reveal-carlos-the-jackal-clandestine-life-prague-abu-daoud  https://www.timesofisrael.com/revealed-munich-olympic-terror-masterminds-drunken-life-in-prague/  https://www.npa.go.jp/archive/keibi/syouten/syouten271/english/0301.html  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/17/national/revealed-n-korea-hideout-of-red-army-faction-fugitives/#.X0XpkTVlAvg  https://apjjf.org/-Takazawa-K--ji--Patricia-G--Steinhoff/5130/article.pdf  https://unseenjapan.com/red-army-faction/  https://www.amazon.com/Jackal-Complete-Legendary-Terrorist-Carlos/dp/1611450268#:~:text=Jackal%20is%20the%20definitive%20biography,ends%20during%20the%20cold%20war. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/love-and-terror-in-the-golden-age-of-hijacking/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We talk about bad people and I don't do a very good job of introducing the show that is the entirety of my job to do and also to introduce. I apologize for that. Today we have a little bit of a special episode for you all. We're talking about the golden age of terrorism, and I'll explain what that is in a minute.

And my guests are a couple of friends and colleagues of mine from the real world and the mean streets of Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show. Two of the people I get repeatedly tear gassed and granaded and threatened with firearms sometimes with. Be in a line. Hello. Hi. How are y'all doing tonight? I'm doing okay.

I'm not getting threatened with grenades or tear gas. Yeah, that's always a fun thing to do, especially since probably some of our friends will get threatened with grenades into your gas tonight. More likely than not. Yeah, that's most most nights. So you want to you want to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself since you're not you're not coming into this as as big time stand up comedians like most of our guests. Or is local youths like garrison. Yeah. Um, yeah, so my name's be and I'm half of 45th absurdist.

We're a journalist collective that started as a shit 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 pepper balls since then. Yeah, an amount that seems almost impossible. And sort of silly when you try to take stock of it. I have now been tear gas with you more times than I can count.

Yes. Yes. That is very accurate, but certainly I can confirm north of 100 times. 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 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 and AK-47s.

Yes, to everything, but the AK-47. So this is a fascinating period because what we're talking about the golden age of terrorism is like the 60s up through the late 70s. And some people would say into the 80s, one of the things that's fascinating about it is that modern body armor didn't really exist. Like you had some, you know, some flak vests and stuff. You had some stuff that could 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 that 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 mils. I'm familiar with this. And Tokarevs. Yeah. All of the all of the 80s action movies have prepared me. Yes. And every good James Bond.

And every good, that's why I'm excited to talk about today. Cause like terrorism, real bummer these days, right? Like it's mostly you're going to kill a lot of innocent people. You're going to 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 like 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 your kind of white, like whatever, whatever kind of terrorist you are. It's a bleak ass kind of terrorist.

Whereas in the 60s and 70s, there were some fun terrorists. Like, I mean, they, they killed a lot of people. Wow. But did any of them want to drown Silicon Valley to make France a new hub of technology? Not. No. But James Bond movie is that that would have been, that would have been fun. The good ones.

There is, there is, there is a pretty good attack on OPEC though. Well. Yeah. So it was like you, you got in this period of time, number one, the world wasn't quite so bleak. So terrorism was like a lot more fun. And it's a lot cooler. Everybody's like walking around in 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. And the main thing people do isn't just suicide bomb others too and fire randomly into businesses full of people. Yeah. We're going to talk a lot about plane hijackings to 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 80s episodes make jokes and there's like the movie airplane. There's a joke of it. We'll talk about all that in a second. So we're going to talk about the golden age of terrorism and that's mostly going to be part one. We're mostly going to talk about skyjackings and the Japanese Red Army, which is a fun group. And then part two is going to be all Carlos the Jackal, who used to be the most wanted terrorist in the world and is a neat guy. I mean, a monster. Is he one of the pelican briefs?

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 was pretty inspired. But anyway, yeah, Carlos the Jackal, who, as you can tell by his incredible nickname, one of the coolest terrorists to learn about ever. His body's bones. I mean, probably bones and sucks out the marrow somewhere. 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. Okay, well, this is lots of things will 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. I don't 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 if you're aware of that. I've seen a very specific movie from the 70s that implies that.

Right. Oh, yep. Yeah. I don't remember. Opening in Misty Beethoven. Opening in Misty Beethoven. I've never heard of that movie. 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. Nobody gets to enjoy an air. It used to be fun. Hijacking airplanes used to be a joyful affair. And they ruined it. That's really the crime. No, okay, probably shouldn't.

So, the first recorded skyjacking occurred on February 21, 1931 in Arequipa, Peru, when a group of... They had passenger planes? Yeah, 1931. They were really like one of the crazy things when you study aviation. It was like, how fucking quick? It was like, well, now we're just flying these things all over the damn place. Yeah. I don't think it was a good passenger plane.

And now we're skyjacking. Skyjacking. Skyjacking. Very hijacking. The first one, yeah, Arequipa, Peru, when a group of rebel soldiers accosted two American pilots and tried to force them at gunpoint to drop propaganda leaflets over Lima. So, the pilot said no. And so, the rebels occupied their plane and kind of sat around for two weeks, basically. No one was good at it yet, right?

It wasn't flying. No. They were just kind of sitting there on the tarmac being like, drop these pamphlets, fly us around. And the pilots were like, no. And they were like, okay. Yes. Yeah, they weren't dicks. Like they weren't going to murder them, but they really.

She was like less of a skyjacking and more of a sit-in. Yeah. It was an attempted skyjacking. No one was good at it yet. But yeah, that was the first attempt at a skyjacking anywhere in the world that is on record as far as I can as far as I can find. 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 1931.

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 somewhere in Peru? You know how it is when you kind of like get your heart set on something. I do. Yeah. And you're already there with a gun pointed at the pilot. Sure. And you're on the tarmac and there's like military surrounding you at the airport or something.

It's 1930. Oh, it's 1930. Never mind. Yeah. I don't know how much attention it drew. But yeah, that's the first one. Now, the first U.S. No.

Someone would have to know about it. And it's the 30s. Yeah. The first U.S. skyjacker was a failed Carney named Ernest Pletch. And in 1939, he shot his flight instructor in the back of the head during a training flight while in midair and very nearly crashed because he shot his instructor in the head. Who was flying at the time. Who was flying at the time. That was a bad call.

Also, what a career trajectory. Yes, failed Carney to skyjacker, to first American skyjacker. I'm no good at operating this Ferris wheel. Perhaps I'll try stealing an 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 Pletch, yeah, shoots his flight instructor, manages to like, I think throw his corpse out of the plane and like, take control.

And then he kind of goes on the run with this stolen plane. But almost immediately before he can really get into being on the run. He stops for hamburgers. I'm sorry. What? He stops for hamburgers. Like he lands the plane. He lands the plane.

At a drive-in? 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 bad. And sorry, where was this?

Let's see. I forget exactly where Pletch was when he, but some like, some were in the middle of fucking America, right? So, you know, the sheriff was like, hey, there's a plane and that guy's covered in blood. Capersaw. 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. Bad ass.

The coolest crime you can get charged with, right? Like if I had to go commit federal crimes that were going to put me in prison, I would want it to be air piracy. Because then people are 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 on one cheek. Oh yeah.

Yeah. You got to 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 in such a way that I have exactly one rake-ish scar on my right cheek. That way, 20 years from now, when Nicholas 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 into Alcatra, whatever. Wait. That's just my pitch for a movie about Nicholas Cage. Isn't that the rock?

It's like the rock, but in the air the whole time. Oh, yeah. It's a sky prison. It's a sky prison. All the ground prisons are full, so they have sky prisons. Oh, so it's like escape from you anyway. Yeah. So, yeah, so the Pledge case invents a lot of the early legal code for sky crime, air piracy.

But by the time the federal government started to oversee aviation in 1958, hijacking a plane, it still was not technically a crime. Nobody really thought they'd need to put that in the locker. So as long as you're not on the ground or the water, it's fine. It was fine. There were no laws in the sky in 1958. What a 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 even think for a second about airport security? There was no reason. There was like an aggressive disregard for wanting to take any precautions. You're saying it's like when we drive past the National Guard car lot. Yeah. They just assume no one can 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 Tulio Ortiz is the first guy to hijack a plane successfully. 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. Tinsons were high between the United States and Cuba. And Castro basically was like, oh, shit, like this is a great opportunity to say fuck you to the United States and not actually risk anything.

So he offers Ortiz political sanctuary. Not super romantic, though, because he's locked in the bathroom threatening the plane. What if no one had seen the note? Yeah, you wonder like a number of things about this. Okay, and my only other question is that he just want to lift to Cuba or was he taking the plane there for some like reason? No, he just wanted to lift to Cuba. He just wanted to go to Cuba. There's easier ways to do.

Kind of weren't at that point. Really? Yeah, I mean the Bay of Pigs had just happened. But you go to another country and like just reroute a little bit. I don't know if it was that easy in that time. You could lock yourself in a bathroom and slip the bomb note under the door. Whatever the reasoning, Ortiz decides this is the way he's going to Cuba and he doesn't like it there. He actually tries to leave and then gets put in prison in Cuba.

It takes him like 15 years to get back to the United States. So he regrets his decision very quickly. Sometimes you make your bed and then you lie in it. Yeah, then you get to live in Cuba, which I don't know, right now, maybe not the worst bed in the world. So yeah, so Ortiz, 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. But a lot of people suddenly realize once he's done it like, it's that easy? All you got to do is slip a note under a door.

Maybe I want to go to Cuba. So three more US planes were hijacked and taken to Cuba over the course of 1961. And afterwards it becomes a meme. In the next like eight years, 177 skyjackings were committed worldwide. And more than 70% of them involved in an attempt to divert a plane to Cuba. So Cuba is the place to go. Cuba is the fucking place to go if you're jacking a plane. If you're an airline or government, maybe just let people fly to Cuba.

Yeah, that might have been an option. 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 70s. It was real cheap to fly anyway. You could do everything. It was the golden age. And you could smoke on airplanes.

Everybody's smoking. Like 100% of the people involved in all of these hijackings are smoking the entire time. That is something we have to keep in mind. So yeah, Cuba becomes like the motherfucking place to go if you're hijacking a plane and the reason to hijack a plane. Cuba's got like a pretty decent airport setup, right? Because otherwise I could see this being a problem. I haven't ever heard that it was a problem. I think they, I don't know much about the Cuba, Cuban airport.

I'm just imagining being an 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 back? We're getting to that. So the reasons why people would hijack, skyjack planes and take them to Cuba were varied.

Everybody had like a different purpose behind it. But Fidel Castro kind of helped 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 you steal a plane, you can land in Cuba and live here was like essentially what he told everybody. And there were a lot of ways in which he benefited from the situation. For one thing, it was good propaganda, all these like people leaving the deck in West like traveled to this socialist paradise of Cuba. 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 $7,500 per plane. So every time a plane got skyjacked, they got a pile of cash to return it.

Yeah. So that's, that's, they're a little industry develops. I mean, you build your own commercial airline one plane at a time. But I guess that works. And just to crunch the numbers here for a second, you said so there was. About 120 or so. Well, no, about like 130 years, something like that. Trips to Cuba out of that.

Yeah. Okay. That's not bad money. That adds up. That adds up. Yeah. I do it for a living. So, yeah.

Now, a number of people, there were a lot of reasons people skyjacked planes for Cuba, including like some folks were just kind of mentally ill and decided to do it. 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 successfully 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 the 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 were things of the past. I had come to Cuba to feel freedom at least once. There are a number of non-white people who skyjacked planes to Cuba because they're just kind of like, fuck this bullshit in the United States in the 70s, 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 by one way or another. Better place than jail. That's what people say. Yeah. So, the reality of the situation, I don't know, it differed for everybody, but it was less rosy than a lot of skyjackers had anticipated. 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 things they do. So, thanks for the plane, we get $75,000 out of it. $7,500.

Oh, sorry. Oh, right. I forgot it was the 70s. The 7,500 was a plane. It's still at some point $200,000 or something. It's a lot. But now that you brought us this plane, you're also the kind of person who steals planes by pointing guns and bombs at them. We don't really trust you is what we're saying.

We're the kind of person who's not one of our highly trained doctors in our very good medical system. So according to Wired, quote, Castro had little but disdained for the hijackers themselves whom he considered undesirable, malcontents after lying landing at Jose Martí, which I guess is the airport hijackers were whisked away to an imposing Spanish citadel that served as the headquarters of G2 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 Casa de Trancitos, the hijacker's house, a decrepit dormitory in Southern Havana, where each American was allocated 16 square feet of living space. The two-story building eventually held as many as 60 hijackers who were forced to subsist on monthly stipends of 40 pesos each. Skijackers who rubbed their G2 interrogators the wrong way, meanwhile, were dispatched to squalid sugar harvesting camps where conditions were rarely better than nightmarish. These tropical gulags inmates were punished with machete blows, political agitators were publicly executed, and captured escapees were dragged across razor sharp stalks 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, kind of a mixed bag. Bummer. He stole a whole plane just for that? Because 16 feet of living space, that's two feet by eight feet, that's like a cot. Talking about career trajectories of hijackers, you really gotta have an end goal in mind, but hijacking itself cannot be the end goal. Better to be the broker who's arranging the transfer of the planes back to their airlines. That's a good gig.

That's a good gig. A 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 value. Yeah. Yeah, you know, all governments are kind of the same when you get to it. On the other hand, depending on where you lived before, at least you're warm now. Yeah, you're warm now. Better beaches.

You assume it works out for some of them, right? Like there's gotta be some people that get in good with the G2 folks, and I don't know. I assume it worked out for some people, but 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 hijacking. One of the Jackers was a 34-year-old Cuban exile who simply couldn't live any longer without the taste of his mother's free holies. He'd apparently left as a kid. Yeah, and wanted his mom's soup, which is, I hope he got a lot more soup. He missed his mom.

He missed his mom. So he had to steal a plane. So he had to steal a plane. You really missed your mom. That was a decision you could make because there were essentially no risks. It was not dangerous to hijack a plane at a creative time. 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, and of course there were non-Cuba-related jackings. A 28-year-old trust fund kid hijacked a Delta Airlines flight while dressed as a cowboy. He received $50,000 and parachuted out. He horribly injured himself upon landing and was immediately caught. Yeah. Way to go, trust fund kid. Yeah.

Just gone to Cuba, buddy. Skyjackings represented a problem for the airline industry, but not really a big one. Most skyjackings would cost the airline between $20,000 and $30,000. And since passengers were basically never harmed, there wasn't really a lot of desire among the people buying flights for it to be stopped. It wasn't a horrible issue for most people. It's just the cost of doing this. They got a detour to Cuba. Yeah, that was the thing.

Skyjackings meant some excitement for everybody on the plane. You might get a free night in Havana or something. I assume it wasn't great for everybody, but 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. Basically, airlines were like, people will never submit to this. Unfortunately, we never did. Nobody ever changed their mind about that.

One by one, all of the airlines looked at this problem of hijackings every year, many, many of them. And we're like, I guess we'll just kind of write it out. Sure. Fuck it. I mean, what's the worst outcome you can imagine from people hijacking planes? It's fine. No one's going to fly them into buildings. 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.

These hijackings were an international embarrassment, and they also helped fund because a lot of times people would like the Jackers would ransom 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 and a real issue for the US government. And in 1968, a Senate hearing was held on the matter. Irving Rip, who represented the FAA, 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.

No. And certainly wouldn't search every single passenger before they boarded a plane. That would be madness. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's actually the quote I'm about to. Oh, yes. Quote from Wired. Senator George smathers of Florida countered Rip's gloom by raising the possibility of using metal detectors or X-ray machines to screen all passengers.

Preposterous. 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 check-in gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns or other weapons just prior to implaning, smathers said. But Rip dismissed the senator's suggestion as 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 screening.

No one is going to fly if someone asks you if you have guns before you get on a plane. If you take a single solitary action to make sure people aren't carrying whatever gun they want onto a plane, people will not fly. It will ruin the industry. And I think history has borne the same. I won't get on a plane without my scorpion machine pistol. Occasionally, I think about how people believe in this idea of the forward progress march of history. And this is a solid indication that we have headed dead back. No, because they were right in the 70s by God.

About everything. About absolutely everything. Especially cigarettes. And cocaine, which is not addictive by here. It's not addictive. Mix as well with cigarettes in a way that, again, absolutely not addictive. And when you're high on coke and smoking, you know it feels really good. High jacking a plane. 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 you have a pony tail. Yeah. A leather vest like you wouldn't believe. Such a leather vest. I want a gold medallion that I could use as a coaster. Medallions where you keep the extra bullets too. It's like a pez thing.

So two weeks after the Senate inquiry, a forklift operator named Oren Richards hijacked a Delta Airlines flight. Upgrade from a forklift. Yep. Upgrade from a forklift. He springs his trap over West Virginia pulling 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 wound it up wound up being a sitting senator from Mississippi. 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 should probably had this motherfucker off at the pass. 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, if we just say any American can go to Cuba for free once.

The forward march of history is a lie because there was a point where we all could have just taken a free trip to Cuba. Castro actually said no to that. He's like, I don't want the U.S. just offloading all their fucking shitty people. I've never had any reason to critique anything for that Castro has done, but right now. This all changed. This is the first thing that's problematic that I'm aware of. I mean, okay, stripping people's flesh off by dragging them over sugarcane. That was not great either.

It wasn't a little bit of that. It was a little bit of that. If you've got sugarcane, you're going to strip people's flesh and drag it over it. And if you've got to strip off people's flesh, you might as well use sugarcane, right? Exactly. I've always said that. Yeah. Yeah.

It's basically the same thing that those fancy salons do when they use the sugar to make the thing for depiliating hair. Sure. But it's your musculature 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 today. So, yeah, Castro is like, no, I'm not going to just take all of the Americans who want to go to Q think they might like Cuba. There's an alternate timeline where Cuba becomes the absolute like Cuba becomes Silicon Valley because they went with that plan. I could have been pretty sweet, actually.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, so he refuses to accept them. So the FAA forms a special anti-jacking task force instead. And they're, I don't understand why you're laughing. And they are deeply, deeply confused about what their job is from the get go. So they, 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, arming stewardesses with tranquilizer darts, making passengers wear boxing gloves so that they couldn't grip guns. Yes. 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 sounds just fun and impeachable as a strategy. I personally think boxing gloves would be fantastic. That would be very funny.

Because I would love to see people trying to defeat their airplanes. 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 and the lineup waiting for it. So not all of the suggestions were immediately rejected by the government. The most popular one among the FAA 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 to Ghana. And then right next to where they stage the moon landing. Exactly. But yeah, which of course isn't they put in Florida. That's where you put your fake moon. They're such similar. Anyway, yeah, so the FAA 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 B to completely comply with skyjackers in all ways. They actually banned employees from taking any action whatsoever to stop a skyjacker. It's like if you work in a retail store, the policy about shoplifting. Yes. And this actually winds up having an impact on why 9-11 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 2001, oh, they're going to ransom us or take us somewhere. They're going to fly us somewhere like they want to get money or something.

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. By 2001, 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 as it is. Like you just would carry a gun onto a plane. So I know some have been a lot and ruined it for everybody.

He really did. Nope. That's his want. No. Okay. Only mistake. Nope. So the airlines, yeah, again, decide like everybody's just got to do whatever the hijackers say.

So all plane cockpits in the United States were for a period of time equipped with charts of the Caribbean Sea, regardless of the flight's 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. Just accessorize 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 of like, yeah, rum like Cuba. Well, probably not Cuba Libre's because those won't go over well once you're in Cuba.

No. Yeah. Anyway. 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 1969. Yeah.

11 US flights were commandeered in the first six weeks of the year alone. Everyone was really excited by the number. Yeah, they really were. They wanted to make it count. One plane was taken by a released mental patient and his three-year-old son, which... Which one held the gun? I'm sure it's a less fun story than it is. I 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 most 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 80s where like, you know, he gets out of the middle institution and like his kid wants to like teach him a lesson about...

It would have had Arnold Schwarzenegger in the early 90s. I don't know. You could make a fun, feel good movie about it. Then he falls in love with the stewardess. Right. And then they go to Cuba. Yeah, yeah. Then they go to Cuba and help ignite a communist worldwide revolution like Tom Hanks has always wanted to do.

So, yeah, one plane in 1969 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 bugs. I think he did like a flamethrower thing, but I'm not really sure. And another was commandeered by a retired Green Beret whose plan was specifically to beat Castro to death with his fists. Oh.

That's new. So this was... Yeah. This was 1969. Yes. So this was before any of the Rambo movies would have given him that idea. Yes, yeah. Cool.

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. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, speaking of landing in Cuba, you know what Cuba loves? Rum. Cigars.

Yes. Yes. Not America. But broader than that, Cuba, if anyone knows anything about them, it's that they love products and services. Oh. Huge fans of corporations and advertisements. Several of those things that I've just listed are in fact products and services.

Products 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. Just very good hurricane response. It could be an ad for any of those things. So here we go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So in this period of time, there was exactly one reasonable person who worked in the entire US government. And he was a guy named John Daly. He was the FAA'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 try to analyze 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 give away the fact that someone was planning 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. So these behaviors weren't uniform, but Daly 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's repeatedly checking his gun. Better, better let him get on this plane. You say, that guy's repeatedly checking his gun. I'm going to ask him if he plans to hijack the plane.

But not prevent him from bringing the gun onto the plane. Well, they tried to. That would be communism. That would be communism. So it actually worked really well. 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 hijackers. And that's all it took.

That's really all it took. And now the episode's over. That was great. Thanks. End of terrorism forever. There were reports from airports around the country in this period of time for weeks after these plant, like after airports started doing this of like airport security, finding guns and knives and bombs stashed in the bushes outside.

Oh shit, guys. They're going to search for these realized and dumped it outside. We got to hide it in the bushes. They're never going to let us take this to Cuba. Yeah. By 1970, the skyjacking epidemic was mostly over. So it really worked. This is part of why like D.B.

Cooper, that guy in 71, who I think part of why it was so noteworthy is that like they really gotten a handle on hijacking for the most part. And then he managed, he does it. But this like it turns out like a lot of people were just hijacking planes because there was literally no barrier to hijacking planes. I got to 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 would hijack a plane.

I think a lot of people would in Minecraft hijack a plane, which is not a thing that anyone in the real world would want to do. Yeah. So yeah. By 1970, they'd kind of gotten a handle on the jackings in the sky. Now, up to this point, I mostly focused 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 kind of international solidarity with a lot of like Palestinian liberation movement. So there were 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 was a big deal. It happened in the US, but also like all around the world. And it was, you know, a thing that other groups would do to kind of fund their activities or to make political points.

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. Okay. 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. There's a lot of fun.

There's a lot of fun stories and you're doing a terrorism. It's really just laughs all the way down. But this is all the way down. Yeah, like that falling man on nine. Okay. So to tell this story, we have to talk a bit about Japan in the 1960s. Japan was just 15 years out of World War Two at the start of the decade, and thus only 15 years out of like literally centuries of rule by emperors and shogun.

Like they didn't have a lot of experience with democracy. It had not been an open society. Right. And, you know, then there's a bunch of nukes going off and Douglas MacArthur is in charge for like five years. Nothing could go wrong with that at all. 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. 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. Hard right.

He frees all of Japan's imprisoned left wing radicals, including communists. 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 a party in the country and very different from like other communist parties in that part of the world at the time. And there's some there's some very famous authors from from the post war Japanese period. Oh, I know is one of them who yeah, it's like hard line anti capitalist communists and also really excited about the post war Constitution. Yeah, yeah, it's a good there's a lot of cool stuff in it.

Yeah, exactly. And it's one of the reasons MacArthur is such an interesting dude to like look at his because he's a big impact on the Constitution. He's a monster also. 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 150,000 members by 1950, just five years.

Another major major change to 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 of why he left rises. He's like, this will flush out the nationalists.

He hates communists, but he's but he hates the guys. He was just fighting. Yeah. And anti fascism, anti totalitarian first kind of he was pretty. It 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 of they're not going to be able to shut up about it. Exactly.

Yeah. That's more the reason like MacArthur's not doing this because he's a nice dude. No. And there's there's certainly things to bear that out because you have like Mishima and his Shield Society and there's there's some really wild right wing uprisings that happen in post or Japan. People who are just I rate about the idea that like a switch. Yeah.

The emperor can't order everyone to die anymore and that is unacceptable. It's the worst thing that's ever happened. So yeah, students self governing associations pop up at campuses across Japan and they functioned kind of like unions, giving kids a voice on their campus in 1948, a bunch of these associations formed up into a national league. They called themselves Zengikuren, which is short for all Japan League of Student 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 skittles. There's right. Yeah. There's Lenin and there's Trotsky Stalin. At this point, most of the Stalin young Stalin. Yeah. Those are all the kinds that I know.

And at this point, you know, 1948, even the people who are like Stalinists aren't really Stalinists by what we 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. He'd done a lot of it.

Did he still have a goldfish pond? Yeah, I think so. Okay. 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. Well, because the US military presence in Japan is enormous. It's massive. Yes. Absolutely enormous. They have a lot of fond memories of driving past like missile silos that are just like in the countryside. I have family who was stationed in Okinawa and my impression is that there's not much

to Okinawa other than military. Oh, no. Okinawa fucking rules. Like there's a bunch of cool shit on it. Well, I'm sorry. That's what I mean. But I imagine the whole shit is like. The bases are big.

Like it's big and it has a major impact on the local culture for sure. But there's a lot of cool shit going on in Okinawa. So, yeah. So they start protesting US bases on Japanese soil. And this is where Douglas MacArthur stops being on board. He wasn't down. Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah.

Why not? But won't the fascists be upset that? Oh, they won't be upset about that, will they? No. No, that's when MacArthur stops being okay with the students speaking their minds. So in 1949, he backs a bill that like 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 students in Japan who are again able to protest and organize for the first time. And more than 200,000 of them take to the streets and shut down universities across the country. It was so shocking that the government was forced to backpedal and scrap the bill. But more attempts followed. In 1952, the government tried to pass an anti-subversives bill that was basically Japanese style McCarthyism. 20,000 students attempted to storm the Royal Palace hurling stones at lines of armored riot police who eventually beat them back with such violence that two students died in the

fighting. Yeah, it was a heck of a riot. 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. Which doesn't sound like anything that's ever happened since. Ever come to that conclusion.

Yeah, based on police violence. Yeah, certainly not. Only happened this one time in this one country. Right. Yeah, I'm going to 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 emblazoned with the names of their organizations, carried long fighting poles and threw 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 sprayed fire hoses of water laced with tear gas at the students. At the peak of the protest cycle in 1968-69, Japanese authorities suddenly cracked down with mass arrests and prolonged incarcerations of thousands of students. This turned the tide 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 people don't like do shit like this anymore to a large extent.

Because they arrested everybody. Yeah, because they arrested and beat and yeah. Right. The color coded crash helmets sounded real cool though. That does sound cool. And the long sticks. Long sticks. And the hurling.

OK, so by the early 1970s, the Zengoku-ren, which are again these like student self-governing organizations, it started turning away from the Japanese Communist Party and mass, largely so 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. It sounds like a summary of the entire 70s after 1968. Yep, yep. So it's a thing that keeps happening. So, 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. I was about to say yourself.

Is this specific to Japan or is this just... This could be literally any movement that's ever happened in America. And also any movement that's ever happened in the 1970s after 1968 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 nonviolent resistance was no longer practical. Japanese riot police were too good at their jobs and less committed members of the left were no longer trustworthy allies. The communist chunks of the left began to split between those who wanted to continue the old methods of protest and propaganda

and those who wanted to actually wage global war against capitalism. And 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 20th century is anytime that something's called the Red Army, everything is good from there on out. Red Army Faction, all good, wonderful, Red Guards, those are all good, never a problem. So, Japanese Red Army, everything is coming up. The Soviet Red Army famously know war crimes committed. That's why the Polish people were so happy with it.

Yes, so I'm going to quote now from a fascinating write-up in Unseen Japan that really goes into these guys. They do actually a great multi-part essay on the whole history of the Japanese Red Army. That's very cool. The leader and ideological master of the newly minted Red Army Faction was one Shiyomi Takaya, an avowed Trotskyite for whom a violent international revolution was the goal. In Shiyomi's eyes, any attempt at coexistence with the imperialist West, as was then being professed by Soviet Premier Khrushchev following his shocking repudiation of Stalinism, were a corruption of true Marxism. World Revolution required unflinching action. Imperialism needed to be purged from the world, and 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 internecine battles 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 while escaping being held hostage at the League headquarters at Nihon University. Death had become a part of the Red Army mythos from its very first days. So they're taking hostages from their own side. In their own headquarters. How can you go and fight the capitalists if you cannot even properly purge your own ranks? Exactly.

If you're going to clean the house, you've got to clean your closet first. Oh, and this is a story with a real purgey ending. Y'all are going to enjoy this. So the Red Army differed from many of its fellow lefties by stating openly their desire to commit violent actions against the state. Their propaganda heavily cited Leon 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 all of these guys throughout history who keep being like, so we're going to 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, it works that way. As opposed for like, hey, guys, what if we don't wear a 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 thing people hate, it's doing things. They really do.

They don't like it. And this was before Netflix. Yeah, yeah, this is before. Yeah, so you had a chance, but 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. This created a lot of buzz around the new organization. Where do you publicize that? By the way, is that like pamphlets and shit? Okay, I'm just wondering if that's like the back page of the newspaper and like the help wanted ads.

Revolution wanted. Yeah. We're going to kill 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 1969 featured a massive display of state authority. In addition to the ring of uniformed police surrounding the building, plain clothes police photographed the 300 people who entered and more police stood around the back of the hall watching on stage. I'm going to make you maybe a little bit less excited about openly calling for violent insurrection against. They loved this shit.

They loved this shit. They all made speeches wearing like ski masks and stuff. So they couldn't be identified. Oh, you're right. And they didn't get arrested that day because it wasn't illegal to say that stuff. But everyone knew they were saying we're going to break the law very soon. And so yeah, and they're all masked up and it's pretty good, pretty good propaganda too. 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 patience for such things. They moved almost immediately to hijacking vehicles, bombing police stations and robbing banks. Once they had a few months of this under their belt, the leadership coders 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 weathermen and a Black Panther rally in Chicago, which is... I mean... Yeah, it's not necessarily a bad idea. I think that news cycle, you're going to dominate, you're going to dominate in the news cycle.

Yeah, maybe. It said 1968. It was a very busy year. It was a year to try that sort of thing. You got to give them that. So I'm going to quote from Patricia Steinhoff again. Sekigun, which is like the Red Army faction's 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 university campuses where local Sekigun chapters were stockpiling poles and iron pipes for street fighting and glass bottles for making Molotov cocktails.

The Osaka and Kyoto raids involved over 2,000 riot police and resulted in nearly 100 arrests and 64 indictments. These raids contributed directly to a huge increase in student weaponry confiscated by police in the second half of 1969. In the end, the uprisings turned out to be relatively minor skirmishes in which Sekigun members ran around the streets throwing fire bombs at police stations. One area of Sekigun innovation, weaponry, was handled secretly from the beginning. Sekigun threatened publicly to use more powerful weapons, but the specific details were restricted to those directly involved. A small Sekigun 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 piece 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 Sekigun members were taught the new technology and manufactured the bombs as a cottage industry. They get really going.

I like that there's a specific brand of cigarettes where they're like, this is the grenade brand. They call them peace bombs. Yeah, they did. 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. It's like what old people in America do when they go to gamble in Vegas, like pachinko's that, but country-wide. It's just like a, I don't know how to describe it, if you've never seen people play pachinko. Yeah, it's kind of like bingo. It's kind of like bingo and they use it to make grenades, which is very fun. That's cute. Whatever else you can say about the Japanese Red Army, they didn't lack Chutzpah. Shiyomi, 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 meeting with Richard Nixon and finalizing the return of Okinawa to Japan. This action was disguised as a mass training event in the mountains where members would learn to use explosive-stirring assaults.

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 bombs. That's our cover story. Have you noted an error in their thinking? A tactical shortcoming perhaps? 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. That way you'll be out of the way during the time. And this was in 1969? I can't imagine that less than 30 years out from World War II, 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 riot police to bust their explosives training drill in the mountains. Why? And 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. And I'm going to continue quoting from that right up in Unseen Japan here. Ironically, the discovered materials reveal that the Red Army faction had functioned on a hierarchical structure that was anything but revolutionary. Those without a college education or those who were in vocational school or high school were the grunts of the organization. This is such typical business firm company man bullshit.

I don't know, you went to a state school but for violent communist insurrection. And you can tell that the people who went to those good schools were the ones capable of making the really important good decisions like to disguise kidnapping the prime minister as an illegal bomb building party. Look, when I went to my elite university, we did an entire class in how the prime minister doesn't care if you say you're going to make bombs for a massive insurrection. Yep. Now you did go to Brown. I mean, I'm just going to 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. I get to be a grunt 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'm equally sure that I have been so broken by higher education that I don't know which conversations you're talking about. Good country system. 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 successful to wash away the tarnish of 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 disappear into these networks of safe houses. 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 watch on the police, you know, whenever the law caught on to one of their properties and they would like, they came famous for like right as the police were about to raid them, they would like close out their lease and leave and there would just be the spotless apartment behind. Oh, that's the power move too. If you've seen The Departed, that's the little booties on your shoes at the end of just nailing it.

Yeah, we're so ready for you that we cleaned. So yeah, the switch in tactics actually enraged most of the imprisoned founders of the group, which saw theft that harmed normal working people as counter-revolutionary. I thought you said it was bank robbery. Yeah, but I don't know if their banks were like, I don't know anything about Japanese bank. Maybe they don't have the FDIC. This is the issue that people had, that like some of the imprisoned founders had with them. Maybe the imprisoned founders should have advocated for the FDIC 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 had the money to buy samurai swords and pipe bombs and plane tickets for nine men on a March 30th, 1970 flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka. I realize it's Japan, but you did just say matter of survival and then move straight to samurai swords and pipe bombs. Yeah. Which having taught... The necessities. Having taught something about survival over the course of my life. I understand that, yeah, you're going out in the woods, first thing you need, samurai swords and pipe bombs. Yeah, that's how you, how else are you going to start a fire without pipe bombs?

And are you going to hunt that rabbit without a samurai sword? I thought you were going to hunt it with a pipe bomb. You can hunt anything with whatever. That's the beauty of hunting. So yeah, they buy tickets for this flight to Fukuoka and as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude, the members of the Red Army stood up and grabbed the weird tube-like pieces of luggage they'd all stowed under their seats and they pull out samurai swords and bombs. They were art students and it was just funny. We should really start searching things at least one time one of these days.

It's not a poster. Under no circumstances should we search things because that way lies totalitarianism. People will get angry. Unlike these nice young men with all their tubes. Oh, let me help you with your art supplies, sir. So they pull out samurai swords and bombs and their leader 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 this is still 1969? Yeah, 1970. Is we're going to North Korea as bad a thing to hear in 1970 as it is in say 2020? It's not a great thing to hear. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's not a great thing to hear. Not as bad for sure. Right. I think the mass starvation stuff hadn't really hit as bad.

Because Kim number one is still around at that point. Yeah, this is actually kind of like what a lot of North Koreans would call like a golden age sort of period. Like they had many tractors. Are any of these people from Japan part of the Korean diaspora that was in Japan at that time? Not that I'm aware of, no. But I, you know, maybe. But I think these are all like specifically kind of like Japanese middle class and upper middle class kids. So the 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. Oh, 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 shitload of people in the tarmac there to meet them. So there's a bunch of tense conversations and after like negotiations, they released 23 people from the plane, women, children and the elderly, and then the flight takes off again.

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 U.S. is like, no, we can't. Japan doesn't like an hour. Yeah. Which says everything. We could have just had a fake Havana airport in Miami instead of the TSA.

We could have done that. Did anyone ever think of that? Honestly, we could have had the normal Miami airport look like the Havana airport. Yeah. No one would have known. Miami lives under Cuba law now. Like whether or not Cuba wants it and the U.S. is washing its hands of the matter. Well, let's see what happens.

So Japan builds an airport in an hour. Yeah. They build a fake airport very quickly. And yeah, it's pretty good. They're fake airport, but they forget to cover up the tail markings of a Northwest Airlines flight. Oh, yeah. So the hijackers. Was Northwest Airlines not flying to Pyongyang at that time?

No, 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 Pan Am, everything would have been fine. Yeah. Yeah. PWA. So yeah, the hijackers realized something is wrong because they're pretty smart cookies. And yeah, they refuse 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 Kim Il-sung 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 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. Any picture they bring out, if this isn't North Korea, isn't going to be big enough to believably be what North Koreans would say. Oh, you want the big picture? Oh. It's going to take like six days. Look down, you landed on it when you arrived.

It's actually a pretty smart thing to do because they're going to bring out like what normal people would think is a big picture maybe. And anyone who knows anything about North Korea is going to be like, that's not a big picture of Kim Il-sung. I can see it. That's the wallet size. And we're not flying right now. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually a pretty smart move.

So yeah, they realize what's happening and they refuse to let the passengers off. And yeah, so eventually the Japanese government is forced to compromise with them. And it's actually like kind of an impressive compromise. Like this is the one member of government maybe ever that I'm proud of. Japan's vice minister of transportation comes out and he's like, what if you let everybody else off and you just take me prisoner and you fly me to North Korea. Damn. And the hijackers are like, sure. And that's a good thing to do.

Wait, did you say a politician putting himself on the line instead of their constituents? Yeah, it happened once. This exact time is the one time it happened. I'm so impressed. Well, that in the Jonestown congressman. Yeah. Yeah. You also said this is the guy who's in charge of transportation.

The vice minister for transportation. Right. So he's also like, this is my job. This is my duty. Yeah. I am in charge of this thing. Yeah. And better.

Yeah. And yeah. And to their credit, the Red Army guys are like, oh yeah, that works great. And so yeah, they all fly to North Korea. 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 oh, because that was why so many Japanese planes crashed that. Okay. I was at Harrison Ford. He's not a good pilot. No, he's terrible. He's one of the worst.

So yeah, the Red Army, they succeed. It's a big caper. It's big international news. They jack a plane and take it to North Korea. I do like calling it a caper. It is a good caper. Makes it sound real whimsical. Now, they're pretty much all miserable in North Korea.

So they're not like it there? The North Korean government didn't really want them. Because again, North Korea doesn't really trust people who hijack planes. Or are from not North Korea. Or are from North Korea. Or are from North Korea. 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 and 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 love to do this. So North Korea didn't really like the idea of giving these guys military training and they keep telling them maybe later. 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 Kimihiro, discussing their desire to be trained as soldiers and 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 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, achieve the uprising, victory and 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 it be best if you stopped shouting your slogan? So North Korea is like, okay guys. It's early. We get it.

It's early. But maybe not. And they're also like the Red Army again, their whole thing is simultaneous worldwide revolution and North Korea's got their own thing. That's very different from that. Which is we have a sort of semi-deified leader and we seek to be completely autonomous. Yeah, that like Juche stuff. Have you considered leaving us the fuck alone? Yeah.

We would like. And instead they have all these guys, these fucking college students running in circles, shouting. So what they do is they forcibly indoctrinate them for years until they all agree that Juche is the way to go. Fortunately, I have never heard anything bad about the detention facilities in North Korea. And I'm sure it was fine for those guys. Two of them were trying killed trying to flee. Yeah. And a couple of they stopped their training running every day.

Yeah. Yeah. And a couple others made it out under the guise of continuing the revolutionary activity. The members remained in North Korea where they spent years faking a conversion to Juche philosophy. In 2004, they announced their desire to return to Japan. And yeah, it's it's a it's not a perfect story, but pretty good hijacking. I do like that you said spent years faking their conversion to Juche philosophy, which puts them in good company from what I understand with most people in North Korea. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, who doesn't fake their commitment to the ideas of Kim Il-sung? Could it possibly be products and services? It is products and services. Are you sure they don't? Yeah. We're entirely supported by the North Korean defense industry. I was going to say.

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But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Oh my gosh. How good was that? So, that was all very silly.

But it was pretty good hijacking, and it shows that there was some steel in the Japanese Red Army, right? Like, they did some silly shit, but like... They had color-coded grash on them since long six. Yeah, there were some hardcore motherfuckers in that group, and they didn't all go to that plane caper. In fact, there were thousands and thousands of kids left over in Japan. 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, and one fragmented. The ones who went to good colleges. 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. So, you know, for people who might not know as much about that history, we're not going to do it nearly the justice that it deserves. But, you know, Israel became a thing, and kind of the term that's used to refer to that is the Nakba, or catastrophe, by the Palestinian people. 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 700 to 800,000 people forced out. And that had happened about 20 years ago at this point, right? So it's really fresh, and the revolutionary movement dedicated to taking it back is also really fresh. Right.

There's no way to talk about this where I won't make a lot of people angry. So I think, I'm just going to say, I think what was done to Palestine is a real bummer. 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 shit. Yeah. But the Red Army hear about like, you know, 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 going to do this international revolution thing, here's a great place to do it.

Right. 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. We're the Japanese Red Army, and that's what we're going to do. And that's exactly what they do. I cannot see how this plan would go wrong at all. They're actually kind of great at it.

Okay. I was actually going to say this is, I don't know. Yeah. I'm curious to see how this plays out. Yeah. So they go and 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 pick up guns.

Well, good for starters, Palestine, before, like before the Narcba, Palestine is like the size of New Jersey. It's not giant. It's tiny. Yeah. They need, they're going to need people. Because there's not actually a ton of people there. Yeah. And the communists, you know, the Japanese Red Army guys are all like really smart and really dedicated.

And like, they, so they, they wind up in Lebanon and they get trained by the popular front. And then they go out and they start, they start doing shit in May of 1972. Three Japanese Red Army members open fire with automatic rifles at the Tel Aviv airport. They fire at random, killing 24 people and wounding 76. So not, yeah, some pretty serious terrorism right out that fucking gate. Yeah, it's also, could you imagine how many planes they could have stolen with those? They could have stolen, they could have stolen hundreds of planes with those three people. One for every boat.

It's not, not great tactics there. Maybe. I don't think that was their goal. I think it was more of a, what we, what kind of modern terrorism. Yeah. They're kind of like more into that sort of thing. This is terrible. Yeah.

The cause of terror instead of, 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 like 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 Brigade, or Red Army members in order to free ransom captives. And there's still some Red Army folks out there today, although they're all pretty old at this point and not super active. 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, pretty scary motherfuckers outside of Japan. Now, the folks who remained behind in Japan on the other hand. Are they less committed? No, they were actually more committed, but in a real dumb way. Was it like, do we get purgy?

Yeah, we're going to get purgy. This is like the dumbest story. Some of these people have subscribed to slightly different versions of communism than other versions of these people. I'm just, I 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 cadre anymore because those people have all gone on to like do better things than, you know.

And higher communist organizations do fine with leadership backings. Yeah. Like really just great. So all of the leadership to the Red Army in Japan kind of falls on one dumb kid named Mori Tsunio. He was not a great master of communist political theory, nor was he an inspiring leader, 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 we just kind of aged into it, like by seniority. Yeah.

Okay, cool. 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 things. We call it taking a Kennedy. Yeah. Yeah. I was speaking about the most recent Kennedy who just lost his election because that's clearly what he was trying to do.

Anyway, not the ones who got shot by Bernie Sanders. So, yeah. Wait, did both of them? Yeah. Oh, I thought it was, I thought it was just JFK. Sirhan Sirhan, like same number of letters as Bernie. Pull off his face from Tom Cruise style. Yeah, Bernie Sanders the whole time.

Yeah. So, yeah, the guys, yeah, we're going to tell the dirt. This is probably, honestly, probably the dumbest story in the history of terrorism. Okay. And that's hard because there's a lot of fun videos of like militant groups accidentally shooting each other and like, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, after all the smart people left, yeah, Mori Sunio winds up on top. I like that.

I know, I know it's a different name, but I love that his name is Mori. Yeah, it is kind of funny. So, the Red Army at this point is the most wanted militant organization in Japan. So, Mori 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 limited domestic focus causes a lot of grumbling within the ranks, as did Mori's undeserved dissent. There were vicious struggles within the organization, and those made some members leave and others flee to Lebanon. Mori knew the Red Army needed a new caper to keep their name in the news, so he hooked up with another radical group who'd recently pulled off a daring gunstore robbery,

which obviously made them valuable because it's not real easy to find guns in Japan. Right. So, these kids have guns. This also sounds like the start of a western, like one of the sad westerns. Kinda, yeah. You get pretty good Quentin Tarantino movie out of this story. So, yeah, they hook up with this group that's just robbed a gunstore because the Red Army's got like money and fame, and this group has guns. But both different organizations differed significantly in their political beliefs.

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 what happens when they merge. The leader of this organization that had stolen the guns, a woman named Nagata Haroku, becomes like co-leader with this guy Mori. So, Nagata, who was just about as competent as Mori, 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'd chosen to desert. And desert 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'd once been their best friends. Then they were buried in shallow graves outside of town. Now, when Mori hears about this power move, he gets jealous because he'd always been too much of a cow.

Jealous is not the word I expected. So, 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'm sorry I appreciate you as a comrade, but I don't think I want to be in your organization anymore. 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 plain door so that we don't have to hang out anymore. I bet you that's not the choice he made. So, well, no, Mori actually, he'd never had the guts to have deserters executed, but 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. Bad camp? Don't go to that camp.

Yeah, 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 of you already know. Like, you're not knowing any other context. 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. Yeah, I'm going to quote here from a write-up in 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 amongst Japanese new left groups, who called the process Sokatsu.

Operations once completed would become the subject of group discussion, where criticism of others and of oneself 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 group 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 1971, 29 people consisting of 19 men and 10 women made their way to the Sangaku base, lodged deep in mountainous rural Gunma Prefecture. For days, they lived and strategized and engaged in sessions. So, yeah, they start doing these big self-criticism sessions, isolated alone in the mountains, and things don't go well.

Members of 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. And then there's punishments when people are found out when enough of the group agrees that someone did something wrong. So, it starts with like forcing people to go days without eating, or sitting for long periods of time in like this really uncomfortable position, like a yoga position that hurts after a while, and Mori 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. So, not starting out in a healthy place. 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 that engaged in 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. Like, it'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 and reactionary group, and the group they teamed up with for no other reason than that they stole a fuck ton of guns. And we already know that somebody got strangled and buried in shallow graves. I think a group self-critique session that also involves arbitrarily designated punishment, you don't think that that's going to end well? I mean, no. I don't.

So, by, like, after 20 days of this, people still aren't getting along. Like, the two groups haven't come together well enough. They don't feel good about everything. Yeah, and so Mori and Nagata are like, we've got to be more brutal about our punishments. That's how you get people to get along. People are not, don't have the right amount of revolutionary fervor, right? So we have to punish them more. That's like when you get in a 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. Oh, see, there's the problem right there. Probably drinking a bit. I don't know. Yeah, and I'm going to, the write up in 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. At 21 years old, the Tokyo University of Fisheries 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. Mori's collective punishment for these offenses was to have Ozaki face off in a no holds bout with a much bulkier co-revolutionary. The others encircled the two fighters, ensuring Ozaki could not run away, and then the larger man began wailing on Ozaki. Beat into the ground time and time again, Ozaki, bloodied, still rose for more punishment. He knew the only way out was to accept his physically imposed chastisement. Finally, the badly beaten Ozaki was allowed some rest. He then made a fatal mistake. He thanked Mori 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 sub-zero temperatures. After some hours of this, Ozaki, shaking and injured, was asked to be allowed to lay down. This was the last straw. 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 carried Ozaki's broken body back outside, where he was tied to a post that, and lieu of ideological metal would keep him standing. He hung there for hours and hours, as his comrades ignored his increasingly weak cries 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 shit, right? Yes. Like, oh, we're going to 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 seen that he was fundamentally flawed and he'd bring the revolution down because of his weakness. So he had to kill himself in order to save the revolution. He was calling for help while tied to a post and subzero temperatures. He knew they'd beat him to death for it. Well, you know. Yeah, so they decided to, like, celebrate this guy's death, because he'd made the movement stronger. Oh, did they have a little party?

They had a little party, yeah. Yeah, so the self-criticism sessions continue. Self-criticism is a strong characterization. So I'm just going to put out there that, like, some people call in outside consultants and kind of look like, they really are taking a deep dive down this one hole. Yeah. Right, they could have done a ropes course. They could have.

They did strangle some of them. They could have played paintball? They could have played paintball. Yeah, to make a really horrible story a little bit shorter, this keeps happening. Every night to someone new, they just keep murdering each other. For ideological improperness. Are the last three left the most pure? Well, by the time it's over 14 of the 29 people who went out there had been killed.

Oh, that's less than I thought. Yeah, yeah. And the remaining 15 get along really well. They do get into a gunfight with the cops. I mean, you know, maybe they shouldn't have led with that. Probably would have formed some, you know, trauma bonds. Yeah, so they purge, like, half of themselves. You know, everyone will get along really well if you just kill everyone that doesn't

agree with you already. I've always said that. And that's why Stalinist Russia had no backstabbing at all. The Stalinist Russia, the place where everyone got along. Yep. That's what they call it. So that's the podcast episode. Be in a lane.

You want to tell people where they can find you? Yeah, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram and medium at 45th Observist. And you can find me in the mountains with 28 of my closest friends, where we all try to make each other into better, better people, better people. Not going on that camping. Just so you know. Get a big old pile of rocks for self-improvement purposes. And a post.

And a post for self-improvement. I'm going to beat you that day. Yeah. You know. Mum. We'll see. In three weeks. That's the episode.

Go. Oh, yeah. You can find us online at BehindTheBastards.com. 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. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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