[The following article by syndicated columnist Victor Riesel appeared in various U.S. newspapers in mid-March. An article discussing Riesel's column appears elsewhere in this issue.]
WASHINGTON-There is a new red flag furiously waving a bloody shadow over the free world. This is understatement. This isn't the traditional banner of Moscow, Mao or milk-toast intellectual socialism. It is the ensign of a new, now independently wealthy terrorist international swiftly raising its minions and millions from ransoms and bank robberies.
It is the standard of latter-day Scarlet Pimpernels with cel s here, there, everywhere, but mostly 1 Latin America and in a handful of American cities. Its paramilitary self-styled Robin Hood is a killer, Mario Roberto Santucho, a sophisticated Argentinian in his late 20s.
Its erudite, leading intellectual exponent of world terror as a tactic of global civil war is Ernest Mandel, alias Ernest Germain, one of the world's foremost Marxists.
Sad and frustrating to say, this movement is misunderstood not only by America's semi-skilled intellectuals but by some of this nation's foremost thinkers. When Germain-Mandel attempted to enter the U.S. in 1972 his visa application was rejected. University leaders of Harvard, MIT and elsewhere fought for him. The Supreme Court turned him back. It was the so-often undervalued House Committee on Internal Security which identified Ernest Mandel for what he is - Ernest Germain, world terrorism's most influential philosophical proponent.
It is easy to trace the terrorist international. Basically it is the revived network of followers of the late Leon Trotsky (who quixotically enough once was a Bronx tailor shop worker in exile from Stalin's Russia).
Today this is the United Secretariat of the Fourth International run by Germain- Mandel in Brussels. Its American affiliate is the Socialist Workers Party, still nonviolent though it has a deviation called the International Tendency which believes in terror and its grim variations. It has cells in New York and the Oakland-Berkeley area and points in between such as Bloomington, Ind., Houston, Texas, and in eight other cities.
These revolutionary cellmates look longingly to the Argentine as young violenceoriented radicals of the '20s looked to Moscow and in later years to Mao's Yenan caves. Their meccas are Buenos Aires, Cordoba and Andean hideouts.
For there are ERPs, the Peoples' Revolutionary Armies' handfuls of men who have rolled up over $20 million cracking banks and kidnapping corporate executives. Some of these revolutionaries have executed labor leaders and military men. There are at least three ERPs but the biggest, the toughest and the deadliest is the tiny revolutionary "army" led by Santucho. The "armies" - perhaps some 200 strong - are splinters from splinters of Trotskyites. They spring from the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT). One sliver-like ERP wants part of the government action and would like to work inside the Peronist governing party. The second paramilitary band is the "Red Faction." It is loyal to the party and to Germain-Mandel's United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
The third "army" is the biggest, the most ruthless and generally believed by intelligence forces to be the kidnapping force which has Exxon's $14 million ransom for plant manager Victor Samuelson. This is Santucho's.
He has told the Argentine Trotskyite party to go to hell. And he has told Mandel's Secretariat to join the party in his special brand of political purgatory. He is beholden to no one but his own ERP.
Senor Santucho is a knowledgeable, sophisticated and technical revolutionist - a Leninist-type bandit. For example: the U.S. was startled to hear the Symbionese use tape recordings as a communication and communique system. Santucho is a modernist. He uses videotape. Argentine kidnapers have produced their own visual material. They are specialists. They use the newest equipment. They put their victims on trial before the camera. The victim confesses and urges the ransom. These tapes then are distributed around Latin America for broadcast. Specialists report some have been aired.
But Santucho is no loner. There is liaison. His ERP and other "armies" keep contact. Not only inside Argentina, but with the revolutionists of other Latin nations - including Cuba. They exchange warriors. They slip into Montevideo (Uruguay) to operate with the Tupamaros and into Chile to coordinate with the MIR (left revolutionaries). The MIR was the late President Allende's storm troops. They broke up rallies of other parties and beat their leaders. Today they are the underground terrorists.
They are knit by an information network streaming from the Trotskyite United Secretariat of the Fourth Internation in Brussels. This pours from the headquarters' secret International Information Bulletin and the international Internal Discussion Bulletin. They're dedicated to holding the world for ransom someday. Now it is the tragedy of kidnaping. Tomorrow it will be a factory or a city.
Certainly it sounds melodramatic. In the past few have listened. Many have made it impossible for the FBI and other authorities to infiltrate and keep files. Even now the FBI is being forced to disgorge its dossiers. For the moment, the free world is not equipped to cope with this tiny force whose red banner casts such a sorrowful shadow.