Mission almost accomplished

Last night's TV reviewed: Age of Terror

Frankie Howerd used to talk about Robin Day and his cruel glasses. The glint of Peter Taylor's specs have lately become of interest to his directors, who tend to zoom in on them and his furrowed forehead as he ponders his past. Although he has worn them for as far back as I can remember, they are there, I would guess, to suggest age and wisdom. As a “green young reporter” in the 1960s, he told us last night on Age of Terror (BBC Two), he had hardly heard the word terrorism. Yet terrorism, particularly Irish terrorism, would become his specialist subject.

So when Taylor started the first episode of Age of Terror with a promise to tell us the history of terrorism over the past 40 years, it was hard to imagine anybody better-placed to fulfil it. After all, his previous work includes several magisterial documentaries on Northern Ireland, and 2005’s The New al-Qa’eda, which gave a calm but thorough kicking to Adam Curtis’s theory in The Power of Nightmares that al-Qa’eda doesn’t exist. Oddly, though, Taylor’s 40-year history then began in 1976.

On June 27, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked by two Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two West Germans members of something called Revolutionary Cells, all four collectively belonging to a revolutionary network called Terror International. It was never made clear exactly who or what comprised that shadowy organization. Taylor insisted that the hijacking “seemed to be the work of a network of revolutionary groups called Terror International” or that “the bloody imprint of Terror International in its various guises seemed to be everywhere.” Although the intervention of left-wing German terrorists into the Palestinian dispute undoubtedly shocked Jews and looked like a recrudescence of German anti-Semitism, there were a lot of “seems” when Taylor discussed this mysterious network. I would have liked to hear one of his interviewees actually mention the outfit but the best he came up with was old film of his meeting with the big-haired Blank Panther Angela Davies, “someone who shared the revolutionary fervour of Terror International”.

Anyway, the next day, the plane landed in Uganda – where President Amin had recently declared himself a champion of Palestinian freedom. As ever, Taylor provided a beautifully clear account of what happened next. How the terrorists separated out the Jewish passengers and sent the rest home. How they threatened to kill the hostages unless dozens of their imprisoned comrades were released. How, after some government-level vacillation, the Israeli Defence Forces launched a night raid that saved 100 lives. Partly the success was due to their hitting upon an inspired solution to the problem of transporting soldiers quietly from the airport to the terminal. They ordered a black Mercedes of the type Amin himself travelled in, to which the typical Ugandan response was a salute. When Mossad instead delivered a white one, they thought laterally, and painted it.

Most of us know the story roughly, if only through movies such as Raid on Entebbe, but many details have faded. That made for suspense as the story unfolded mainly in the words of the hostages but aided by news footage and some discreet re-enactments. I did not remember that the one Israel soldier killed was the leader of the assault, Yoni Netanyahu, a man with such iron nerves that he slept all through the flight over even as his comrades puked out of nerves and air turbulence. His older brother, Binyamin, went on to become Israeli Prime Minister in the 1990s. Nor did I recall the disgusting detail that after the operation, Amin ordered the murder of Nora Bloch, a 75-year-old taken from the plane with a choking fit in order to recover in hospital.

In many ways, then, you could understand why this story took over the whole programme. Not only is it a famously riveting tale in itself, but Taylor also had gripping interviews with several of the people involved. (One Israeli sergeant, for example, wasn’t sure which of the hijackers he shot – but prefers to think it was a German.) Nevertheless, it still felt something between a pity and a slight swizz that an event initially put forward as an illustration of wider trends should end up squeezing out any proper discussion of the trends in question.



Now, in common with television executives, terrorists like to get good ratings. Capturing public attention is part of the plan, and though their actions generally have a narrowly defined goal – the release of imprisoned comrades, say – they're always advertising for the cause as well, pushing what they regard as a criminally neglected injustice into the headlines. Which means that the relationship between terrorists and journalists is always potentially compromised, the interests of both parties overlapping in a slightly queasy way. The problem is conspicuous in Age of Terror, which purports to be about cardinal moments in the recent history of applied terror but that can't help but look like what old print journalists used to call "marmalade droppers", stories so captivating that the toast halts in mid-air as it travels to the mouth of the newspaper reader.

"What happened during those six days in Entebbe transformed the age of terror," Taylor claimed about the 1976 hijacking of an Air France aircraft. But he never persuasively explained how. It seemed just as likely that this incident had been singled out from the many assaults and atrocities of the Seventies for the same reasons that it had dominated the headlines at the time: the story might have been crafted for Hollywood in its combination of historical irony and bold endeavour.

The historical irony, a cruel one, came from the fact that Israeli passengers found themselves undergoing a selection as menacing as anything that had occurred on an Auschwitz platform: the German- accented voice of Brigitte Kuhlmann, one of the four hijackers, calling out the names of Jewish passengers as she sifted through their passports. Since part of the fuel for the German revolutionary underground had been rage at the country's Nazi period, there was something grotesque about this echo from the past, and there was some evidence that it contributed to the Israelis' determination to go the extra mile in avoiding any kind of deal with the hijackers.

Or rather the extra 2,500 miles, the jet having been flown from Athens to Uganda, where the hijackers felt confident of a friendly welcome from Idi Amin, who had recently transferred his dubious loyalties from the Israeli government to Colonel Gaddafi. This is where the bold endeavour came in, the plan to take direct action and snatch the hostages out of captivity being so difficult and so unlikely to succeed that the hijackers almost certainly believed that it wouldn't be attempted. The very improbability of the deed may have contributed to its success, as did that canny decision to drive the kilometre from the Israeli transport planes to the terminal building in a black Mercedes limousine, thus staying the trigger finger of the Ugandan guards at the airport. As you would expect, Taylor's account of this operation was gripping, underlined by interviews with several of the original hostages. But the very cursory thumbnail sketches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the curiously unprobing interview with a former colleague of Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfred Bose, the two German members of the hijack team, left you feeling that you knew more about the incident without learning a lot more about why it had occurred, or what relation it might bear to our own status as terrorist targets now.

Taylor did give us some background to the terrorists’ actions – but so briefly as to prove ultimately tantalising. Most viewers will have understood what the Palestinians were up to. Yet, why some supposedly intellectual left-wing Germans decided to ape the Nazis in the cause of overthrowing capitalism remained more of a mystery. Admittedly, an exposition of revolutionary theory might have made for less sexy television than the raid at Entebbe. Without it, though, the history we’d been promised seemed distinctly incomplete – and a few silent reconstructions featuring some student-types smoking fags and looking earnest didn’t really fill the gap.