Bonn Sought to Infiltrate Informer into Gang : German Unit Bombed Jail in Anti-Terror Plot

HANOVER, West Germany — An elite West German anti-terrorist unit bombed a German jail holding a top guerrilla in 1978 in an elaborate government-backed plot to penetrate the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, officials said Friday.

The plot, aimed at getting a police informer into the left-wing guerrilla group, was exposed Friday by the newspaper Hanover Allgemeine and confirmed by Lower Saxony State Premier Ernst Albrecht.

State Interior Minister Egbert Moecklinghoff said the raid was staged by GSG-9 commandos and undercover agents with the knowledge of then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his interior minister, Werner Maihofer. Schmidt’s office said he knew nothing about the operation.

The paramilitary GSG-9 squad achieved fame in 1977 when it staged a spectacular rescue of hostages aboard a Lufthansa airliner hijacked by guerrillas to Somalia in a vain bid to win the release of jailed Baader-Meinhof gang leaders.

The July, 1978, bombing blew a large hole in the outside wall of a jail in the town of Celle, 30 miles north of here, holding guerrilla convict Sigurd Debus. No one was injured.

The attack was blamed at the time on a “guerrilla sympathizer” whom Moecklinghoff described at a news conference as a common criminal turned police informer.

The revelation was the latest of unorthodox schemes used in the 1970s to break the spiral of kidnappings, murders and bombings by the Baader-Meinhof gang, now known as the Red Army Faction .

The gang, in its spectacular “1977 offensive,” assassinated Frankfurt banker Juergen Ponto, German industry leader Hanns-Martin Schleyer and West German Attorney General Siegfried Buback in separate attacks.

The Social Democrats, party of Schmidt, and the radical Greens immediately called for parliamentary hearings into the operation, which they condemned as the illegal “use of terror to fight terror.”

But Albrecht said the deception “proves just how determined the democratic state is to defend itself against terrorists.”

The bomb that damaged Celle prison was planted close to Debus’ cell and was officially interpreted at the time as part of a campaign by guerrilla sympathizers to win political prisoner status for jailed Baader-Meinhof activists.

Moecklinghoff said the informer, a robber paroled from a Celle jail shortly before the bombing, had agreed to infiltrate the guerrilla scene in return for early release and had provided valuable information that helped thwart several attacks.

But the Hanover newspaper which exposed the operation said the plot misfired when the informer cheated on his side of the bargain and went underground instead.

Debus was sentenced to 12 years in jail in 1975 for armed bank robbery and conspiracy to stage bomb attacks. He died in 1981 while on hunger strike in a Hamburg jail.