The Red Army Faction

From the 1970s onwards, the RAF was a significant element in the armed reaction to the oppressive operations of Washington's West German client state.

Although its name has passed into left-wing mythology it did not actually carry out as many actions as the parallel Revolutionare Zellen - RZ or Revolutionary Cells - but after the unification of Germany a new generation of RAF activists declared a campaign against what they described as the Fourth Reich.

This enormous volume is touted as just the first section of a documentary history of the RAF and it lives up to its promise by providing the first publication in English of many of the movement's seminal works.

It's equally as valuable as a source book for any study of the relationship between underground revolutionary action and legal activism.

This relationship has been well understood by communists since Lenin's analysis in 1908 that it was necessary for the Bolsheviks to participate in the state parliament while at the same time preparing for the coming revolutionary armed struggle.

As Ed Mead of the US George Jackson Brigade puts it succinctly on the very first page, "From this book you will learn the mistakes of a group that was both large and strong, but which (like our own home-grown attempts in this regard) was unable to successfully communicate with the working class of a 'democratic' country on a level that met their needs.

"While the armed struggle can be the seed of something much larger, it is also another means of reaching out and communicating with the people."

What the book does not provide is systematic documentation of the way in which the RAF was penetrated by agents of the West German internal intelligence service.

The facts are there but you need to trawl to find out about people such as Verena Becker who worked for years as a secret service informant or Klaus Steinmetz, who was responsible for betraying Birgit Hogefeld and Wolfgang Grams to the authorities.

Yet it does not appear that the RAF was at any time controlled by the intelligence services, as happened in Italy with the Red Brigades.

The RAF effectively derailed the so-called "historic compromise" between the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats (CDU)

Their assassination of the CDU prime minister Aldo Moro who supported this method of bringing the communists into government torpedoed that possibility.

The Red Army Faction can be ordered from orders@turnaround-uk.com.