The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,128
watchman could easily have been in the area. The charges were increased to attempted murder and federal conspiracy, and Cooper's bail was revoked. By that point, however, he had fled the country, making his way first to Canada and then to Western Europe.
And in Europe, another chapter of his curious career began. The exaggerated reports about him circulated by American law enforcement were swallowed whole by the radical groups of Europe's revolutionary left - the circle associated with Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, known formally as the Rote Armee Fraktion, informally as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; the tight-knit organization that called itself the Movement 2 June; and, in Italy, the Red Brigade. Intoxicated by the romance of urban insurrection, these militants regarded the shaggy-haired American as a latter-day Jesse James, a free rider for the revolution. They welcomed him into their circles and disputatious factions, asking him for advice about tactics and techniques. Barry Cooper was pleased by the adulation, but his visits were also a strain. He knew a great deal about varieties of marijuana - about how Maui sinsemilla differed from Acapulco red, say - but had little interest in, or knowledge of, the practical affairs of revolution. Far from the criminal mastermind of the Interpol advisories, he had been a slacker, along for the ride - for the drugs and the sex. He had been too dazed to comprehend the ferocity of his new comrades - too dazed to comprehend that what he regarded as student pranks, the equivalent of stink bombs in the bathroom, they regarded as prelude to violent upheaval and the forcible overthrow of the existing order. When he was among the revolutionaries, he kept this to himself, hiding behind gnomic responses. His reticence and pointed lack of interest in their own activities rattled them-surely this showed that the American terrorist did not trust them or take them seriously as a revolutionary vanguard. They responded by revealing to him their most ambitious plans, trying to impress him by disclosing the extent of their human and material assets: the safe house in East Berlin the front organization in Munich that provided them with financial support, the officer in the Bundesrepublik national guard who kept his radical lover supplied with quantities of military-grade ordnance.
As time passed, Barry Cooper grew uncomfortable, and not simply with the masquerade: he had no stomach for the acts of violence they vividly described. One day, in the aftermath of a subway bombing in Stuttgart arranged by the Revolutionary Cells, he saw a list of victims in a newspaper. Pretending to be a newspaper reporter himself, he visited the mother of one of the passersbys who were slain. The experience - coming face-to-face with the human reality of the glorious revolutionary violence - left him shaken and repulsed.
Janson paid him a visit not long afterward. In the attempt to gain entree to the shadowy world of these terrorist organizations, he searched for people whose fealty to civilization might not have completely eroded - people who were not yet dead to so-called bourgeois morality. Barry Cooper's association with those organizations always struck him as odd; he knew his file well, and what he saw was someone who was essentially a joker, a cutup, a clown, rather than a killer. A get-along go-along guy who had found himself getting along and going along with some very bad company.
Cooper was already living in Amsterdam, in the very same houseboat, making a living selling colorful sketches of the old town to tourists - kitsch, but sincere kitsch. He had the affect of someone who had smoked too much pot for too long a time: even when he wasn't stoned, he had a slightly unfocused and ingenuous manner. The two men did not bond right away: it was hard to imagine two souls less alike. Still, Cooper finally appreciated that his visitor from the U.S. government tried neither to ingratiate himself nor to make threats. He looked like a jarhead but he didn't come on like one. Oddly low-key in his approach, he played it straight. When Cooper diverted the conversation to the inequities of the West, Janson, as a trained political scientist, was happy to follow him.
Rather than jeering at his politics, Janson was happy to concede that there was much to criticize in the Western democracies - but then rejected the dehumanizing simplifications of the terrorists in direct, hard-hitting language. Our society betrays humanity whenever it doesn't live up to its own expressed ideals. And the