ABSTRACT
A few days before Christmas 1975 a group of terrorists of unknown provenance broke into the OPEC building in Vienna and kidnapped the representatives of the chief oil-producing nations. Coming soon after the attacks of the South Moluccan separatists in the Nether lands, the incident occasioned great consternation among leader-writers in the Western press, who were anxiously concerned about the power concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and who made harrowing predictions about what all this could mean for the future. The incident monopolized the headlines: clearly it was an event of world-shaking consequence. Yet only a few days later when the shooting was over, when the terrorists had temporarily vanished from the front pages and the small screen — until the next hijacking or some other such action should take place — it appeared that the operation, however meticulously prepared, had been one of the great nonevents of the year. Its purpose was anything but clear: the terrorists seemed to have only a hazy notion of what they intended to achieve. They induced the Austrian radio to broadcast the text of an ideological statement which, dealing with an obscure topic and formulated in left-wing sectarian language, might just as well have been read out in Chinese as far as the average, baffled Austrian listener was concerned.
