SAS spy's memoir claims he 'probably saved Gorbachev's life'

Pilgrim Spy – published under pseudonym Tom Shore – also claims a ‘third generation’ Baader-Meinhof gang came close to halting the fall of the Berlin Wall

A terrorist plot to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev in East Germany in 1989 has been revealed in print by the SAS soldier who claims to have thwarted it.

Tom Shore – a pseudonym – was sent into East Germany by British security services in 1989 on a mission to uncover details of what was believed to be a Soviet military operation. He found no such evidence, but while undercover he made contact with a movement working for reform and democracy in Leipzig.

“Then there were the home-grown terrorists, like the German Baader-Meinhof Group – otherwise known as the ‘Red Army Faction [or] RAF’… The group is often talked about in terms of generations. The ‘first generation’ consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and others. The ‘second generation’ came about after the majority of the first generation was arrested in 1972. The ‘third generation’ RAF existed in the 1980s, 1990s and up to 1998.”

Related: Neal Ascherson on how terrorist collective Baader-Meinhof terrorised West Germany in the Seventies

Continue reading...