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One possible such attack came just weeks after the Berlin Wall’s fall. It was 8.30 in the morning on November 30 1989, and Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of Deutsche Bank, was setting off from his home in Bad Homburg, Frankfurt, for his daily drive to work. The first car in his three-car convoy was already heading down the road that was his usual route. But as Herrhausen’s car sped to follow, a grenade containing 150 pounds of explosives tore through his armoured limousine, killing him instantly. The detonator that set off the grenade had been triggered when the limousine drove through a ray of infrared light beamed across the road.[80] The attack had been carried out with military precision, and the technology deployed was of the highest sophistication. ‘This had to be a state-sponsored attack,’ said one Western intelligence expert.[81] Later, it emerged that Stasi officers had been involved in training camps at which Red Army Faction members had been instructed in the use of explosives, anti-tank rockets and the detonation of bomb devices through photo-electric beams just like the one used in the Herrhausen attack.[82]

Herrhausen had been a titan of the West German business scene, and a close adviser to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. The attack came just as reunification had suddenly become a real possibility. This was a process in which Deutsche Bank could stand to gain massively from the privatisation of East German state enterprises – and in which Dresdner Bank, where Putin’s friend the Stasi officer Matthias Warnig would soon be employed, was to battle with Deutsche for the spoils. According to the former Red Army Faction member, the attack on Herrhausen was organised for the benefit of Soviet interests: ‘I know this target came from Dresden, and not from the RAF.’[83]

For the former Red Army Faction member those days now seem long ago and far away. But he can’t help but remember with regret that he was no more than a puppet in Soviet influence games. ‘We were no more than useful idiots for the Soviet Union,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘This is where it all began. They were using us to disrupt, destabilise and sow chaos in the West.’