Word: bern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sails in from outside one of Miller's shots, as it sometimes peculiarly does. The coach is played hard by Robert Mitchum, whose wise and cynical presence just does not suit a man living on nostalgia and dead ideas. The rest of the solid cast includes Bruce Bern, Stacy Keach and Paul Sorvino, who have their moments. But these never add up to persuasive performances...
Wysocki and his accomplices, however, were unprepared for the practical details of their attack. Within 24 hours, they released one of their hostages, a pregnant embassy employee. They also decided to allow the Bern police to deliver packages of food, medicine and newspapers to the embassy's doorstep, and agreed to talk to a Polish-born Dominican priest, Josef Bochenski, 80. After intensive negotiations, which were led by Swiss Justice Minister Kurt Furgler, the gunmen agreed to a 48-hour extension of their deadline and to the release of five more hostages. Some 30 hours after the initial occupation...
Finally, the terrorists turned their political demands into a simple plea for safe conduct to Albania or China, and a $1.4 million ransom. The Swiss government immediately rejected that idea. Warsaw offered to send in its own antiterrorist squad to help the Bern police, but the Swiss firmly refused. Then the Swiss police made their move...
...thoughts that the Bern siege might have had political implications were laid to rest when Colonel Wysocki was finally identified by authorities. He turned out to be Florian Kruszyk, 42, a onetime member of the Polish state security apparatus who spent ten months in Austrian jails in 1968-69, after he was caught spying on Polish refugees. Thereafter, he served time for robbery. Kruszyk and his three associates, it turned out, had never belonged to Solidarity...
After the Swiss rescue operation, Polish officials conceded that there were no links between the terrorists and any groups in Poland. Despite that admission, the fact was that the Bern terrorists had given the military government a boost, rather than the opposite. Throughout the siege, the Jaruzelski regime was able to inveigh even more against the trade-union movement that the Communist leadership in Poland is striving to crush...