The Targeting of America

A Special Report on Terrorism

If terrorists had been watching when Lebanese president Amin Gemayel arrived at the Madison Hotel in Washington last October, the sight would have warmed their hearts. The front of the building was swarming with police. Up and down 15th and across M Street, Secret Service agents stood guard, nervously watching the tops of surrounding buildings. Each man wore a single earphone with a wire that disappeared into his clothing. Inside the hotel, Lebanese secret police stood watch in the corridors while Secret Service agents searched floor to floor. Simultaneously, a private security firm staked out the building and coordinated communications. The hotel was strung with wires and antennas. The lobby was jammed with security personnel waiting, listening, anticipating. In short, Gemayel's mere presence caused an almost palpable level of anxiety not only within the hotel but throughout the neighborhood just north of the White House.

More precisely, it was not Gemayel but an unseen presence that caused the anxiety. What electrified the place was the uncertainty. Would it be the man entering the elevator carrying flowers? Would it be the unoccupied taxicab parked by the side of the building? It might be a gun, a rocket, a poisoned apple or the Armenian double-bomb trick, in which the first bomb goes off, a crowd gathers to see what has happened, and then the second bomb goes off. Terrorism: Guess. Guess again.

Just one month earlier, Gemayel's brother, Bashir--himself the newly elected president of Lebanon--had been killed when a 400-pound bomb destroyed the Christian Phalangist headquarters in east Beirut. When Amin Gemayel left the Madison Hotel after a two-day visit, one could see the relief in the faces of the doormen, the concierge and the assistant managers: The place had not been blown up. No one had even phoned in a bomb threat. Gemayel was now someone else's problem.

We hear about terrorism almost daily, yet few of us have a precise notion of what it is. Fewer yet could say what sort of people we would find behind the ski masks. The experts aren't really sure of what most terrorists want. They haven't even been able to agree on a definition of terrorism. But however we choose to define it, terrorism has become a fact of life. Between 1970 and 1980, according to a 1981 conference at Los Alamos National Laboratories, nearly three terrorist operations per day were reported world-wide. The total number of people killed by terrorism in that ten-year period has been estimated at around 10,000. The cost in property destroyed was about $200,000 per day. At least $150,000,000 in reported kidnaping ransom was collected by terrorists between January 1, 1971, and late 1982. The security necessitated by terrorism costs billions. But terrorism is not only a major economic influence in the world today, it's a psychological and a political one as well.

It has permanently altered Western Europe, Japan, South America, Central America, the Middle East, Africa--most of the world, in other words. And now, some experts say, the U.S. may be the next big target.

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There are people paid to worry about just that possibility, and in the International Club of Washington, where some of them gather to eat lunch, the tension is sometimes as thick as the cigarette smoke. Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.) is located in the same building. C.S.I.S. is a private think tank, and a lot of the thinking that goes on there these days concerns terrorism.

I sat in the club one day last summer listening to two of the world's top experts on terrorism, Yacov Heichal, former head of planning for the Israeli military, and Robert Kupperman, executive director of science and technology for C.S.I.S. They were making the small talk of their profession--discussing the prospect of being on various hit lists and the security precautions each takes.

"We're not on them so far as we know," says Kupperman, "but it's always a concern. It's something you watch for."

"They don't like me to walk around in Old Jerusalem," Heichal says of the Israeli security guards. "But I do anyway. I keep my eyes open. You have to keep your eyes open. I like Old Jerusalem. It's my home."

How do you know when you're on a hit list?

"People tell us," Heichal says.

And then what happens?

He shrugs. "Maybe it goes away. Or maybe you're still on it. Maybe they get interested in someone else."

It was August 1982 and Israel had virtually leveled Beirut in an attempt to drive out the P.L.O. In the process, it had destroyed or captured nearly all the conventional military equipment the P.L.O. had acquired during the previous decade. While the P.L.O. had been founded as a terrorist group and achieved its status largely through terrorist actions, it had begun to show signs of becoming a more conventional nation, lacking only a place to call home. According to Heichal and others, Israel's actions have forced the P.L.O. into a corner where terrorism is now its only option. The question was when it would begin. Kupperman estimated that it would take another few months for the P.L.O. to get organized again. But the day after terrorists machine-gunned a Jewish restaurant in Paris, killing two Americans, Heichal was pacing back and forth in Kupperman's office, chain-smoking cigarettes and saying, "It's begun. It's begun." He turned to Kupperman. "Do you think it's begun?" It was a time of high anxiety. But in the business of counterterrorism, most times are.

"A two-star general in the field with 16,000 soldiers at his disposal," Kupperman says, "would laugh at the mere suggestion that a dozen well-prepared men could render him utterly powerless. Jimmy Carter might also have laughed once at the suggestion that a small group of ill-prepared Iranian students could render the entire U.S. powerless. But it did."

Across the street, I visited with Yonah Alexander, director of the State University of New York's Institute for Studies in International Terrorism. He is editor of the scholarly journal Terrorism (yes, terrorism even has its own magazine now). He shares the concern about the P.L.O. "It has to show it is alive and kicking," he says. "And the P.L.O. is very much alive. As a military force, it is no longer viable. It has lost the military option. But as a terrorist force, it certainly is viable. It has an eight-country network. I predict that it will intensify its activities. And Americans today are target number one throughout the world."

Why the United States? And why now?

In the view of academic spooks, as high-level intelligence types are often called, terrorist warfare--like warfare in general--is in a period of evolution. For a long time, terrorists were content to toss bombs, to stage some derring-do with airplanes now and then, to kidnap a few key political figures. But they are becoming more sophisticated, according to intelligence sources, not only in their methods but in their choice of targets. And they are beginning to understand that the U.S. is a perfect terrorist target. It is the largest free nation in the world--a target of tremendous symbolic value. Since terrorism is largely a symbolic act, that is decisive. Second, the U.S. is a democracy. Most experts agree that a key element in the success of terrorism is good press coverage. It balloons the event and gives it a dimension it otherwise might not have. The U.S. is ideal because it has an uncontrolled and voracious press--essential for democracy, good for terrorism. And, finally, it's a highly mechanized society, dependent on fragile technologies that are subject to attack.

It may come from the P.L.O. It may come from the F.A.L.N., the Puerto Rican national-liberation movement, one of the most active on U.S. soil. Or it may come, as the kidnaping of General James Dozier did, as the Iranian hostage crisis did, well away from the U.S. mainland itself. Terrorists can attack the U.S. from anywhere in the world. The sun never sets on their targets of opportunity, except, perhaps, during the winter months in Alaska.

But some experts feel that the P.L.O. is the most immediate threat. Backed into a corner, it could turn to the U.S. as the last remaining pressure point, a last push for continued national existence. Among major concerns are that it could use blackmail (nuclear blackmail, biological-warfare blackmail) to shift U.S. foreign policy toward its own ends. Some say that the U.S. is the Hiroshima of terrorism, pristine if not untouched, being saved for something ultimate.

As usual, however, there is disagreement among the experts. Former director of the CIA William Colby says, "The P.L.O. does have a political option. Because of the way Israel handled itself with respect to the mass killings in Lebanon, the P.L.O. has a new recognition. It is being dealt with. It has Arab political support. The mass murders in Lebanon are the Israelis' downfall as far as the P.L.O. goes. The P.L.O. will continue to fight and will undoubtedly go over the edge, and to the extent that it goes over the edge, it will lose rather than gain. Your real problem is that you have an intractable difference between peoples, and they're going to fight each other. You've got to get a negotiated solution." He believes that the prospect of terrorism's sweeping the United States is overblown.

"The reason the U.S. has never had a major terrorist problem," says Colby, "is that you can't rally public support of terrorism, because the channels are open to legitimate protest. It's surprising that the blacks didn't resort to terrorism, but they didn't--probably because of the fine leadership they had from religious leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others."

Even if we were able to rule out homegrown terrorism (and many people do not rule it out), that doesn't preclude the imported variety. In a world that hardly blinks anymore when someone snatches a jet in Poland or Spain or Africa, there are a lot of groups out there for whom the United States is a target with an extremely high payoff potential. The Tupamaros, the F.A.L.N., the P.L.O., the Japanese Red Army, S.W.A.P.O., the I.R.A., the P.F.L.P., the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Black June, the Basque Separatists, the Christian Phalangists--there are more than 140 terrorist organizations currently in operation. Some, such as the P.L.O., have fairly clear motivations (a homeland--and erasing Israel from the map). Others, such as the Japanese Red Army, appear to be purely nihilistic--they seem to be saying that society, civilization, life itself are all worthless and should be destroyed. It may be difficult for us to grasp such a motivation, but it's just as real when the bombs go off.

Whether or not one chooses to believe that a terrorist-precipitated Armageddon is about to take place here, the notion has gained some currency in the Reagan Administration. The problem is that the Administration has responded to the terrorist threat as a convenient public-relations tool instead of a problem in need of solutions.

Kupperman gives the background: "In part, it was terrorism that cost Carter the Presidency. When the Iranians took over the U.S. Embassy, he failed to act. After one week, it was already too late. Then it went on for a year. The final ignominy took place in the desert where a rescue attempt failed before it even got under way. All that was left then was the rug bazaar: negotiating the price for the release of the hostages. For the terrorists, it was complete victory."

In the wake of that political debacle, the Reagan Administration needed a new public-relations tool--a banner, as it were. Human rights wouldn't do, primarily because it was old and was associated with the Carter Administration. And anything associated with the Carter Administration seemed to carry with it the lingering smell (continued on page 171) Targeting of America (continued from page 92) of political death. Reagan came to power proclaiming that terrorism was America's number-one foreign-policy problem. Alexander Haig (himself once a target of a terrorist bomb) held a press conference to announce that the Soviets were "training, funding and equipping" terrorists around the world.

Coincident with the installation of the new Administration, two books were published that would strongly influence thinking about terrorism. One was the scholarly work Kupperman co-authored, Terrorism: Threat, Reality, Response, now considered a classic within academic circles. Terrorism magazine summed up the book's content: "There is a very real danger in the years ahead that terrorist groups will seek to further their causes by resorting to high-technology terrorism."

The other influential book was by journalist Claire Sterling, The Terror Network, published by and excerpted in Reader's Digest. It was not considered a scholarly work and was, in fact, savaged by the press. Sterling was accused of timing the book to promote the Reagan Administration's point of view, an accusation she flatly denied. Her book described in elaborate detail a massive Soviet conspiracy to use terrorism world-wide to destabilize democratic societies.

Almost immediately, the battle lines were drawn on either side of the Soviet question. Senator Jeremiah Denton opened the hearings of his Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism on April 24, 1981, surprised that the room wasn't jammed with Senators eager to nail down the Soviet menace. Undaunted, Denton launched into a tirade against Soviet expansionism and support of world-wide terrorism. Often waxing incomprehensible in his windy statements between questions, he was given to what can only be called raving. "The Soviets were not particularly terroristically inclined in the sense of the fragmented terrorism that was going on around the world," he said. And: "Americans, in general, are not fractionally appreciative of this relativity of badness and goodness." Although I am quoting him out of context, he spoke largely out of it as well. One of his key witnesses was Sterling, to whom he said, "I must say that, although I have great respect for the CIA and our other institutions, I believe that they have such a multitude of matters with which to concern themselves, necessarily, that you, in the field of terrorism, in my opinion are the most valuable source I know of from which to extract that which is significant and news."

But while Sterling and Denton were spinning out their theories of the Soviet connection, the State Department and the CIA, under orders from the White House, were trying to dig out some hard evidence of it. The Administration, as Kupperman put it, "got burned painfully trying to prove that the Soviet Union was behind it all." Soon, it was being reported in the press that a draft of the national-intelligence estimate prepared by the CIA had been rejected by Haig because it didn't prove the Soviet connection. It had been sent back for redrafting to make it square with the Administration's line. Unfortunately, it never did. The evidence just wan't there, at least not in the eyes of the CIA.

Colby was called to testify for Denton and did so. And while he admitted some Soviet involvement and responsibility, he had a more moderate version of the story. "With reference to directing the [terrorist] 'orchestra,'" he said, "no, the Soviets are not directly directing the orchestra today. But, yes, they did provide the instruments in the training and some of the equipment that these people had originally and [the Soviets] bear a responsibility for their use.... I think there is a feeling that there is some central war room with flashing lights and red arrows on the wall, and so forth; that it is all being run from some big center. That is not the way terrorism works, and I do not think there is such a central war room for the whole movement."

As most bright intelligence workers knew then and know now, terrorism is a messy, complicated business, not easily packaged as a public-relations tool. Even Kupperman, who is associated with the "Georgetown crowd," typically identified with the right-wing position on terrorist matters, said, "Although Russia certainly provides funding for some terrorist operations, if it withdrew that patronage, little would change. Terrorists know how to raise money. Furthermore, there is really no need for a master conspiracy to keep terrorism going. But," he added by way of warning, "the very diversity and uncontrollability of terrorists make them that much more dangerous to the United States. Terrorists are not constrained by diplomatic considerations. Moreover, it is a mistake to assume that terrorists are necessarily rational people. In many cases, they most definitely are not."

Once again, the proponents of the Soviet connection are undoubtedly sincere, whether they are right or wrong. But the Soviet connection is also a powerful public-relations tool and is almost certain to be misused, even if there is some truth in it. And in the meantime, it stands in the way of actually confronting the problem.

Kupperman, Alexander and others are concerned that if the terrorist threat becomes reality in the U.S., it will be too late for us to react properly. "The entire crisis treatment of terrorism has been one of denial," Kupperman says. "One of believing in a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you breathe a word about it, if you even think about it, it's going to happen. Well, it has happened, and we weren't ready for it."

He points out that in the two most important terrorist incidents in the U.S.--the Iranian hostage crisis and the seizure of Washington embassy buildings by Hanafi Moslems--we botched the handling of the situations. But the terrorists don't need to operate within the borders of the United States to have the desired effect, as demonstrated in Iran. "Qaddafi threatened to attack nuclear facilities in Western Europe. Right now, NATO is hanging by a thread. It would fold if those facilities were attacked. Every European nation would demand that we remove the nuclear weapons, and NATO has little else."

But what of the U.S. military? Isn't it prepared to deal with terrorists if the need arises? A man well versed in the problems that terrorism presents for the military is Colonel William J. Taylor, who spent 27 years in the Army, 13 of them as director of national-security studies at West Point. He is now director of political-military studies at C.S.I.S. He is part of the nation's brain trust on terrorism. Lean and fit-looking, he has neatly cropped, straight black hair and clear eyes. On the left side of his upper lip, at the corner of his mouth, is a scar shaped like a bent staple. It makes it seem as if he's smiling even when he's not.

"The military does not cope well with uncertainty," he says. "And that's what terrorism is. In Vietnam, the war was lost to the Cong--terrorists. When the Cong massed as conventional units, we ate their ass alive. And they learned not to mass. In Four Corps, we had an east-west road between two towns. We owned it during the day. But going out on it at night was a suicide mission."

The lesson of Vietnam, he says, is that you can't fight terrorists with a conventional army. And the U.S. hasn't learned the lesson.

Both Kupperman and Taylor have pointed out that the future of warfare promises to be far different from its past. In their view, land wars are outmoded and nuclear war is still unthinkable, contrary to what Time and Newsweek would have us believe. The warfare of the future is low-intensity conflict--in other words, terrorism. It's cheap, it requires little training or equipment and few men, and there is no trench or fallout shelter into which one can climb to escape it.

"We would find a strategic nuclear exchange to be an extraordinarily unlikely event," Taylor says, adding that the Soviets aren't going to start a nuclear war, because it would be too costly. "They're not going to start a land war in Europe, either, because that would lead inexorably to nuclear war. Anyway, they're probably going to get what they want in central Europe. But now they're going to low-cost, low-risk operations. There are going to be more Cubas, more Ethiopias--the operations for which we're least prepared. We train for the big war. But not for this other stuff. We're training for the least likely forms of conflict and not training for the conflict we're in. We need better intelligence to cope with terrorism, and we're not getting it. For the most part, the American officers stationed in Europe don't speak German. So how can they know what's going on if they can't listen to what people are saying? The secret of counter-terrorism is intelligence--nonmilitary, nonstandard intelligence. The military is a target, so the military has to respond. The Army doesn't coordinate well with others. It needs to--with the FBI, the CIA and other services. It may have to resort to other forms of intelligence--payoffs to informants, dirty tricks, maybe the use of ex-tortive measures.

"So far, the terrorism has amounted to kidnaping Dozier and bombing an officers' club--that sort of thing. Future terrorists may take whole compounds. They may also take a nuke. Nobody in the military has trained to handle this. What's being taught at West Point? One lesson on terrorism in the entire four years."

He says that when he berated a student at the war college for not paying attention to the material, the student, a colonel, said, "Sir, with all due respect, you're mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit."

Taylor leans forward on his desk and his eyes go to points. The scar makes it appear as if he were smiling, but he is not. "We are at war," he says.

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At war, perhaps, but with whom? If we arc to believe the proponents of the Russian connection, we are at war with the Soviet Union. But academic spooks and other experts in a position to know say that it is not that simple. The Russian connection is just a convenient way to package the problem not only for public consumption but also for the Administration. The Administration doesn't want to deal with anything more complicated than the Russian connection. Because if you take away the Russians--or even say they are only partly responsible--you are left with a Hydra-headed monster that replicates itself infinitely as you attempt to destroy it.

Moreover, if we are at war with such elusive enemies, we still don't even know who they are, what they want and how to tell the terrorist from the other people in conflict. Colby says that when he was parachuting behind enemy lines in Germany during World War Two, he was considered a terrorist and hastens to point out that he was not, for he was fighting a declared war and was not attacking innocent civilians. "Terrorism is, of course, a tactic," he says. "It particularly applies to endangering innocent people in order to demonstrate a terrorist's power or to influence others. Thus, the deliberate tactic of the F.L.N. in Algeria was to demonstrate French inability to maintain order by randomly machine-gunning passengers waiting at bus stops."

Harry Rositzke, a former CIA expert on the Soviet Union, wrote, "Confusing simple terrorism with serious revolutionary 'wars' will create problems for United States policy makers." And so we find ourselves at yet another disadvantage. We are big and simple and visible. The terrorist is small and numerous and unfathomable. Who will win?

W. Clifford of the Australian Institute of Criminology is the man responsible for having terrorism put on the agenda of the General Assembly of the United Nations. "Where modern terrorism strikes a liberal state," he said, "the appearance, at first, is that of a malevolent David ranged against a benevolent Goliath. And in constraining the monstrous upstart ... Goliath has to be careful that his methods do not ultimately deprive him of his benevolent image and reveal him as an infuriated bully hitting out at everyone. It is precisely this transformation of labels that the terrorist seeks to achieve by his atrocities."

The classic contemporary example of how terrorism works is Uruguay. It was one of the few true democracies in South America. There were free elections, free trade unions, a healthy population and a functioning Social-Democratic government. In the mid-Sixties, a far-left Marxist group, the Tupamaros, was trained in Cuba for urban guerrilla warfare. It was trained according to the theories of a Brazilian terrorist, Carlos Marighella (not to be confused with Carlos the Jackal), whose classic work, Mini Manual for Urban Guerrilla Warfare, explained terrorism this way:

First, the urban guerrilla must use ... violence ... to win a popular base. Then the government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life in the city unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government is unjust, incapable of solving problems and resorts, purely and simply, to the physical liquidation of its opponents.... [Then] the urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnapings and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act.

In the Sixties, the Tupamaros began bombing, assassinating and kidnaping at random. Feeling frightened and helpless, the Uruguayan people demanded that the government do something--anything--to stop the violence. Thousands demonstrated in the streets. By 1972, the government was forced to act. It brought in the army to attempt to restore order. But a terrorist doesn't stick out from the crowd. He looks like everyone else. So how do you crush him? The army did the only thing it knew how to do: It controlled not just the terrorists but the entire population. The result has been that Uruguay is now a police state run by the military. The Tupamaros have provided a model for many terrorist groups since then.

While the people who protect Government officials in the U.S. are extremely sensitive to that very problem, it is difficult to avoid the appearance of a police state when the police are forced to act as if a terrorist bombing or an assassination were about to occur. And this is the central paradox of terrorism: There is no real defense against it, because the defense itself is an admission of defeat and plays into the hands of the terrorists. Throwing up the extravagant security curtain around the Madison Hotel to protect President Gemayal was like putting up a great neon sign advertising the power of the terrorists.

Terrorism is so effective, in fact, that merely suggesting it works as well as committing a terrorist act. When Secret Service agents heard rumors that a Libyan hit team was coming down from Canada to assassinate President Reagan, they were so afraid that it might be true that they wouldn't let him go out to light the White House Christmas tree. An unimportant failure, it would seem, but one with tremendous symbolic value for the Libyans. The White House Christmas tree, the symbol of peace on earth and good will toward men, had been transformed into a reminder of the American giant afraid of its own shadow.

Although the U.S. has by no means become a police state, we have by otherwise insignificant increments made dramatic changes in our attitudes toward authority during the past dozen years. The House and the Senate galleries of the U.S. Capitol building are guarded by ranks of Sentrie metal-detection gates. We say, "So what?" Better that than have some nut toss a bomb down there. No one would think to object to a luggage search at an airport. Clifford, on the other hand, asked "how far a democracy can afford to become undemocratic in dealing with those who seek to destroy its very existence.... Should there be restraints on a person's freedom to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater...?" Perhaps. It is, after all, illegal to joke about bomb threats at an airport gate. You can go to jail for it.

There has been a general blurring of where individual rights end and the right of society to protect itself against and individual begins. Take the Tylenol case, for example.

During the fall of 1982, after several people had been killed by Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide, no one seemed even mildly alarmed when video tapes were produced showing one of the victims purchasing the Tylenol that killed her. It just seemed natural. Indeed, it seemed a good thing that those cameras had been there, for they also photographed a man thought to be a suspect in the murders. He turned out to be a look-alike. In fact, during that period of time, precisely what Marighella described took place: "The police roundups ... of innocent people." A number of people with beards were falsely accused because the suspect had a beard. But people put up with it in good spirits. After all, there was a greater danger afoot, a special situation.

No one, of course, has suggested that the Tylenol killings were terrorist acts. But they give an idea of how terrorism can work even in the largest democratic nation. Within a few weeks of the Tylenol incident, police agencies were deluged with reports from people who either thought they had seen the bearded suspect or thought their drugs had been tampered with. Mass hysteria ensued at a high school football game when a rumor swept through the crowd that the Coca-Cola sold there had been poisoned. More than 100 students were taken to the hospital with symptoms of food poisoning, which turned out to be anxiety attacks. Overnight, the entire country was clamoring for stricter legislation, tighter controls, more security.

But suppose that this wasn't the act of a lone madman. Suppose that the P.L.O. had poisoned the Tylenol. And suppose that the problem, rather than disappearing, began to get bigger. Say people began dropping dead from eating oranges. One year, P.L.O. terrorists injected a few Israeli oranges with mercury and the entire crop had to be destroyed because no one would eat them. (Ironically, metallic-mercury isn't even particularly poisonous when ingested.) The result in such cases is that people demand that the government do something. Without considering the long-range consequences, we give up little by little our rights and our freedom for the appearance of protection.

This may seem insignificant, but in France, the Renseignements Generaux (comparable to our FBI), in an effort to combat terrorism, has assembled a file of 22,000,000 names, nearly half the population. Scotland Yard has 1,300,000 names in a similar file, and West Germany's BK.A secret police has 3,000,000.

We haven't experienced even a taste of what day-to-day terrorism is like in some countries, where the university presidents, the news commentators, the liberal lawyers, the local politicians are slaughtered systematically, one by one. Yet we have already allowed intrusions that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. So imagine what we might put up with if a trained, well-equipped terrorist group selected the United States as a prime target.

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Besides being considered one of the world's foremost authorities on terrorism, Robert Kupperman is a pure scientist of considerable accomplishments. He has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and a grounding in a number of other sciences. He is a consultant to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and to the Rand Corporation, Sandia Laboratories and a number of foreign governments. He was chief scientist for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and organized the NATO International Conference on Earthquakes. One of his current activities is attempting to get the Government to face up to the possibility of a problem here in the U.S.

One way he does that is by designing terrorist war games. In effect, he plays the role of terrorist and thinks up something diabolical to do. Then he stages the game with members of the Government representing those who would actually have to react to such a crisis.

For example, suppose terrorists broke into a nuclear-weapons-storage site somewhere in Europe and held some officers (or some nuclear weapons) hostage. It would hardly matter whether the terrorists ultimately succeeded or failed; any protracted hostage/barricade situation at a nuclear-storage facility could easily cause the European governments to insist that the U.S. get all its nuclear weapons out of Western Europe. That, of course, would effectively be the end of NATO. That is the sort of problem Kupperman throws at the Government. And there are no ready answers. If you were President, what would you do?

Kupperman's answer: "You have to end it quickly, and you have to face the possibility that some people might get killed in the process. You simply evacuate the area and end it as neatly as possible. Then you hope like hell that confidence is maintained."

This is a matter of national sovereignty of the utmost importance, he says, a case in which the use of force is justified. In contrasting the Iranian hostage situation with the siege by Hanafi Moslems in Washington, experts point out that in the first case, we should have stormed the embassy to end the deadlock, even at the risk of lives, because national sovereignty was at issue. In the second case, it was not, and there was no need to use force. The trick is knowing how to react in each case and to react immediately and never to make a mistake.

"That's the point," says Taylor. "It can shred your profession, it can shred your country. It can create great uncertainty, that for which the military officers are least prepared. Military officers are taught to fight set-piece battles toe to toe with the enemy."

And while such lessons as Kupperman teaches in his elite classrooms may prove valuable, most experts--including Kupperman himself--agree that it would be much easier for terrorists to choose chemical- and biological-warfare (C.B.W.) methods than to steal a nuclear weapon.

Alexander says, "What's really worrisome is escalation from conventional to nonconventional force--that is, from the bomb to the chemical and biological or the nuclear. The P.L.O. and Fatah a few years ago made the decision to go nuclear to balance power with Israel. Whether or not they have, I don't know. I would not be at all surprised if they had. And if you escalate to chemical- and biological-warfare methods, it is a threat to civilization itself. They've thought of it. There have already been incidents of terrorists using C.B.W., and they have been intercepted."

Where? I asked.

"All over."

In the U.S.?

He nodded.

It's not surprising that such incidents do not become public. Most Government officials don't even want to think about the possibility of C.B.W.'s being used. But as early as 1975, Viennese authorities arrested a group of Germans who were attempting to sell Tabun to terrorists. Tabun is nerve gas. That same year, terrorists contaminated a Viennese train with iodine-131, a radioactive isotope that causes cancer. And although no one will talk much about it, intelligence services now have evidence that terrorists are creating biological-warfare weapons. What, exactly, is biological warfare?

"Two sailors," one source said, "on a nuclear aircraft carrier, contaminated with a lethal virus. I don't want to name it. It's the only disease I know of that the doctors and nurses treating it invariably contract. It also has a ten-day incubation period and a mortality rate of more than 90 percent. So you'd have this nuclear ghost ship drifting nine days out. The Navy doesn't like to talk about it. It has already had cases in which a single infected sailor contaminated 20 percent of a ship's population--not intentionally, just by accident. But you see the point."

"In despair," Alexander says, "if all were lost, terrorists might decide to commit suicide." In a paper delivered before a conference on the future of warfare, he wrote, "It is possible that certain conditions could provide terrorists with an incentive to escalate their attacks dramatically. Relevant examples include ... perceptions that the 'cause' is lost and, hence, recourse to the 'ultimate weapon' is justified." He calls such suicide the Samson Solution: Bring the whole house down, taking the Philistines with you.

A few years ago, when a Princeton student designed an atom bomb, a great deal was made of the ease with which a terrorist group could "hold the world hostage." Although it is highly likely that a "gray market" in plutonium will arise over the course of this decade, according to intelligence sources, the atom bomb isn't the likely weapon of choice. It is difficult and dangerous to make a nuclear weapon. There are easier ways. And those in the counterterrorism business are worried that if they have thought of such methods, so have the terrorists.

If Kupperman is America's top expert on terrorist games, Heichal may be the world's foremost designer of those exercises in the unthinkable. For each game, a handbook is written and kept under lock and key. "They're very dangerous," Heichal says. "We always think of what would happen if someone got hold of them. Then there are scenarios we think up that we are afraid even to write down. They are too simple, too horrible. I wake up at night sometimes thinking about them."

Taylor believes that the risk of playing terrorist war games is worth taking. He says it's necessary to "make people confront the incidents and think them through before they happen." What, exactly, is it that the experts are worried might happen? There are two sides to the problem. One is that terrorists might attack our high technology. The other is that they might use high technology to attack us.

In the first instance, a few people with rocket-propelled grenades (easily available on the black market) could knock out the electrical power for a large part of the New York City area. The grenade launchers would be in the back of their jeep, covered by a tarpaulin. They would stop by the side of the road, fire, cover the weapon and be gone before anyone knew what had happened. The targets: extremely high-voltage transformers (E.H.V.s). They're custom-made in Europe, one-of-a-kind items, and there are no replacements waiting if one is destroyed. It could take up to six months to replace a single E.H.V. The ones that control all the power for New York City are within firing range of a large highway. When New York was blacked out for only one day, in 1977, there was uncontrolled looting, arson and general chaos. No one wants to think what a two-week blackout might do, yet the E.H.V.s remain largely unprotected today.

A group of fewer than a dozen terrorists could cut off 75 percent of the natural-gas supply to the Eastern Seaboard in a few hours without ever leaving the state of Louisiana. The pumping stations and the places where exposed pipes cross rivers are unguarded. In the middle of winter, such an attack could cripple the nation. The cost of the operation would be a few thousand dollars.

Nearly every convenience of a technological society represents a possible point of vulnerability. Several times, Palestinian terrorists have been caught with surface-to-air missiles and rocket-propelled grenades--twice while attempting to shoot down airliners. These small, light weapons can be dismantled and carried in a suitcase. It would require no great skill to hit one of the enormous natural-gas storage tanks near Kennedy Airport with such a weapon. Many people on the East Coast saw what the explosion of one gasoline storage tank was like when it burned in New Jersey for a full week last January. The explosion of a natural-gas storage tank would make that seem trivial by comparison.

More subtle attacks on high-technology targets would require few men and only a little knowledge, most of it readily available. The air-traffic-control system is a prime target. Minor interruptions in service due to malfunction have frequently resulted in near disaster. A concerted effort to disable the system could be devastating.

Another point of vulnerability is the computer. In a society in which the most valuable information is stored as tiny electrical charges on bits of magnetic material, a small (if sophisticated) effort would be required to bring about complete disruption of business. The erasure of records at a major bank or investment firm (or, say, the IRS) would be sufficient to jeopardize public confidence in all computer information. It could be done without breaking into the building, by using equipment that would fit into a truck parked outside. To describe the construction of that equipment would be irresponsible, for while it is true that some computers are now shielded against such dangers, the vast majority are not.

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In the view of counterterrorists, then, the United States is like an exquisitely constructed glass house. A stone thrown by a child could put a noticeable hole in it. A few stones thrown by clever enemies could bring it crashing to the ground. And neither the atom bomb nor the largest standing army in the West would be of any use in preventing the destruction.

But that's just half the worry. What about terrorists using high technology against the U.S.? For example, cobalt 60 is a commonly available radioactive isotope used in cancer therapy. It is, in Kupperman's words, "a nasty gamma emitter." What if someone sprinkled it throughout an abandoned building in lower Manhattan and then alerted the authorities? The area would be sealed off. A massive cleanup effort, worth far more than the building itself, might help. Most likely, the area would be uninhabitable for years.

"But what," Kupperman asks, "would the authorities do when a message arrived threatening to do the same thing to a large high-rise office building? It would be impossible to search everyone entering every building in Manhattan. It would be equally impossible to install Geiger counters at every entrance to every building. The fact is, no one wants to think about it, because no one knows what to do."

The question of biological warfare in the hands of terrorists is a delicate one. One senior fellow at C.S.I.S. warned us not even to mention it. It is too hot, too risky. But Kupperman and others feel that if we "keep our heads in the sand" for too long, we are just asking for trouble. Given the evidence that intelligence services have already compiled to show that terrorists have attempted biological warfare, the matter is more or less academic now. Biological warfare is a possibility.

"Suppose," Kupperman says, "that one day, the FBI gets a call that there is a package they should pick up at an address in Harlem. Suppose they pick up this package and inside is a sealed glass container, and inside it are two dead rats infested with fleas. Suppose, further, that these are taken to a lab and are found to be infected with bubonic plague. What do you do?" In the 14th Century, plague killed three fourths of the population of Europe and Asia.

"Or let's make it simpler," Kupperman says. "Suppose the FBI receives a tiny phial with anthrax spores in it and a note demanding that the United States begin immediately to use all its powers to create a Palestinian homeland."

Along with that is a plan to run a small boat up the Mississippi from Memphis to Cairo, Illinois, with a high-powered air compressor pumping anthrax spores into the atmosphere during the entire 200-mile trip. Pulmonary anthrax runs its course in a day or two. The onset is like that of a common cold. During the crucial early hours when treatment might help, no one would even report such symptoms. After that, the mortality rate nears 100 percent. Depending on which way the wind is blowing at the time the boat passes, the death toll could reach into the hundreds of thousands.

There is an island off the coast of Scotland called Gruinard, where the British conducted anthrax experiments during World War Two. It is now uninhabited.

Scientists went there in 1966 to measure concentrations of anthrax spores. When they returned, they reported that the island would remain uninhabitable for at least another century.

"Now imagine that you are President of the United States," Kupperman says. "What would you do?"

I asked whether such things could take place without the public's finding out--whether, say, President Reagan could already have been blackmailed by the P.L.O. in some way. The only thing the public would see would be subtle shifts in foreign policy, such as a shift from favoring Israel to favoring the creation of a Palestinian homeland.

"I don't think it's happened, no," says Kupperman. "But primarily, that's because I think it would leak. If it happened, word would get out. I also don't think the terrorists are politically that sophisticated yet. But it could be done, yes."

As one colleague says of him, "If Kupperman were a terrorist, he'd bring Western civilization to its knees within a week." And there are thousands of qualified scientists out there who could conceivably do the same.

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In light of the fact that even a single person bent on wreaking havoc could do so, the question of what we are prepared to do--or are even capable of doing--about it remains. Such questions as whether or not the Soviet Union is directing worldwide terrorism fall away when the practical considerations are brought forth. What, indeed, would the President do?

The war games have been an attempt to answer those questions. But is anyone listening to the answers?

In July 1979, there was an international conference on terrorism in Israel. At the end of the conference, a war game was played. Each government had its own team. The line-up was formidable. Israeli experts played a group of Palestinian terrorists who hijacked a jetliner to Iran. Once the airliner arrived, the Ayatollah Khomeini held the American passengers hostage. He wouldn't give an inch. Neither would the terrorists. Former Israeli intelligence chief Aharon Yariv wouldn't budge, either. U.S. Ambassador Anthony Quainton, former head of the State Department's Office for Combating Terrorism, wanted to continue negotiating, while American military experts wanted to attempt an Entebbe-style rescue operation. The game ended with American hostages still held in Iran, and everyone returned to real life. Less than three months later, the U.S. embassy in Iran was actually taken over. The Ayatollah refused to free the hostages.

What happened? Why didn't the rehearsal pay off? The answer lies, in part, in the history of U.S. attempts to cope with terrorism. In response to the Palestinian-terrorist attack that left 11 Israeli athletes dead at the 1972 Olympic Games, Henry Kissinger formed the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism (C.C.C.T.). Composed of about a dozen people at the Cabinet level, it was supposed to formulate United States policy and design a strategy for coping with future incidents. The C.C.C.T.'s history is a simple one: It held one meeting.

At that meeting, it was decided to delegate the problem. A working group was formed. The C.C.C.T. Working Group (C.C.C.T.W.G.) met perhaps 100 times. It is axiomatic in government that a committee's importance diminishes with the passage of time, no matter what its business. At first, assistant secretaries and undersecretaries attended the meetings. After a while, however, no one above the rank of colonel was showing up. Moreover, some two dozen departments and agencies were represented within the C.C.C.T.W.G. The meetings were usually 75 or 100 people strong. Not only were there too many people in one room to get anything done but the various representatives wouldn't talk with one another. The issues were too sensitive. A lot of information was classified, and no one was sure who could (or should) know what. The FBI, for example, steadfastly insisted that it had the terrorist problem solved.

By 1974, it had become obvious that the C.C.C.T.W.G. wouldn't work. The Executive Group was formed. This was a pared-down version of the working group that wouldn't work, with representatives from the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Treasury; the Joint Chiefs; the FAA; the CIA; the Department of Energy; and the National Security Council. While the Executive Group did involve itself in planning for terrorist threats, it limited that planning to those situations it was sure could be handled. The members didn't want to think about more difficult problems that might arise. As Kupperman puts it, "They can solve all the problems that will go away on their own. The trickier ones, such as an attack on the electrical power grid or the use of germ warfare, they wouldn't touch."

Virtually the same group, consisting of the same key people (mostly at the three-star-general level), exists today.

In spite of all the bureaucratic confusion, however, the United States does have a plan of sorts for coping with terrorism. It involves what is called the lead-agency concept. If the incident occurs on U.S. soil, the Justice Department (FBI) will take the lead. If the incident takes place abroad, the State Department will take charge. When Carter came to power, he issued Presidential Review Memo (PRM)-30, which stated four things: (1) The U.S. would never give in to a terrorist demand. (2) The lead-agency concept was to be followed. (3) The National Security-Council would coordinate Justice and State during a terrorist incident. (4) The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Centers for Disease Control would have responsibility for "cleaning up" after any terrorist incident that took on the proportions of a national emergency (e.g., the blackout of New York or the contamination of the San Francisco subway system with anthrax). Since Carter issued PRM-30, it is difficult to say that its major directions have been followed; no matter how good a document is, it is going to be violated in time of crisis. And there is serious question as to whether or not Fema can handle any emergency of this magnitude.

Fema is a composite agency, drawing from the Office of Preparedness, the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration, Civil Defense and half a dozen other offices. It is the same agency that is now well known for thinking up the scheme to provide everyone with change-of-address forms after a nuclear war. The strategy of this and all other agencies involved in contemplating terrorism is one of hiding behind a screen of secrecy and then hoping that whatever happens is either small enough to handle or so enormous that no one can be blamed for failing to cope with it.

Perhaps the most important thing to know about this complex mechanism for responding to terrorism is that it was in place when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was captured. Although it was supposedly ready to swing into action the moment the incident occurred, the entire U.S. apparatus to cope with terrorism was ignored during the Iranian crisis. Ad hoc committees were hastily thrown together to come up with solutions to the problem, with widely publicized and tragic results. That, in short, is precisely what would happen today if another major terrorist incident occurred. It may be worse now than under the Carter Administration, because Reagan's failure to prove the Soviet connection has forced him into the position of quietly dropping the ball in favor of some other more manageable public-relations tool. Terrorism, it seems, is just too hot to handle.

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For the counterterrorists, however, the problem is too hot not to handle. And whether or not you take the point of view that terrorism in the U.S. is imminent, the most difficult part of dealing with it or preparing to deal with it is going to be avoiding the appearance of a police state. Because terrorism is such a complex and subtle weapon, our reaction to it must be carefully thought out. Overnight solutions make nice politics but little else.

As Clifford has written: "Thus did Pisistratus appear in the market place with wounds that he claimed had been inflicted in a murder attack by rival factions; he asked for and received, thereby, a vote of confidence giving him a bodyguard of citizens. Since a bodyguard has no predetermined size and there were no other forces to control its growth, Pisistratus was able to expand the force into a personal army to repress the citizens of Athens. And his method was copied not only by Dionysius of Syracuse but also by a number of modern dictators from Hitler to Idi Amin and from Lenin to the late 'Papa Doc' Duvalier."

In December 1982, a 66-year-old Miami man drove his van up to the Washington Monument and got out wearing a snowmobile suit and a helmet. He refused to speak with police but did tell a reporter that the truck was loaded with high explosives and that he would blow up the monument if something weren't done about nuclear-arms control. Meanwhile, nine people were inside the monument, afraid to come out. The situation dragged on through the afternoon and into the night. The "hostages" walked away without interference from the "terrorist." At some point, the man decided to move his truck, and the police opened fire, killing him.

Reflecting on the situation, a well-known expert on hostage negotiations says that there was no communication between the man and a police negotiator--none of the human transference of feelings that usually takes place. "For that reason, and the basic belief that they had to make an object lesson out of the situation, there was a lot of macho, a lot of hysteria involved. Most of us suspected that he had no explosives anyway. And even if he had them, there was no risk to anyone. The police could have surrounded the van with buses, for example. Even if he had set off explosives, that would have contained the blast. If he didn't set them off, they could have shot out his tires and waited him out. And, of course, he had no explosives. But the park police couldn't stand the embarrassment, so they killed this 66-year-old man."

If terrorists were watching and were pleased when President Gemayel stayed at the Madison Hotel in Washington, they would have been delighted to see U.S. authorities, just blocks from the White House, slaughtering an old man in a snowmobile suit while the President moved his dinner guests to the other side of the mansion so as not to be disturbed by the gunfire.

The point is, there are times when we can afford to be humane. There are times, in fact, when to avoid the appearance of a police state we are obligated to act humanely. Here there was no question of national sovereignty involved. Nothing was at stake. To take a life was to play the very role real terrorists would prefer the U.S. to play: the imperialist ogre lashing out.

And that, finally, may be the most difficult challenge a democratic nation faces from the terrorist threat: to be alert enough to see terrorism where it exists--but wise enough to resist seeing it where it does not.

'"The entire crisis treatment of terrorism has been one of denial,' Kupperman says."