FBI Chief Confident in Terrorism Fight : Warns Against Panic, Says Problem Is Dealt With Appropriately

FBI Director William H. Webster said Thursday that the only way terrorists can “destabilize” the United States “is if we panic ourselves into taking extraordinarily repressive measures against a problem that is, at present, being fully addressed.”

“I know there is a potential for great pressure to bend the rules and do what’s necessary” to prevent terrorism outbreaks in the United States, Webster said at breakfast with The Times’ Washington bureau. “We have to keep reminding ourselves that the terrorist wins whenever the terrorist succeeds in busting up a system in a free society.

“Terrorism expertise is becoming a cottage industry,” Webster said, “and it’s very easy for everybody to say it will be here next month or next year, and if they’re wrong, no one will remember.

“It’s hard for me to say it isn’t coming next month, because it might,” he said. “But, on the basis of the evidence we have, we believe that we are dealing with the problem appropriately and . . . certainly are not panicked by what’s taking place at the present time.”

Drug Link Doubted

Webster also disputed the suggestion, heard both at the White House and in Congress, that terrorists and drug traffickers have joined forces to undermine the United States and other democracies.

“Words like ‘narco-terrorism’ tend to exacerbate the realities as we know them,” Webster said. “I do not believe that the hard evidence links the two, that we are in a situation in which the terrorists have become drug dealers or the drug dealers have become terrorists.”

Citing Cuba, Webster said there is “good evidence that particular individuals in governments have from time to time sweetened their own pockets by accommodating both terrorists and drug traffickers. But I think it’s a mistake to say that Cuba is in the drug-running business or that Cuba is using drugs to support terrorism.”

Webster’s remark seems to contradict his boss, President Reagan, who said in a Jan. 2 press conference that “the link between the governments of such Soviet allies as Cuba and Nicaragua and international narcotics trafficking and terrorism is becoming increasingly clear. These twin evils, narcotics trafficking and terrorism, represent the most insidious and dangerous threats to the hemisphere today.”

Not Inevitable

Webster, noting that 40% of terrorist incidents “affect U.S. persons or institutions abroad,” said: “I don’t think we should buy the proposition that it’s inevitable that we be subjected to the kind of terrorism that other countries have experienced.”

He pointed to “good law enforcement in place and good intelligence” that he said discourages terrorists from striking inside the United States. Recalling the 1984 Olympics and the World’s Fair and two national political conventions that occurred in that same year, Webster said those who thought about committing terrorist acts at these events knew “there was a substantial deterrence.”

It Is ‘Much Easier’

Webster said it is “much easier to go shoot an American middle-level military attache in some other part of the world or to bomb an American facility where law enforcement was not as effective, where the intelligence was not as effective and where the population or the government involved might be more ambivalent about the problem.”

The United States “is not fertile ground for terrorism to flourish in,” Webster said. “It doesn’t mean that they won’t use it because of the potential for a big media event . . . We’ve got a society where change can occur through constitutional means. There are just very few people relative to the 200-plus-million people that we have in this country who think that revolution is the solution to a problem.”

‘Some Vulnerability’

At the same time, Webster acknowledged that, in an open society such as the United States, “there is some vulnerability that we will never completely close.”

The FBI director said terrorism is more difficult to stage inside the United States than outside, “particularly if they (the terrorists) want to leave in one piece. If you bring in suicide people, you might have a different result, but even that kind of fanaticism tends to thin out the farther they get from home.”

Webster said there has been “a very effective effort to keep the infrastructures (utilities, roads, schools, transportation systems) that are already in place from being the vehicle for a coordinated terrorist attempt in the United States.”

Terrorists “have the problem of assembling the explosives, of getting the people in and identifying the targets,” he noted, “and it continues to be much easier to do . . . outside the United States.”

Webster said he was talking “not in the abstract,” adding: “I do know a fair amount about the considerations and the plans, the discussions that have been started and stopped and occasionally aborted by us and the measures that we have taken quietly to deal with this.”