Conferees Face Up to the Ticking Time Bomb of Terrorism

Resolved: That this body call upon the Administration and governments of the states to deny landing rights at international airports in this country to airplanes from nations whose governments continue to provide assistance to terrorists.

--Passed by acclamation at this week’s International Conference on Terrorism in Los Angeles.

One of the first things to jar the senses was a display outside the ballroom of the elegant Sheraton Premiere in Universal City. Set out on a white-draped table were some tools of the terrorists’ trade: a decorated tin gift box containing foil-wrapped bonbons--and a small bomb. A woman’s shoe with its wedge heel hollowed out to hide a booby trap. A deadly orange plastic toy telephone.

Sunday’s daylong conference attracted about 400 people who had paid $125 each to hear what the experts think about worldwide terrorism.

A Moment of Silence

It began with a moment of silence for the victims, in particular the five Americans who had died within the week--four of them sucked through the side of a TWA jet when a bomb exploded on board near Athens, a fifth killed in an explosion in a West Berlin disco.

William Belzberg, conference co-chairman for the sponsoring Simon Wiesenthal Center, quickly got the attention of his audience with his observation that this is war--and in this kind of war, each person in the room would be considered “fair game”--perhaps at the supermarket, perhaps while on an airplane. “All, to the warped mind, are a legitimate enemy,” he noted.

Indeed, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, center dean, this conference had been planned for four months and the spate of recent terrorist incidents was merely unfortunate coincidence. But, he added, within any four-month period “you can be assured there’ll be a terrorist attack.”

Dismayed by their perception that the American public has shown a certain “distance from the subject,” Hier said, the center called the conference to focus attention on the problem, to shake people out of their apathy. In his view, “We ought to be concerned about this as much as we ought to be concerned about inflation. The lives of Americans are on the line every day.”

Obviously, some are concerned, so much so that they stayed away, he said, fearing that the meeting itself--where speakers included a former U.S. government official, an Israeli and a West German journalist--might be targeted for violence. Said Hier, “People called and asked us, ‘What security do you have?’ ”

No Place to Hide

Hier shrugged. “You can’t just go and hide. If people are afraid to walk out of their houses in the United States, then the terrorists have won the war. We can’t show that kind of fear.” (Nonetheless, he acknowledged, conference sponsors had asked a former security chief at the Israeli consulate here to hire six guards who were posted outside the hotel--he said he did not know if they were armed--and several more were posted inside.)

Brian Michael Jenkins, director of Rand Corp.’s research program on subnational conflict and political violence and a recognized authority on international terrorism, opened the morning’s panel by noting that while 1985 marked an all-time high in international terrorism--with 480 incidents and 854 fatalities--1986 “will probably bring us more of the same,” and be bloodier.

Only 10 years ago, Jenkins said, even the so-called experts would have considered “far-fetched” the idea of bombs blowing up on airliners, explosives-laden trucks ramming U.S. embassies on suicide missions, U.S. embassy personnel being taken hostage, erection of protective concrete barriers around the White House.

While killing “in quantity” and indiscriminately has escalated, Jenkins said, he has sensed a degree of public acceptance which, in turn, has spurred terrorists to further escalation “in order to stay in the headlines.”

Today, he said, the perpetrators are terrorists “who are terrorists for the sake of terrorism” and, in many cases, they have “state sponsorship.” He spoke of “an insidious trend toward legitimizing terrorism,” most of which is directed toward two nations--the United States and Israel. (In the last decade, he noted, terrorists have pegged U.S. targets in 72 countries.)

Unlike Israel, Jenkins said, the United States does not consider itself at war and one result is that there is no sustained public demand for retaliation, only short-lived response to specific terrorist actions.

Dilemma of Retaliation

In the face of “increasing perceptions of impotence” worldwide on the part of the United States, Jenkins said, the United States faces the dilemma of retaliation against an elusive enemy: “Whom does it hit?” And how? “To match the terrorists car bomb for car bomb” is no solution, he added.

Frankly, Jenkins said, “I don’t believe that there is a solution”--terrorism cannot be stopped “as if it were some kind of AIDS,” he said. Nor can U.S. law be imposed worldwide--”We can hardly impose it in our streets”--so terrorism is a fact “we’re going to have to live with” until changes in the climate of public opinion encourage the government to take a stronger defensive posture.

Later, Jenkins said he sees terrorist attacks within the United States as only “a remote threat,” pointing out that terrorists get every bit as much American press by bombing a disco in West Berlin as they would “if they carried out the attacks in Leesburg, Va.” and Western Europe provides them with both protection (partly because of the large Muslim population) as well as the promise of lenient treatment if caught.

There is always the potential for “a real (domestic) spectacular” Jenkins said, reasoning that no terrorist is going to come over here just to “put down a pipe bomb” in the dark of night at some government building. But, he cautioned, “It would be a mistake to adopt a Ft. Apache mentality.”

Robert C. McFarlane, until December President Reagan’s national security adviser, was a key figure in negotiations following the hijacking of a TWA jetliner by Shia Muslims over Greece in June, 1985. (Thirty-nine hostages were freed safely after 16 days, but an American Navy man was killed by the hijackers.) McFarlane agreed that U.S. policy in dealing with international terrorism has been largely “ineffectual,” that bursts of public anger are tempered in time with a kind of acceptance.

‘Cautious to a Fault’

Referring to the most recent killings, McFarlane said, “A week from now most people’s thoughts will be on other things.” And, he added, “At the national level your government reacts similarly . . . cautious to a fault, probably” and, always, keeping in mind what is “politically acceptable.”

He is dismayed, he said, by a widespread give-them-the-benefit-of-the-doubt attitude toward terrorists, a notion that they are motivated by some cause they perceive as great and noble. Terrorists, he emphasized, are neither guerrilla fighters nor revolutionaries but “self-appointed minorities bent on violence against innocent people” and it is necessary “to put aside the notion that there is any legitimate goal . . . (terrorism) deserves no sympathy whatsoever. This is nihilism.”

McFarlane suggested two possible actions, one passive, one active--a $3 billion beefing up of overseas protection with additional physical barriers and guards--and the deployment of clandestine U.S. forces to work with clandestine allies to track and apprehend terrorists and, when necessary, to infiltrate terrorist training camps and make preemptive military strikes against those camps.

Benjamin Netanyahu is both Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations and the younger brother of Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, leader of the Israeli commando force that led the daring rescue raid of a hijacked airliner and its 100-plus passengers at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. Jonathan Netanyahu, 30, was the only Israeli casualty of that raid.

Benjamin Netanyahu, also the author of “Terrorism--How the West Can Win,” soon to be published by Straus & Giroux, suggested that “you cannot fight what you don’t understand” and many of his U.N. colleagues would still argue that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

Designed to Inspire Fear

To his mind, Netanyahu said, the distinguishing factor in terrorism is “a deliberate targeting of civilians . . . the more removed they are the better”--deliberate and systematic murder and maiming designed to inspire fear.

He spoke of the danger in the “blurring” of the most important distinction in the laws of war--soldiers fight soldiers, not civilians--and the resultant “blurring of our moral sense . . . we are gradually being conditioned to these wild beasts who prowl our airways and our waterways.”

In the face of growing international terrorism nurtured by a collaboration of Marxist and Muslim radicals, Netanyahu said, target nations must adopt an attitude of, “I will not yield.” Men such as Yasir Arafat and Libya’s Moammar Kadafi, he suggested, are no different from the kindergarten bully and “the only thing you can do against bullies is say, ‘Stop, and I’ll fight you if you don’t’ . . . very, very rarely are terrorists prepared to die. They’re bullies. They think they can get away with it.”

Even though those who commit terrorist acts are no “supermen,” and they will respond to deterrents, he said what must be remembered is that the real battle has to be waged against “the godfathers” and not just “the trigger men.” How can they be reached? Through political sanctions, economic sanctions, denial of landing rights and docking rights, he said--and military response. “If a government has harbored, trained and launched terrorists, it becomes a legitimate object of military response.”

Libya, for example, he said, has 20 known terrorist training camps and “such a government forfeits any claim of immunity.”

A Winnable War

In his view, Netanyahu said, the West “can win the war against terrorism” but “it must first win its war against inner weakness.” The latter, he said, will require that government leaders tell the truth, no matter how unpopular; that soldiers in the field make the decisions about the feasibility of a military operation and that those who live in a democracy show “civic valor” and resist pressuring their governments to capitulate to terrorism. (Specifically, he mentioned pressure by families of hostages.)

Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the German newspaper Die Deutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University, opened his remarks by telling of two hikers who were approached by a grizzly bear. One hiker watched, incredulous, as the other started tying on his jogging shoes. He scoffs at the notion that a person could outrun a grizzly. “Ah, but you don’t understand,” replied the man in the jogging shoes, “I have only to outrun you.”

Since the late ‘70s, Joffe said, as the United States has become terrorists’ No. 1 target abroad, Western Europeans have acted much like the jogger--they have “tried more or less successfully to get out of the way.”

He attributed this to the fact that Europe is, essentially, a collection of small powers and, with the exception of Israel, all small powers tend to leave these burdens to greater powers; to a general climate of passivism (especially in West Germany and Italy) and to the tendency of these nations to seek shelter behind “big brother,” in this case the United States.

Although these Western Europeans nations do not excuse terrorism, he said, they are not primary targets and, as a result, there is a tendency for them to make “little deals,” such as granting terrorists freedom of movement within their borders so long as the terrorists don’t mess with them. (He noted, for example, that the French caught the mastermind of the Munich massacre during the 1972 Olympic Games, but let him go.)

Whereas this unspoken policy resulted in a general decline in acts of terrorism in Western Europe in the late ‘70s, Joffe said, the West Berlin disco bombing early Saturday was evidence that “this deal has been blowing up in our faces.” As additional evidence, he pointed to violence last year at airports in both Vienna and Rome and terrorists’ use of the Athens airport as a “turntable” for their activities.

Other factors contributing to the increase in activities in Western European nations, he said, are the rise of “bizarre groups with bizarre names” in place of the Yasir Arafat-controlled PLO, the rise of state-sponsored terrorism in Libya, Iran and Syria and, finally, the fact that “leniency brings its own punishment.” He observed that Greece, Italy and Austria, in the past the most pliable nations, are now the most frequently targeted in Europe.

Joffe said it was no surprise that no European nations have joined in U.S. economic sanctions against Libya because many have vested interests--for example, he pointed out, 12,000 Italian citizens live in Libya.

Ted Koppel, anchorman for ABC’s ‘Nightline,” was there in the role of devil’s advocate--wondering, for example, if the day’s program had been merely “preaching to the converted,” sparring with McFarlane on the issues of press responsibility in covering terrorists and what Koppel perceives as government’s reluctance to be open with the media during these crises.

And he questioned the speakers’ contention that only innocent civilians and bystanders are victims of terrorists. What, he asked, of the U.S. Marines who died in the bombing of the Beirut barracks?

Koppel asked, too, whether it’s possible that today’s terrorists might become tomorrow’s leaders and, in view of that, if it might be a mistake to dismiss all terrorists’ goals and objectives.

Netanyahu suggested the need to distinguish between “the goals of any war and the means of war.”

Terrorism, he said, is defined not by an ideology but by “the quality of the act” and “one man’s terrorist is every man’s terrorist.”