Terrorism : A World Trembles

‘Even if you have to blow up half a continent, have no qualms.’

--19th-Century German radical Karl Heinzen

A long-haired German construction worker. A sociology professor from Florence. A Belgian printer. A laid-off Yugoslav factory hand.

Each took Der Sprung --”The Leap”--as the Germans call it, going underground to plot, bomb and kill with the radical bands waging terror wars across Europe. Social scientists are trying to discover why.

“If we want to stop terrorism,” said University of Rome psychiatrist Franco Ferracuti, “we must understand terrorists.”

Ferracuti and other investigators, undertaking independent studies of the terrorist mind, have found common traits: They frequently are loners, have lost parents while young, were failing professionally or educationally. They usually are middle-class, with above-average schooling. Guilt feelings often burden them.

Government Study

Although frightened citizens may consider them deranged, “the studies have found conclusively that the large majority of terrorists are not psychotics,” Washington-based behavioral scientist Jerrold Post, who has studied terrorists for the U.S. government, noted in a telephone interview.

Law-enforcement officials agree.

“Their ‘fanaticism’ is extremely overrated,” Raymond E. Kendall, chief of the Interpol police network, said in a Paris interview. “ . . . They prepare their operations very carefully. If I were a professional criminal going to rob a bank, I would behave in the same way. It is a criminal approach.”

The range of personalities and political causes makes generalizations difficult. But Post categorizes terrorists according to their feelings toward their parents.

“Anarchic ideologues,” such as West Germany’s Red Army Faction and Italy’s Red Brigades, are disloyal to parents who are loyal to the existing system, Post says. “Nationalist separatists,” such as the Palestinian guerrillas and Irish Republican Army, are loyal to families disloyal to the regime.

Family Support Important

With the support of family and ethnic community, the nationalists are usually better “adjusted” and may operate relatively openly.

Ferracuti, in an interview in his Rome office, noted that the Palestinians, for example, have achievable, non-Utopian goals, “and that makes it easy to recruit members.”

But Western Europe’s far-left terrorists “are trying to impose a utopian dream on a world saying, ‘Leave us alone,’ ” and therefore must lead clandestine lives, the 58-year-old psychiatrist said.

Ferracuti, who has written widely cited studies of Red Brigades members, Puerto Rican separatists and other radicals, traces the European terrorist movement to the student upheavals of the late 1960s, when university graduates could not find jobs and the Vietnam War was radicalizing Western youth.

Among Italian and West German terrorists, he said, half attended universities and an above-average number were unemployed before going underground.

“For a young man in post-adolescent crisis at the end of the 1960s in Italy . . . terrorism was a way to express political involvement,” Ferracuti said.

By devoting their lives to an ideology--usually Marxist--they may have filled an “existential vacuum” that drove others into the drug culture or simple drifting, Ferracuti theorizes.

“These are people who are misfits, with a poor family life. A member of the family is usually missing. . . .

“But,” he concluded, “I can find no psychopathology.”

Post believes that terrorists justify personal failures by blaming the system--”The idea that ‘it is not us, it’s them.’ ” In a sense, the terrorist group is the first real family they have found, he said.

Competing With Father

More darkly, some psychologists also detect an urge toward patricide--or, if not to kill, at least to outdo a father who, in many cases, is blamed by the son for taking no action against fascism in the 1940s.

The psychologists--and security officials who know terrorists well--agree that the conversion process is slow, step by step. But occasionally a critical event occurs.

Ex-Red Army Faction member Michael Baumann wrote in an autobiography that when West Berlin police shot and killed a friend during a 1967 demonstration, Baumann had a “tremendous flash” that eventually convinced him “we must now fight without mercy.”

Many other terrorists also feel they are on the defensive against a powerful aggressor state, the specialists say. Ferracuti describes it as a “fantasy war.” The terrorists’ terminology reflects it--they are “armies” and “brigades” that engage in “military operations” and demand “prisoner of war” status when captured.

Lose Sense of Reality

“These people lose their sense of reality,” said Hans-Werner Kuehn, a top West German anti-terrorist police official. “In their writings, they see themselves as if they could fight and defeat the ‘imperialist’ system--a blatant misjudgment of their own capabilities.”

They also are found to have little remorse about killing people they view as agents of “the system”--whether policemen, industrialists, labor leaders or others. Italy’s right-wing terrorists have killed indiscriminately, exploding large bombs in public places in the apparent belief that general panic will bring on the authoritarianism they want.

“It’s the Reds and the Blacks. If you are not a member of their group, you are an untermensch --a non-human,” Ferracuti said.

But they are not uniformly ruthless. The specialists say terrorists have disclosed in interviews that each escalation of violence stirs dissent in their ranks. Eventually the more violent prevail.

In another “confessional” book, ex-Red Brigades assassin Patrizio Peci says he began to lose his detachment one day when one of his victims, pleading futilely for mercy, suddenly struck him as a human being like himself.

In the search for causes, physiologists are even trying to identify body chemicals that stimulate terrorist acts. But some experts caution against emphasizing the scientific approach over the political.

Brian M. Jenkins, a leading American theorist on terrorism, says looking for mental illness among terrorists “might have great appeal to those who would prefer not to face the fact of social, economic or political injustices in the world.”

Ferracuti contends, however, that more comprehensive studies ultimately might help control terrorist violence. “We are barely scratching the surface,” he said.