Terrorism Bomb Expert Called to S.D.

The FBI has summoned an expert in terrorist explosives to San Diego to help investigate last week’s bombing of a van owned by Navy Capt. Will Rogers III, a federal source said Tuesday as the cruiser Vincennes sailed for the first time since the incident.

Also Tuesday, a bomb threat was called in to La Jolla Country Day School, where Rogers’ wife, Sharon, works, just before 10 a.m.

Lt. William L. Brown of the San Diego Police Department said nothing unusual was found at the school by officers and a bomb-sniffing dog.

The caller “just said it was a bomb and that they were going to blow the thing up,” Brown said. “But we couldn’t find anything on it. It was thought to be a crank call.”

Took the Week Off

Sharon Rogers took the week off and has been under the protection of Navy security officials since the explosion Friday, which occurred while she was driving the family van to the school.

The explosives expert from the San Francisco office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms will take a close look at the destroyed van in the hope of picking up missed clues to the origin of the pipe bomb that destroyed the Rogers vehicle.

Another federal investigator said the specialist will find little to work with. Only a few pipe fragments were recovered from the scene at Genesee Avenue and La Jolla Village Drive, and there was no chemical residue left from the powder charge to allow agents to trace the explosive’s origin, the investigator said.

FBI agents in charge of the investigation called in the San Francisco specialist, who formerly worked for the Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Detachment, for his experience in probing “numerous” terrorist bombings throughout the world, the federal source said.

The Vincennes sailed from the 32nd Street Naval Station with Rogers in command Tuesday morning for a routine daylong training exercise off the San Diego coast, with the crew “in high spirits and very motivated,” according to Chief Petty Officer Craig Huebler, a Navy spokesman.

Rogers commanded the Vincennes on a tour of the Persian Gulf last July when the cruiser shot down an unarmed Iranian airliner with 290 aboard, mistaking it for an attacking fighter jet. He is scheduled to remain in command until May 27, when he takes over as commander of the Tactical Training Group on Point Loma.

FBI officials in San Diego would not comment on the continued possibility of organized terrorism being responsible for the bombing.

“We are not overlooking any eventuality, including a terrorist bombing,” said Gary Laturno, an FBI spokesman in San Diego.

However, an FBI spokesman in Washington said agents in San Diego are circulating a composite drawing of a “Middle Eastern-appearing” man reportedly seen near the Rogerses’ La Jolla home in recent weeks.

He emphasized that the drawing is not of a suspect. Instead, the agents were using the composite for “lead checking--nothing more.” He added that investigators have not linked the bombing to “any group or motive.”

“I don’t get the sense there are any red-hot leads,” said another federal source familiar with the case.

Two neighbors of the Rogerses, who asked not to be identified, said FBI agents asked them about reports that three Middle Eastern-looking men in a green BMW had inquired where the Vincennes captain lived.

Asked About House

One neighbor said an FBI agent visited her Saturday and informed her that the men had asked someone to point out the Rogers home. The agent told her that the men specifically asked which vehicle in the Rogers driveway was usually driven by Mrs. Rogers, the neighbor told The Times.

Meanwhile, U. S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), quoted in many Tuesday newspapers as suggesting that the bomber was probably an individual and not a state-supported terrorist, said through an aide that his remarks were not based on any special insight.

Wilson, who was not briefed by authorities, was surprised his quotations took on a tone of inside knowledge in news accounts, the aide said. “He was simply giving his opinion based on what he has heard and read in the papers,” said Otto Bos, special assistant to Wilson.

Experts on terrorism cautioned Tuesday that the possibility of well-trained terrorists should not be ruled out just because the bombing attempt failed and the heat-sensitive device that triggered the bomb appears crude and unsophisticated.

They pointed out that Yu Kikumura, a Japanese Red Army terrorist trained in the Middle East, was arrested in New Jersey after a police officer happened to notice that he was acting suspiciously outside the trunk of his car. Inside the trunk, the officer found three pipes, ordinary gunpowder and a set of nails.

“Those looked awfully primitive and crude, too,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist with the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. “But, if those bombs went off, we wouldn’t be saying he was all that amateurish.”

Hoffman also said that, in about 60% of terrorist attacks, no one claims responsibility. No one has claimed responsibility for last week’s bombing, but Hoffman said the attack was not done for publicity.

“They obviously wanted to kill somebody,” he said.

Sgt. Conrad Grayson of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said that, in 12 years as a bomb disposal expert--recovering thousands of explosives--he had never seen a single heat-activated device like the bomb that destroyed the Rogers van.

Bombs are normally detonated with a time-delay fuse or wired to the car’s battery or ignition so the motorist will trigger the explosion, Grayson said.

“There are a lot easier, more effective ways to do it than heat-related,” he said. “That is too sloppy of a way to build a bomb. It’s not dependable.”

A federal source close to the investigation discounted published reports that indicated the explosion may have been caused by faulty ignitions in Toyotas.

“There’s no way it was accidental,” the source said. “There were metal fragments that blew through the roof of the van.”

He added that it was specifically that kind of a powerful force that has led authorities to believe that more than one pipe bomb may have been strapped to the van’s transmission.

Still, there has also been speculation that the bomb could have been planted by a sailor who for some reason is unhappy with Rogers, a veteran Navy officer.

Navy Radioman Wendell Melton was found guilty in 1987 of placing a crude pipe bomb under a car in Long Beach belonging to Capt. Kenneth R. Barry, then commanding officer of the amphibious assault ship Pelileu. Melton, 23, was a crewman aboard the ship.

The fuse on Melton’s bomb consisted of a piece of paper attached to a clothespin. It was discovered by Barry before it could detonate, and authorities doubted whether it was rigged adequately to explode at all. Melton was sentenced to three years of confinement after a court-martial.

Meanwhile, along the U. S.-Mexican border Tuesday in San Diego, the most-utilized crossing point for undocumented foreigners, inspectors and investigators were at a “heightened” state of alert.

The FBI asked border guards to look out for a red Dodge Omni that was seen speeding from the La Jolla intersection at the moment of the explosion Friday. Agents said the car could return to the United States after possibly being driven to Mexico.

Rudy Murillo, an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in San Diego, said the U. S. Border Patrol had been put on alert before Friday’s bombing, but he declined to elaborate.

However the alert is believed to involve intensified lookouts for anyone who fits an unspecified “terrorist” profile. The contents of such profiles--or whether such descriptions are even minimally accurate--are not disclosed.

Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Richard Serrano and Patrick McDonnell in San Diego, Chris Woodyard in Long Beach and Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington.