Same Game, New Targets : Terrorism Expert Leaves RAND to Join Firm That Probes Corporate Crime

As a Green Beret captain in Vietnam, Brian Jenkins developed an understandable interest in guerrilla warfare. But when he returned to the United States in 1968 as a consultant for RAND Corp., he found himself wondering whether a new tactic would become an accepted form of warfare--terrorism.

Jenkins began recording the occasional political kidnaping or hijacking on 3-by-5 index cards and wrote memos at RAND, the Santa Monica-based “think tank,” warning of a possible trend to come. He got no response.

Then, in 1972 terrorists slaughtered 25 people at Lod Airport in Israel and a dozen more at the Munich Olympics. In the United States, a Cabinet-level committee was formed to combat terrorism. Within weeks, the government discovered Jenkins’ memos.

Soon, he was working full time at RAND, preparing policy recommendations for Washington and scrapping the index cards for a computer, quickly becoming one of the foremost experts on terrorism.

But after two decades, Jenkins is leaving behind his computer--with 7,000 terrorist incidents logged in its memory bank. He is departing RAND to pursue a new interest: corporate crime.

Shedding the khakis-and-sneakers informality of RAND for a blue suit--or what he used to call “going-to-Washington clothes”--Jenkins began work this week at the downtown Los Angeles offices of Kroll Associates, the nation’s leading corporate investigations firm. Once dubbed “Wall Street’s private eye,” the New York-based Kroll is best known for its high-priced work digging into the background of corporate raiders.

The 47-year-old Jenkins, who has been named a managing partner at Kroll, said he will not be doing that type of snooping but will concentrate on product-tampering cases, terrorism against corporations and “information crime.”

“I’m moving on to a different sort of villain,” he said. “Some throw bombs, others have Swiss bank accounts.”

Although Jenkins will still do some consulting with RAND on government contracts, he said he had gotten “a little too comfortable” as the chief in-house expert on terrorism; he could not see himself writing “another 200 reports” on the topic.

Rising to chairman of RAND’s political science department, Jenkins became one of the think tank’s highest-profile people, a fixture on network newscasts whenever there was a terrorist act.

His opinions were elicited by journalists on such varied questions as how Iran was likely to respond to U.S. bombing of an offshore oil platform to the impact of terrorist bombings on Paris fashion shows.

“Brian, in a sense, established the idea that you could do policy research on terrorism,” said RAND President James A. Thomson. “He quickly became a national spokesman. A high profile is not something we would expect every staff member to have, but there are certain issues where the client is as much the American people as the government.”

‘Field Manual for Hostages’

One of Jenkins’ early projects was to prepare a “field manual for hostages,” material to alert diplomats to conditions they would face if seized by terrorists.

He interviewed former hostages around the world and pondered the strange process by which they often came to identify with--”even fall in love with”--the terrorists who held them. He concluded that this was a natural human reaction and should not be condemned. He recommended that released hostages not be thrust immediately before the cameras because they needed time to reflect on their experience.

In recent years, Jenkins acted as a consultant to Catholic Relief Services after Father Lawrence M. Jenko was abducted in Beirut. He helped steer the group away from a series of con men who claimed to have Lebanese connections who could secure Jenko’s release for a fee.

Despite his combat background and rugged, square-jawed looks, Jenkins has been a voice of moderation.

For years, he challenged those who claimed that the Soviet Union was the mastermind behind all anti-Western political violence, saying that such an approach to terrorism “underestimates its depths, its extent and its danger.” Recently, he has participated in U.S. talks with the Soviet Union aimed at cooperation in combating terrorism.

‘Surgical Strike’

Jenkins said his war experiences made him intolerant of people who propose military force but describe it with antiseptic terms such as “surgical strike.”

“I always ask them, ‘Are you talking about killing people?’ Because what it comes down to is killing people and destroying things.”

When top government officials ask him to comment on drafts of their speeches, Jenkins said, he spends his first 20 minutes crossing out bellicose language denouncing the atrocities and threats that sound like the “swagger of professional wrestlers.”

“I tell them, ‘Take it as a given that people see this is an atrocity.’ ”

All the pounding on the table only seems silly, he explained, when the speech almost invariably concludes with the whimper of, “Therefore, we recommend economic sanctions.”

Of course, such efforts at editing are not always accepted by government officials who are enraged and frustrated by acts of terrorism. “I cross it out,” he said, “and it gets back in.”

Jenkins has received periodic feelers about taking government jobs but has always resisted, considering himself “too much of a West Coast maverick” to survive in Washington.

“He’d have a hard time in government . . . conforming to a line if he didn’t agree with it,” said RAND’s Thomson, a former staff member of the National Security Council. “He’d be fired,” he added with a laugh.

But Jenkins has done some corporate consulting over the years, and his specialty drew his attention to a series of product-tampering cases ranging from poison-filled Tylenol capsules in the United States to threats to taint tea from Sri Lanka and fruit from South Africa.

‘The Dark Side’

Although such incidents often have been the work of crackpots or simple extortionists, “that’s how hijackings started,” he noted. “I tend to look at that and say, ‘What do villains do with that? What’s the dark side of that?’ ”

The recent poisoning of grapes from Chile illustrated the dark possibilities, he said. “Two poison grapes--$100 million economic damage.”

At Kroll Associates, Jenkins said, he has been given freedom to explore the danger of “commercial fraud on a grand international scale” and such crimes as the theft of secrets and computer sabotage.

Founded in 1972 by a former Manhattan prosecutor, Kroll has offices in London, Hong Kong, San Francisco and several other cities. The firm, which handled more than 1,000 investigations last year, is often called on in takeover deals.

Kroll was also hired to help the defense of Drexel Burnham Lambert and indicted “junk bond” wizard Michael Milken to discredit jailed stock speculator Ivan F. Boesky, who is expected to testify for the prosecution.

In a statement announcing Jenkins’ arrival, Kroll said the RAND expert will “expand our global capabilities.”

Still trying to figure out how to unlock the door to his new office, Jenkins admitted this week to feeling a bit out of place in a downtown high-rise “surrounded by guys who read the Wall Street Journal and who know what soybeans are doing.”

“It’s a little scary,” he said. “ . . . I am now where I was in 1970 with terrorism. I’ve got the notion of a new universe. I just don’t have a map of it yet.”

To help him, he has arranged for a RAND computer expert to help him part time in the corporate post.

“We’re going to make some new databases,” he said. “We’ll probably start with 3-by-5 cards.”