Terrorism and the Numbers Game: First The Good News . . . : Reports of political violence took a sharp decline last year. But the figures can be deceiving, analysts say. And the calm isn’t likely to last for long.

Two decades after the first peacetime hijacking of a commercial airliner, the State Department announced some good news on terrorism the other day.

After an almost continuous climb, the department’s annual report said, incidents of international terrorism fell by 38% last year, the sharpest one-year drop in the 22 years that such statistics have been kept. Attacks aimed at Americans overseas also declined and claimed far fewer lives--16 last year, compared with 192 the year before.

Coming on top of the apparently unconditional release of two American hostages in Lebanon last month, the news from the people who keep the grim figures suggested that the world might finally be turning into a kinder, gentler place.

But you had better underline the might, according to law enforcement and counterterrorism experts, who caution that the trend, if it exists at all, may not last for long.

While a number of developments--chiefly the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Middle East--have helped to curb terrorism over the past year, the experts say, there is no guarantee that they will continue to do so. Further, they warn, terrorism may only be going through a transition as the threat grows in the drug-producing areas of Latin America even as it wanes in the Middle East.

“What we’ve seen over the past two decades of studying terrorism is that, like many other phenomena, it moves in cyclic patterns,” said Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism with the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica.

Terrorism “rose in the early ‘70s, declined in the second half of the decade and started picking up again in 1982,” Hoffman said. “Now it’s declining again, but I wouldn’t conclude from this that international terrorism has passed us by.”

Robert H. Kupperman, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, warned that statistics can be deceiving. “I’ve long had a high disregard for the numbers game,” he said. “Numbers fluctuate, so you can’t really tell anything from that.”

By the State Department’s numbers, international terrorist attacks fell from 856 in 1988 to 528 in 1989.

But Robert Quigley, head of the FBI’s Bomb Data Center, used a broader definition of terrorism and reached the opposite conclusion. He reported last month that terrorist acts increased by 17%, from 3,734 in 1988 to 4,368 in 1989.

The discrepancy stems from the fact that the State Department counts only incidents of international terrorism--those involving two or more nations or citizens of different countries. Quigley also counts terrorism that stems from ethnic conflicts and domestic violence.

“International terrorism is falling at the same time that domestic terrorism is rising--especially in areas such as Lebanon, where some groups are attacking their own constituents,” said Paul Wilkinson, a terrorism expert with Scotland’s University of Aberdeen.

The State Department does not register a terrorist incident when a Lebanese faction detonates a car bomb in a neighborhood of Beirut controlled by a rival faction. “But it’s still terrorism, and if you put both the figures for national and international terrorism together, you come up not with a decline but an actual increase,” Wilkinson said.

The old adage that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” continues to confuse the 20-year-old debate over modern terrorism, experts in the field concede.

The State Department, for example, counted several instances in 1988 in which leftist guerrillas in El Salvador launched terrorist attacks not only against foreigners but against Salvadoran civilians as well.

But its report glided over the numerous reports of murders by military “death squads.” “There continued to be bombing incidents and killings which appear to be attributable to the right-wing,” it said.

Politics skew the statistics in more subtle ways as well. This year for the first time, the State Department did not count intra-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.

“This is the classic problem of whether you count the West Bank as part of Israel or not,” Kupperman said. “How you decide that determines whether you end up with numbers related to domestic terrorism or international terrorism.”

State Department officials say the decision to reclassify attacks by Palestinians against Palestinians in the West Bank was meant to avoid any implication that the United States recognizes Israel’s claim to the West Bank. If the West Bank is part of Jordan or a Palestinian state, such violence would be strictly internal and would not count as terrorism. But if it is part of Israel, the incidents, involving members of one nationality in another nation’s territory, would meet the State Department’s test for terrorism.

Regardless of whether excluding intra-Palestinian violence in the West Bank makes sense, it resulted in a false decline in terrorist incidents from the previous year. “In this case, it’s not the numbers that have changed, but (only) our way of counting them,” a State Department official said.

Despite such vagaries, most experts agree that international terrorism--at least as the State Department defines it--is on the decline as a result of changes on a variety of fronts, from upheavals in Eastern Europe and political shifts in Iran to the winding down of the war in Afghanistan and the evaporation of earlier financial support for regimes that support terrorism.

One of the most significant changes, according to the State Department, was the December, 1988, renunciation of terrorism by Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat. At least until last month’s attempt by gunmen from a PLO splinter group to attack the beach at Tel Aviv, it was a pledge that the State Department and most other terrorism experts agreed Arafat was keeping.

Another reason for the decline was a sharp drop in terrorist attacks by Afghan agents in Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. “Afghan terrorism, which accounted for a large chunk of terrorism in 1988, was down substantially in 1989 and probably won’t come back because of a pending settlement,” a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said.

But perhaps the most significant reason was an indirect one. Revolutions in Eastern Europe toppled a succession of Communist governments that had supplied training, weapons and intelligence to many terrorist groups.

Intelligence experts were shocked when Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s new president, disclosed recently that the former Communist regime in Prague had shipped 1,000 tons of lethal Semtex explosives to Libya over the years.

“The changes in Eastern Europe mean that groups will no longer be able to get Semtex from Czechoslovakia or small arms from other East European nations,” the senior counterterrorism official said. “They will have to look for new arms markets, and that will take time to develop.”

Last week, it was revealed that a half-dozen suspected Red Army Faction terrorists had been apprehended in East Germany recently as part of an extraordinary, cooperative effort by police on both sides of what used to be the East-West divide. East Germany admitted that the ousted Communist regime there had sheltered some of the West’s most wanted terrorists for more than a decade.

The East European reforms have also helped in another way. As Eastern Europe turns away from state sponsors of terrorism such as Libya and Syria, those nations are being forced to turn to the West for aid--and to cease their support for terrorism as part of the bargain.

“Middle Eastern states are finding it very costly to support terrorism,” Wilkinson said. “They may not have abandoned it, but now their involvement is much more discreet.”

This, say the experts, has had a trickle-down effect on at least two of the most notorious terrorists groups--the Abu Nidal organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command of Ahmed Jibril. As Syria and Libya move to restrict their actions and squeeze their financing, these groups have been thrown into an internal disarray.

Abu Nidal’s group is probably the “most vicious and bloody of all the terrorist organizations . . . but their internal problems prevented them from carrying out any serious attacks in 1989,” the counterterrorism official said.

To survive, these groups have been turning to Iran, which most experts agree is now the world’s main sponsor of terrorism. Jibril is reported to have bragged that Iran paid him handsomely to arrange the midair bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet that killed 270 people on the plane and on the ground at Lockerbie, Scotland, in December, 1988.

The bombing was believed to be in retaliation for the accidental U.S. downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf in July, 1988, with the loss of 290 lives.

Lately, however, even Iran has been trying to improve its relations with the West. Its desperate need of economic assistance was probably the main factor behind the release of two American hostages, Frank Reed and Robert Pohill, from Lebanon last month.

But if this is the sunny side of the picture, there is a darker one as well.

“Iran remains badly factionalized and still has radical groups” that don’t want a rapprochement with the West and continue to regard terrorism as “a main tactic of their foreign policy,” Kupperman said. Many of Iran’s Lebanese surrogates--including the hostage-holders--are of the same radical bent.

As a result, most experts hold little hope that the six Americans still in captivity there will be released soon without the kind of deal-making in which the Bush Administration says it will not engage.

Also, many of the forces inhibiting terrorism last year are still in flux. “Arafat seems to have put his money on the Middle East peace process. But if that continues to go nowhere, the hard-liners who support terrorism will grasp the reins of the Palestinian movement again,” Wilkinson warns.

One indication this may already be happening occurred May 30, terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front, a PLO splinter group, made their failed attempt to attack Israel from the sea.

And there are also signs that the Abu Nidal group may be growing active again. “We don’t expect them to remain quiet much longer. We think they have begun to sort out their internal problems,” the senior U.S. official said.

Counterterrorism experts also worry about two other problems--the recent shift in the pattern of violence from the Middle East to Latin America, where the Colombian drug cartels are becoming more vicious, and the proliferation of chemical weapons and ever-more sophisticated types of explosives, timers and other assorted tools of the terrorist trade.

“Overall, terrorism may be going down, but the qualitative risks are increasing,” Kupperman said.

“More sophisticated explosives, better means of concealment . . . this is the terrorist R&D; agenda for the ‘90s,” said Hoffman. He observed that it took only eight ounces of Semtex to blow up the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie. Yet, according to Havel, some 1,000 tons of the material is still in terrorist hands.

That, to anyone bold enough to do the arithmetic, works out to enough Semtex for another 4 million disasters such as the one at Lockerbie.

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.

The Scourge Called Terrorism

International Terrorist Incidents, 1989 in percent

By type of victim Government: 8.3 Military: 7.8 Business: 6.5 Diplomat: 6.1 Other: 71.3

By type of event Armed attack: 14.0 Kidnaping: 5.1 Sabotage: 4.1 Assault: 2.7 Barricade, Hijacking, other: 2.7 Arson: 27.5 Bombing: 43.9