NEWS ANALYSIS : New Breed of Terrorist Worries U.S. Officials : Violence: Latest threat appears to be loose groups of amateurs driven by ethnic or religious passions. Motives, targets are now harder to predict.

The discovery of an alleged plot to stage multiple bombings and assassinations in New York City points to a different kind of terrorist, with new tactics and targets that could present grave new dangers for the United States and the “new world order,” U.S. officials and terrorism experts say.

In stark contrast to the terrorist stereotype in the 1970s and 1980s, the new threat seems to emanate from unsophisticated but dedicated amateurs using conventional and easily accessible weapons.

And despite the FBI’s success in penetrating this latest suspected terrorist cell, amateurs are usually more difficult both to find and to stop, experts say.

“The seemingly amateurish World Trade Center bombers may be the model of a new kind of terrorist group: a more or less ad hoc amalgamation of like-minded individuals . . . who merely gravitate toward one another for a specific, perhaps even one-time operation,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, said in a speech to Pentagon specialists just days before the New York arrests.

“The worrisome aspect is that it’s harder to get a firm idea of the dimensions of their intentions and capabilities,” he said in an interview. “It’s more difficult to build up a modus operandi for them.”

The new breed of terrorists varies from previous groups in the Mideast, Latin America and Europe, which had well-defined organizations and command structures and were constantly engaged in plotting conspiracies. Members usually lived underground and terrorism was their full-time occupation.

Also, the new terrorists appear to be driven by a different set of motivations. After two decades in which terrorists were propelled largely by secular causes and sought tangible territorial or political goals, those likely to dominate in the 1990s are now more often inspired by religious, ethnic and national passions. Their goals are more emotional and their targets are often cultural symbols.

As a result, the cause-and-effect relationship is likely to be much fuzzier, for example, than the 1983 bombing of a Marine compound in Beirut by Shiite Muslims, which killed 241 troops. It was tied largely to the intervention by U.S. warships in the Lebanese civil war, specifically their attacks on Muslim militias.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, the goal of Marxist leftists in Europe attacking American targets was to get the United States to leave Europe and NATO,” said L. Paul Bremer, former ambassador of the State Department’s counterterrorism office. “Palestinian terrorism against America was secular and designed to get us to reduce our ties to Israel.

“Now the agenda of these people is to attack us for what we are,” Bremer said. “They don’t like American culture, our movies, pornography, women, etc. It’s something very hard for Americans who live in a multicultured and secular society to understand.”

When modern terrorism emerged in the late 1960s, none of the 13 main terrorist groups was identified as religious in nature. But 25 years later, at least 20% of the roughly 50 active terrorist groups worldwide have either a dominant religious component or motivation, according to RAND’s Chronology of International Terrorism.

Religious-inspired terrorism can be far more devastating than traditional forms of extremism.

“The religious terrorist sees himself as an outsider from the society that he both abhors and rejects, and this sense of alienation enables him to contemplate--and undertake--far more destructive and bloodier types of terrorist operations than his secular counterpart,” Hoffman said.

Terrorism linked to or motivated by religion is by no means limited to Islam or the Mideast. Many characteristics of Muslim terrorists are also apparent among Hindu and Sikh terrorists in India, radical Jewish messianic movements in Israel, militant Christian white supremacists in the United States and other religions around the world, several experts said.

Over the past decade, for example, some 20,000 people have died--4,700 in 1991 alone--in violence related to the Sikh campaign to secede from Hindu-dominated India.

With the demise of communist powers and the recent weakening of European leadership, the United States, as the world’s most active political and military power, is increasingly likely to be the target of choice for a wide assortment of terrorists for an even wider set of reasons.

As the world undergoes unprecedented political, economic and social changes, the United States is likely to be targeted by those both advocating radical change and others resisting change, experts say.

“I think the terrorism problem is going to get worse,” former CIA Director Robert M. Gates said Saturday on CNN. “It’s not just extremist groups from the Islamic fringe.”

The capture over the past four months of two sets of suspected Muslim terrorists in the United States may also trigger a new and unbreakable cycle of violence, either to seek revenge or to demand freedom for imprisoned brethren, U.S. officials predicted.

Rather than being tightly controlled from abroad, the new part-time terrorists and independent free-lance groups are more likely to be only indirectly connected to a central command authority or a foreign government. Much of their equipment, resources and even some funding may be self-generated.

But that, in turn, can result in fewer constraints on the terrorists’ operations and targets, and fewer inhibitions on their desire to inflict indiscriminate casualties, Hoffman said.

Without a state sponsor behind them, military retaliation and diplomatic or economic sanctions will become either less viable or less effective as a means of fighting terrorism.

Western pressure on nations that supported the Palestine Liberation Organization, for example, finally resulted in a formal renunciation of international terrorism by PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.

In broader terms, three suspected terrorist encounters last Thursday--the New York arrests, the strikes by Kurdish separatists in 29 European cities and the mail bomb that blew up in the hands of a Yale University computer scientist--may be a microcosm of one of the greatest threats to the new world order, the experts said.

“First you have groups, motivated by a religious imperative, that in years past were content to target Americans abroad but are now bringing terrorism home to the United States,” Hoffman said.

“Meanwhile, overseas you have an historically aggrieved minority alienated by repeated diplomatic impasses and almost dilettantish interest in their cause finally getting so frustrated that they take their struggle away from their region to enmesh other parts of the world.

“And finally back in the United States, you have discreet domestic acts of violence directed at individuals underscoring that America is a violent society and that there are enough unstable people prepared to engage in violence.”

Although mail bombers go back to the 1960s and 1970s, the danger in the 1990s is due to the dramatic increase. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reported more than 500 bombings in California alone last year and more than 1,000 nationwide by an assortment of disgruntled employees, psychotics, spurned lovers or vengeful friends.