The Ultimate Hate Crime : THE BOMBING : A Different--and Deadly--Face of Terrorism Comes to Main Street America

Welcome to Bosnia. Welcome to Beirut. Welcome to Sarajevo, or Grozny. The billboards outside Oklahoma City might just as well have read that way after the car-bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Wednesday morning changed the face of America.

The death, destruction and terrible tragedy--made even worse by the death of so many innocent children--have shaken an entire nation. But even beyond the rising death toll, and the immediate grief, the recurrent theme that has emerged in the days since the explosion is one of shock and disbelief that this could have happened in America’s heartland. That terrorism has come home.

In our national mythology, Main Street America is a place of Norman Rockwell characters, neighborly warmth, church suppers and high-school marching bands. A place of cocoon-like safety, where nothing ever happens. A place where Jimmy Stewart might walk in at any moment and announce that it’s a wonderful life.

All that exploded April 19. More than one eyewitness or survivor told interviewers that such devastation was something you see on television, in some remote corner of the globe, not something that happens here.

Terrorism usually has a political agenda. By the FBI’s official definition, it is “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Middle East terrorists, for example, may want to create an independent Palestinian state and destroy Israel. But within that context, terrorists may voice narrower demands. Islamic terrorists who hijack an airliner, for example, may demand cash and the release of political prisoners held by another country. The Red Brigades and the Bader-Meinhof gang also had specific objectives tied to their terrorism and an agenda they publicized.

By contrast, those who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma apparently voiced no demands in advance of their terrorist act. But suspects in the case are reportedly linked to the Michigan Militia, whose members have strong political views. It is a white, gun-loving, right-wing group that claims members in Michigan and in similar organizations in several other states. Its organizers say gun-control laws are the first step in disarming the people so that the federal government can control America, using U.N. troops with old Soviet equipment to crush opponents. There appears to be some overlap between the Michigan Militia and white supremacists.

That such a group might someday target a building in America’s heartland cannot have surprised counterterrorism specialists. After the World Trade Center bombing in New York two years ago, a senior FBI official noted that the United States is a “target-rich” environment for terrorism. America is a nation of 260.3 million people, of whom just under 80% are crowded into metropolitan areas. It is not only federal buildings and other office buildings that are vulnerable, but bridges and tunnels, airports, railway stations, television stations and communications networks, not to mention airliners in the sky.

More than three decades ago, authors Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II wrote a book entitled “No High Ground,” about the history of the atom-bomb project in World War II. The title was taken from a message from Air Force Gen. Carl Spaatz to Robert Lovett, the assistant secretary of war, who had admonished the general to “take the high ground.” Spaatz messaged back that he had seen the photographs of Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped, and there was no longer any high ground.

What was true of the nuclear threat--no high ground, no place to hide--is equally true of the threat of terrorism, whether home-grown or foreign-sponsored. The world, as events in Oklahoma City have proved, has become a much smaller and more dangerous place. The carnage there was by far the worst terrorist event in the nation’s history. But it is by no means the first time that Americans have been the target of terrorism or car bombs, although usually those attacks have taken place abroad.

On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded in the American embassy in Beirut, killing 63 persons, 17 of whom were Americans. On Oct. 23 of that year, a suicide bomber drove a truck into the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Marines. On Sept. 20, 1984, a terrorist drove a truck laden with explosives into the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut, killing two Americans and a dozen Lebanese.

The death and destruction moved closer to these shores on Dec. 21, 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blasted out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew, including 189 Americans. Only last month, the FBI put the two Libyan intelligence agents charged with the bombing, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, on the bureau’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list.

Then on Feb. 26, 1993, came the World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000. On March 4 of last year, four men, all described by the government as Islamic extremists, were convicted in the attack and each sentenced to 240 years in prison. The man described by the government as the mastermind of the plot, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was indicted in New York two weeks ago on charges that he plotted to blow up U.S. airliners.

But Americans in the heartland expect unusual events to happen in polyglot, slightly exotic places like New York and Los Angeles. What has changed after the Oklahoma City bombing is the increased sense of vulnerability of all Americans. If it can happen in Middle America, in other words, it can happen anywhere. Just how jittery the explosion left the country is evidenced by the rash of copycat bomb scares, and the evacuation of several federal buildings in other cities, in the wake of Wednesday’s explosion.

The question now being asked in Washington and elsewhere is whether anything can be done to protect against such terrorist attacks in an open society by what President Bill Clinton has called “evil cowards.” The answer, unfortunately, is mixed and only slightly reassuring.

The type of explosive used in Oklahoma City--ammonium nitrate--is a fertilizer that is cheap and easily available. But the same FBI official who pointed out that America is a “target-rich” society also emphasized that the nation is “a hostile environment for terrorism.” Law enforcement is one reason; the FBI and local authorities solved the World Trade Center bombing in days, after tracing a chunk of a rental van found in the wreckage back to the terrorists. The same technique--tracing a car part--was used in Oklahoma City, enabling the FBI to put out arrest warrants and composite sketches of two white male suspects within a day of the explosion, and to have them in custody within two days.

But in both cases, the government acted to close the barn door after the horse was stolen. What the authorities hope, of course, is that swift action to bring terrorists to justice, whether home-grown or foreign, will act as a deterrent to more acts of violence against innocent citizens.

While the FBI is the arm of the government responsible for investigating and arresting terrorists on U.S. soil, the Central Intelligence Agency has the responsibility of attempting to infiltrate terrorist groups abroad and to foil their activities before they ever get here. In 1986, the CIA established a Counterterrorism Center, which today employs several hundred persons. Employees from other agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, are detailed to the center.

Although the CIA can, to some extent, battle terrorism by satellite photography and, more to the point, by intercepting the communications of terrorists, it cannot really hope to provide advance warning of bomb attacks and other terrorist acts unless it succeeds in infiltrating the foreign groups responsible. And since terrorist groups often operate in small cells, with tight security, that is extremely difficult.

But the CIA is groping for new roles and missions to justify its existence in the wake of the Cold War, and counterterrorism is an area that can be expected to gain new attention now. Former CIA Director William E. Colby says: “Granted, Middle East extremists or religious extremists are a tough target, but certainly no tougher than the Kremlin. And the (Aldrich) Ames case showed we did penetrate into that. We had the agents there whom he betrayed. It means having more people studying Farsi and fewer studying Polish after the Cold War, reorienting our efforts to these targets.”

“Terrorism can be defeated,” Colby adds. “The Italians defeated the Red Brigades. The Germans defeated the Bader-Meinhof gang. It was good police work, good intelligence work that got inside these terrible groups.”

Perhaps so. But in the rush to combat the tragedy in Oklahoma City, Congress and the public must take care not to trample on the Constitution. An anti-terrorist bill that will now be pushed through the House and Senate would permit the government to conceal the source of information damaging to persons it wants to deport. On the face of it, the provision seems to violate at least the spirit of the Sixth Amendment, which says that in America, the accused shall have the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” If America succumbs to the temptation to trim back its liberties to fight bombers, the terrorists will, in the end, have won.