Despite Gains, Halting Terror Elusive

Recent triumphs have been spectacular:

The tracking of Carlos, the world’s most notorious terrorist, during a CIA-orchestrated covert operation in Sudan. The FBI seizure in Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, alleged mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the deadliest act of international terrorism in the United States. And the early capture of Timothy J. McVeigh, who is now awaiting trial in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building last year.

Together these successes reflect the fact that more money, more personnel, more equipment, more intelligence and more attention are now devoted to terrorism than at any time in U.S. history. Unlike the suicide bombings and hostage seizures of the 1980s, acts of terrorism in the 1990s are being solved. Terrorists for the first time are being forced to account for their deeds in courtrooms--including the man accused of being the long-sought Unabomber.

Yet the counter-terrorism failures have been equally notable, underscored by the stunning string of confirmed or suspected violent acts against U.S. interests over the last month--attacks on the Olympic Games in Atlanta, a U.S. military housing compound in Saudi Arabia and, possibly, Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

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They are not isolated cases. “Since the early 1980s, only one in three acts of terrorism has been identified in time to affect the outcome,” said Jeff Beatty, former FBI, CIA and Delta Force specialist on counter-terrorism, citing figures in a Department of Justice publication.

The bottom line is that, despite the escalating pattern of terrorist threats over the last 17 years, the United States still has a long way to go in dealing with what is rapidly becoming the greatest psychological weapon used against the mightiest power in the post-Cold War world.

“We’re probably not halfway toward where we should be in anticipating and preventing terrorism,” Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said in an interview.

“We haven’t had a sufficient sense of urgency on terrorism generally,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the terrorism subcommittee of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The biggest problem is the very nature of the threat. The State Department goal is to win universal agreement by 2000 on a multifaceted international treaty that would make the world “inhospitable” to terrorists and their operations.

Even then, however, the United States is unlikely to be able to protect against all terrorist threats. “Clearly you cannot provide a risk-free existence in a free society,” White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta said Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Then there are the issues of manpower and resource allocation. Since modern terrorists began targeting American victims in 1969 with the hostage seizure of Robert Elbrick, U.S. ambassador to Brazil, anti-terrorism personnel and funds have grown in fits and starts.

The two centerpieces of U.S. counter-terrorism are the FBI, which takes the lead on both domestic attacks and assaults on U.S. targets overseas, and the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, launched in 1986. The center brings together more than a dozen agencies, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Energy. Money for both has increased in the 1990s, despite a general budgetary shrinkage.

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Yet funding may not be adequate nor personnel levels appropriate, experts argued. “We don’t put enough resources into several areas--CIA [covert] penetration, FBI staff, research and development in detecting and countering weapons of mass destruction, just to name a few,” said L. Paul Bremer, a former State Department counter-terrorism chief now at Kissinger Associates.

Others contended that efforts are too fragmented or poorly coordinated. Ninety-five agencies deal with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, for example, Specter pointed out. The bureaucracy of counter-terrorism also sometimes slows the dissemination of intelligence.

Staff also has not been shifted as the threat has changed, critics said. “We spent millions tracking Soviet missile silos, but you knew what you were looking for--a hole in the earth, an infrastructure being developed, a military deployment,” said a leading U.S. counter-terrorism official.

“But terrorists are often three or four people working out of the back of a house without a lot of money, using information available in textbooks or the Internet. That’s tougher to find and stop, and you need different kinds of personnel.”

As a result, developing stronger human intelligence capabilities should be at the top of the list of improvements so the United States can cultivate terrorist sources to prevent attacks, both Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said Sunday.

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“We can’t deal with Boy Scouts and Rotary Club members . . . to get that intelligence,” Nunn said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.” Over the last decade, Washington has had little success in penetrating either terrorist cells or the intelligence agencies of rogue states that sponsor extremism, law enforcement officials and congressional sources said. Few agents even speak local languages.

A third weakness lies in the relative inability to keep up with the tactics of terrorists, who traditionally have been at least a jump ahead of both law enforcement and victims.

The next threshold for the United States lies in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, said Lugar. The dangers were reflected in the use of poisonous sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway last year.

The United States had its own close call. The World Trade Center bombers had sodium cyanide, which, if used in the fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb, would have released poison gas, vastly increasing the fatalities in New York, intelligence officials said.

“If you need a wake-up call, then take a look at some people who are already at work on this stuff. What kind of preparations do we have? Not enough,” Lugar said.

But U.S. vulnerabilities are not always under American control. Although international cooperation has vastly increased since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, friends who do not always want to follow the American lead sometimes can be as much a problem as are foes.

State Department counter-terrorism teams have established ties with counterparts in dozens of countries, including old foes such as Russia and Syria. Last month the Group of 7 industrialized nations concurred on 40 principles for countering terrorism, ranging from speedy extradition of suspects to confiscation of terrorist assets. And more than 17,000 people from 87 countries have received training from the State Department’s anti-terrorism section.

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“The network of international cooperation is growing stronger as more and more nations treat terrorism as a crime and realize that cooperation is essential,” said Philip C. Wilcox Jr., State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism.

But the United States has been unable to persuade a single major player to cut off trade with Iran as part of an effort to discourage what Washington claims is an active state sponsor of terrorism.

Yet even critics say that gradual improvements have made a difference. “How many terrorist attacks are acceptable? Zero. So intelligence and counter-terrorism communities are working to a high standard. And they do well,” said a leading congressional specialist.

“Given how big we are, how widespread our interests and how open a society we are, we are still remarkably free from terrorism, and that’s not because we are lucky.”