Prophetic 'Terror 2000' Mapped Evolving Threat

By ROBIN WRIGHT

Aug. 9, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON —

A few years ago, the Pentagon’s secretive Office on Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict quietly buried one of the most comprehensive reports ever commissioned on the changing patterns of global terrorism.

The “Terror 2000” findings compiled by 41 experts--including former ranking CIA, FBI, State Department and Rand Corp. officials, as well as an ex-KGB general and Israeli intelligence agent--were deemed too alarmist and far-fetched. “Outrageous,” commented one CIA official. Even a sanitized version designed to promote public preparedness was axed.

The only catch is that many of its predictions have since come true.

Among them: International terrorism would reach American shores, potentially targeting a major U.S. financial center. Home-grown zealots would pose big-time threats to domestic security.

Within three years of the 1993 report, massive bombs at the World Trade Center in New York and the federal building in Oklahoma City became the deadliest acts of international and domestic terrorism ever carried out in this country.

“Terror 2000” also predicted that overseas extremists would use chemical or biological agents in a couple of major subway systems. In 1995, an extremist group released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 11 and injuring thousands. “There’s only been one. But then we haven’t yet hit the year 2000,” project director Marvin J. Creton noted wryly in an interview Saturday.

The lesson, looking back, is that of all the forms of warfare that exist at the 20th century’s end, terrorism may be the most intractable.

The simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Friday underscored that lesson with deadly force. Whether motivated by ideological hatred, financial greed or religious passions, terrorists have moved further and faster in devising imaginative new targets and tactics than government counter-terrorism officials can keep up with.

In the aftermath of the East Africa carnage, Terror 2000 offers a road map to what lies ahead. One of its fundamental conclusions, endorsed by a host of independent experts, is that trends in terrorism will continue to mutate in the post-Cold War world.

Even the most conservative prognosis contained in the report is that terrorist acts against the United States are likely to increase at an annual rate of at least 15% for several years to come. Since the report was issued, the rate has jumped up and down, with no clear trend. But the volatile period envisioned in the report is distinguished by what it calls “superterrorism,” involving sporadic but sensational attacks, often featuring advanced weaponry.

“Future terrorists will find they need ever more spectacular horrors to overcome this [American] capacity to absorb what previously would have seemed intolerable,” the report states. “We must be prepared to defend against dangers that only a few years ago seemed impossible.”

Perhaps the most ominous development is that, like everything else, superterrorism is going global.

Consider one hypothesis about the devastating car bombings in Kenya and Tanzania: The sites hit were in Africa. The real target was an ocean away in America. Several terror groups deemed capable of such an attack are in the Middle East and South Asia. If the bombs contained Semtex or C-4--extremely powerful explosives used in several major terrorist acts--the raw materials may have come from a fourth continent, Europe.

On the eve of the new millennium, terrorism is evolving on several key fronts:

Terror 2000 warned that extremists who traditionally sought to shock and scare their foes through selective strikes are increasingly shifting to indiscriminate acts against mass targets.

Gone are the days when Marxist groups kidnapped American diplomats or businessmen to demand release of political prisoners, as was in the case in the 1969 seizure of U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Charles Elbrick, the first modern act of anti-American terrorism.

Extremism instead is now characterized by attacks far grander in size, casualties and impact.

“In some ways, we’re a victim of our own success,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of Britain’s Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence. “As we’ve made it appreciably more difficult for terrorists to reach their traditional targets, they’ve just calculated how much bigger their bombs or weapons have to be to reach their targets or how many lives it will take to have an impact.”

In one uncannily accurate prediction, “Terror 2000” warned that extremists may try to maximize their impact by moving beyond one-at-a-time attacks to multiple, simultaneous targeting, thus demonstrating their reach and taxing governments’ ability to respond. That’s exactly what happened in Africa, when the two car bombs exploded within minutes of each other in cities about 400 miles apart.

In one respect, Friday’s embassy bombings run counter to recent trends. Because of heightened security, the number of attacks on U.S. diplomatic and military personnel plummeted from 200 in 1986, to 39 in 1995, and to eight in 1997, according to the State Department. Last year, 104 of the 126 casualties in anti-American attacks were business people.

But in other key regards, the East Africa bombings appear to fit the trend toward attacks against less defensible targets such as tourists, private businesses and their clients, and even children.

Indeed, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were among the most vulnerable U.S. government targets in the world because they have not been upgraded to meet new security standards. In addition, they were located in “soft” settings, particularly in downtown Nairobi. More than 95% of the casualties in what clearly appears to have been an anti-American attack were African civilians--indicating a willingness to kill people with no connection to the presumed target. The message was in the magnitude.

The embassy bombings also underscored the fact that Americans increasingly are the intended targets. During most of the 1990s, almost 40% of all international terrorism incidents have been against U.S. citizens and facilities.

Public awareness, travel advisories and international cooperation have made favored practices more difficult. Long-term hostage seizures, which traumatized the world in the 1980s, are now limited largely to Colombian groups out for ransom.

Extremism today is often characterized by fewer, but deadlier, attacks. Bombings are the primary tactic. In 1997, 108 of 123 anti-American attacks involved bombs, according to a State Department report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism 1997.”

But new twists add chilling new dangers.

Air terrorism--once centered on hijackings in which most passengers survived unharmed--increasingly involves on-board bombings no matter what the cost in human life.

In what would have been the deadliest series of attacks against U.S. targets, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Pakistani, also plotted in 1993 and 1994 to blow up 11 Delta, Northwest and United aircraft flying out of the Far East.

At the top of the list of future dangers are more sophisticated weapons, including chemical and biological agents and even nuclear devices.

“We are concerned that terrorists will push this trend to its most awful extreme by employing weapons of mass destruction,” former CIA director John Deutch bluntly told Congress in open testimony.

“Terror 2000” outlined fictitious plot lines for simulations played out like war games between U.S. counter-terrorism teams. One centered on the release of a chemical nerve gas in the New York subway system, a scenario that proved eerily prescient when sarin was used in the Tokyo subway.

The new dangers are attributable in part to the impact of the Information Age. Three Internet sites provide data on Semtex, a sophisticated plastic explosive used in the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. About 400 sites discuss sarin, a Nazi nerve gas so lethal that a single milligram quickly kills.

“The means and methods of terrorism are readily available at bookstores, from mail-order publishers, on CD-ROM or even over the Internet and therefore accessible to anyone with a grievance, purpose, agenda or any idiosyncratic combination of the above,” said Hoffman, author of the book “Inside Terrorism.”

Online terrorist handbooks offer a guide to everything from ammonium nitrate--the basic ingredient in the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City explosions--to bombs hidden in books, phones and even lightbulbs.

Extremists don’t need computer capability. The Merck Index: An Encyclopedia of Chemicals and Drugs, which provides the chemical formulas for sarin and its deadly cousin, tabun, is available in most U.S. libraries. The index is a reference book that usually cannot be checked out. But in Washington’s Martin Luther King library system, where all 27 branches had copies at one time, only one remains, according to a research librarian.

Bomb-making ingredients are readily accessible. Many are used in making plastic, ink or fertilizer and processing foodstuffs, Deutch warned Congress. The Japanese sect Aum Supreme Truth legally bought the ingredients for its homemade nerve gases. It also sent disciples to Russia to seek components for nuclear devices and reportedly dispatched others to Zaire, now known as Congo, in an effort to obtain the ebola virus.

In the mid-1990s, Germany intercepted at least three shipments of nuclear materials bought or purloined in the former Soviet bloc. Uranium shipments were found in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania and Kazakhstan, according to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Potential perils are not limited to super-bombs like those used in New York and Oklahoma City. On a Moscow park bench, Chechen rebels in 1995 left radioactive material designed to produce radiation sickness that would destroy human cells and cause a slow collapse of body functions.

“Easy access to biological, chemical and nuclear technologies will bring many new players to the game of mass destruction,” “Terror 2000” warned. “They may not even be limited to states and traditional terrorist groups. Organized crime, fanatical single-issue groups and even individuals all will be able to acquire weapons once limited to regional and world powers.”

The good news is that many of the world’s most notorious terror-masters have been contained.

Except for Iran, which continued to actively support terrorism in 1997, international pressure and sanctions largely have contained terrorism by other state sponsors such as Libya and Iraq, according to the State Department.

Also fading into history books are groups such as Italy’s Red Brigade, West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof and Japan’s Red Army. The Red Army has only seven adherents left, the State Department reports.

With the demise of communism and the birth of dozens of new democracies, leftist groups across Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia have lost their causes as well as their followers.

Secular terrorists such as Peru’s Shining Path and the Palestinians’ Abu Nidal have been replaced by religious zealots such as Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden, who has recently called for terrorist attacks on U.S. targets, and sects like Japan’s Aum Supreme Truth. State sponsors and structured, well-organized groups are giving way to amorphous terrorist “cells” and freelancers.

“The greatest terrorist threats to U.S. interests today come from extremist groups who claim, however falsely, to act on behalf of a religion,” said Retired Adm. William Studeman, former acting CIA director.

In the late 1960s, when modern terrorism took off, not one of the 11 known terrorist groups was classified as religious. In contrast, nearly a quarter of 50 identifiable groups around the world today are motivated largely by religion, Hoffman noted.

The new crop of amateurs and tightknit cells can be just as dangerous as the older groups, and in some cases even more deadly. They are often better at evading detection, exploiting modern communications and transportation, and tapping informal sources of funding.

Ad hoc groups tend to be decentralized and to lack established organizational identity, making them difficult to trace, much less penetrate. They change names to confuse. They plug into ethnic or resident alien communities, providing them with informal but international networks for new recruits.

Overall, “Terror 2000” predicts eight to 10 years of “tumult and transition” terrorism, and other forms of low-intensity conflict, until rules of the post-Cold War world are better established.

In the end, it suggests terrorism will level off and perhaps even decline.

“In the future, we expect peace settlements in many areas where violence has originated--in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Russia and its neighbors,” project director Creton predicted. “But it will take time. And during that time terrorism is going to get worse before it gets better.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Six Years of Casualties

Number of fatalities and injuries caused by anti-American terrorism around the globe, 1992-97.

1992

Injuries: 2

Fatalities: 1

1993

Injuries: 7

Fatalities: 1,004

1994

Injuries: 6

Fatalities: 5