The terror before

Washington, D.C.

The New York waterfront fills with the noise of explosions. The Statue of Liberty is showered with meteorites of shrapnel. A water main snaps. A subway tunnel buckles. The spans of the Brooklyn Bridge sway dangerously. Each blast illuminates the sky, revealing terrified Americans screaming in pain, while others search desperately for loved ones.

The date is July 30, 1916, when German saboteurs exploded a million pounds of munitions stored on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor, part of an attempt to prevent a then-neutral United States from supplying ammunitions to Allied forces in World War I. The scene is also part of a new exhibit that just hit Washington, D.C., a city already on terrorist alert, about the history of violence against civilians within U.S. borders.

“It was interesting that the U.S. has been under attack for our freedom and way of life ever since our nation was founded,” said Hank Trenk, an information technology specialist at the state legislature in Helena, Mont., who toured the exhibit last week with his 12-year-old son, Michael. “After Oklahoma City, I thought, ‘Why are we under attack now?’ It turns out we always were.”

The exhibit, “The Enemy Within: Terror in America, 1776 to Today,” includes a fragment of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, complete with FBI markings used in the investigation. Housed at the International Spy Museum for the next year, the exhibit opens with the Loyalist plot to kidnap George Washington and assassinate his chief officers (the mayor and governor of New York were arrested in the crime) and ends with a post-Sept. 11 film that broaches the possibility of “vague threats” ahead, from dirty bombs to biological weapons.

In between, with narration by a fictional radio correspondent who happens to be on the scene even at terrorist incidents that took place before broadcasting, the self-contained exhibit (separate admission: $5) makes a broad statement about the dangers of government overreaction to terrorism.

Radio correspondent Christopher Baker is there in August 1925, when tens of thousands of members of the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan march on Washington, two years after President Warren Harding was formally inducted as a KKK member in a White House ceremony. Baker’s narrative gives way to a film so graphic -- including images of black men being lynched -- that viewer discretion is advised.

He is there after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. A stray Japanese pilot takes some local Hawaiians hostage, with the help of a Japanese American, Yoshio Harada, who later commits suicide. Within months, the U.S. government rounds up hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps, even though not a single one is ever found guilty of actions against U.S. interests.

Vietnam War-era turbulence

He is on the scene in 1971, when the radical Weather Underground bombs the U.S. Senate, one of 24 buildings throughout the country the group bombed in protest of the Vietnam War. Onetime member Bernadette Dohrn gave the Spy Museum an interview in which she defends the group’s actions. “We were not terrorists,” she says in the film. “We were [a model of] absolute American radical resistance ... to military and corporate power abuses.”

And he is there, in Washington, for perhaps the most compelling case of a response to terrorism that tramples civil rights. In 1919, reacting to an anarchist’s bomb on his front lawn, Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer cracks down on what he calls foreign subversives, threatening to deport 4,000 immigrants. In the process, J. Edgar Hoover gains new muscle as head of the new General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department, before the effort is discredited as social intolerance.

To museum guest Father Robert “Mick” Egan, a priest at St. Viator Church in Chicago, the Palmer raids struck a chord. “As I watched, I thought of today’s events,” he said. “Maybe history repeats.”

For Taylor Cole, who works in Washington and is originally from Los Angeles, the central lesson in the exhibit is about “profiling gone bad.” With sections on the ferment against Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, and the Ku Klux Klan lynchings of black Americans throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the exhibit raises the question of how to spot enemies within without hurting the innocents.

“I kind of see how we are trying not to make the same mistakes with profiling again,” he said.

Curators also pose the question of whether Americans are willing to forgo some civil liberties in the name of security. At one point, the exhibit asks if Americans want to live as Israelis do, with armed guards on every bus.

“There is a balance between national security and civil liberties,” said Anna Slafer, who oversaw the exhibit as the Spy Museum’s director of education and public programs. “The position the FBI and CIA find themselves in today is a result of history. In the 1920s and again in the 1970s, the FBI overstepped, and their authority was restricted.”

Poll questions intersect the exhibit’s main chapters, interactive screens for visitors to vote on such questions as: Should terrorists get the death penalty? Should the government export foreigners with ties to dangerous groups? The answers are tallied continuously by the Gallup Organization, which also offers historic comparison to the answers of Americans in previous generations. So far, said Irving Ehrlich of Reading, Pa., who toured the exhibit Tuesday, the responses are running “on the extreme side,” with visitors tending toward a harsh response to terrorism.

Asked why an exhibit on terrorism at home is included in a museum dedicated to the art and tools of espionage, Director Peter Earnest said terrorists often use the techniques of spies -- forming cells, infiltrating society, taking surreptitious photographs -- and share the same motivation.

“This is about violence, often directed at noncombatants, for political, religious or cultural ends,” said Earnest, who served in the Central Intelligence Agency for 36 years. “In the fight against terrorism, intelligence is a major player.”