Fighting Terrorism Read online

  But it was nothing of the sort. As has by now been revealed in the wake of the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989, most of the international terror that plagued the world from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s was the product of an ad hoc alliance between the Soviet bloc and dictatorial Arab regimes. Together, these two groups of states sponsored or supported most of the international terrorist activities that took place during this period.

  The proclivity toward terror on the Soviet side had clearly defined origins. The philosophical roots of European and Soviet terrorism may be traced to an anti-czarist group called Narodnaya Volya, or The People’s Will, which in 1879 began a campaign which eventually succeeded in killing Czar Alexander II as a representative of the autocratic, capitalist, Russian Orthodox social system which was to be destroyed in its entirety. The success of subsequent domestic terrorists, such as the Social Revolutionaries (SR), in breaking down the prestige of the czarist government and preparing the way for the revolution taught the Bolshevik leadership the utility and importance of the terrorist method in destabilizing and eventually destroying regimes.1 When Soviet Communism finally emerged as an international power in 1945, after the defeat of Germany, it was these indelible memories which became one of the underlying motifs of Soviet foreign policy. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes trained insurgents and assassins from Italy, Greece, French Indochina, and Portuguese Africa in terrorist methods.

  Italy provides a telling example of how the Soviet terrorist network operated. Marxist assassins in Italy were already receiving training in the Soviet satellite states of Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia in the period immediately following World War II. By the close of the 1940s, a terrorist group called Volante Rosa was carrying out attacks and assassinations against government targets in Italy, and fleeing to Czechoslovakia when they felt threatened by the authorities. Another subversive organization was Pietro Secchia’s Communist paramilitary group, which was strong and professional enough in 1948 to seize control of some sections of northern Italy and assume control of the national telephone network. When Secchia’s group disintegrated in 1953, he and many of his followers fled to the Czech capital of Prague. In the late 1960s, Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) began operating a training course for foreign terrorists in Czechoslovakia, whose graduates included many of the early leaders of the Italian Red Brigades. The founder of the Red Brigades was Carlo Curcio, who also traveled repeatedly to Prague, where he conferred with veterans of the Secchia group. Similarly, the Italian publisher-terrorist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, another graduate of the GRU course, traveled to Czechoslovakia twenty-two times between 1969 and 1971, finally defecting with the assistance of the Czech security services. Another Italian extremist group, the Nazi-Maoists, was also apparently a concoction of the Czech intelligence services. Additional assistance and training were later given the Red Brigades by the Bulgarian intelligence services, while Sardinian and Sicilian terrorists, as well as Italian neo-Nazi organizations such as Ordine Nero, began receiving training, money, and weapons from the Soviet’s new Libyan ally, Muammar Qaddafi.2

  By the 1960s, the Soviets had established recruitment centers for terrorists of both Marxist and non-Marxist varieties in Moscow—Communist Party members at the Lenin Institute and the non-Marxists at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. There “students” were selected for training in a network of training camps in Odessa, Baku, Simferopol, and Tashkent, where they were taught propaganda, bomb making, urban warfare, and assassination techniques. The graduates of such courses were often sent to Cuba, Bulgaria, and North Korea. One of the best-known among them was the notorious archterrorist Ramírez Sánchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal.” Carlos had been recruited by the KGB in his native Venezuela and educated in the 1960s both in Cuba and at Patrice Lumumba in Moscow before embarking on one of the most publicized terror sprees of the century, including the takeover of an OPEC ministers’ gathering in Vienna in 1975 and a murderous attack on a French police train in 1982.3 (When international terrorism could no longer be pursued on this footing, Carlos had outlived his usefulness, and apparently found a place of refuge in Syria—until he was packed off to the Sudan in 1994 and from there deported to France, apparently sacrificed as a gambit by Syria in order to curry favor with the West.)

  The willingness to engage in terror, albeit under the control and supervision of the Party hierarchy in Moscow, was always part of Soviet Communist internationalism. Support for the construction of the international terrorist infrastructure was provided by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Soviet Security Police (KGB), and Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU).4 But the centrality of terrorism to Soviet foreign policy emerged only in the 1960s, with the stalemate in the Cold War and the emergence of independent Arab states willing to hitch their oil revenues and their war against Israel to the terrorist internationale. During the 1950s, it still appeared as though containment might fail, and the Communist juggernaut would continue its expansion into Southeast Asia, southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. But by the 1960s, the nuclear balance of terror between the superpowers had cooled any lingering Soviet interest in open confrontations with the West. The borders of the conflict had more or less stabilized. The Soviet Union was shut out of any substantial influence in the democratic countries, and the Cold War had devolved into a series of proxy confrontations in the Third World. Since a direct assault on the democracies had become unthinkable, the Soviets developed international terror as one of the weapons in their arsenal for carrying on the Communist struggle in many Western strongholds, while maintaining plausible deniability about their complicity.

  Here the carefully concealed, one-step-removed brand of Soviet-supported terrorism found a ready partner in the rabid anti-Western antipathies of the radical Arab regimes led by Syria, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these countries were established in mid-century, and they fulminated with rage over what they considered to be centuries of Western oppression of a humiliated Arab world. Even less able than the Soviets to take on the West directly, these Arab regimes embarked on a covert terrorist campaign against American and Western targets, though they showed little of the aptitude and finesse of the Soviets in covering their tracks. Terror, of course, had been a staple crop of Middle Eastern politics for a thousand years, since the time of the eleventh-century Shiite Assassin sect, originally called hashishin, for the hashish with which they drugged themselves to better carry out their deadly attacks against their Seljuk Turkish rulers. But it was only with the emergence of independent Arab states that this tested weapon of subduing opponents was transformed into a habitual tool of foreign policy, rivaling oil as the Middle East’s chief export, and reaching practically every part of the world.

  State-sponsored terror of a more limited variety had in fact been a constant factor in the Arab war against Israel. The Jewish communities in mandatory Palestine were subjected to campaigns of terror from the 1920s on. After Israel’s independence in 1948, Egypt and Syria continued to encourage cross-border fedayeen attacks, which claimed hundreds of lives and resulted in Israeli counteractions on the Arab side of its borders. In 1964 and 1965, Egypt and Syria established rival “Palestine Liberation” groups modeled after the National Liberation Front (FLN), whose eight-year insurgent war had succeeded in driving the French from Algeria only two years earlier. The avowed goal of both of these organizations was the “liberation of Palestine,” which in practice meant liberating it from both the Israeli and the Jordanian states. The Egyptian group, called the Palestine Liberation Organization, was led by Ahmed Shukeiri, whom the diplomat and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien later referred to as a “windbag’s windbag.” More deadly was the Fatah organization sponsored by Syria and headed by Yasir Arafat, which by 1967 had mounted a campaign of cross-border attacks primarily against Israeli civilian targets. After the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War of that year, Arafat dumped Shu
keiri and became the head of a unified PLO structure.

  Early on, Arafat recognized that the support of various Arab states would be insufficient to produce any kind of sustained terrorist campaign against Israel. Egyptian President Nasser’s fulminations notwithstanding, Shukeiri had never been permitted to launch extensive attacks from Egyptian soil for fear of triggering an unplanned Israeli response; Arafat himself had been kept on a short leash in Syria, and his gunmen had run into trouble with Jordanian troops from the very first. (In September 1970, King Hussein expelled the PLO from Jordan in a bloody stroke that left ten thousand dead.) Arafat therefore intensified PLO ties with the Soviet bloc, which would help him wage an unrelenting terrorist war against Israel. One of his first encounters was with Fidel Castro, who had repeatedly welcomed him to Havana from 1965 on. Later, the Soviets trained thousands of PLO operatives, awarded them special diplomatic status, and allowed them free movement throughout the countries of the Eastern bloc.5

  By the early 1970s, Arafat had established a quasi-independent PLO state in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese government was too weak to extend its authority into the south of the country, and within this domain Arafat was able to set up shop, creating a mini-state which enjoyed a close relationship with the Soviet Union and its satellites. This quasi-independent base was to be the propelling force behind the tidal wave of international terror which hit the Western democracies in the two decades that followed.

  As noted, the Soviets had supported terrorist insurgents since World War II, but had carefully avoided taking direct responsibility for launching terrorist campaigns against the NATO powers. Other states were in some cases willing to take the heat in exchange for Soviet support in other areas; Libya and North Korea, for example, covered for the Soviets by providing a place of refuge for airline hijackers, allowing the Soviets to insist that they were opposed to this particular type of terror. But Arafat offered what no other nation in the world was willing to provide. Receiving generous Eastern bloc support, he established in Lebanon a training center and launching ground for international terrorism the world over. The Soviets could merely deny knowledge of what was taking place, and the various branches of the PLO would happily collude in a worldwide movement of terror against the Western countries. Like Lenin before him observing the destabilization of czarist Russia at the hands of the SR, Brezhnev could benefit from the destabilization of the capitalist societies under pressure of the terrorist weapon, while being able to keep his hands relatively clean.

  Within short order, the Soviet—PLO axis had managed to transform an astonishing collection of domestic terrorist factions into a full-blown international movement devoted to anti-Western and anti-Israeli political violence. In time, the PLO’s newfound playground of horrors offered a base of operations and a safe haven for virtually every one of the most notorious terror groups ever to raise its head. The IRA, the German Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction, and numerous neo-Nazi splinters, the Italian Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, the French Action Directe, the Sandinistas and a dozen other Latin American groups, the Turkish Liberation Army, the Armenian Asala, the Kurdish PKK, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards—all came to the PLO camps in Lebanon, were trained and armed there, and were dispatched to their targets. In 1972, the alliance was formalized at a terrorist conference organized in Badawi, Lebanon, by George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) faction of the PLO. At the end of the Badawi Conference, Habash triumphantly announced: “We have created organic supports between the Palestinians and the revolutionaries of the entire world.” The nature of these “organic supports” became obvious as the PLO’s “Black September” group (operated by Abu Iyad of Arafat’s Fatah faction) carried out firebombings in Trieste for the Red Brigades; Japanese Red Army gunmen massacred pilgrims in Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport; Italian terrorists were caught smuggling Soviet-made SAM-7 missiles for the PFLP; German terrorists participated with Palestinian gunmen in the Entebbe hijacking; and the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) carried out joint attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe with Odfried Hepp’s VSBD neo-Nazi group.6

  Arafat’s activities in Lebanon were replicated to different degrees by Libya, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen. They cut deals with dozens of terror factions, allowing them to establish head offices in their respective capitals, providing them with training, diplomatic cover, financing, and refuge in exchange for terrorist services directed at enemies of their choice. These states soon became a second, independent source of international terror. Essentially radical Pan-Arabists in their ideologies—the ideas of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi being an original cross between Pan-Arab fascism and militant Islam—their great enemy was and is the West, which they understood to have dismembered the Arab world and left it “colonized” by pro-Western lackeys such as the Saudi and Kuwaiti royal families. Each of the regimes made its own independent arrangements with the Soviets, enjoying Soviet military assistance and diplomatic support, in exchange for its staunch anti-Western stance. Libya in particular became a clearinghouse for Soviet military equipment. In 1976, it was party to one of the largest arms deals in history, purchasing perhaps $12 billion worth of arms, a small part of which were in turn supplied to terrorist groups around the world, including the PLO, the IRA, Carlos’s Arm of the Arab Revolution group, the Baader-Meinhof, the Japanese Red Army, and other terrorist and insurgent groups in Turkey, Iran, Yemen, Eritrea, Chad, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, and the Philippines.7

  The full extent of the Soviet-Arab terrorist network—indeed, the fact that it was a network—was throughout the traumatic years of international terrorism obscured by successful efforts to “delegate” much of the violence to other Eastern bloc and Arab regimes that could be blamed for these activities. For example, much of Soviet covert operations in the Western Hemisphere was taken over by the Cuban secret service, the DGI, although it eventually became clear that the DGI was itself nothing more than an arm of Soviet intelligence. And in all the Western countries, including the United States, there prevailed the view that the incredible wave of terrorism gripping the Western countries was indeed the work of frustrated and deranged individuals, or else groups responding to local problems resulting from oppression of one sort or another. It was not until 1982, when Israel invaded the PLO’s labyrinth of training bases in southern Lebanon, that extensive documentation was captured giving an idea of the actual magnitude of the international cooperation between the terrorist groups and the supportive climate that had been afforded them by their sponsors.

  The Israeli incursion resulted in the destruction of the kingdom of terror that the PLO had carefully built up in south Lebanon over more than a decade. The leadership of the PLO was expelled to Tunis, where its ability to wreak havoc was significantly curtailed. Moreover, the mid-1980s saw the West open up a broad and unprecedented offensive against international terror. This offensive was first and foremost political; it was intended to expose those countries supporting terror, and to unequivocally label terrorism as immoral, regardless of the identity of the terrorists and their professed motives.

  The political offensive had been preceded by a deliberate intellectual effort spanning a number of years to persuade the West to change its policies regarding terrorism. It was in the context of these efforts that the Jonathan Institute was founded. Named after my brother Jonathan, who had fallen while leading the Israeli force that rescued the hostages at Entebbe in 1976, its purpose was to educate free societies as to the nature of terrorism and the methods needed to fight it. The Jonathan Institute’s first international conference on terrorism, held in Jerusalem in 1979, stipulated that terror had become a form of political warfare waged against the Western democracies by dictatorial regimes. The participants at the conference, among them Senator Henry Jackson and George Bush, then a candidate for the U.S. presidency, provided evidence of the direct involvement of the Eastern bloc and Arab regimes in spawning international terror. These revelations met with no small
amount of resistance—so much that a correspondent covering the conference for The Wall Street Journal commented that “a considerable number in the press corps covering the conference were much annoyed.”8 The idea that terrorism was not merely a random collection of violent acts by desperate individuals but a means of purposeful warfare pursued by states and international organizations was at that time simply too much for many to believe. (After the collapse of the Soviet Union, I had the opportunity to discuss this incredulity with a number of officials of the former Soviet bloc, and they expressed astonishment at the naivete of Western journalists and government figures in this regard.) Yet these and other revelations had a sobering effect on Soviet sponsorship of terror in the 1980s. Increasingly, the glare of publicity regarding their complicity in terrorism impaired the Soviet Union’s capacity to pursue detente, and forced it to back off from supporting terrorist groups—even compelling it to begin denouncing terrorism with fewer and fewer reservations. By mid-decade, Soviet support for international terrorism was almost a thing of the past.

  At the second conference of the Jonathan Institute, held in Washington in 1984, the participants, including leading figures in American politics, called for political, economic, and military sanctions against the states sponsoring terrorism. The proceedings were edited by me into a book entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win, to which I contributed an essay arguing the need to take direct military action against the terrorist states, which by then were primarily radical Arab regimes. The essay and other sections of the book were reprinted in Time magazine and read by prominent members of the U.S. administration—leading some commentators in the Arab press to pin the “blame” on me for some of the subsequent American actions against terrorist states.