Spectator's Journal / Beyond Terrorism
Peterson, Dan
Ray Cline began with a tale that was chillingly apt: On September 1, 1983, Cline was in Seoul, South Korea, helping to organize a conference on "Security in the Northwest Pacific." He was...
...Security officers from major corporations--IBM, Xerox, TRW, Bechtel, Exxon, Texaco, Westinghouse, and many others--were well represented...
...Think of all the time...
...No one expects our intelligence agencies to be rebuilt overnight...
...Six months later, they were further reduced by 4,200, to a mere 626 investigations...
...Army Intelligence participated openly, and all indications were that the CIA was there under light cover...
...The FBI, Secret Service, and U.S...
...Iran, for example, sponsors Shiite Moslem terrorist groups, and there are right-wing terrorist groups in Italy, Turkey, and throughout much of Latin America...
...Less than two weeks after the conference, 239 American servicemen were killed by a terrorist attack in Beirut...
...John Barron, perhaps the leading nongovernmental expert on the KGB, exp!ained: Until the late sixties, the Soviets, were wary of dealing with subversives whom they could not directly control...
...Sterling gave a brief preview of her new book, The Time o f the Assassins, which documents the Bulgarian connection in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II...
...John Barron cited a Carter directive which required the FBI to share intelligence about anti-Castro groups with the Cuban DGI...
...I t doesn't happen today...
...A surprising number of registrants paid cash...
...What is more troubling, however, is the refusal, even in high quarters, to admit that we have a problem...
...And I'd say, "Well, what happened...
...Suppose that Agca is lying...
...The crowd attracted by these experts was nearly as intriguing...
...Joel Lisker, Chief Counsel for Senator Jeremiah Denton's Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, gave some astonishing figures regarding domestic intelligence...
...After the guidelines were issued, 16,000 of these were closed almost immediately...
...The nature of Soviet policy is an open secret_9 Does our failure to respond to Soviet-inspired terrorism really result from a failure to see it...
...Most of the speakers agreed that terrorism is, if anything, likely to increase...
...I t ' s unbelievable but it happened," said Barron...
...A week later the FBI was still looking for a lead on the group...
...Sixteen days before these went into effect, the FBI had 20,868 such investigations pending...
...At present, the number is--are you ready--seventeen...
...He was waiting for Congressman Larry McDonald, who was also to have participated in the conference, when word reached Seoul that KAL flight 007 had been blasted from the skies by a Soviet rocket...
...As Colonel Goss said, they "clearly see terrorism as an essential weapon in their strategic armory directed against the West...
...Not only did the Soviets begin to work with groups like the IRA and PLO who were beyond direct control, but there also appeared a heavy emphasis on "active measures," including terrorism...
...Therefore, Sterling reasoned: If this young man Agca knew enough to be able to say so many things that checked out--down to the view from the windows from Antonov's apartment, the kinds of flowers growing on his balcony, and so on--somebody had to be telling him...
...Are such breakdowns merely remnants of the bad old days when Frank Church and Company made bashing the CIA and FBI a national sport...
...It is using people who are deluded, usually, into thinking they will win when in fact they will usually be killed...
...The evidence he has given checks out so thoroughly, Sterling said, that "you have got to conclude, a child would conclude, that it was not possible for this young man to make up what he said aboutthe three Bulgarian agents who worked with him in Rome to plan the assassination...
...I discovered that people try to kill you during World War II and that was such a shock to me I've never recovered...
...If the CIA was correct in saying the Bulgarians and Russians did not send him, the only other agency that could have sent him was the CIA...
...Sterling didn't answer her own questions, and of course she didn't have to...
...and they'd say, "Well, we used to have penetrations there, we used to have people there, but back in the budget cutting d a y s . . , we sort of c u t . . , this _9 . . stuff loose...
...Though the speakers offered a variety of remedies ranging from better public information to specific measures such as a federal anti-terrorism statute, virtually all mentioned the need f o r b e t t e r intelligence...
...Ambassador to Colombia when American businessmen were kidnapped by terrorists: I'd ask for a report on the organization that had them and invariably it would be a couple of years old...
...A spokesman for the Marine Corps said that " f o r all we knew [it] might have involved an old lady carrying a shopping bag filled with explosives...
...Observed narron: If you think about the significance of that it is portentous indeed...
...Nor is all left-wing terror directly controlled by the Soviet Union...
...To the speakers, the fact of KGB involvement was taken to be massive, inescapable, colossally obvious...
...In addition to the weapons and cash required to mount sustained terrorist operations, Goss emphasized what he called "the machinery of clandestinity": training, sanctuary, communications, transport, false documents, and the rest...
...Why would you want to train thousands of staff officers in these tactics unless you intended to resort to these tactics on an ever greater scale...
...In President Chun's words, are we really surprised by it...
...Six months after that, there were 102...
...Houston's Investigative Research Foundation had assembled perhaps the most knowledgeable group of experts on terrorism, ten in all, ever to address a public meeting...
...in The Terror Network by Claire Sterling, who spoke at the conference...
...I really d o n ' t know who did i t , " he said...
...But there was also a sprinkling of diplomats, academics, and police officers, as well as members of the general public...
...Why...
...Think of the effect on morale...
...A group named the Armed Resistance Unit claimed responsibility, saying that it planted the bomb " t o retaliate against imperialist aggression...
...The Administration said after the attack that it was "looking into" possible Syrian involvement, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger went on record as saying that there was "much that points in the direction of I r a n . " Almost a week later, a senior official was quoted as follows: " I think it is fair to say that all the intelligence now points to the Iranians in one form or the other, but we want to be very sure before we do anything_9 Several days later, it was revealed that a highly restricted intelligence document circulated three days before the Beirut bombing contained a warning of sorts, but did not contain any indication of the date of the possible attack, of the type of attack, or of the possible target...
...As Morton Kondracke has recently pointed out in the New Republic, the budget cuts, mass firings, blown covers, and general demoralization of the CIA had become so bad under the Carter Administration that things were bound to improve under Reagan...
...As for the CIA, Diego Asencio recounted a number of cases during his service as U.S...
...Though there have been changes since 1976 in the way the FBI counts its investigations (e.g., the more recent figures exclude certain investigations of groups with links to foreign countries), it is difficult to explain a 99.9 percent drop as a mere statistical artifact...
...Recent evidence, however, indicates that we still have a long way to go...
...But there are a lot of people in the world who can be easily deluded, and a lot of them have what they consider genuine grievances...
...Instead, these figures appear to confirm, as an FBI agent recently told Lisker, that the FBI is "out of the domestic intelligence business...
...Meanwhile, she said, the Russians and Bulgarians have mounted a huge campaign to convince the world that the CIA is responsible...
...Here you have thousands of officers, many in their middle age, and suddenly you're saying, "You're going to acquire these skills...
...Less than 24 hours before Cline spoke, half of the South Korean cabinet had been blown up by a terrorist bomb in Rangoon, Burma...
...Ray Cline put it more colloquially: [The Soviets] think they've got a good thing going...
...The evidence that Mehmet Ali Agca has given the Italian authorities about his Bulgarian co-conspirators is so detailed that there can be no reasonable doubt of Bulgarian complicity_9 But suspend judgment for a moment...
...Colonel Goss, now head of the American branch of the British security firm Control Risks Ltd., is in a position to know...
...In mid-1982, another KGB major, Vladimir Kuzichkin, fled to the British, the only staff officer of the KGB Illegals Directorate ever to defect to the West...
...In 1980, Ambassador Asencio himself was kidnapped and held hostage by a Colombian terrorist group for 61 days...
...Camps such as Balashikha do more than train KGB men...
...It's low cost...
...It might also be noted that the "Smith revisions" issued last spring to the Levi guidelines have marginally relaxed the strictures on the FBI in initiating domestic security investigations...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 49...
...The next evening, Cline and several other Americans met with South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan at the presidential residence...
...so were members of private security firms...
...President Chun narrowly escaped...
...This was Claire Sterling's theme in her presentation to the conferees over lunch...
...It is now known that throughout the seventies they were used to train terrorists imported from abroad...
...There is, first of all, ironclad evidence of Soviet provision of weapons, training, and finance for most of the major terrorist groups throughout the seventies and early eighties, most thoroughly documented Dan Peterson is General Counsel for Gulf& Great Plains Legal Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri...
...One university professor brought five of his students...
...Second, even if such direct evidence were not enough, the sheer magnitude and sophistication of left-wing terrorist operations can only lead one to conclude, as another speaker, Colonel Peter Goss, put it, that it is "extremely doubtful" that terrorism "would be of great significance without the patronage of powerful governments," chiefly the Soviet Union...
...While completing the research for his latest book, KGB Today, Barron had picked up a tantalizing scrap of hearsay evidence from KGB defector Major Stanislav Levchenko to the effect that a complex called Balashikha, fifteen miles east of Moscow, was being used to train terrorists...
...He has now revealed that since 1980 all officers of the KGB First Chief Directorate (responsible for all KGB operations abroad) have been required to undergo a training course in 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 the techniques of terrorism...
...Sterling then asked directly: What are the values, political values, that would persuade an American intelligence community to take a position of such flat denial of the possibility of Soviet responsibility for the attempted assassination of the Pope that they would rather allow the public to believe that the CIA did i t ? . . . What value could there be so important as to conceal from the public the fact that the assassination of a Western political leader of dhormous importance to the Western world, this Pope, is a fact of Soviet policy...
...Perhaps what is missing in our response to terrorism is what Ray Cline touched on at its most fundamental level: I take it very personally...
...In recounting President Chun's words, Cline--perhaps best known for his service as the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence during the sixties-was addressing a conference on "Domestic and International Terrorism" held in Houston on October 10-11...
...One may suppose that once again he was not surprised...
...Nevertheless, it is unlikely that many of the participants were shocked by what they heard at the conference, namely that the Soviets are the moving force behind world-wide terrorism...
...To carry on repeated, large-scale terrorist operations without detection requires a degree of finance and access to the "machinery of clandestinity" that is simply out of the reach of most purely private groups...
...The Soviets, moreover, have every reason to support existing terrorist groups...
...Starting with his service in the British Special Operations Executive in World War II, he was until 1979 involved in British Army counterinsurgency and counter-terrorist operations around the globe, including Malaya, Palestine, Aden, Oman, and Northern Ireland...
...She recounted how the CIA denied from the outset and has continued to deny that the Bulgarians, and by implication the Soviets, were behind the attempt to kill the Pope...
...He also identified a trend which he admitted surprised him: What can we do...
...Well, yes and no...
...It's risk free...
...Think of the interruption...
...Agca knew not only who they were, but when they were in Rome, what their houses looked like, what kinds of cars they drove, whether or not they had wives and children, and many other facts that checked out...
...Barron cited Andropov's tutelage under the notorious Comintern agent Otto Kuusinen, one of the original advocates of "active measures," and observed that Andropov as General Secretary has spread his KGB cronies into highepositions throughout the Party and government "to a degree that's unprecedented in Soviet history...
...Capitol building...
...Barron also provided some new information, only recently obtained from defectors...
...I decided that it was rather important for me to prevent them from doing it to me or my friends and have been thinking about the ways in which our enemies try to do us in ever since...
...To be sure, not all terror is Soviet terror...
...This attitude changed shortly after Yuri Andropov became head of the KGB in 1967...
...I wish I did...
...The next evening, on the domestic front, a bomb was exploded in the U.S...
...On November 6, two weeks after the bombing, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff summed up the state of knowledge quite candidly...
...In the summer of 1976, Attorney General Edward Levi issued the "Levi Guidelines" governing domestic security investigations by the FBI...
...Nevertheless, the recurring view that the Soviets are somehow exonerated merely because certain terrorist groups may have indigenous origins or local grievances is, as Ray Cline tactfully put it, "a stupid position...
...We're saddened, just as you are, but we're not surprised...
...On the same day, newspaper reports appeared stating that the CIA's intelligence capabilities in Beirut had been severely damaged by the bombing deaths at the Marine headquarters, and by the PLO pullout from Beirut...
...As the experts in Houston were careful to point out, the degree of Soviet support for and control of terrorist groups varies widely, and the Soviets often merely exploit groups which have indigenous origins, such as the IRA, PLO, and Red Brigades...
...His story had a grisly timeliness...
...Few of Cline's listeners were surprised, either...
...According to Barron, the KGB and GRU residencies in the Middle East were actually required to fill specific quotas of Palestinians for terrorist training in the USSR...
...Have we recovered our senses...
...Chun contrasted the reactions of Americans and Koreans: "We Koreans are just as saddened as you are by this senseless destruction of innocent lives...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
