Stefan Wisniewski was arrested in France in May 1978 and extradited to West Germany a year later. On November 5, 1979, he was charged in Karlsruhe with murdering Schleyer and his bodyguards, kidnapping, attempted extortion, coercion, and forging documents.
Rolf Wagner was arrested on November 19, 1979, after a gun battle with Swiss police. He was suspected of being the driver of the van used in the getaway. He was one of the four terrorists arrested in Yugoslavia in May 1978 who were later released in a dispute over extradition of Croatian terrorists.
On April 29, 1991, the prosecution in the Stuttgart higher regional court charged RAF member Maier-Witt of having participated in the 1977 kidnapping and murder of Schleyer. Police said she participated in the attempted mortar attack on the Federal Prosecutor’s Office that took place on August 25, 1977; the failed assassination attempt on NATO commanderin-chief Alexander Haig in Belgium on June 25, 1979; and in a bank robbery in Zurich, Switzerland, that took place on November 19, 1979. She was arrested in East Germany in August 1990. She was charged with five murders, several attempted murders, and robbery causing subsequent death. On October 7, 1991, a German court sentenced her to 10 years for her part in the three attacks. She was convicted of helping commit the Schleyer kidnapping and confessed to aiding in the Haig attack and the bank robbery in Zurich.
1978–1995
The Unabomber
Overview: Before the “lone wolf” became the template for homegrown violent extremists in the 2010s, Theodore Kaczynski, popularly known as the Unabomber, established that mass mailing package bombs to government officials was an effective terror technique. His 17-year U.S. private campaign of terror lasted from the 1970s into the 1990s. The Kaczynski case raises the question of how many incidents are needed to constitute a designation of an individual as a terrorist, and what constitutes a terrorist versus a disturbed individual cloaked in political rhetoric. The loner Kaczynski showed most of the characteristics of classic terrorists of his era, including interest in publicity for his cause and willingness to use violence to influence a wider group than the immediate victims. His attacks presaged the October 2001 anthrax attacks attributed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to scientific researcher Bruce E. Ivins, whose motives remain unclear.
Incidents: On October 7, 1993, the FBI put out a $1 million reward for Kaczynski’s arrest. By that time, he was responsible for at least 14 parcel and emplaced bombings. His terrorist resume eventually included
On May 25, 1978, one person was injured at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
On May 9, 1979, one person was injured at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
On November 15, 1979, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of American Airlines flight 444 as it flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Twelve persons suffered smoke inhalation. The device was designed to explode at high altitude.
On June 10, 1980, following receipt of a letter saying that he would receive a book he needed, Percy Wood, a former president of United Airlines, received a book-sized package containing a bomb at his Chicago home.
On October 8, 1981, a bomb was disarmed in a business classroom at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
On April 25, 1982, a pipe bomb attack was directed against Patrick C. Fischer in Nashville, Tennessee.
On May 5, 1982, one person was injured at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, when a package addressed to a professor exploded.
On July 2, 1982, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science was injured in a faculty lounge at the University of California at Berkeley.
On May 8, 1985, police disarmed a bomb mailed to the Boeing Corporation in Auburn, Washington.
On May 15, 1985, John Hauser, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, saw a black notebook inside a plastic container in the computer lab in which he was working alone. Upon opening the container, the bomb tore off part of his right hand, ending his career as an Air Force fighter pilot.
On November 15, 1985, a secretary was injured by a package bomb mailed to Professor James V. McConnell at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
On December 11, 1985, Hugh C. Scrutton, a Sacramento, California, businessman, was killed when he picked up a bomb disguised as a block of wood near an entrance to his computer rental store.
On February 20, 1987, a bomb was placed in the parking lot behind CAAMS in Salt Lake City, Utah.
On February 20, 1989, a man was injured by a bomb left behind a computer store in Salt Lake City.
On June 22, 1993, a letter bomb exploded in the home office of Charles Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, wounding him in the abdomen, chest, face, and hands. UNABOM had identified himself as FC in two earlier letters, claiming to be part of an anarchist group.
On June 24, 1993, a package bomb exploded in the office of Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter, famed for developing the Linda computer language that had applications in publishing and animation. He lost use of a hand and his right eye was lacerated.
On December 10, 1994, a mail bomb killed Thomas Mosser, 50, executive vice president and general manager of Young and Rubicam, Inc. Worldwide, one of the world’s largest ad agencies.
On April 25, 1995, a package bomb mailed to the lobbying offices of the private California Forestry Association in Sacramento, California, killed Gilbert B. Murray, 47, its chief lobbyist for the timber industry. The package was postmarked from Oakland, California, and addressed to a colleague, William Dennison, former president of the association.
On June 27, 1995, UNABOM sent a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in which he threatened to blow up an airliner leaving Los Angeles International Airport in the next six days. The next day, he sent a lengthy manifesto to the Washington Post, Penthouse, and New York Times, demanding that one of the publications print the screed as a way to halt the killings.
On August 2, 1995, the Washington Post and the New York Times published excerpts from his manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future . On August 3, 1995, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione published a full-page open letter in the New York Times to the Unabomber in which he offered “one or more unedited pages in Penthouse every single month” if the bomber stopped bombing.
The FBI arrested Kaczynski on April 3, 1996, in a one-room cabin in the hills near Lincoln, Montana. Bomb-making paraphernalia was found in the cabin, as was the typewriter that matched the fonts used in the Unabomber’s manifesto. His brother David had contacted the FBI in February 1996 to say that he believed Ted was the Unabomber. Texts he found in his mother’s Chicago house when she was going to sell it were similar to the Unabomber’s tract. A bomb blew up in his cabin four days after his arrest.
Kaczynski had graduated from Harvard, earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan, and became a math professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
On June 18, 1996, he was indicted for the killings of Gilbert B. Murray in 1995 and Hugh C. Scrutton in 1985, and the injuries of David Gelernter and Charles Epstein in 1993. He was charged with transporting an explosive device with intent to kill or injure and mailing the device. Conviction carried a sentence of death or life in prison. On June 21, 1996, U.S. District Court judge Charles C. Lovell ordered his trial moved from Helena, Montana, to Sacramento, California. On June 25, 1996, Quin Denvir, Kaczynski’s public defender, pleaded not guilty to the charges. On June 28, 1996, Kaczynski was indicted for three more Unabomber attacks, specifically the April 25, 1982, pipe bomb attacks against Patrick C. Fischer in Nashville; the November 1985 pipe bomb attack against James V. McConnell in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and the February 20, 1987, placing of a bomb in the parking lot behind CAAMS in Salt Lake City, Utah. On October 1, 1996, a federal grand jury in New Jersey handed down a threecount indictment against him, charging him in the December 10, 1994, bombing death of Thomas J. Mosser. On December 10, 1996, he pleaded not guilty.
Jury selection began on November 12, 1997.
Kaczynski sought to dismiss his lawyers because they planned to introduce the issue of his mental health. On January 20, 1998, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed that he was mentally competent to stand trial. On January 22, 1998, he pleaded guilty to all 13 federal charges as part of a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty. He was sentenced to serve life in prison without possibility of release. He also admitted that he placed or mailed another 11 bombs for which he was not yet charged. He agreed that he could not appeal any part of the sentence. The judge warned that he would be forced to pay restitution if he received money for his writings, mementos, or interviews. On May 4, 1998, he was sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years in prison and sent to a maximum security cell in Colorado. On October 23, 1999, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco agreed to review his case, finding sufficient evidence to examine his contention that his guilty plea was coerced and that he was inappropriately denied the right to self-representation. However, on February 12, 2001, the court rejected his request for retrial. On August 17, 2001, he lost another appeal for a hearing. On March 18, 2002, in Kaczynski v. U.S. 01–7251, the Supreme Court rejected his attempt to withdraw his 1998 guilty plea and obtain a new trial.
On May 19, 2011, the FBI requested a DNA sample as part of its look into whether he was involved in the September 29, 1982, deaths of seven people who took potassium cyanide–laced Tylenol in the Chicago area, where he occasionally stayed at his parents’ home. He refused to voluntarily give a sample. The Tylenol poisonings do not fit with his standard modus operandi. As of this writing, the Tylenol case remains officially unresolved.
1985–1986
Lebanon Kidnappings of Westerners
Overview: By 1985, Hizballah (the Party of God) had established itself as a parallel government in Lebanon, providing services that the weakened Lebanese government was unable to offer, while also conducting a highly publicized series of kidnappings of dozens of Westerners.
Incidents: Sometimes termed the Lebanon Hostage Crisis when considering years 1982–1992, the years 1985 and 1986 saw a significant uptick in Western kidnappings by Hizballah that included journalists, prominent theologians, a university president, and teachers. Negotiations for the hostages’ release took months, sometimes years. Among them were Terry Anderson, Rev. Terry Waite, Rev. Lawrence Jenco, Joseph Cicippio, Thomas Sutherland, David Jacobsen, and Frank Reed. The 1985 kidnappings began on January 3 with Eric Wehrli, the Swiss chargé d’affaires. At least six people died in 1985 and 1986, including William F. Buckley, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Chief of Station kidnapped in 1984.
Elements of a frustrated U.S. administration quietly reached out to the Iranian regime, offering to provide arms in exchange for Tehran pressuring its Hizballah protégés to release the hostages. While hostages were eventually freed, the arms-for-hostages plan ultimately led to a fissure between the administration and Congress that took years to heal. Attempts to bring the hostage-takers to justice came in fits and starts. The most prominent of the kidnappers, Imad Fayez Mugniyah, was killed on February 12, 2008, by a car bomb in Syria.
On October 14, 1992, former U.S. hostages Joseph Cicippio and David Jacobsen sued Iran for $600 million in U.S. District Court in Washington, saying it orchestrated their abductions in an effort to recover millions of dollars frozen in the United States. The suit sought damages for kidnapping, physical abuse, false imprisonment, inhumane medical treatment, loss of job opportunities, and pain and suffering. While terrorist victims often won major awards from courts, few were able to collect from state sponsors of terrorist attacks or from the terrorist groups and their aboveground wings.
January 25, 1993
CIA Headquarters Route 123 Entrance Attack
Overview: Although the term “lone wolf” terrorist became popular among U.S. terrorism-watchers only in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the first inkling of a homegrown Islamic terrorist problem surfaced on January 25, 1993, when Pakistani citizen Amal Kasi, 28, opened fire just outside the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, killing two CIA employees as they headed in to work one morning.
Kasi’s attack was the latest in a string of attempts to target CIA employees, the most successful being the 17 November Group’s assassination of Chief of Station/Athens Welch in 1975 and Hizballah’s kidnapping on March 16, 1984, and murder on June 3, 1985, of Chief of Station/Beirut Buckley in 1985. The bloodiest attack came two decades later, when an al Qaeda suicide bomber killed seven people at an Agency base in Khost, Afghanistan. The Kasi killings led legislators to look at loopholes in gun laws.
Incident: On the morning of January 25, 1993, Kasi stopped at a red light at the Route 123 entrance to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, got out of his car, and fired a Chinese-made AK-47-type assault rifle into the cars of CIA employees waiting to make the left turn, killing two people and injuring three others. He fired left, then right, then left again, firing at least two shots per victim. The turn signal had just turned green, and some cars flew across the intersection to get out of the way.
The dead were Dr. Lansing C. Bennett, 66, and Frank Darling, 28. The wounded were Nicholas Starr, 60, an intelligence analyst; Calvin Morgan, 61, an engineer; and Stephen E. Williams, 48, an AT&T employee.
Nearby schools, including the Potomac School and the Country Day School, locked doors and monitored radios as rumors spread that the gunman was on the loose in the nearby woods.
Darling’s wife, Judy, was with him in the couple’s Volkswagen Golf when Kasi shot him. She was treated for shock at a nearby hospital. Three bullet holes were found in the windshield.
Starr managed to drive to the entrance gate to the 258-acre compound before he collapsed. He underwent 12 hours of surgery, having lost 11 pints of blood from the wound to his arm that severed the bone, an artery, and some veins. Fragments from the bullet lodged in his chest and collapsed his left lung. Doctors had to graft a two- to three-inch long piece of artery from his groin area to reconnect the artery in his arm. He since has experienced some impairment in his left arm because one of its three major nerves was severed and another is not working. More than 250 people showed up when the hospital asked for donors of his rare O-negative blood. Another 200 gave blood the next day.
Morgan suffered at least one gunshot wound in the left arm. The bullet traveled up his arm and lodged behind his ear. He was on the operating table for a few hours. His wife, Doris, said he saved himself by diving on the seat of his Cadillac. He was released from Fairfax Hospital after three days.
Williams was treated at Arlington Hospital for a graze wound to his chest and released. A bullet may have been deflected by his rib. He managed to drive his car the 500 feet to the CIA entrance gate to get help.
Police noted that the gunman did not fire at women in the queue.
The gunman drove up and parked his car behind Bennett’s Saab in the rightmost of the two left-turn lanes, fourth car in the line for the turn. He walked to the head of the two lines and then calmly walked up to each car, firing his AK-47 with a cold, emotionless expression.
The FBI ran a computer check of fingerprints, but its computer had only the prints of people arrested for felonies. The millions of others in paper files had to be searched manually.
The police bulletin described the gunman as a white male between 20 and 30, weighing 145–165 pounds, having a dark complexion, of medium build and height, and having dark brown or black, medium-length hair.
Hours after the shootings, a man driving a light-brown compact station wagon narrowly missed an Alexandria, Virginia, police officer who was clocking traffic with a radar gun on Slaters Lane, near the George Washington Parkway. The driver reportedly swerved toward the police officer, who leaped out of the way. The car was found abandoned at Potomac Yard.
Among those in the line was former ambassador Gilbert Robinson and freshman senator Bob Smith (R-New Hampshire). Smith told the news media, “He looked in my direction, and then he turned and walked away. He coolly
, methodically, with no expression, with no words, he simply walked up to the cars and fired shots point-blank at people. It was a pretty horrible sight.”
Agency officials said that they planned a small monument as a memorial to the two men who were killed. The median strip was littered with flowers and flags from CIA employees. In a memorial service attended by thousands of CIA employees, First Lady Hillary Clinton offered the president’s condolences.
At 4:00 P.M., eight hours after the shooting, Kasi walked into Crescent Groceries, a few miles away in Herndon, and attempted to purchase a oneway ticket to Pakistan. Pakistani immigrant Mohammad Yousaf, owner of the store where Kasi was a regular customer, called his Arlington store to arrange the purchase. An Arlington store employee then called Super Travel, an Alexandria, Virginia, travel office owned by a Pakistani immigrant. Kasi paid $740 in cash for the ticket and promised to return the following afternoon. Kasi came back at 1:30 P.M. the next day. Yousaf gave him a ride in his Caprice Classic to National Airport.
Ballistics experts determined that the gun was a Chinese SKS gasoperated rifle with 10 rounds. There are several knockoffs of the AK-47, such as the AKM, which carries 30 rounds. WTOP radio reported that the 7.62 mm Russian AK shells could also fit a U.S. Ruger. The gunman fired at least 10 rounds, hitting the 5 victims 8 times.
On January 28, 1993, Kasi’s Pakistani roommate, Zahed Ahmed Mir, 39, reported Kasi missing to Fairfax police. He said that he last saw him on January 25, 1993.
The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks Page 30
