THE MYSTERY OF THE
LONE
WOLF
KILLER
ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK AND THE
THREAT OF TERROR IN PLAIN SIGHT
UNNI TURRETTINI
FOREWORD BY KATHLEEN M. PUCKETT, PH.D.
PEGASUS CRIME
NEW YORK LONDON
To the victims of the July 22, 2011 massacre.
“A child whose integrity is harmed does not stop loving his parents; he stops loving himself.”
—JESPER JUUL
FOREWORD
In September 2001, I was finishing my last assignment as a Special Agent in the FBI. A high-ranking executive in the Counterterrorism Division, Terry D. Turchie, had asked me to conduct a behavioral study of domestic “lone wolf” terrorists. I had earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology during my FBI career, and the Bureau needed to know if social science research could contribute to the identification of lone wolves before they appeared—seemingly out of nowhere—to stage their devastating attacks.
Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” had single-handedly carried on a bombing campaign for eighteen years before we finally found him in a remote cabin in the Montana wilderness. Timothy McVeigh acted alone in placing a vehicle loaded with explosives outside the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. And Eric Robert Rudolph, the bomber who targeted the Olympic Games in Atlanta, spent five years hiding out in the North Carolina forests without talking to another living soul until his arrest in 2003 for his solitary attack on a birth-control facility in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed a policeman and maimed a nurse.
What made them tick, these American lone wolves who were overlooked by everyone who might have noticed them? They all ended up on “Bomber’s Row” in the federal maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, for the rest of their lives. Each of them had acted alone, and none of them had a criminal background. They had not been members of any extremist group—at least not for long, but they were all firm believers in extremist ideologies, and they all killed horrifically in their service.
Kaczynski believed that modern industry and technology were destroying the human race. McVeigh considered himself a patriot but believed that the U.S. government needed to be overthrown. Rudolph believed that support from the “godless” bureaucrats in Washington for abortion and gay rights was destroying America.
As I formed my conclusions, the international terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred. My report was noted and shelved. At the time, the imminent danger from a vast al Qaeda terrorist network trumped any other concern, and my findings about what makes lone wolf terrorists tick were largely ignored by those in law enforcement charged with what was regarded as a larger international “war on terror.”
By 2008, Terry and I observed in our first book that the merging of lone wolf terrorism with international terrorist ideology would endanger communities all over the world with mysterious attacks by their own citizens that seemed to come out of nowhere.
In 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik stunned Norway and the world by savagely killing seventy-seven of his fellow Norwegians—most of them teens—in a sequential bombing and mass shooting, I watched the news coverage with a kind of weary despair. Here was another lone wolf, determined to make his mark on the world. Terry and I were interviewed by media in the U.S. as well as Norway, and we provided answers to the same questions we’d been asked for years.
Yes, it was likely that Breivik was the latest incarnation of the lone wolf terrorist. No, he was most certainly not likely to be a member of any terrorist group. Yes, his objective was to call attention to his own version of an extremist ideology. No, he likely had not targeted any specific individuals and did not know any of his victims. No, he was unlikely to have any history of violent criminal offenses, and law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials had not known of his intent to kill his fellow citizens. Until July 22, 2011, his preparation and planning for his attacks had been carefully hidden by the fact that he was isolated and had no close associates of any sort. And so he appeared to have come out of nowhere, alone, to wage war on his government by killing his fellow citizens.
Billions of dollars have been spent in the “war on terror,” on weapons, training, intelligence operations, and task forces. In the case of lone wolves, however, Terry and I had said for years that the key to recognizing lone wolves before they act is citizen awareness and involvement. It was not in a criminal underworld or a prison—or in a terrorist group—that lone wolves are formed and primed to attack, and so they are virtually invisible to law enforcement. Their own communities are where they grow into lone wolves.
Unni Turrettini contacted me through her editor in June 2013. Born in Norway and living in Switzerland, she trained as a lawyer and had been transfixed by the depredations of Anders Breivik since the attacks two summers before. How could this have happened in her peaceful homeland? She wanted to know how and why, and she conducted her own investigation to find out.
Unni has a unique perspective on the country she left to conduct her life with her family elsewhere. Prosperous and peaceful as they appear to the rest of the world, Unni regards her former countrymen as “sleepwalking” through life. From an early age, she says, Norwegians are discouraged from standing out in a crowd and asserting their individuality.
When she began interviews and research for this book, Unni intended to conduct a sociological study of the attacks of July 22, 2011. But there is a subset of psychology that focuses on the development of an individual within society: social psychology.
This expansive and keenly reasoned social-psychology study is a model of concerned citizen involvement in understanding and combating one of the most critical dilemmas of our age: the lone wolf terrorist.
Unni became fascinated with, and focused on, how Anders Breivik developed into a solitary warrior for his twisted cause within the context of Norwegian society. She and I had many discussions of exactly what makes a lone wolf tick and what makes him try over and over again to connect with other extremists who share his ideology but are distracted by the normal social world they inhabit.
Breivik and other lone wolves have no position in the social world. Because of a specific inability to develop meaningful relationships with other people, they are driven instead to intense relationships with extremist ideologies. Being human, they are hardwired to connect; a group was the primeval avenue of survival for a species, like humans, without fangs and claws. Being unsuccessful in connecting with other people would have earned a solitary individual a swift death early in human evolution.
Today, different strategies are possible. What do you connect to when you can’t connect meaningfully to other people? In the industrialized Western world, you have a number of opportunities. If you’re intelligent, you might connect to the world of art or one of the sciences. You might become a naturalist, most comfortable in the natural world and largely uninvolved with people. Many people prefer their own company to that of others, and a solitary life is their choice.
But what if it isn’t your choice? What if, no matter how many opportunities exist for you in the world, you are utterly unable to have the connections you most crave?
Because you are unable to establish the kinds of social connections that preoccupy most human beings, you can’t be satisfied by gathering with friends in a park, going on dates, marrying, and having children. And in the absence of such social distractions, you are free to develop grandiose plans to grab attention for yourself and your grand ideas. You are free to live in the basement of your mother’s house, or on a remote farm, and make your preparations, unnoticed, as Breivik did.
Throughout history, thousands—if not millions—of viol
ent criminals have placed or sent bombs, shot, or otherwise killed their victims. Many committed their crimes alone; however, there are two things I found in my study that differentiate the lone wolves from other solitary criminals. First, their crimes had to be big, at a societal level. Second, they were shaped and motivated by ideology. They didn’t know their victims, and they weren’t out for money or any personal gain outside the notoriety of their acts.
Lone wolves like Breivik need to matter in the world. They are repeatedly thwarted in this by the fact that no one recognizes their true genius. They have the answers to the issues that bedevil society, if only they were recognized. Very well, then. The world will be forced to recognize them. Too bad that people have to die to make that happen. Nothing personal. As Timothy McVeigh said of the children he murdered in Oklahoma City, there is always collateral damage in accomplishing a goal.
Police and counterterrorism officials, limited in number, look primarily at extremist groups and the people who socialize in them. They miss the hidden development of lone wolves because they aren’t in those groups.
The only way to uncover and intervene in the development of a lone wolf is to enlist the help of the community he comes from in recognizing the repeated attempts he makes to connect with those groups.
Unni Turrettini does a magnificent job of illustrating the evolution of Anders Breivik in the context of modern Norway, a world she knows is fertile ground for the development of a lone wolf terrorist. She recognizes what Norwegian authorities have preferred to ignore: that privilege and comfort in a society do not eliminate the likelihood of a terrorist blooming in its midst. She is adamant that viewing Breivik as an aberration or as insane only serves to reassure Norway that sleepwalking is the best way to proceed in life.
In doing so, she represents a level of citizen involvement unparalleled by anyone else in the examination of how and why Norway grew a lone wolf like Breivik, and what can be done to prevent the savagery lone wolves inflict on the population in any country.
Kathleen M. Puckett, Ph.D.
Hunting the American Terrorist—
The FBI’s War on Homegrown Terror
INTRODUCTION
THE KILLINGS
This is the big day you have been looking forward to for so long. Equip yourself and arm up, for today you will become immortal. . . .
—ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO
189 MINUTES OF TERROR
This is my last day, he thinks as he wakes that morning. Eight A.M. He needs to hurry. Convinced that he’ll be killed, Anders Behring Breivik struggles to send the e-mail manifesto he’s compiled. Too many addresses slow down his computer and make him late. That won’t do. Last night, he’d put the bomb in his minivan, which he parked a short walk from his house. Fertilizer and fuel oil, like McVeigh’s.
He’s exhausted, and he doesn’t want to die. For three months, he’s been taking anabolic steroids. He drinks a cocktail of ephedrine, caffeine, and aspirin. The e-mail goes through. Now, from this manifesto, more than eight thousand people will know who he is. And soon, many more. By the time they read this, it will be over. And he may be dead.
168 VICTIMS
Today the world will know his power. Twenty-seven-year-old Timothy James McVeigh sees himself as a warrior and hero who must defend the Constitution. In the early morning of April 19, 1995, McVeigh drives into downtown Oklahoma City in a rented Ryder truck containing a lethal fertilizer bomb that he and his friend Terry Nichols have made. After arriving at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, he parks in a handicapped zone, jumps out of the truck, and disappears into a maze of streets and alleys. At 9:02 A.M., the bomb demolishes a third of the building, killing a total of 168, including nineteen infants. More than five hundred are wounded. McVeigh, wearing earplugs, is so far away that he cannot hear the emergency sirens clearly. Near the site, his explosion is so powerful that it lifts pedestrians from the ground.
A 102-HOUR MANHUNT
Although Tamerlan Tsarnaev is on multiple U.S. and Russian watch lists prior to 2013, neither the FBI nor the CIA can justify investigating him further. Dzhokhar (Jahar), his brother, manages to fly under everyone’s radar. On one occasion, Jahar does tell a friend that the September 11 attacks on the United States may have been justified; but, true to form in the case of lone wolf killers, the friend does not recall this statement until it is too late for Tamerlan, Jahar, or their victims.
On Patriots’ Day, April 15, 2013, the annual Boston Marathon begins with sun, cheer, goodwill, and—thanks to two checks by officials—no signs of bombs. Few notice the two young men, one in a black baseball cap, the other in a white cap turned backward, as they round the corner from Gloucester Street onto Boylston Street at 2:38 P.M. Each carries a bulky backpack. They stride toward the finish line, where, just a short time earlier, the governor has hugged race organizers.
No one is sure when Tamerlan and Jahar put down their bags, but they do. They then pause several minutes and leave the scene, moving calmly.
Then, at 2:49 P.M., about two hours after the winner crosses the finish line, and with more than 5,700 runners yet to finish, the worst happens on Boylston Street near Copley Square: about 200 yards from the finish line, two bombs detonate.
The blasts blow out windows on adjacent buildings but do not cause any structural damage. Some runners continue crossing the line until eight minutes after the explosions. The bombings kill three people—including an eight-year-old boy—and reportedly injure as many as 264 others, many losing limbs.
Shortly later, the FBI announces that the Tsarnaev brothers are suspects in the bombings and releases images of them. As the manhunt ensues, the brothers kill an MIT police officer, carjack an SUV, and engage in a shootout with the police in the Boston suburb of Watertown, during which Tamerlan is killed and an MBTA police officer is critically injured. Jahar Tsarnaev, although injured, escapes.
Three mass killings. Four killers who could have been detected before they struck but who were free to go about planning and carrying out their crimes—because they left no paper trail. These are the lone wolf killers, who operate outside of any particular affiliation with a terrorist group, and who must be identified before they strike again. Anders Breivik is the key to finding them.
WHY BREIVIK MATTERS
Anders Breivik is the only one of these lone wolves who is still alive and willing to discuss his crimes. Although Theodore Kaczynski entered into a plea bargain, and McVeigh and Jahar, the surviving Tsarnaev brother, pleaded not guilty, Breivik made his trial a verbal manifesto, an explanation of why he did what he did.
Understanding how this man in a presumably peaceful country committed crimes as terrifying as other lone wolves in the United States and other countries is the only way law enforcement can figure out how to prevent the next massacre. Contrary to a common belief, Breivik is not a Scandinavian nut case or freak that will never again reproduce itself. Few realize that his story is just like, or extremely similar to, those of the American mass murderers. Until now, FBI experts and psychologists have been guessing and speculating as to these killers’ profiles. Breivik’s case finally sheds the necessary light on a devastating problem, not only in the United States but also in the rest of the world.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
When investigators finally gained access to the boat where Jahar was hiding, they discovered a jihadist rant on its walls. In it, according to a thirty-count indictment handed down in late June 2013, Jahar appeared to take responsibility for the bombing, although he insisted that he did not like killing innocent people. But “the U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians,” he wrote, presumably referring to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. . . . We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all.” With this, he echoed the cliché sentiment of Islamic militants. Then, according to Rolling Stone, he wrote a final “Fuck America.”
In the note in the boat, he also wrote that he didn’t mourn the death of his br
other, that Tamerlan was a martyr in paradise now, and that he expected to follow his brother there soon. His victims were “collateral damage,” he wrote, a statement eerily similar to the way McVeigh and Breivik described their victims.
HOMEGROWN TERRORISM
Inside the building McVeigh had destroyed, many of those who were not out for coffee or other tasks were lost in the explosion (an estimated 168 out of 646). Demolition was even more horrible in the children’s day-care center directly above the bomb. Floors crushed those beneath them and set up a chain reaction of destruction. Rescue workers rushed to the scene almost immediately, employing listening devices in search of the living. Professionals and volunteers clawed through the rubble to help dig out the wounded and remove the dead.
One twenty-year-old woman lay bleeding in a foot of water. She had lost her mother and her two children, and for five hours her leg had been pinned under a pile of cement. The massive pile could not be shifted, so the rescue team’s only hope of getting her out alive was to amputate her leg without anesthetic, which could send her into a fatal coma. Following the operation, she was finally dragged from the ruins and hospitalized, her life and body shattered.
With McVeigh’s acts of violence, terrorism took on a new face—not the crazy killer on every police record. Not the predictable ones. Writing in a crime blog, Ted Ottley (www.crimelibrary.com) summarized the growing danger McVeigh’s crimes represented: “Homegrown terrorism had arrived with a vengeance, and the terrorist was the kid next door. And he was cruising away from the carnage—down Interstate 35.”
Homegrown terrorism has spread out its roots in these days when we don’t know when and where the next killer will strike—only that he will. That day in Boston, the area had already been swept twice for bombs. The last sweep took place only one hour before the explosions. So relaxed was the area that anyone, including the killers, could freely carry bags in and out.
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 1
