Lone Wolf Terrorism

by Jeffrey D. Simon

  Rudolph continued his violent campaign over the next two years, with bombings at an abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb in January 1997 that injured six people; a bombing at a gay nightclub in Atlanta one month later, in which five people were wounded; and a third bombing, at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, in January 1998, which killed one person and injured another. Rudolph planted second bombs at both the gay nightclub and the Atlanta suburb abortion clinic, set to go off after police and emergency-services personnel had arrived at the scene in response to the first explosions. Police discovered the second bomb at the gay nightclub and defused it, but the second bomb at the suburban Atlanta abortion clinic went off, injuring several people, including police officers. Rudolph later explained his motives for targeting law enforcement and emergency-services personnel:

  Because this government is committed to the policy of maintaining the policy of abortion and protecting it, the agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly. And whether these agents of the government are armed or otherwise they are legitimate targets in the war to end this holocaust, especially those agents who carry arms in defense of this regime and the enforcement of its laws. This is the reason and the only reason for the targeting of so-called law enforcement personnel.64

  It was after the Birmingham bombing that Rudolph took to the woods of North Carolina to hide from the authorities, having learned that his truck had been seen near the explosion site and that it had been traced to him. Despite a massive manhunt by the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, Rudolph was able to avoid capture for more than five years. He most likely learned survivalist skills while serving with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division in the late 1980s. His ability to survive in the woods and thumb his nose at the authorities for so long gained him a folk-hero status among some people in Murphy, North Carolina, his last residence before he went on the run. T-shirts appeared that exclaimed, “Run, Rudolph, Run,” and “Eric Rudolph—Hide and Seek Champion of the World.”65 Rudolph was finally arrested in May 2003 after a rookie policeman on routine patrol spotted him behind a grocery store around four o'clock in the morning. Thinking that a burglary was in progress, the policeman arrested Rudolph, who gave the officer a false name. Another officer, however, later recognized him to be Rudolph.66

  In April 2005, Rudolph pled guilty to the Olympic bombing and the three other bombings in order to avoid the death penalty. He was eventually sentenced to multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. As part of his plea agreement, Rudolph provided authorities with the location of more than 250 pounds of dynamite that he had buried in the North Carolina woods. FBI and other federal agents recovered the explosives at three different sites and destroyed them. In the statement released at his plea-bargain hearing, Rudolph explained his motivation for the bombing of the gay nightclub in Atlanta:

  Along with abortion, another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality…. Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society…. But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet and into the public square…every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort.67

  Yet it was the abortion issue more than anything else that drove Rudolph to violence. He made it clear that his terrorism against the government was not part of any sweeping ideological motivation. “I am not an anarchist,” he said. “I have nothing against government or law enforcement in general. It is solely for the reason that this government has legalized the murder of children that I have no allegiance to nor do I recognize the legitimacy of this particular government in Washington.”68 At his sentencing hearing in August 2005, Rudolph expressed remorse only for the bombing at the Olympics. “I cannot begin to truly understand the pain that I have inflicted upon these innocent people,” Rudolph said. “I would do anything to take back that night.”69 He did not apologize for the bombings of the abortion clinics and gay nightclub.

  Rudolph also denied that he was part of the Christian Identity movement. He issued a postscript to his plea-bargain statement in protest of the book Hunting Eric Rudolph, which claims that he was indeed a Christian Identity supporter.70 In the postscript, Rudolph wrote, “I would like to clear up some misconceptions about me which are based upon the false information, innuendos and lies disseminated by some unscrupulous individuals.” Rudolph claimed that “I am not now nor have I ever been an Identity believing Christian. I was born a Catholic, and with forgiveness I hope to die one.” He admitted to attending an Identity church for approximately six months in the early 1980s but claimed that was because the father of a woman he was dating went there. “While attending this church,” Rudolph wrote, “I never bought into the convoluted Identity argument of racial determinism.”71

  Eric Rudolph therefore felt the need to once again convince everyone that he was a true lone wolf extremist, devoted to a single issue and not part of any other movement or ideology. He expressed some ambivalence, however, about resorting to violence in his fight against abortion in a letter that he sent to his mother while in prison. After telling her that perhaps he “should have found a peaceful outlet” for what he wanted to accomplish, he still voiced a rationale expressed by those terrorists who later in life may have doubts about what they did. “However wrongheaded my tactical decision to resort to violence may have been,” he wrote, “morally speaking my actions were justified.”72

  Volkert van der Graaf

  On May 6, 2002, animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf walked past Pim Fortuyn, a controversial politician and potential prime ministerial candidate, and shot him five times from behind in the parking lot of the Dutch National Broadcasting Center as Fortuyn was leaving a radio interview. The assassination represented the first political murder in the Netherlands since it became a kingdom in 1813.73 For a country that felt immune to the terrorist assassinations common in many parts of the world, the Fortuyn killing sent shockwaves throughout the nation. “Things like this don't happen in Holland,” said one resident of an Amsterdam suburb. “It's like the 11th of September for us. Everybody thought this couldn't be, but we see that it is possible. I feel very insecure.”74 Dutch prime minister Wim Kok said that the political assassination was “deeply tragic for our democracy”75 and that “a dark shadow has fallen over the Netherlands that has given way to deep emotions.”76 Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said he believed something like this was “impossible in this day and age, in the European Union, in the 21st Century.”77

  The shooting came just nine days before national elections in which Fortuyn's party, List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), was expected to do well. Despite the assassination, the elections were still held as scheduled, with LPF winning 17 percent of the vote and thereby becoming the second-largest party in parliament. A coalition government of LPF, Liberals, and Christian Democrats was formed, but it collapsed just six months later. By the next elections, the LPF had lost most of its support and was no longer a force in Dutch politics. Fortuyn had been a lightning rod for controversy with his anti-environmental, anti-immigrant, and anti-Islamic views. He had stated that he was in favor of legalizing mink farming, complained about “the problems of multicultural society,” and called Islam a “backward religion.”78 Fortuyn also told an environmental group, “The whole environmental policy in the Netherlands has no substance any more. And I'm sick to death of your environmental movement.”79

  Comments like those did not sit well with Van der Graaf. A lifelong advocate for animal rights, he had fought most of his battles in the courtroom. In 1992, he cofounded the Association Environmental Offensive (VMO) with a friend. The organization, through the court system, systematically challenged permits that had been awarded to fur and cattle farmers. Their goal was to force those businesses to shut down.80 Also, Van der Graaf believed it was his duty to stand up for animal rights. “
People think it normal that you eat animals and that you let fish suffocate in nets when you catch them,” he once wrote. “But inside me arose a sense of justice—such things shouldn't be happening in a civilized country, I thought, but there is no one to stand up for them.”81

  Prior to the event, Van der Graaf did not let anyone know about his intention to kill Fortuyn. The assassination, however, did not surprise people who knew him. “In my opinion, Volkert devoted all his time in doing stuff for VMO and animals,” one of his friends said. “His life was all about that. Whenever a person like Fortuyn comes along and says fur animals can be bred again, I can imagine Volkert losing his temper. Volkert is a rational person, who thinks always carefully over the purpose of his actions and consequences.”82

  As his friend suggested, Van der Graaf meticulously planned his attack on Fortuyn. On May 5, 2002, he searched the Internet for information on Fortuyn's daily schedule. When he learned that the politician would be having a radio interview the next day at the 3FM building at the Media Park in Hilversum, a town thirty kilometers southeast of Amsterdam, he decided that would be a good opportunity to implement his plan. He went there with a map of Media Park and the 3FM building that he obtained from the Internet and waited until Fortuyn exited the building. He claimed he did want to injure anybody else, so that is why he decided to shoot Fortuyn from behind:

  I had figured out that if I would approach Fortuyn from the front, he might be able to see the attack coming. Shooting Fortuyn from behind would be least problematic. In that case he would not be able to duck away, which could cause danger for the others present at the scene. Next to that, I did not wanted [sic] Fortuyn to suffer more than necessary. Shooting from behind would make it possible to deadly wound him immediately.83

  After the shooting, Van der Graaf ran from the scene but was captured a short time later. He did not talk about his motives for several months. He then claimed in a confession that he killed Fortuyn in order to stand up for the “weaker and vulnerable members” of Dutch society. He compared Fortuyn's rise in politics to that of Adolph Hitler and stated that he killed him as a favor to the Muslim minority in the Netherlands as well as other vulnerable segments of society.84 He described Fortuyn as a dangerous man “who abused democracy by picking on vulnerable groups” and who had terrible ideas “about immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, animals, and the environment.”85

  With the exception of animal rights, and to some extent the environment, Van der Graaf's friends and relatives were shocked at his claiming his actions were done in the name of all the other causes that he mentioned above. They did not remember him as being politically engaged in those issues.86 Under Dutch law, even though Van der Graaf confessed to the murder, prosecutors still had to prove their case in court. In April 2003, Van der Graaf was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. He told the court that he regretted the killing and that he still “wrestled” with the question of whether he was right in murdering Fortuyn. “Every day I see it before me. I see myself shoot and Fortuyn fall,” he said in court.87

  The Fortuyn assassination was a watershed in the Dutch experience with terrorism. As noted above, it sent shockwaves throughout the country. Several spontaneous shrines were created in the days after the shooting, with thousands of people leaving messages and thousands more paying their respects.88 It was not only the fact that a political assassination had taken place that shocked the Netherlands, a country with a nonviolent and pacifist heritage, but that a powerful new voice in Dutch politics had been silenced. Although he was controversial, Fortuyn and his party had challenged the establishment and won many supporters. He “represented a political voice in which a substantial, but regularly ignored, part of the lower and middle classes of the nation heard their views and feelings reflected.”89

  The assassination also led to an investigation concerning whether the government was negligent in not protecting Fortuyn, since he was a controversial figure who had received many death threats in the past. An independent commission concluded that, while the assassination of Fortuyn was “a serious attack on the democratic constitutional state,”90 the government could not be blamed for his murder. The commission emphasized that, even with protection, the complete safety of a politician cannot be guaranteed. As one government official noted, with the lone wolf assassination of Fortuyn, “the Netherlands had lost its innocence.”91

  CRIMINAL LONE WOLVES: JOHN GILBERT GRAHAM AND PANOS KOUPPARIS

  A unique category of lone wolves consists of those who perpetrate their violence for purely personal or financial gain. I discuss in the appendix why I believe these types of individuals should be considered terrorists; even though their motives are different from those extremists with political, religious, or ethnic-nationalist objectives, the impact of their actions upon society and government can be just as profound as that of more-traditional terrorists. Two cases illustrate this point. One involves an individual who carried out the first major midair plane bombing in US history in order to collect an insurance policy. The other deals with an individual working with a few family members in order to extort millions of dollars from the government of Cyprus.

  John Gilbert Graham

  Acting the role of a loving, devoted son, twenty-three-year-old John Gilbert Graham drove his mother to Stapleton Airport in Denver on November 1, 1955, carried her luggage inside the terminal, and kissed her good-bye before she departed on her United Airlines flight to Portland. From there she planned to continue on to Anchorage to visit her daughter. Daisie King must have thought that all was well with her son, who had previously been in trouble with the law. What she didn't know was that hidden in one of her suitcases were twenty-five sticks of dynamite, a timer, two dynamite caps, and a dry-cell battery.

  Graham waited at an airport coffee shop until he heard word that the plane had crashed shortly after takeoff. He later telephoned the airline's office to find out if his mother was killed in the crash. When a sympathetic airline official informed him that it was very likely she was among the forty-four dead, Graham simply replied, “Well, that's the way it goes.” His motive for the bombing was greed: a $37,500 insurance policy on his mother's life that he bought from an airport vending machine shortly before she boarded the plane. He was also in line to share in his mother's $150,000 estate. What he collected, however, was execution in the gas chamber at the Colorado State Penitentiary a little more than two years later.92

  Since this was the first major midair plane bombing in the United States, the FBI had no prior experience in investigating such acts of terrorism. It was, therefore, a pathbreaking effort on their part in reconstructing the aircraft to determine that explosives were the cause of the crash. Their investigation set standards for future scientific analyses of airplane bombings. The investigation of the Denver crash marked the first time that residues from parts of a plane were examined in a scientific manner to determine the exact cause of an explosion. Parts of the wreckage were sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC, for analysis, where it was discovered that sodium carbonate was on some of the parts of the aircraft. That led the FBI to conclude that the plane was brought down by a dynamite explosion.93

  Meanwhile, in Denver, FBI agents studied the passenger list to see if there was anybody on board the doomed plane who might have been the target of a murder plot by someone who knew how to use explosives. Extensive background checks on all the passengers and their relatives led the FBI to Graham, who had a prior arrest record for forgery and knew how to use explosives, having worked for construction and logging companies that used dynamite. The insurance policy was another piece of the puzzle that led the authorities to Graham, who confessed but later recanted his confession. Ironically, even if Graham had never been caught, he might not have been able to cash the insurance policy because his mother never countersigned it.

  Graham was arrested in November 1955, convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to death in May 1956. He was executed in January 1957. His execution
occurred under Colorado law, since there was no federal law to cover his offense at that time. The bombing led Congress to pass a bill in 1956 that established the death penalty for anyone convicted of causing loss of life by damaging an airplane, bus, or commercial vehicle. An existing statute covered the sabotage of trains.94

  The Graham bombing shocked the nation, including President Dwight Eisenhower, who was outraged by this new form of violence, along with most Americans. The bombing also led the FBI and the Civil Aviation Administration to conduct studies on measures that might be taken to detect explosives in luggage. However, sophisticated technology was not yet available to aid in designing effective and speedy airport security systems. As one observer noted shortly after the bombing, “The rigmarole involved in merely running the detector over every suitcase and hat box going aboard a plane would make present baggage routine, a frequent annoyance, seem like the essence of convenience. So, if the airlines continue current policy, the suitcase with the bomb inside is unlikely to be detected.”95

  The United States had never before experienced an incident like the Graham bombing—a midair plane bombing over Chesterton, Indiana, in 1933 (see note 4 from the introduction) did not receive the media exposure or reaction across the country that the Graham bombing did. People were perplexed not only by the fact that individuals were capable of blowing up planes in midair, but also by the fact that the person responsible was motivated by the desire to kill his mother for money. An editorial in a local newspaper best captured the bewilderment of people over Graham's crime: