Lone Wolf Terrorism

by Jeffrey D. Simon

  Idiosyncratic lone wolves like Kaczynski are particularly dangerous when they combine a high degree of intelligence, which allows them to design clever plots and strategies, with a total lack of guilt or remorse for their actions. As Johnson, the court-appointed psychiatrist, noted, Kaczynski “has demonstrated a reckless regard for the safety of others. He demonstrates a lack of remorse as indicated in his writings by being indifferent to having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from others.”113

  Muharem Kurbegovic

  Another mentally ill yet highly functional lone wolf terrorist was Muharem Kurbegovic.114 Known as the “Alphabet Bomber,” Kurbegovic, who committed his criminal acts in the United States in the 1970s, can be considered a terrorist ahead of his time. He was one of the first to threaten to release nerve agents in populated areas, to acquire sodium cyanide, and to use the media in a systematic way to communicate his message and spread fear among the public. His actions received attention from the highest levels of government.

  The violence began on August 6, 1974, when a bomb exploded in a locker at the overseas passenger terminal lobby of Pan American World Airways at Los Angeles International Airport. The eleven-pound bomb created a ten-by-fifteen-foot hole in a wall and devastated a hundred-foot area in the lobby, sending bodies, metal, glass, and debris flying through the air. The blast killed three people—two died at the scene and one later in a hospital—and injured thirty-five others, including one man who had to have his leg amputated. It was one of the deadliest incidents of random violence in Los Angeles history. Late that night, a man telephoned the city editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and claimed credit for the bombing. He correctly gave the publicly undisclosed locker number, T-225, where the bomb had exploded. He said that his name was Isaiak Rasim, “Chief Military Officer of Aliens of America,” and that the bombing had been committed by this new terrorist group.

  Rasim was actually Kurbegovic, who acted alone in the bombing. He telephoned the CBS television station in Los Angeles three days later and told them that a tape cassette about the bombing could be found in a trash bin outside a local bank. When police recovered the tape, they found with it the key to the airport locker that had contained the bomb. “This first bomb was marked with the letter ‘A,’ which stands for Airport,” Kurbegovic said on the tape. “The second bomb will be associated with the letter ‘L,’ the third with the letter ‘I,’ etc., until our name has been written on the face of this nation in blood.”115 Kurbegovic had indeed stamped the words “Aliens of America” on the lip of the canister of the airport bomb.

  Kurbegovic subsequently placed a bomb in a locker (letter “L”) at a downtown Los Angeles Greyhound bus station but decided to alert police to its location. The bomb was safely defused. He indicated that he was pleased with the media coverage his acts and threats of violence were receiving, and that is why he decided not to detonate the bus-station bomb. “The letter ‘L’ in our name stands for ‘locker,’ and it also stands for ‘life,’” Kurbegovic said on a tape he left with the Herald-Examiner. “We have decided because our cause is getting publicity that it is momentarily not necessary to continue to horrify the population of this land, and we can afford the luxury of revealing the location of such a bomb and let it stand for the word ‘life!’ Nothing could make us happier than if we could conclude that we can reveal the location of bomb ‘I,’ which is already planted.”116

  There was no “I” bomb, but Kurbegovic threatened to unleash “two tons of sarin” nerve gas over Washington, DC. “Imagine what will happen if we are lucky and the wind blows from Supreme Court to Capitol Hill to White House to Pentagon,” Kurbegovic stated in one of his communiqués. He also claimed that he had acquired the plans for the air-conditioning systems of thirty skyscrapers in Los Angeles and was researching ways to release chemical agents in those buildings. The fear of terrorism gripped Los Angeles, as people were afraid to venture outside due to the possibility of another bombing. Among the newspaper headlines were “L.A. Bomber Pledges Gas Attack” and “Race against Time to Find Third Bomb.” A Watts Summer Festival concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum that was expected to attract seventy thousand people drew only thirty-five hundred.

  Kurbegovic stated that he was committing his acts of violence to protest unfair treatment of immigrants and other various causes. Among his demands were that all immigration, naturalization, and sex laws be declared unconstitutional. Even before his bombing at Los Angeles International Airport, he had left a tape with the media, issuing an ultimatum to all governments of the world to surrender to “Aliens of America.” He stated that his objective was to bring about a society free of nationalism, religion, fascism, racism, and communism. He also claimed in that tape to have sent to all the US Supreme Court justices postcards that had toxic material placed in metal disks underneath the stamps. Postal authorities intercepted the cards when they became caught in the canceling machine in a Palm Springs post office, but no toxic material was found in the metal disks.

  The effort to catch Kurbegovic involved the US Secret Service and other federal law-enforcement agencies. During his campaign of violence in 1974 and his subsequent years in prison, Kurbegovic threatened the life of every US president. A special office in the basement of the White House was set up to aid in his capture. The CIA provided sophisticated audio equipment to analyze the cassette tapes, and linguists worked to identify Kurbegovic's accent, which was Yugoslavian. That information, combined with Kurbegovic's having mentioned in his tapes the names of several individuals against whom he had personal grudges, eventually led investigators to identify him as the Alphabet Bomber. Kurbegovic was finally arrested on August 20, 1974.

  Kurbegovic, who had been born in Yugoslavia, was an engineer who developed an extensive knowledge of chemicals by reading books and other documents. He had been denied a permit to open a dance hall in Los Angeles because of a prior arrest, and he felt that the justice system was persecuting him and other immigrants. When police searched his apartment after his arrest, they found pipe bombs, explosive materials, books and manuals on germ and chemical warfare, gas masks, catalogues for purchasing chemicals and laboratory equipment, and maps of Washington, DC, and London's Heathrow Airport. In subsequent searches of his apartment, police found twenty-five pounds of sodium cyanide, which is a precursor chemical for the manufacture of the nerve agent tabun. It can also be used to generate toxic hydrogen cyanide gas. Interestingly, Kurbegovic learned about chemical warfare agents by checking out books from a public library and obtaining declassified government documents. What took him a few months of research in the 1970s to learn would probably take a person today only a few hours of searching the Internet.

  Kurbegovic's trial did not begin until February 1980. The delay of more than five-and-a-half years from the time of his arrest resulted from legal questions concerning his mental competency to stand trial. Even though he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, he was still ruled competent (like Theodore Kaczynski) to stand trial. He was found guilty eight months later of twenty-five counts of murder, arson, attempted murder, possession of explosive material, and exploding a bomb. He was sentenced to life in prison. Upon hearing the sentence, Kurbegovic complained to the judge that a life sentence was too vague. He asked her to change it to one thousand years in prison “so I can have something to look forward to.”117

  The Kurbegovic case illustrates how a disturbed but highly intelligent lone wolf can think up a variety of terrorist tactics and act upon them, since he is accountable only to himself. In one of his tapes, Kurbegovic stated, “We do not ask American people to support us; in fact, we don't give a damn whether they like what we have to offer or not.”118 He also didn't mind shocking people with his statements, as was evident in court when, acting as his own attorney, he asked a pastor who had lost his leg in the airport bombing, “So where was your God when this bomb went off?”119 Kurbegovic also asked Judge Nancy Watson to declare him the Messiah. His behavior during the trial took its toll on Watson. “
I really felt beaten down after a while,” she recalled. “I mean it was just unending with him.” She told Kurbegovic during the sentencing that she considered him to be “the most dangerous person in custody that I know of.” She said that Kurbegovic had an “enormous capacity for feelings of vengeance and anti-social acts” and that he had intended to “kill as many people as he could” with his bombs.120 Kurbegovic, though, had the last word, as he held up a sign while being led from the courtroom. The sign read, “I shall return!”

  OBSERVATIONS FROM THE CASES EXAMINED

  This brief analysis of ten cases of lone wolf terrorism reveals some interesting observations regarding the different types of lone wolves. First, there was little difference among the lone wolves in terms of the tactics they chose to use. Bombings were committed by secular (Timothy McVeigh), single-issue (Eric Rudolph), criminal (John Gilbert Graham), and idiosyncratic (Theodore Kaczynski and Muharem Kurbegovic) lone wolves; while shootings were chosen as the means of attack by religious (Nidal Malik Hasan and James von Brunn) and single-issue (Volkert van der Graaf) lone wolves. A secular lone wolf (Anders Breivik) committed both a bombing and a mass shooting, while a criminal lone wolf (Panos Koupparis) attempted an elaborate hoax in order to extort money from the Cypriot government.

  There was some difference in terms of the targets chosen, with secular lone wolves (McVeigh and Breivik) attacking government buildings (with Breivik also attacking civilians, although the civilians were youths who were political activists for the ruling Norwegian government party), a religious lone wolf (Hasan) attacking military personnel, and another religious lone wolf (Von Brunn) attacking civilians at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Civilian targets were also chosen by the criminal lone wolves (Graham and Koupparis; in the case of Koupparis, the threat was to harm the Cypriot population), the idiosyncratic lone wolves (Kaczynski and Kurbegovic), and a single-issue lone wolf (Rudolph), while the other single-issue lone wolf (Van der Graaf) chose a politician to attack.

  All the lone wolves who were active in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when online activity was already pervasive throughout the world, used the Internet in various ways. This included Breivik (secular), Hasan and Von Brunn (religious), and Van der Graaf (single-issue). Criminal lone wolves Graham and Koupparis, as well as idiosyncratic lone wolf Kurbegovic, did not have the Internet available to them when they were committing their crimes. The Internet was in its early stages of development when McVeigh (secular), Rudolph (single-issue), and Kaczynski (idiosyncratic) were active.

  The major differences, however, among the lone wolves discussed above can be seen in their motivations, level of creativity and innovation, and degree of guilt or remorse for their actions. Secular lone wolves McVeigh and Breivik were motivated in part by a hatred of government, and their violence was due to the desire to take revenge for a government raid at the Branch Davidian cult's compound in Waco, Texas, in the case of McVeigh, and for the Norwegian government allowing Muslim immigration into Norway, in the case of Breivik. (Related to that was Breivik's desire for an end to “multiculturalism” and the “Islamization” of Western Europe). Religious lone wolves Hasan and Von Brunn were motivated respectively by Islamic extremist views, in the case of Hasan, and neo-Nazi, white-supremacist ideology, in the case of Von Brunn. The single-issue lone wolves we examined perpetrated their violence in the name of specific issues, such as abortion, in the case of Rudolph, and animal rights, in the case of Van der Graaf. Criminal lone wolves Graham and Koupparis were motivated by financial gain, while idiosyncratic lone wolves Kaczynski and Kurbegovic had irrational objectives (an end to the industrial-technological society, in the case of Kaczynski, and an end to nationalism, religion, fascism, racism, and communism, in the case of Kurbegovic) that motivated their violence and were due to severe personality and psychological problems.

  The lone wolves we examined also exhibited different levels of creativity and innovation in their terrorist attacks or threats. As noted earlier, lone wolves in general tend to be more creative than organized terrorist groups, since there is no group decision-making process that they have to go through in order to get approval for their plans. Therefore, they are free to think up any scenario they want and then implement it. However, in the cases examined above, it was the criminal and idiosyncratic lone wolves who proved to be the most innovative in their plans. Graham thought up and implemented the first major midair plane bombing in US history, while Koupparis designed an elaborate hoax involving a chemical agent. Kurbegovic was among the first terrorists to threaten to use nerve agents over populated areas and was also creative in using the media to gain publicity and reaction to his terror campaign, particularly in the use of the alphabet to spell out the name of his fictitious group. While Kaczynski's sending of package bombs was not unique (it had been done by terrorists in the past), he did demonstrate a level of creativity in handcrafting his bombs with wooden parts and in targeting a diverse array of individuals living in different parts of the United States. This prevented federal authorities from discerning a clear pattern that could lead to his arrest.

  The lure of money in the cases of criminal lone wolves and the effect of severe psychological issues in the cases of idiosyncratic lone wolves apparently free these types of individuals to think up the most creative and innovative ways to meet their objectives, even more so than the other types of lone wolves. Two other cases of innovative terrorist attacks that were not discussed in detail above also involved idiosyncratic lone wolves. The first case of product tampering in the United States is suspected to be the work of a mentally ill individual who laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, while the first case of successfully sending anthrax spores through the mail to kill people was the work of a mentally ill microbiologist.

  There was also a difference among the lone wolves who did not die in their attacks regarding how they viewed their actions after they were arrested. Secular and single-issue lone wolves expressed some degree of guilt or “apology” for their violence, while the criminal and idiosyncratic lone wolves remained unapologetic. McVeigh claimed that he was not aware that there was a daycare center in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and that, had he known, he might have chosen a different target. While Breivik did not feel remorse for his twin terror attacks in Norway, he did acknowledge to his lawyer that what he did was indeed “atrocious.” Rudolph expressed remorse over the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and even some doubts about the bombings of abortion clinics and other targets in a letter he sent to his mother while he was in prison. In court, Van der Graaf stated that he still “wrestled” with the question of whether he was justified in killing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn.

  There was no remorse, however, shown by Graham, the criminal lone wolf, after he was arrested for blowing up a plane carrying his mother and forty-three other people in order to cash an insurance policy. Likewise, Koupparis showed no remorse for his dioxin plot in Cyprus. Idiosyncratic lone wolves Kaczynski and Kurbegovic also never expressed any regrets for their violence. In terms of the religious lone wolf cases we examined, Hasan, as of November 2012, has yet to speak about the shootings at Fort Hood, while Von Brunn was killed in his attack at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is unlikely, however, that religious lone wolves would express any doubts or guilt over their actions, since that would make them question their religion or at least their interpretation of what their religion teaches them, which could be a very painful experience.

  We have seen in this chapter how lone wolf terrorism is a diverse phenomenon that can have as much, and sometimes even more, impact on governments and societies than violence committed by larger and more organized terrorist groups. We now turn to a discussion of why lone wolves can be so dangerous and why they are prime candidates to use weapons of mass destruction.

  One of the unique characteristics that separates terrorism from all other types of conflicts is the ability of a single incident to throw an entire nation into crisi
s and create repercussions far beyond the original event. The taking of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, for example, led to a more than fourteen-month-long crisis that virtually paralyzed the administration of President Jimmy Carter and may have led to his defeat in the 1980 presidential election. The September 11, 2001, hijacking-suicide attacks in the United States changed the course of US domestic and foreign policy for years afterward. For many Americans, it was the first time they seriously thought about the threat of terrorism. And the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, led to deteriorating relations between India and Pakistan. India accused Pakistan of being involved in the shootings that left more than 160 people dead. Many other countries have also seen a terrorist incident affect government and society long after the event is over.

  Yet for all the crises and repercussions that terrorism has caused in the past, the potential for a major, successful terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction is the most troubling. The fatality level would likely be higher than any previous terrorist incident, with one estimate running as high as between one and three million people killed if there were an anthrax attack over Washington, DC.1 Such an event would also create a medical, political, and social crisis unparalleled in our history. How real, then, are the prospects for such an attack, and how likely are lone wolves to be among the perpetrators?

  TERRORISTS AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

  When I first began writing about the potential of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction (commonly referred to as “WMD”) in the late 1980s,2 there were two main criticisms leveled at anybody dealing with this topic. The first was that you might be giving new ideas to terrorists, who were busy at the time setting off car bombs, hijacking planes, kidnapping individuals, and doing other types of conventional terrorist attacks throughout the world. The assumption then was that terrorists did not know much about these weapons, so the less said or written about the subject, the better. The days of WMD terrorism being a taboo topic, however, are long gone. Today, there are countless books, articles, Internet websites, television commentaries, and government reports devoted to this issue.