Surprise Attack by Larry Hancock

Author:Larry Hancock [Hancock, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619026575
Publisher: Counterpoint

Chapter 15

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

A new threat to America emerged toward the end of the Cold War. It came from a totally different type of enemy, not an enemy nation or bloc of nations but stateless individuals who simply considered themselves to be at war with the United States for a variety of reasons. The one commonality among them was that they began to target Americans, internationally and ultimately, within the United States itself. Classic intelligence practices, particularly human intelligence, demonstrated little success against attacks that came seemingly at random. The initial response to this new threat was to treat each individual attack as a crime, to be investigated by law enforcement agencies, in particular the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and prosecuted in American or foreign courts. That approach was fundamentally legal in nature and focused on prosecution rather than on interdiction—the initiative remained totally with those planning and carrying out the attacks.

The attacks themselves almost all involved individuals from either the Middle East or North Africa, carried out by individuals motivated by the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Airline hijackings began as early as the 1960s; in 1969 a TWA flight out of Rome was seized and flown to Syria. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its affiliates engaged in an ongoing series of aircraft and even ocean-liner seizures; the frequency of incidents escalated into the 1980s. American citizens were targeted for special attention, hostage-taking and in several instances outright murder. The attacks were directed toward “soft” targets, targets involving civilians and offering little to no risk of military opposition. The objective was intimidation, blackmail and the generation of raw fear. The motive in the attacks was clearly political, and those involved were affiliated with various organized groups. The attacks were publicly treated as crimes, the attackers individually charged, prosecuted and jailed simply as criminals, not dealt with as “combatants,” even if they and their groups considered themselves to be at war.1

From the American legal perspective, domestic intelligence and criminal counterterror activities were conducted in accordance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1977. That legislation had been passed in reaction to congressional investigations of the domestic activities of both the CIA and FBI, in particular illegal activities that had been conducted against Americans involved in civil rights and anti–Vietnam War activities. The act did allow intelligence surveillance (electronic monitoring and physical searches) of foreign groups and individuals inside the United States, but ongoing monitoring required the issuance of an order from a special FISA national security court within seventy-two hours of the beginning of the activity. Additional rules and directives were implemented within the FBI, with oversight by the Justice Department. Those directives were aimed at separating intelligence collection from actual criminal investigations and created a “wall” that restricted automatic circulation of foreign intelligence data to the criminal sections of the Bureau. Those procedures, intended to protect the legal rights of American citizens, proved to be acceptable with regard to the standard intelligence activities of foreign nations but eventually proved

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