POLICY REVIEW ARTICLE BY REPRESENTATIVE JIM COURTER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88B00443R001904430052-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 14, 2011
• Sequence Number: 52
• Publication Date: April 15, 1986
• Content Type: MEMO

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policy
I E W
Adam Meyerson
Editor
Dinesh D'Souza
Managing Editor
David I. Meiselman
Chairman
Editorial Board
Edwin 1. Feulner, Jr.
Publisher
Burton Yale Pines
Associate Publisher
I thought you might like to see an advance copy of "Protecting
Our Citizens: When to Use Force Against Terrorists," by Representative
Jim Courter (R-New Jersey). The article appears in the spring issue
of Policy Review, the quarterly magazine of The Heritage Foundation.
"Time and time again," writes Representative Courter, "hostages
have been rescued unharmed by the swift and skillful use of force. Time
and time again, decisive action has destroyed terrorists' headquarters
and thus impaired their military capabilities or deterred them from
using terrorist tactics." Representative Courter draws practical lessons
from successful counterterrorism in the past.
Policy Review publishes a lively letters to the editor section. If
you would like to take issue with, or to support, Representative
Courter's argument, we welcome letters to the editor of no more than 500
words. Letters must be received by May 15 to go into our summer issue.
I am also enclosing the cover page of our spring issue. Please let
me know if you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the magazine.
A publication of The Heritage Foundation
Ygurs sincerely,
Adam Meyerson
Editor
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r
O
REVIEW
Spring 1986 Number 36 Four Dollars
My Plan To Balance The Budget
Representative Jack Kemp
Anti-Terrorist Strategies That Work
Representative Jim Courter
Racism In Russia
Deroy Murdock
Shanty Raids At Dartmouth
Dinesh D'Souza
Future Challenges For Conservatism
George H. Nash
Should We Privatize Money?
Richard Rahn
Charlton Heston On Hollywood Politics
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PROTECTING OUR CITIZENS
When to Use Force Against Terrorists
T
REPRESENTATIVE JIM COURTER
wenty-three Americans died in terrorist attacks abroad
last year, and another 160 were wounded. From the mur-
derous and elaborate theater that Nabih Berri and his asso-
ciates staged around the TWA jetliner in Beirut, to the
bombings which killed servicemen in Greece and West
Germany, to the use of an automatic weapon on invalid
Leon Klinghoffer traveling on the Achille Lauro, terrorists
have treated American lives and honor with contempt.
And yet, apart from the use of fighter aircraft to capture
the Achille Lauro pirates, the United States has done re-
markably little to secure justice for the wrongs done to its
citizens. Americans have been hearing for a long time
about "the war against terrorism," but thus far the war has
been one-sided, and it is not the terrorists who are losing.
There have been no known attempts to rescue the six
americans still held hostage in Lebanon. Nor have there
been any known measures taken against Iran, which last
had possession of the Shiites who murdered William Stan-
ford and Charles Hegna in December 1984 on a Kuwaiti
airliner at Teheran. The killers of Navy petty officer Rob-
ert Stethem have been identified by the State Department,
but have since been reported to be at large in Beirut. Very
recently, one of them was allowed to pass through France
untouched.
Neither Abu Nidal nor his Libyan and Syrian patrons
have paid any price for their submachine gun and grenade
attacks on defenseless travelers in the Rome and Vienna
airports in December. Instead, the new year began with the
Sixth Fleet maneuvering uselessly off the coast of Libya, as
Colonel Qaddafi poured scorn on the White House. The
naval exercises may not have intimidated Qaddafi, but they
can be presumed to have reinforced his megalomania.
Thomas Jefferson dealt differently with the Mediterra-
nean pirates of his day. "An insult unpunished is the parent
of others," he said. Jefferson overturned the George
\X'ashington/John Adams policy of paying protection
money to the Barbary pirates who preyed upon commerce
from bases in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. In lieu
of further payment, he sent our six-ship Navy under Ste-
phen Decatur's command to the Mediterranean. The fleet
bombarded the pirates' bases and the military installations
of their governmental sponsors and blockaded their coasts,
eventually forcing their submission. Decatur came home
with guarantees of something which tradition and all codes
of international law promised but could not by themselves
preserve: the freedom of trading ships to move on the high
seas.
"History is full of such episodes," wrote Yale's Sterling
Professor of Law Eugene Rostow in 1980 after critics
questioned the legality of our attempt to rescue diplomats
imprisoned in our Teheran embassy. The cases demon-
strate both the responsibility of a state to prevent its terri-
tory from being used as a base for international crimes, and
the right of a victimized state to redress such crimes by
force if other means fail. A simple reprisal is acceptable
where it is "discriminate"-no more dangerous than, nec-
essary to innocent parties-and "proportionate," which
means punitive but no more so than necessary. Natural
moral law, traditional international law, and even the more
delicate rules of the United Nations Charter all guarantee
the right to self-defense, particularly against the transna-
tional movements of armed bands.
As one terrorist atrocity follows another, it has not been
law which has prevented measured and forcible American
reaction. Our hand has been stayed by political reserva-
tions and by moral and psychological inhibitions. The Rea-
gan Administration's policy-that force is both justifiable
and necessary-has been argued clearly and repeatedly
since 1981. But time after time, we have vented our anger
and sheathed our sword.
We have made ourselves experts at explaining why not
acting is almost always the more satisfactory course. We
think of the danger a rescue mission poses to the hostages
and of the dangers military reprisal presents to innocent
bystanders. We echo each other's remarks about not fur-
thering "the spiral of violence." We persuade each other
that retaliation would mean Libyan or Iranian terrorism in
American streets. We read of the concern any action
would be certain to raise in the capitals of friendly coun-
REPRESENTATIVE JtM COURIER Republican of New Jersey, is
a fourth-term member of the House Armed Services Com-
mittee. He was aided in preparing this article by legislative
assistant Christopher Harmon.
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tries or even in capitals of unfriendly countries like Syria,
which already has a place on our list of identified govern-
mental sponsors of terrorism. And if all these reasons do
not stop us from punishing terrorists and their patrons,
then we come to discover that, after all, visiting justice on a
religious or political zealot is counterproductive because it
would only gratify his longing for martyrdom.
Meanwhile, we have been overlooking the remarkable
number of counterterrorism success stories in the past two
decades. Time and time again, hostages have been rescued
unharmed by the swift and skillful use of force. Time and
time again, decisive action has destroyed terrorists' head-
quarters or camps and thus impaired their military capabili-
ties or deterred them from using terrorist tactics. The op-
tion of the use of force, while not always necessary, must
always be available. Contingency planning for a rescue
mission or military retaliation or both should begin from
the very hour in which Americans are taken hostage or
killed abroad. There is no need for us to be paralyzed:
history gives ample evidence that international terrorism
can be impeded by countermeasures that are skillful and
swift.
Rescue Missions
Delta Force, the U.S. Army's team of counterterrorism
specialists, is regrettably best known for failing to take
enough helicopters to the desert staging ground outside
Teheran in 1980. When three of the eight helicopters de-
veloped mechanical problems, the mission to rescue the 52
Americans had to be aborted. But Delta should also be
remembered for other, more successful missions.
In March 1981, for example, the unit was asked for
assistance when Islamic fundamentalists of the
"Kommando Jihad," or Holy War Command, seized an
Indonesian DC-10 airliner with about 50 passengers. As the
plane rested on an airstrip in Bangkok, Thailand, Delta
Force sent an anti-terrorist team with specialized equip-
ment to advise and assist the Indonesian commandos. The
Indonesians then stormed and liberated the airplane, kill-
ing three terrorists and mortally wounding a fourth.
Delta's advice was sought again in July 1984 when a
Venezuelan DC-9 with 79 aboard was skyjacked by a
Dominican national and a former Haitian army captain.
The Venezuelan government defied the terrorists' de-
mands, and the airplane made a series of short hops around
the Caribbean, settling in Curacao. A clever airport techni-
cian crept to the plane and let the air out of its front tires
and removed several electrical fuses. Eventually, 12 Ameri-
can-coached Venezuelan commandos armed with Uzi sub-
machine guns approached the plane from two directions.
As a hijacker panicked and threw gasoline into the aisles,
they stormed the aircraft and killed both gunmen. There
was no injury to any of the hostages.
Israel has successfully prevented the hijacking of its pas-
senger liners. One El Al jet was commandeered in 1968 by
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (P.F.L.P).
Never again. Israel put undercover sky marshals on se-
lected flights, reinforced cargo holds to nullify the effect of
baggage bombs, and reportedly installed devices under jet
wings which can alter and misdirect the flight of incoming
missiles. When two Arabs tried to seize an El Al jet in 1970
Protecting Our Citizens
on its flight from Amsterdam to New York, one of them
was shot dead by a marshal while the other was handed
over to authorities when the plane landed in London.
Palestinian terrorists lost their interest in flying with El Al.
The Israelis also have a fine record of recapturing other
nations' airliners for them. Disguised as ground attendants,
one team liberated a Belgian plane at Ben Gurion Airport
in 1972, killing two members of Wadi Haddad's P.F.L.P.
team and saving 97 passengers. Another squad retook a
Sabena Airlines plane held by Black Septembrists that same
year.
Egypt was one of the countries to study the Israeli les-
sons. In 1976, gunmen in the pay of Libya made the mis-
take of skyjacking an Egyptian Boeing 737 en route from
Cairo to Luxor. As the government's negotiators stalled
the gunmen with false news of a technical problem that
would delay lift-off from Luxor, the army was working
with information provided by several released hostages to
develop a plan. Crack Egyptian paratroopers dressed as
technicians were put aboard to perform the "necessary
repairs." Working slowly, they talked themselves into the
terrorists' confidence and their eventual request for spare
parts and tools was granted. When these arrived, the "tech-
nicians" suddenly opened battle with the iron tools, batter-
ing several hijackers in prolonged hand-to-hand combat. A
second team rushed in with effective automatic weapons
fire. Every terrorist ended up in the hospital while every
one of the 101 passengers and crew-Arab, French, West
German, and Japanese-escaped harm.
In 1977, Palestinian gunmen hijacked a Lufthansa flight
to Mogadishu, Somalia, where they threatened to kill the
90 hostages unless Baader-Meinhof terrorists were re-
leased from a West German prison, and a S9 million ran-
som was paid. As Somalian government negotiators
bought time, a team from West Germany's GSG-9 team,
commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ulrich Wegener, flew
in from Crete and made an unobserved night landing. With
blackened faces, dark clothes, and special soft shoes that
allowed them to creep unnoticed along the wings of the
plane, they placed their explosives. A ruse was employed to
get all the terrorists to go forward to the cabin momen-
tarily, and the starboard doors and several rear windows
were then blown off. The GSG-9 team rushed in and
gunned down all four terrorists. No one else was hurt.
Leaders of the Baader-Meinhof gang committed suicide in
their German prison cells when they heard of the
counterassault. The raid at Mogadishu proved to be the
psychological and political end of their movement.
The team at Mogadishu was assisted by specialists from
Europe's most celebrated counterinsurgency professionals,
the British Special Air Service (S.A.S.). The S.A.S. carries on
a small exchange program with Delta Force, and has
helped the Dutch Royal Marines, who put an end to South
Moluccan terrorism in their country in the 1970s by suc-
cessfully storming a train, an embassy, a school building,
and other enclosures where hostages had been seized. Initi-
ated to carry out commando raids against Rommel's forces
in North Africa in World War II, the S.A.S. then focused
on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism work in Indo-
nesia, Malaya, and South Yemen. Today, rescuing hostages
is one of its specialties. So formidable is its reputation that
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WANTED: Yasir Arafat for ordering the killing of Cleo Noel; Abu Nidal, for the hijacking of an Egypt Air plane list
November; Abu Abbas, for the murder of Leon Klinghoffer.
the reported presence of plainclothes marksmen from the
regiment was said to have persuaded four Irish Republican
Army terrorists to surrender after holding a building on
Balcombe Street in London in 1975.
An S.A.S. contingent attached to the Special Branch of
London's Metropolitan Police went on alert on the after-
noon of April 30, 1980, when dissident Iranians stormed
their own embassy in London and seized 26 hostages.
Armed with a submachine gun, a machine pistol, Browning
automatic pistols, and hand grenades, the Khomeini oppo-
nents from the Arab province of Khuzestan separated the
hostages by sex and held them in two rooms on the third
floor of the elegant rive-story building. Such dispersal of
hostages makes rescue considerably more difficult, which
is why the tactic has become commonplace in more recent
years.
London's police specialists had outlasted and out-talked
and outwitted many hostage-takers before, and remained
confident during the six-day siege. They kept the terrorists
on one telephone and passed everything they learned by
another to the S.A.S. The regiment was busy with blue-
prints of the building, their contingency planning, and cer-
tain limited movements on the embassy site itself. The
gunmen began to sense their presence, and the government
was still resisting their demand for an airplane to Baghdad.
Terrorist leader Sami Mohammed All lost his patience.
"The time for talking is past," he announced into the
telephone as he gunned down a hostage. He pushed the
body out the door and warned that another would die
every half hour. "Knowing someone had been killed,
things had to change," said John Dellow, deputy assistant
commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
"What followed rook just 11 minutes," The Times of
London later reported. S.A.S. reams descended from the
roof of the embassy using a high speed drop along ropes
which they had anchored earlier to the jump-off point.
They carried "frame charges" four feet long and two feet
wide, specially packed with plastique, which they placed
around the perimeters of the heavily reinforced windows.
Through the blown apertures came stun grenades, an
S.A.S. invention which produces a flash and a roar that
momentarily immobilizes terronsts and hostages alike.
Then the S.A.S., wearing helmet gear and built-in radios,
came through and rushed upstairs, killing one gunman in
the hallway and the others in the rooms with the hostages.
Then some searched the rest of the embassy while others
formed a human chain and virtually hurled the hostages
one by one down the staircases and out of the burning
building. With facts still hooded-now against the eager
electronic eyes of the press-the S.A.S. troops boarded
their waiting helicopters and disappeared.
The motto of the Special Air Service is "Who Dares,
Wins."
Retaliation
The United States helped impose a Palestine Liberation
Organization contingent on Tunisia as part of the deal it
brokered in 1982 to evacuate Palestinians loyal to Yasir
Arafat from Beirut and scatter them throughout the Medi-
terranean. The elderly President Bourguiba did his best to
Polio Review
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alleviate his new problem by not permitting P.L.O. mem-
bers to wander far from their camp and not permitting
them to take their weapons with them when they did. But
while he would later make reference to their "combatant"
status, Bourguiba did not try to inhibit their foreign opera-
tions. He must have known very well what they were.
Tel Aviv knew as well. Force 17, Arafat's elite personal
guard, was increasingly assuming an external role. Several
crimes inside Israel were credited to them, and boatloads
of Force 17 guerrillas were apprehended twice approach-
ing the Israeli coast in August 1985. Israeli Defense Minis-
ter Yitzhak Rabin charged that they were launched from
Algeria on the orders of the Tunis headquarters, and cold
simply "to kill as many Jews as they can." Rabin made his
statement in early September, a few days later, Force 17
seems to have sent three terrorists to murder Israeli tourists
moored off Cyprus in a yacht. Many of these events were
boasted of by captured Force 17 members and confirmed
by American and British intelligence. The P.L.O. denied
everything.
On October 1, 1985, two weeks after the Cyprus
killings, Israeli jets left home for Arafat's headquarters just
outside the Tunisian capital. Carrying the radar-jamming
and deflecting equipment that proved so successful against
Syria in 1982 and refueled in the air by Boeing 707 tankers,
they approached the compound in two waves. First came
F-15s, carrying laser designators to mark the P.L.O. head-
quarters building. Then came F-16s, which dropped Amer-
ican-built, laser-guided bombs that honed in on laser
beams reflected off the designators. The phrase "surgical
strike" has seldom been more appropriate. According to
the Washington Post, the raid "damaged or destroyed
buildings used by Force 17 ... while leaving others in the
complex untouched." Of the 70 or so killed, all were
P.L.O. except for a dozen Tunisian policemen.
In an age of highly accurate weapons, including preci-
sion-guided munitions, Americans have clung stubbornly
to the view that bombing is almost by definition indis-
cnminate. In part, this is due to our endless war in Viet-
nam, where we dropped staggering amounts of ordnance
with remarkably little effect. But the Vietnam War was
also a proving ground for new radio- and laser-guided
munitions that can be used with pinpoint accuracy and
minimum risk to civilians. The U.S. Air Force flew about
800 sorties against the Thanh Hoa bridge near Hanoi be-
tween 1965 and 1967 and lost 30 to 40 aircraft. But in May
1972, the first four Phantoms to be sent in with laser
bombs hit the bridge, In June 1972, using 15 laser-guided
2,000-pound bombs, the U.S. Air Force destroyed the gen-
erating capacity of the Lang Chi dam, northwest of Hanoi,
without destroying the dam itself-thereby preventing a
flooding of the Red River valley that would have endan-
gered civilians.
These and other more sophisticated weapons can be
employed, as they were at Tunis, to ensure that reprisals
against terrorist encampments or military and economic
targets are exact and undamaging to civilians.
Not all Israeli raids have been as "clean" as that at Tunis.
But the Israeli Defense Force history includes many such
strikes in which the damage is devastatingly effective but
limited to military targets. Late this January, after the at-
tacks in Vienna and Rome by Abu Nidal's Libyan- and
Syrian-supported Palestinians, and after a Syrian-supported
Fatah faction led by Abu Musa claimed credit for the
Sunday bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria, Israel decided
upon action against an Abu Musa outpost at the Ain el
Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, long a shelter
for Palestinian gunmen. As first light broke on the morning
of January 29, a flight of Israeli war planes swept over the
It took the British Special Air
Service just 11 minutes to rescue
hostages from the Iranian embassy
in London in 1980.
Lebanese border and struck at a selected cluster of three
houses outside the camp. Though surrounded by sandbags
and twin-barrelled anti-aircraft gun emplacements, all
three buildings were destroyed by strafing and 50-pound
fragmentation bombs.
Israel's pilots returned safely to their bases and reported
accurate hits on the one-story center of Abu Musa's group,
a smaller building occupied by Ahmed Jibril's Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command,
and a two-story possession of another guerrilla group. The
operation was over so swiftly that the Palestinians were
unable even to remove the covers from their anti-aircraft
guns. The refugees nearby were untouched.
The psychological effects of such an accurate raid are
extraordinary. It must have been particularly hard on Abu
Musa: 18 months before, in August 1984, Israeli jets had
hit his bases with precision attacks in East Lebanon's Bekaa
Valley, home to 5,000 anti-Arafat Palestinian guerrillas,
and the departure point for frequent raids into Israel. One
pair of Israeli bombers destroyed several buildings at Mejd
el Anjar, a guerrilla base just south of the Beirut-Damascus
highway. Abu Musa would admit to losing only four of his
fighters, but about 100 people were buried in the rubble of
a three-story building which Israel said served as his secu-
rity and intelligence office. If the pursuit of Abu Musa has
not yet resulted in his death, it has seriously disrupted his
military operations. Many terrorist commanders remem-
ber the Israeli air attacks as "the worst part of their ca-
reers," wrote veteran Middle East reporter John Laffin,
"because the Israeli planes 'always seemed to know where
to find us."'
American cases of retaliation are rare. One involved a
combined rescue /retaliation action directed by President
Gerald Ford in 1975 when Cambodian Communists seized
the American cargo ship Mayaguez off the Cambodian
coast. The U.S. Navy counterassault was swift, somewhat
clumsy, and successful: all 40 captives were rescued. The
President was much criticized by those who would guard
us against any trace of "adventurism" and by others who
judge a rescue mission not by its punitive and deterrent
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Protecting Our Citizens
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effect or by the retrieval of hostages but by body counts of
the American soldiers who try to bring them back. Inter-
viewed by Hugh Sidey five years after giving the orders for
action, Mr. Ford had a short answer for his critics: "There
was never a repeat while I was President."
The case of the Mayaguez illustrated how necessary our
military alliances and overseas bases are to rescue missions.
Reconnaissance aircraft were dispatched from Utapao Air-
field in Thailand. The U.S.S. Coral Sea carrier group was
redirected toward the area, as were other U.S. ships of war.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff needed a landing party and or-
dered an Okinawa-based Marine battalion to Utapao. Two
other Marine platoons would be brought in from Cubi
Point in the Philippines.
The captured Mayaguez had been anchored near Kaoh
Tang Island, and the movement of small boars to and from
the ship suggested to intelligence that the 40-member crew
had been transferred to land. (Intelligence, as it happens,
was wrong.) Late in the fourth day, following a meeting of
the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
ordered that Kaoh Tang Island be attacked and the empty
Mayaguez reboarded and towed to sea. Airstrikes hit the
Cambodian airfield at Ream, heavily damaging the installa-
tions and the airstrip. The 180 Marines in the helicopter-
borne landing parties nonetheless took barrages of auto-
matic weapons from the ground. Of the eight helicopters
in the first wave, three crashed and two were disabled.
Claymore mines on the beach also took their toll. Other
landings placed hundreds of other troops ashore, some on
nearby Tang Island where they engaged 150 Cambodians.
If the fighting was bloody, it was also brief: three hours
after the assault commenced, a fishing boat with mostly
Caucasians on board was reported to be approaching Kaoh
Tang Island flying a white flag.
The incident has a number of parallels with the Grenada
operation of 1983. Both combined rescue and assault mis-
sions. Both successfully used overwhelming force on a
small enemy-held island, but proved costly in men and
machines. In both, there were lethal accidents. In Grenada,
a skiff full of equipment-laden Navy SEALS overturned in
unexpectedly heavy surf as a helicopter towed it towards
the shore of the eastern side of the island. In Thailand, as
helicopters landed at a U.S. base with Cambodia-bound
Marines, one chopper crashed, costing 23 lives. The Cam-
bodian operation used three arms of the military services:
Navy, Marines, and Air Force. The Grenada mission used
the Navy, Marines, Army personnel, and special forces.
President Ford had been told to expect to lose between
10 to 40 men in the Mayaguez mission. Fifteen died in
action, and the 23 others in the shattered helicopter in
Thailand must also be counted as losses. Another Si ser-
vicemen and officers were wounded, and a three-man ma-
chine gun crew disappeared in action. Two cryptic entries
in the records of the debriefing of the Mayaguez crew
would have satisfied Commander-in-Chief Ford, however.
According to one of these, the Mayaguez captain "con-
vinced Cambodians that he could get U.S. forces to stop
bombing/strafing if ship and crew released." The other is
the last: "Ship's captain states that Cambodian fear of
airstrike and prompt U.S. force response were the primary
causes for release of the ship and its crew."
What Works, and What Doesn't
Certainly there are cases in which force has been used
badly. Last November, 59 hostages of an Egypt Air plane
hijacked to Malta by followers of Abu Nidal were killed
during a rescue attempt by the Egyptian counterterrorist
squad Sa'iqa. A rescue attempt was necessary, because the
terrorists had begun executing passengers. But action is not
of itself enough. Neither planning nor skill were in evi-
dence. French counterterrorism expert Paul Barril, who
helped the Saudis recapture the Great Mosque of Mecca
from heavily armed Sunnis in 1979, has criticized Sa'iga for
using no sophisticated equipment, such as spike micro-
phones, which can locate each of the terrorists with some
precision inside the plane, or incapacitating gas, or the stun
grenades which had rooted out the terrorists in the cata-
combs beneath the Great Mosque. No deception was at-
tempted to provide the element of surprise.
Maltese authorities were also to blame. Available Amer-
ican experts were kept confined to their quarters by the
Maltese; they were not even allowed to communicate with
Sa'iga's commanding officer. Barril notes further that the
Maltese authorities' refusal to allow refueling of the plane
cost Sa'iga its best chance to approach and gather intelli-
gence. The rule in hostage situations is not to refuse to
negotiate but to buy time by appearing to negotiate.
Sa'iga commenced its operation with an attempt to blow
an aperture in the plane, but used too much explosive and
set the aircraft on fire. Then, unforgivably, it killed inno-
cents after passengers and terrorists began rushing from the
burning plane. Counterterrorist forces are trained at instan-
taneous distinction between those with guns and those
without. Firing without certainty is the worst mistake.
Sa'iga had no reason to fire into knots of escaping passen-
gers and terrorists when the police presumably had the
airport cordoned off.
Disaster in Colombia followed the one in Malta, and the
reasons for it were similar. After three dozen M-19 Com-
munist guerrillas seized the Palace of Justice and a number
of judges on November 6, the Colombian army stormed
and recaptured the building. The result was some 100
deaths and only three dozen of the dead were guerrillas. So
bad was the carnage that the 12 rescued justices boycotted
the memorial service that President Betancur held for their
11 colleagues and the other innocents.
The operation discredited the use of force, an option to
which a democratic society like Colombia must have re-
course when faced with drug traffickers and Communist
terrorists. Given the strategy by which terrorists and their
sympathizers operate, lethal overreaction by the victimized
government is of more propaganda value to them than a
successful act of terror. Terrorists wish above all to dis-
credit the power and the legitimacy of the government in
the eyes of their audience, the people.
Time was on the side of the Colombian officials at
Bogota and they threw it away. Until the terrorists began
killing (and they apparently had not) waiting was appropri-
ate, just as it was at the Iranian embassy in London in 1980.
Instead, President Betancur waited two days-more than
enough for the terrorists to organize their defenses but not
enough for them to be worn down by the siege-and then
the army was sent in with much bravado and no apparent
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This attack by Arab commandos at Rome Airport in December 1985 cost 13 lives. Fifty others were wounded.
plan. Soldiers simply rammed an armored personnel carrier
through the front door. The ensuing firelight raged for two
days inside the block-long, three-story building. Some of
that time seems to have been used by the guerrillas to
execute at least six of the 11 justices who died.
The M-19 guerrillas who took the Palace of justice were
reportedly led by five Cuban-trained members of Nicara-
gua's Directorate of Special Operations. At a safehousc
outside the capital, they had built a scale model of the
targeted building and trained with it for three weeks. They
maintained regular coded communication with Cuba and
Nicaragua, which supplied half the arms they took to the
Palace. Such opponents cannot be surprised-or prevented
from shooting their captives-by the appearance of an
armored personnel carrier at the front door. But even two
army fire teams, introduced into the building by stealth, or
given satchel charges and placed on the roof by helicopter
at the moment the ground assault began, would have di-
verted the besieged, compromising their freedom to con-
centrate their fire on army personnel on the ground.
When to Use Force
Malta and Bogota are cases in which force was used
ineptly. Sometimes force ought not be used at all. This is
most likely when hostages are taken on a country's own
soil and the government possesses complete control over
the environment. Police and political officials can permit
or limit the terrorists' movement, allow or prevent visitors,
withhold or grant food and communication.
The New York City police department has a splendid
record of outlasting and out-talking nonpolitical hostage-
takers. "We bore them to death," one officer has said.
Although ideological zealots differ from emotional cases,
sometimes they, too, can be exhausted or tricked into
submission. There may also be times in which terrible
danger can be averred or scores of hostages rescued by
giving into the demands or granting terrorists their escape.
In such cases, it is important to make sure that punishment
or reprisal take place afterward.
Everything that was done wrong at Malta and Bogota
was done right at Entebbe. Even after a decade, that opera-
tion by the General Intelligence and Reconnaissance Unit
269 of the Israeli Defense Force remains the model of the
three elements of success in rescue missions: surprise,
speed, and skill.
On June 28, 1976, Air France flight 139 en route to Tel
Aviv was skyjacked by Palestinian and German terrorists
and flown to Entebbe, Uganda. By the morning of July 1, a
fullscale mock-up of Entebbe's Old Terminal had been
built from blueprints (obtained from the building's Israeli
architect) and from tourists' vague photographs. The com-
mando force was assembled and commenced rehearsals
under the stopwatch. One hour before midnight on July 3,
the first of four C-130s touched down after a 2,200 mile
flight, exactly 30 seconds behind schedule. The planes
disgorged armored personnel carriers, jeeps, other vehicles,
and several hundred men. They killed the terrorists, recap-
tured the hostages and put them on a plane for home,
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machine-gunned the Ugandan MIG fighters at the airstrip,
refueled, reloaded, and disappeared into the skies, all in an
hour and a half. The Israelis called it "Operation Thunder-
bolt," and Ugandans in the ministries and army barracks at
Kampala understood what they meant.
Without surprise, the lives of hostages and counter-
attackers alike are in the gravest danger. The terrorists may
fire on their captives; this happened at Entebbe and Lon-
don, though in most cases terrorists naturally rum upon
their attackers. Operating at night has often proven a good
way to gain surprise. Guards are least alert then, and al-
though the commandos are on unfamiliar ground, they
enjoy the advantages of moving out of darkness and to-
ward lit interiors. Where they attack in dark interiors,
infrared-sensitive night vision goggles can provide an ad-
vantage in a firelight. The rescues at Entebbe and Mogadi-
shu occurred at night and a dozen others were planned for
or took place in darkness. By contrast, some of the most
celebrated disasters-the attempt to stop Black Septem-
ber's escape with Israeli hostages at Furstenfeldbruck Air-
port outside Munich in 1972, Larnacav on Cyprus in 1978
where Sa'iga botched a rescue attempt, and the Malta
disaster of last year-took place in the full light of day.
The best opportunity for Delta Force to rescue the TWA
847 passengers last June may have been stymied by Alge-
rian authorities, who kept on the brilliant lights at Algiers
airport while the plane was held there overnight between
trips to Beirut.
Arriving at Entebbe at night was not of itself enough to
gain surprise. Elaborate plans were necessary to fool the
Ugandan radar systems and the Entebbe air traffic control-
lers. In addition, putting a C-130 Hercules transport air-
craft down on an airstrip unseen may be possible, but
putting it down quietly is a challenge. William Stevenson
has described how the first of the four transports cut its
speed to a mere 100 miles per hour and then cut it again to
75. To the soldiers strapped inside, the landing airplane
"seemed to fall out of the air with a shriek of twisted metal
and protesting turbines," but outside "an observer would
have seen the craft slide almost soundlessly onto the run-
way, the underinflated tires uttering a soft squeal."
Enemy troops on the ground presented another prob-
lem. An Israeli paratroop major assigned to get his men
from the first plane to the distant Old Terminal building
(where the hostages were) solved the problem of surprising
the expected sentries only in the last hours before board-
ing. He realized that the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin always
traveled in a black Mercedes, and had been visiting the
airport regularly to see his P.F.L.P. friends and "console"
the hostages. The major requisitioned a Mercedes, but the
only one available was white-, it went into the Hercules
with a new wet coat of black paint. The deception worked
perfectly. Outside the Old Terminal, Ugandans who would
have fired upon an unidentified column of jeeps snapped
to attention when it was led by a black Mercedes, and the
commandos inside cut them down with silencer-equipped
pistols. The addition of surprise to the customary swiftness
and skill of Israeli military operations made the Entebbe
rescue a masterstroke. It broke a most dangerous circle of
political criminals from Palestine and West Germany and
saved the hundred persons they had victimized.
What Can Be Done
The President and Secretary of State Shultz have pro-
pounded a reasonable, moral, and convincing doctrine of
the use of force against terrorism. Calling for the use of
preemption, punitive retaliation, and other acts which go
to the sources of terrorism, this doctrine is said to have
been codified by National Security Directive 138 in April
1984. The doctrine has often been invoked but rarely ap-
plied. Given the fact that Americans continue to be the
leading targets of international terrorism and that such acts
of terrorism continue to rise, it is necessary for the United
States to undertake a more aggressive counterterrorist role.
While it must be to others to choose the methods and
tools of action, the following suggestions indicate the
breadth of the American options.
The United States should make immediate and effective
use of international arrest warrants for known terrorists,
both those shielded from extradition by foreign govern-
ments and those beyond the control of their own poorly
governed states. The Terrorist Protection Act, recently
passed unanimously by the Senate, would lower domestic
legal barriers that inhibit American agents from seizing
those who kill Americans for political reasons abroad and
allow them to be brought to trial under American law.
Bounties may be useful supplements to American efforts
to arrest and prosecute known killers. The Department of
Justice has offered a bounty of S250,000 for the killers of
Charles Hegna and William Stanford on a hijacked Ku-
waiti airliner on December 4, 1984 at Teheran airport. It
has offered 5500,000 for Hasan Izz-Al-din and
Mohammad Hamadei, the Hezbollah members who mur-
dered Robert Stethem on the TWA plane last summer.
While there is no good moral or political reason to turn
over to bounty hunters the counterterrorism work we
should do ourselves, bounties may nonetheless be of use in
cases in which American agents are simply unable to locate
the killer.
There will, of course, be objections. Israel's clever kid-
napping-for-trial of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina 25
years ago produced a roar of international protest in spite
of the distinct unpopularity of Nazi mass murderers. We
must expect the objections, as surely as President Reagan
expected Mubarak's unhappiness about the Achille Lauro
force-down. We should turn them against the government
from which they come: if requests for extradition go un-
heeded, the snatch that follows should be accompanied by
wide dissemination of details of the government's refusal
to help seize an international terrorist, and by full listings
of the charges against the accused.
Ambassador Charles Lichenstein, formerly with our
United Nations mission, is among those examining ways of
bringing formal charges against Yasir Arafat, who is alleged
to have given orders over a shortwave radio to kill Cleo
Noel, American ambassador to the Sudan in 1973. Carlo
Mastelloni, a magistrate at Venice, has already issued a
warrant for Arafat's arrest (in September 1984) on charges
of weapons smuggling to the Italian Red Brigade via the
Mediterranean. And a justice in a court in Genoa, from
whence the Achille Lauro sailed, has issued a warrant for
Abu Abbas on charges of piracy and the murder of Leon
Klinghoffcr.
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Another candidate for arrest or reprisal may be Hussein
Mussawi, a Lebanese militant and an organizer of
Hezbollah, the sponsors of the TWA hijacking. Mussawi
operates primarily from West Beirut, Baalbek, and south-
ern Lebanon. He has been identified as the probable
draftsman, with Iran's Minister of Islamic Guidance, Seyed
Muhammed Khatami, of a 200-page plan drawn up in May
1984 for the formation of terrorist strike forces. Mussawi
reportedly sits as part of the secret council of Islamic Jihad,
or "Holy War," which meets in the Iranian Embassy in
Damascus. Apart from holding our six American hostages,
Islamic Jihad claims credit for the bombing of the Marine
barracks, as well as that of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in
April 1983. The Departments of Justice and State might
also take a hard look at the chief of Syrian military intelli-
gence in Lebanon, Colonel Ghazi Kanaan, to whom terror-
ism expert Arnaud de Borchgrave ascribes "the key super-
visory role for Shiite extremists in Lebanon. [He) functions
as President Assad's pro-consul in a country Syria regards
as its own. Colonel Kanaan has worked closely with the
K.G.B. in Syria and in Lebanon."
Kamaran Island, South Yemen's northernmost posses-
sion in the Red Sea, may be an example of the kind of hard
target available to American planners, should they be di-
rected by the President to retaliate for the killings of Amer-
icans by the P.L.O. In early 1985, Kamaran Island was
reported to be a new site for pro-Arafat P.L.O. activities.
The 70-square-mile island was leased to him and military
construction and the lengthening of an airstrip were under-
way. P.L.O. pilots were expected from other Middle East-
ern bases. If U.S. intelligence had confidence in such a
report, Kamaran Island could have been deemed a reason-
able target for a bombing raid following pro-Arafat P.L.O.
atrocities. The danger to South Yemeni citizens would
have been minimal.
Any number of Iranian, Syrian, or Libyan terrorist train-
ing camps suggest themselves as potential targets when
retaliation is appropriate. The State Department says it
knows of some 15 camps in Libya. Instructors are Syrian,
East German, Palestinian, and Cuban. Some 7,000 young
men and women from all over the world train there. Many
of the camps are on or near the Mediterranean coast and
are vulnerable to airstrikes and covert or overt operations
from the sea. These include Res al Hilal west of Tobruk,
the "April 17th" camp near Benghazi, and a cluster of
others around Tripoli.
If action against a country like Iran is necessary, accord-
ing to the Naval War College's chairman of strategy, Alvin
Bernstein, the best targets would be those outside the
country which would not endanger Americans carrying out
the reprisal. Arms-carrying ships essential to the
Ayatollah's war effort against Iraq are one such target;
naval patrol boats are another.
We should also start thinking about using political alli-
ances, political leverage, and financial and covert opera-
tions against state sponsors of terrorists who kill Ameri-
cans. Every dictator has vulnerabilities. Arafat faces
enemies within the P.L.O. Syria's Assad is a member of an
Alawite minority in a largely Sunni country. Egypt might
give quiet support to U.S. operations against Libya, which
has repeatedly engaged in cross-border terrorism and assas-
sination attempts against Egyptian Officials. Terrorist
atrocities sponsored by Iran could be answered by overt,
publicized increments of military aid to Iraq.
A Closing Word
If the first five years of the present decade have demon-
strated anything, it is that closer international cooperation
by victimized states, better intelligence gathering, and dip-
lomatic and economic sanctions can all help control ter-
rorism, but that each fails in decisive respects. Most terror-
ists, particularly the most well known, are not caught by
such means. And most of those who are caught do not stay
in jail long.
Five years ago, 52 Americans finally came home from
Iran. Khomeini had done nothing for 444 days. Then a
"breakthrough"-for which more than one negotiator
claimed credit-came in the very first hours of the Presi-
dency of Ronald Reagan, who had made well known his
opinions of the handling of the hostage crisis and of Kho-
meini. The new President welcomed back the 52 Ameri-
cans with words we would do well to live by: "We hear it
said that we live in an era of limits to our powers. Well, let
it also be understood, there are limits to our patience."T
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