New Year's Evil?

  • The terror of terrorism is what you don't know. You can listen all you want to warnings to be vigilant. Cops can scan crowds; dogs can sniff luggage; border crossings can be tightened; you can report parcels left unattended. But if--when--it comes, you won't be warned. "We're not confident we can stop it," admits an Administration official.

    Nonetheless, the Clinton team is determined to try. It lives in dread of an NSSE--the Disneyesque abbreviation for a national-security special event that triggers special precautions. But with Y2K happening all across the world, a flood of threats has washed in from every corner of the globe, and suspicious characters have been arrested. There's no shortage of danger out there. The government has conducted drills in 27 cities for an NSSE, but the real strategy is "Raise your defenses and plan for the aftermath." So when the Administration's heavy hitters convened in the basement of the White House Monday afternoon to hash over a subject so sensitive that few of their top aides were allowed in, they had a surfeit of possibilities to worry about but precious little that was concrete and even less they could do.

    What got the government on edge also seeped through to the public. The State Department issued two warnings about possible overseas attacks. The FBI chipped in with an alert for mail bombs, further raising the temperature. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on Thursday found that 62% of citizens surveyed believe terrorism is likely by New Year's Eve. Yet at the same time, official after official trotted out with reassuring words to soothe the jitters. "The authorities are on a higher level of alert," said President Clinton, the nation's Calmer in Chief, but ordinary people ought to go ahead and party.

    The President is the man who will ultimately bear the blame if something happens. But his top aides came away from their Monday confab with more questions than answers. They've developed a bad case of nerves since a suspicious Algerian was arrested at the Washington State-Canada border two weeks ago. But they have uncovered no mother lode of hard information about his plans. "You don't know what's true," says a senior intelligence official. "But the political price of making a mistake in judging is so high." Is the chief threat lurking abroad or at home? Is Osama bin Laden masterminding a spectacular millennial blast, or would something come from an unknown, homegrown wacko?

    Terrorism has undergone a sea change since the old days of skyjackings and hostage taking. Back then, the who and the why were known: leftists like the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof gang, nationalists like the I.R.A., the P.L.O. and the Kurdish Workers' Party, and state sponsors like Syria and Iran, all with rational political objectives. In an odd way, the older forms of state-sponsored terror were easier to manage. They were tactical ploys with built-in limits to the damage that could be inflicted if the groups hoped to win hearts and minds to their causes--and the perpetrators left an address for retaliation.

    Today the fastest-rising practitioners of the sneak attack--what the Pentagon likes to call using "asymmetric warfare" to slip past America's vast military superiority--are fanatics pursuing hate. "The normal restraints on the use of violence don't apply to them," says Steven Simon, assistant director at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. These kinds of terrorists, he says, "want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead." More important, he adds, "they want God watching. That's why they don't care about claims of responsibility."

    They're by no means all Muslim either. Israel is seriously preparing to guard against end-of-time Christians hoping to speed the arrival of the Messiah by prompting Armageddon through an assault on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, holy to Jews and Muslims both. More dangerous still are the mystery crazies out there. The worst U.S. attack, the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City that killed 169, was perpetrated by a couple of homegrown disgruntled ex-soldiers. American millenarian sects, antigovernment militias and white supremacists who believe 2000 heralds the advent of racial war have wreaked their share of damage.

    The most notorious exemplar, though, is bin Laden, the Saudi-born terror kingpin charged with organizing the embassy bombings that killed 224 in Kenya and Tanzania two years ago. But even he represents only one part of the new-style problem: hundreds or perhaps thousands of tiny cells, each made up of a few like-minded zealots, nearly impossible to penetrate and linked only loosely through shared finances and training grounds.

    In fact, the U.S. believes it has kept bin Laden pretty well bottled up since his Africa attacks. The cruise missiles that leveled his Afghan hideaway have driven him into a sleepless life of hide-and-seek. Though his protectors, the Taliban government in Afghanistan, still refuse to hand him over, he is constrained not to tick them off. The U.S. warned the Taliban again last week to expect harsh reprisals if bin Laden acts. They responded that he cannot even use fax or phone to direct his enterprises, but U.S. officials don't believe it.

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