Tower Terror

A murderous explosion in the heart of New York City raises the specter of terrorism in America and sets off a feverish hunt for the bomber

By Richard Lacayo Monday, Mar. 08, 1993

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    Once more is known about the methods and materials of the bomber, federal agencies can compare them with the details of past bombings that are stored on its computer data base. There is also a massive job ahead of identifying and interviewing witnesses who may have seen something in the parking garage or the building. And the FBI is intensifying surveillance of possible terrorist groups and foreign agents suspected of involvement in the bombing. The bureau . has also infiltrated potential terrorist groups in this country, as the CIA has done overseas. Those contacts can now be used to gather leads. "You're going to have to depend on informants," says former CIA official David Whipple. "And you almost always have informants."

    Investigators will look at every possible motive, from Balkan nationalism to employee dissatisfaction at the Trade Center. "You can't take just one track, because you come to dead ends and you've lost time," says an FBI official. "You have to investigate multiple tracks at the same time." Eventually, with luck, the pieces start coming together. "Some of it is misinformation, some of it is disinformation," says Jenkins, "and some small portion is information. You have to sort all that out. In the ideal situation, these paths begin to converge. You get a chain of physical evidence that takes you all the way from the debris back to the perpetrator."

    Will the perpetrator be carrying a flag? Says former CIA Director Robert Gates: "It's always been a possibility that, as ethnic conflicts spread, the losers might try to exact some sort of price, to attract attention to their cause." But it was by no means certain last week that the Trade Center bombing was an act of political terrorism. During the Gulf War, a bomb found on a chemical storage tank in Virginia instantly raised an alarm. The culprit turned out to be a businessman who hoped to make an insurance-fraud fire look like the work of Iraqis.

    Yet even before the answers were in as to who had planted the bomb, a new question -- whether a season of terrorism might begin in the U.S. -- had been raised. In the wake of the explosion, bomb threats forced the evacuation of the Empire State Building and Newark airport. Both threats were false, but no one was ready to dismiss the likelihood of another assault. Around the country, airports and other public facilities stepped up security. The blast was a reminder of the vulnerability of most American office buildings, shopping malls, airports and railway stations. Even the U.S. government has let its guard down since the mid-1980s, when American installations were on constant alert and concrete barriers were set up around many government buildings n Washington.

    "International terrorism in the '80s was fundamentally fueled by the cold war," says Phillips, "and you can almost date the diminution of that terrorism with Gorbachev's ascension to power." But the end of communism has $ helped ignite the fires of nationalism in regions like the Balkans, emboldening other fanatical groups to sow the kind of trouble once created by Soviet and East bloc terrorists.

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