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Says Schlossberg: "You would have had to have a master's degree to know the Croatians. Who ever heard of South Molucca? Almost all anybody could have told you was that it was south of North Molucca." Today's terrorists can score such public relations victories primarily because of modern military technology. They can buy or steal some of the most modern arms in national arsenals: grenade launchers, heat-seeking rockets, sophisticated delay caps and fuses that fire photoelectrically.
Such weaponry can cut at the exposed jugulars of modern industrial societies. Explains Walter Laqueur, director of London's Institute of Contemporary History: "In the Middle Ages, if you wanted to throw a town into darkness, you would have had to smash every single street light. Today, a hand grenade tossed into a power station would be sufficient." Equally inviting and vulnerable are electronic communications networks, computer nerve centers and transportation hubs. Indeed, it is an ironic truth that at the very time terrorists are attacking Western industrial states as fascistic or oppressive, their acts are exposing how fragile today's societies can be. The Schleyer kidnapers—presumably a mere handful of hoodlums —were able to wreak havoc on West Germany.
The urban terrorist's publicity goals are simplified because modern communications ensure him a worldwide audience. Writes Laqueur in a new book called Terrorism (Little, Brown): "The success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives. This was one of the main reasons for the shift from rural guerrilla to urban terror in the 1960s; in the cities the terrorist could always count on the presence of journalists and TV cameras." Coverage of terrorist incidents can intensify the climate of fear and help discredit legitimate political authority.
Democracies are especially vulnerable to terrorism. Totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union and China, seem nearly immune. Explains Rome University's Ferracuti: "The terrorists take advantage of all the legal freedoms, and these freedoms cannot be curtailed selectively." Democratic societies impose virtually no restrictions on speech or movement and very few limits on the right to assemble and demonstrate. Palestinian guerrillas, for example, were able to operate with impunity inside Lebanon, which until the civil war was the Arab world's only viable democracy.
Planning terrorism is relatively easy in open societies. Frank Bolz, commander of New York City's anti-terrorist unit, observes that terrorists can buy "from anywhere" information about a building and its construction. In libraries, they can learn very much about a prominent individual—his address, his family. From his company, they may be able to determine his working habits. Last winter West German Terrorist Willy Peter Stoll went to the Kiel Economic Institute and researched the backgrounds of some of his country's leading industrialists. One was Hanns-Martin Schleyer.
Once caught, terrorists in democracies can often take advantage of judicial systems designed to protect the rights of defendants by allowing reasonable bail and providing relatively easy appeal.