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Algeria's Colonel Houari Boumedienne has long been happy to pick up the bills for "serious" visiting revolutionaries, but apparently he did not feel that Dohrn and Leary belonged in that category. At week's end there were reports that the two had been asked to leave Algeria and were on their way to another guerrilla training ground: Jordan. Palestinian terrorists have trained radicals from West Germany, Nicaragua and the U.S. in camps outside Amman. A Canadian journalist touring a guerrilla camp in the Jordanian mountains, was astonished to find two young Montrealers in Bedouin headgear learning the craft of "selective assassination." The youths, both members of the F.L.Q., thought that problems with language and unfamiliar Soviet weapons were a small price to pay for "military training which we can easily put into practice when we get back." Recently, eight Panthers received six weeks of instruction in bombing and street warfare at a Palestinian commando training camp near Amman. They were recruited by Arabs living in New York on assignment to U.N. missions. The same Arabs reportedly have instituted terrorist training for Panthers in northern New York State. Money also is known to have reached the Panthers from North Korea and from Arab guerrilla organizations through their exiled minister of information, Cleaver.
Who are the urban guerrillas? No government has ever made a systematic effort to develop a profile. In general, says a U.S. Government specialist, the cell member may fall into any of several categories: "A few are adventurers, in the underground for the hell of it. A few are 'crazies.' And there are some idealists of the Marxist 'useful idiot' type." More broadly, the guerrillas can range from outright criminals to blue-collar workers, from romantic, fanatic children of the elite to men of considerable intellect and courage.
What makes them tick? Undoubtedly, the dehumanizing conditions of the modern city contribute to the paranoia that often marks the urban terrorist. Those conditions also intensify his sense of alienation—and make it easier for him to depersonalize the "pigs" and other targets of his violence. Historian Hisham Sharabi, at the American University in
Beirut, maintains that there are two ways to view the terrorist. "The sympathetic approach holds that the individual is overcome by despair that he will ever accomplish anything by conventional means, and one implication is the severance of the last ethical link with established values in society." The hostile approach, he says, is to "see a common denominator in childhood experience, psychic debility or even derangement."
Psychologists like U.C.L.A.'s Charles Wahl favor the hard view. All revolutionaries, Wahl says, have had fathers who