(8 of 9)
Terrorism is warfare by intimidation, by the creation of paranoia. The devilishly clever design involving Flight 800, if indeed it was premeditated, was to lob one over America's back fence while her people were all in the front room, gathered around the TV watching the Olympics. It was on Atlanta that most of America's security apparatus was focused. All the more ironic, perhaps, that this fixation grew out of an attack 24 years ago in Munich, when Palestinian terrorists shocked the world by kidnapping and killing more than a dozen members of the Israeli Olympic team right in the middle of the modern, gray concrete Olympic Village. A generation later, while the Olympics have been secured, the rest of America is wide open.
All of Atlanta's moments now come with shadows. The Olympic Extra newspaper last week had to push aside photos of the torch for headlines involving the FBI. The 63 TV screens in the workroom of the main press center were full of pictures of debris. The very images of triumphal youth and arriving planes that Atlanta had been hoping to send out, like the inflated Gumby and two-story beer can downtown, seemed beside the point, almost tactless.
There is already a small community of people whose legacy is grief. Every time a plane goes down, the Lockerbie families cringe. This time the parallels are almost unnerving: a night-time transatlantic flight destroyed most likely by a terrorist bomb shortly after takeoff. Richard Mack lost his younger brother William in Lockerbie. When he heard the TWA news last week, he couldn't sleep. His wife Kathleen became ill; his 74-year-old father John collapsed. Other Lockerbie survivors had fits of anxiety and sleeplessness as well. Mack sympathized immediately with the hundreds of families who were reeling from the disaster, unable to comprehend, unable to get information. He remembers arguing with a Pan Am representative who refused to check the names of his brother, his traveling companion and another relative who might have been on the flight. When he finally got help, the airline employee said, "Well, we have two out of three. You're lucky on the one." The TWA incident, says Mack, "was like hitting a brick wall. You know what these people are going through, now and forever."
If terrorists cold enough to remain nameless have broken through America's cordon of safety, these experiences may be repeated over and over again. The consequences will almost certainly reverberate beyond this summer, beyond the besmirched beaches of New York. Early last Friday morning on Fire Island, Judy Hester walked down to the surf in front of her cottage. As she watched the sun peeking over the Atlantic, she saw that the glassy calm of the ocean during the past day and a half had disintegrated. In its place were "a lot of choppy, wind-driven waves." Unsettled by the sight, she returned home and phoned her sister Peg. Even before Judy could finish her description, Peg broke in to say she understood. "She thinks it's a sign of all the distressed souls still out there," says Judy. "The ones who were lost in the night."
--Reported by Lisa Granatstein, Jenifer Mattos, Marguerite Michaels and Elaine Rivera/New York, Elaine Shannon and Douglas Waller/Washington, Wendy Cole/St. Louis, Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral and Greg Burke/Rome