In 1985 I chaired the ”First World Conference On Counter Terrorism” which took place in Washington, DC. In attendance were more than a hundred counter-terrorist experts from a dozen countries including Germany, Canada, Italy, England and Israel. Virtually every US agency engaged in counter-terrorist activities at the time was represented including the FBI, CIA, the Secret Service, US Customs and the maverick of law enforcement, ATF, or Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (the concept of a department of homeland security was not even a gleam in anyone’s eye at the time). I asked the late Al Haig, a friend from my days in the Pentagon, if he would make the keynote address: he agreed.
The Europeans and Israelis set the tone for this conference. By 1985, they had experienced the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre by Palestinians, the Bader-Meinhoff Gang in Germany, the hijacking of an El Al flight that resulted in the Entebbe raid, and the Red Brigade of Italy …. Their message to us was: “Get ready, America … you’re next”. At that time, the worst act of terrorism inflicted on the US had been the suicidal destruction of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, killing 243 marines; this incident was deemed a criminal act rather than an act of terrorism, though a relatively unknown (at the time) organization that called itself “Hezbullah” was involved. In fact, all of the attendees at this first conference on counter-terrorism were from the international law enforcement community.
Our conference and Haig’s subsequent publication of an Op-Ed piece on the topic in the Washington Post after the conference had zero impact on US policy. In fact, as a group we had little sense that terrorism would become the threat it is today to the American way of life, nor do I recall that anyone even proposed any serious policy recommendations beyond some meek efforts to increase US awareness of the matter.
If someone had proposed a consolidation of the multitude of agencies that now comprise the Department of Homeland Security, no one would have taken it seriously. If anyone had speculated an attack, say, by suicidal Islamic radicals hijacking commercial airliners, no one would have bothered to take notes. If anyone had speculated that we might one day launch two pre-emptive strikes, one against Afghanistan and the other against Iraq, our group would have complimented the speaker on a great imagination. There was no message from this first public discourse on international counter-terrorism to carry to our head of state at the time, President Ronald Reagan (though if we had been so motivated, Al Haig could have carried such a message).
The fact is, it took vastly more to get the attention of the world’s leaders. After the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, other than an official investigation and an attempt to assassinate Muammar Qaddafi by an air strike, we did nothing. After the attack on the US Cole, we did little. After the attack on the US marine Barracks in Lebanon, we got out. After the first attack on the World Trade Center using a truck loaded with explosives, a urea nitrate-hydrogen gas enhanced device that was intended to topple the North Tower into the South Tower, our response was a criminal investigation (6 were killed and over a thousand injured right at the very site of the 9/11 attack).
What does it take to get the attention of a national leader for such threats? I suspect that so long as the threat is considered to be a criminal act, no major policy change is likely to be considered. If the threat is considered to be a military threat, we have a better chance of giving the matter the attention it deserves. The professionals in our CIA and defense department are much more attuned than the law enforcement community to think in terms of an enemy eager to do us in on a wholesale basis. Until we have a better mechanism of categorizing potential major threats to the homeland, I fear we will continue to be vulnerable to attack. President George Bush’s definition of our response as a “war on terror” was, and still is, correct.
