were arrested in July 1993, together with the material for six car bombs. MI5 reported that over the following twelve months, eighteen out of thirty-four IRA mainland operations were frustrated. A ceasefire was declared in August 1994 which lasted until February 1996; bombs planted in spring 1996 at Canary Wharf and Manchester’s Arndale Centre were not as devastating as the IRA had hoped. An Active Service Unit comprising some of the IRA’s most able members was put under surveillance by MI5 and arrested in July before they could disrupt London’s power supply.
The ceasefire came back into effect three weeks after the Labour party’s electoral victory in Britain in May 1997; less than a year later, Prime Minister Tony Blair said it wasn’t the day for sound bites, but he felt ‘the hand of history on his shoulder’, as he prepared to sign the Good Friday Agreement.
America also faced domestic terrorists. Although counterterrorism wouldn’t become the official fourth priority for the FBI until 1982, they dealt with various high-profile cases before then. These included the bombing at the University of Wisconsin-Madigan on 24 August 1970, in which an Army think tank, the Mathematics Research Center, was attacked by radicalized students protesting the Vietnam War; and the campaign waged by the Weather Underground Organisation (better known as the Weathermen). Their manifesto, Prairie Fire, claimed in 1974 that their intention was ‘to disrupt the empire… to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks’. They carried out over two dozen bombings, including one at the State Department in Washington DC in January 1975. Those responsible were tracked down by the FBI over many years and brought to justice.
The FBI also tried to capture the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, who sent explosive devices over a period of seventeen years from 1978. He was only caught after he sent a ‘manifesto’ to the FBI in 1995 explaining why he was carrying out his attacks; when it was printed, his brother David provided convincing proof that Ted was responsible.
The Bureau spent five years hunting down Eric Rudolph, who had been responsible for a bomb at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics. He planted further devices over a two-year period at abortion clinics and gay-friendly meeting places in Alabama before disappearing into the Appalachian wilderness and living rough. He was eventually caught while searching for food in a dumpster.
They were rather quicker tracking down the Oklahoma Bomber, former soldier Timothy McVeigh, whose homemade device killed 168 and injured hundreds more on 19 April 1995 — partly because he had actually been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon a mere ninety minutes after the blast. Nearly a billion pieces of information were reviewed in preparation for McVeigh and his co-conspirators’ trial. McVeigh was executed on 11 June 2001. Suggestions that he had connections with Middle Eastern terror groups have never been proven.
When papers wrote about Middle East terrorists in the forties, they were usually referring to the Zionist extremists who were seeking to set up the state of Israel. However, with the arrival of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in 1968, the emphasis switched to the Arabs, and once al-Qaeda started to make a name for itself with various terrorist attacks during the nineties, the volatile region became the focal point for agencies worldwide.
With the exception of the Israeli security agencies, notably their secret service Mossad, most of the world’s intelligence agencies weren’t particularly pro-active in their attitude to potential terrorist threats emanating from the Middle East during the seventies and eighties. The terrorists of the PFLP, guided by Dr Wadi Haddad, devised a new strategy: hijacking aircraft. The first, in July 1968, was an El Al Boeing 707 bound for Tel Aviv (the one and only time an aircraft belonging to the Israeli national airline would be successfully hijacked). Haddad was eventually recruited as a KGB agent, giving the Soviets some control over the PFLP’s actions. The terrorist group’s actions escalated culminating in the attempted capture of four aircraft on 6 September 1970 with a fifth following three days later. Known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings after the RAF base in Jordan to which the planes were flown and then blown up, this resulted in King Hussein of Jordan taking violent action against the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organisation led by Yasser Arafat.
While most intelligence agencies were focusing on securing airports and aircraft, the Israelis went a step further. When a Sabena aircraft was diverted to Lod airport in Israel by the PFLP in May 1972, they sent in special forces disguised as airport workers and recaptured the plane. This escalated the situation. Three weeks later, members of the Japanese Red Army Faction, working for the PFLP, massacred twenty-six passengers at Lod. And on 5 September, Black September, an offshoot of the PLO, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine hostages at the Munich Olympic Games. A firefight at the airport led to the death of all the hostages. With the help of assets that they had within the PLO, Mossad tracked down those responsible for the attack, and executed them (regrettably killing some innocents along the way, notably in Lillehammer, Norway, in July 1973, when Ahmed Bouchiki was murdered in the belief he was Ali Hassan Salemeh. According to Mossad chief Zvi Zamir:
We are accused of having been guided by a desire for vengeance. That is nonsense. What we did was to concretely prevent in the future. We acted against those who thought that they would continue to perpetrate acts of terror. I am not saying that those who were involved in Munich were not marked for death. They definitely deserved to die. But we were not dealing with the past; we concentrated on the future.
The PFLP’s final reported hijacking resulted in West German forces storming the plane when it was on the ground at Mogadishu airport in 1977. The British took similar strong action when terrorists seized hostages at the Iranian Embassy in London in April 1980. When a hostage’s body was pushed through the front door after the terrorists lost patience with the authorities, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave permission for the SAS to attack. All bar one of the hostage-takers were killed; all bar one of the remaining hostages were released safely. In all such similar situations, intelligence agencies provided information on the hijackers and their causes and assisted with the planning of operations.
Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi, became an increasing threat to the West during the eighties, not simply because of his financial support of terrorist organizations. Regarding those who opposed his regime as ‘stray dogs’ who needed putting down, Gaddafi launched various waves of assassination attempts against emigres, and assets within his People’s Bureau were able to provide MI5 with information to prevent these. In April 1984, Gaddafi personally ordered Libyans within the London Bureau to fire on demonstrators outside (a fact MI5 learnt from Oleg Gordievsky, who had been passed it from Moscow Centre), which led to the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Diplomatic relations were cut with the regime, and sixty of Gaddafi’s spies were expelled from Britain.
America similarly had problems with Gaddafi. In July 1981, despite a warning from the CIA not to proceed, President Reagan had ordered a naval exercise in the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya considered its territorial waters. The NSA were able to read most of the Libyan diplomatic and intelligence cyphers and intercept Gaddafi’s personal phone calls, which showed the depth of the Libyan leader’s anger and the retaliatory action he ordered against Americans.
The conflict in Lebanon, in which American troops tried to protect a ceasefire between Druze and Shi’ite Muslim militias and the mainly Christian Lebanese army, saw two major setbacks for the CIA. In April 1983, a bomb at the embassy in Beirut killed most of the Agency’s station staff, including the CIA’s top Middle Eastern expert, Robert Ames. A few months later, when the NSA intercepted a message indicating that ‘a spectacular action’ was shortly to take place against American marines, they sent out an urgent warning — but it was ignored. In a horrible foreshadowing of the intelligence mess that would see warnings about 9/11 not passed on because no one put the pieces together in time, the notification was either not taken seriously, or became lost within the bureaucracy. On 23 October, a huge explosion at Beirut International Airport killed 241 marines and sailors.
In 1986, Reagan stepped up the pressure on Gaddafi’s Libya with further exercises in the Gulf of Sidra. After the Navy destroyed a Libyan SAM battery and two guided missile patrol boats, Gaddafi ordered all Bureaus to target American servicemen. On 5 April a bomb went off in a disco in West Berlin, killing three and wounding 230, which the Libyans believed ‘would not be traceable to the Libyan diplomatic post in East Berlin’. Perhaps unwisely, Reagan revealed two days later that they had proof of Libyan involvement in the bombing; the Libyans immediately changed all their codes. On 14 April a huge attack was launched against Tripoli and Benghazi — although most of the information about its success derived from CNN rather than from spies on the ground.
The FBI’s counter-terrorism program was assisted by the Omnibus Diplomatic Security And Antiterrorism Act of 1986, which allowed them to conduct investigations in a foreign country where crimes had been committed against American citizens, with that country’s permission. The first to feel the effect of this was Hezbollah terrorist
