Rescuing Hostages: To Deal or Not To Deal

IT has become a universal nightmare. Terrorists strike without warning. Innocent persons--a diplomat, a businessman, a planeload of tourists, a team of Olympic athletes--suddenly become hostages, pawns in a parochial struggle that may be blazing half a world away. The "nonnegotiable" demands are issued--for the release of political prisoners, for money, or for passage to another country. Lights go on in the ministries, and the agonizing begins. Is the safety of the hostages to be secured at any cost? Or must their lives be risked to discourage other terrorists and save future victims?

As the recriminations that followed the Munich massacre suggest, the answers are far from clear. While Israel's Premier Golda Meir was thanking Bonn for its desperate efforts, other Israelis were vehemently agreeing with the Tel Aviv daily Hatzofeh that the whole tragedy might have been avoided had West Germany not "surrendered" in the past to the demands of terrorists; last February, Bonn delivered a cool $5,000,000 cash ransom to Palestinian hijackers who had taken over an Athens-bound Lufthansa 747 with 186 passengers and crew members and diverted the plane to Aden. For their part, German officials complained that Israel's refusal to release any Arab prisoners had made the botched rescue a vain effort from the start.

Guerrilla groups, bandits and freelance psychopaths in unpredictable varieties have been staging ever more spectacular outrages since 1968, when some enterprising Palestinians pioneered modern-day political extortion by forcing an El Al jet down in Algeria and negotiating the release of 16 Arabs from Israeli jails in return for the lives of twelve Israeli hostages. During the past five years, Palestinian terrorists, Latin American guerrilleros, Viet Nam War protesters and common criminals in Europe and the Americas have been responsible for roughly 260 skyjackings and political kidnapings. Their bold forays have brought a Dark Ages gloom to travel and diplomacy in much of the 20th century world. What has been learned about how to deal with them?

Forced to confront the problem through heavy overlays of politics, emotion and history, different countries have found different answers. None have been notably successful. Not counting last week, when it found itself squeezed between Israeli determination and the weight of its own Nazi past, West Germany has seemed most comfortable with the acquiescent approach. Bonn has not forgotten the 1970 kidnaping of its ambassador to Guatemala, Count Karl von Spreti; he was summarily executed when a one-month-old Guatemalan government that was determined to strike a tough law-and-order posture refused to release 22 jailed Guatemalan terrorists and to allow Germany to pay a $700,000 ransom.

One recent convert to the relaxed approach is Argentina. Last March, Buenos Aires did not allow Fiat to negotiate with the guerrillas who had kidnaped Oberdan Sallustro, the boss of its operations in Argentina; Sallustro was shot dead. But the government raised no objection last week when the Dutch electronics firm, Philips, paid a reported $500,000 ransom for the release of its Argentine manager, Jan Johannes van de Panne, who was kidnaped by some 35 guerrillas as he drove to his plant outside Buenos Aires. Evidently the regime has taken a second look at the advice offered by former President Pedro Aramburu before he was kidnaped and killed by Peronist guerrillas in 1970. On the subject of dealing with terrorists, he wrote: "Human lives are the main thing. If there is a way to save them, it should be done, no matter what the cost."

On the other hand, more and more countries are becoming tougher in dealing with terrorists. In the past three years, Brazil's military rulers have flown some 130 jailed leftists out of the country in order to free four kidnaped diplomats (one of them an American). Now, Brazilian officials suggest that they will not be so quick to open the prison gates the next time terrorists grab a foreign diplomat. In the wake of Munich, angry Washington officials were saying that "the U.S. view is now close to that of the Israelis." In a flurry of announcements, the Administration promised special efforts to protect American Jews traveling abroad and to lead a global diplomatic attack on terrorist organizations.

Since August 1969, when it freed 71 imprisoned Arabs at the behest of some guerrillas who seized a Tel Aviv-bound TWA jet with 113 aboard and took it to Damascus, Israel has been the leading advocate of the nononsense, no-negotiations approach. With some 500 Arab guerrillas crowding its jails (only Nazi war crimes rate the death penalty in Israel), Israelis argue that the present rash of hijackings and other extortion attempts would quickly become a galloping plague if they answered threats to hostages by releasing prisoners. "We believe that blackmail leads only to more blackmail," says an Israeli foreign-ministry official. "If we release 250 prisoners today that will only encourage the terrorists to demand more prisoners tomorrow. And what would stop them from asking for political ransom? They could kidnap Israelis somewhere in the world and demand that we get out of the Golan Heights or the West Bank."

The argument against acquiescence is persuasive. Still, there is little to suggest that the tough Israeli approach has discouraged terrorists. Tel Aviv's uncompromising stance did not dissuade a Palestinian guerrilla team from seizing a Sabena jet with 90 passengers at Tel Aviv's Lod International Airport last May and trying to bargain for the release of 117 imprisoned fedayeen. It was sheer luck that only one passenger was killed when Israeli security men stormed into the plane with guns blazing to end the extortion attempt. Three weeks later, a trio of machine-gun toting Japanese radicals working for the fedayeen killed 26 tourists and wounded 85 inside Lod International Airport.

Clearly the choice between the hard and the soft approach will remain a matter of fallible human judgment; and there are no reliable guideposts. But experience is valuable when it comes to dealing with terrorists in the tense minutes and hours before a choice must be made. To those who have studied the patterns, the behavior of the Munich guerrillas was strikingly similar to that of the typical skyjacker --and was thus somewhat predictable.

Dr. David G. Hubbard, a Dallas psychiatrist and expert on air piracy, finds that skyjackers and political terrorists are almost always paranoid schizophrenics with overt suicidal tendencies--a deadly species. "To this kind of mentality," he says, "death is not the ultimate punishment, it is the ultimate reward." As a skyjacker might do in a similar situation, the Munich terrorists unhesitatingly killed the two men who tried to resist when they burst into the Israeli dormitory. But then the terrorists cooled off, again in the skyjacker pattern; they were reluctant to kill again, as long as all concerned were abiding by their rules. Very probably, the Arabs eventually found themselves in the oddly fraternal "We're in this together" bond that often develops between a skyjacker and airliner crew. That bond--broken by the ambush at Fuerstenfeldbruck--could explain why the terrorists let several deadlines pass during the long ordeal.

Where did the West Germans go wrong? As the experts see it, the mistakes started piling up long before the firing began at the airport. Sending whole platoons of police into the Olympic Village was like giving the terrorists a shot of Adrenalin; paranoiacs are excited by shows of force, not cowed. Willy Brandt should have been kept out of the affair; dueling with a head of state is an enormous ego-builder for a terrorist, who is typically a lifelong loser. It was probably also unwise to offer the Arabs "any amount" of money rather than a specific, plausible sum; a limitless offer might appeal to an ordinary man, but it could raise only dark suspicions in the mind of a paranoiac. In general, the German authorities should have tried to minimize the dramatics and simply allowed the terrorists to exhaust themselves. "Had they had any experience in these things," Psychiatrist Hubbard says, "they would have known that the terrorists did not sleep the night before the event. These types never do." If the negotiators had been able to stall until the pre-dawn hours, when humans reach a physiological low point, the terrorists might have yielded--or have been successfully overpowered.

Could technology have come to the rescue? There have been suggestions that a gas of some sort might be used to temporarily incapacitate everyone, terrorists as well as hostages, in an aircraft cabin say, or in an Olympic Village dormitory. But no gas that would be quick acting or effective enough exists; even if one were being developed, it would surely be an object of debate and controversy.

Short of some magical political solution to today's more intractable tribal conflicts, the best hope is for wider psychological understanding of how to deal with the fanatics who insist upon pursuing those conflicts all over the civilized world. Until then, governments will be fumbling through other Munichs--and wondering sorrowfully afterwards how they all happened. . Timothy James

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