"An Attack on Civilization"

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"We are in the midst of an undeclared war."

-- CIA Director William Casey, briefing Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

A war in which almost anyone could be a target any time, anywhere, while carrying out the most innocent activities: waiting for a flight in an airport lounge, dining at a sidewalk cafe. A war waged by shadowy enemies who could be almost anyone: the passenger in the next airplane seat, the occupants of the next car driving by. Worst of all, a war in which civilized society so far is a bewildered, if not impotent, loser.

Or so it seemed to Americans who kept their eyes glued to their TV sets through a phantasmagoric week. Scarcely had an image of helplessness faded from the screen before visions of destruction appeared.

-- In Beirut, Shi'ite Amal militiamen took 37 American male passengers off the TWA jet hijacked two weeks ago and hid them somewhere in the chaos of the western sector of the city. The triumphant captors brought five of their victims before TV cameras for a news conference, in which the prisoners pleaded that the U.S. not try to rescue them or take any military reprisal lest all the hostages die. At week's end the Shi'ite Party of God staged a rally around the captured jet; 1,000 demonstrators cheered the hijackers and chanted "Death to America!"

-- In Frankfurt, an overstuffed gray travel bag left unnoticed beside a trash can in the international airport blew up next to a row of metal chairs. West German police found the mutilated remains of three victims, who were eventually identified as a Portuguese man and two Australian children. Another 42 were injured, including one American. Police had no clues to the identity or motive of the bomber.

-- In San Salvador, six to ten gunmen leaped out of a pickup truck and opened fire on diners enjoying an evening meal at four adjoining sidewalk cafes on a downtown street. Killed: four off-duty U.S. Marine guards from the nearby American embassy, two American businessmen, five Salvadorans, a Chilean and a Guatemalan. At least 15 people were injured. Witnesses said the gunmen, disguised as Salvadoran army regulars, concentrated their fire on the Marines and even hunted one down in a back room. The killers are presumed to be Marxist rebels, turning to urban terrorism because their guerrilla war in the jungles to bring down the U.S.-backed government of President Jose Napoleon Duarte is making no headway (see WORLD).

-- In Tokyo, a bomb exploded at Narita Airport Sunday as luggage was being unloaded from a Canadian Pacific Boeing 747, which minutes before had arrived from Vancouver. Two airport workers were killed and four others injured. Less than an hour later, an Air India 747 en route from Toronto plunged into the sea off the Irish coast, and all 329 people aboard were feared dead. Authorities suspected that the otherwise inexplicable crash might have been triggered by a bomb. The international police organization Interpol began an investigation of possible links between the two incidents (see WORLD).

Internal terrorism also made headlines around the world last week. In the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, a car bomb exploded, killing 75 people and injuring 100. In Katmandu, capital of the remote Himalayan nation of Nepal, five bombs exploded at the royal palace and government buildings, killing seven people and wounding 240. The explosions came a day after King Birendra declared that he would thwart any "attempt to undermine peace and order." In London on Sunday, police set up cordons after a bomb was discovered in a hotel across the street from Buckingham Palace.

"This cannot continue," said Ronald Reagan in a formal statement rushed out by the White House after the Frankfurt bombing and San Salvador killings. The statement promised consultation with U.S. allies "to determine what actions, military and otherwise," can be taken against terrorists. In a speech in Dallas on Friday, the President linked those outrages with the TWA hijacking as constituting "an attack on all Western civilization by uncivilized barbarians." He quoted Theodore Roosevelt: "The American people are slow to wrath, but once their wrath is kindled it burns like a consuming flame."

But how can that wrath be channeled effectively against terrorists? At his White House news conference three nights earlier, Reagan had confessed that in trying to figure out a way to free the American hostages in Beirut, "I'm as frustrated as anyone. I've pounded a few walls myself, when I'm alone, about this." A rescue operation looks impossible. Retaliation? If he were to order it, said Reagan, "I would probably be sentencing a number of Americans to death," presumably from terrorists' revenge. Besides, he said, terrorists are difficult to isolate, and if "you just aim in the general direction and kill some people, well, then you're a terrorist too." It was a candid statement of a fearful dilemma: placing an overriding value on human life is the hallmark of a moral nation, yet it puts that nation at a disadvantage in confronting zealots who live by the gun and bomb and are perfectly willing to spill innocent blood, and indeed their own, in a fanatic cause.

The first response to a hostage crisis by a nation unwilling to pile death + on death must be negotiation. Though Reagan has vowed never to make a deal with the terrorists, an American intelligence expert on Lebanon predicts that the U.S. may have no choice but to acquiesce in one. It would involve the release of 776 Lebanese, mostly Shi'ites, who were taken to a prison in Israel by Israeli occupation forces withdrawing from southern Lebanon. The trick would be to avoid making an exchange look like capitulation to terrorism -- for example, by securing the release of the American hostages before the Lebanese prisoners were let go. The Administration could rightly argue, too, that Israel was going to free the Lebanese prisoners anyway and that the hijacking only delayed their release. Such subtleties would probably be lost on world opinion, which would see only a straightforward swap. Nonetheless, Israel took a step in that direction Sunday when it announced that it was releasing 31 of the detainees early this week while denying that the gesture had been precipitated by the hostage crisis in Beirut.

Some experts fear that successful terrorism grows by example. "Terror waves come and go like earthquakes," says Robert Kupperman, an analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We are in the middle of a big shock wave that is not over yet, and it will be followed by smaller shock waves." One reason, he says, is that when fanatics "see the amount of prime time devoted to terrorist actions, when they realize the level of frustration exposed by the media, and when they analyze the public impact of their deeds," they are emboldened to go and do likewise.

American intelligence experts have no doubt what will be the prime target: the U.S. "The next attack will be here, on the American continent, and aimed to hit the heart of our system," predicts one high-ranking intelligence official. Some experts fear that a retaliatory strike against terrorists abroad could provoke reprisals inside the U.S. Thousands of Iranians and Lebanese have recently settled in the U.S., and there is no way to distinguish the tiny minority who may be potential terrorists from the great majority who are legitimate refugees.

All this presents the Reagan Administration with not one but a series of puzzles. Security certainly can be tightened, but the U.S. must not let fear of terrorism turn it into a police state. Better intelligence is urgently needed, but terrorist groups, to put it mildly, are not easy to penetrate. Retaliation must be considered, but, says former CIA Director Richard Helms, anyone advocating it "ought to be condemned to pick the targets and specify the force that will be used to take out those targets." When those kinds of questions are raised, the response is often an embarrassed silence. A potentially effective form of retribution would be to send covert-action hit teams or employ local agents to strike at terrorist squads. But American inability to keep secrets, and moral qualms about adopting the terrorists' own tactics, make that difficult if not impossible. The only certainty seems to be that for the foreseeable future, countering terrorism will rank second only to preventing nuclear war among the problems of assuring the survival of a free and stable society.