The plain and painful truth about terrorism is that it is like cancer. No one has found a cure. No one seems even close.
As America agonizes once again over the fate of American hostages–this time in Beirut–President Reagan has promised once again a worldwide campaign by the U.S. and its allies ”to end this increasingly violent and indiscriminate but purposeful affront to humanity.”
He will not be short of advice on how to go about this. But the historical fact is that virtually all of what is being proposed now in the wake of the hijacking of TWA flight 847 has been proposed, and tried, by someone somewhere before.
Occasionally, something works in a specific case. But what works once does not always work the next time.
Always when these things happen, Israel is cited as showing the world the way to deal with terrorism, with which it has been more grievously and constantly afflicted than anyone else.
The Israelis have had some conspicuous successes in countering terrorism, most spectacularly in their lightning commando raid at Entebbe, Uganda, on July 4, 1976, when they rescued more than 100 hostages captured in the hijacking of an Air France flight.
The Israeli commandos killed 7 hijackers and more than 20 Ugandan troops. Only 1 commando and 3 hostages were lost in the daring attack, which remains the most brilliantly conceived and executed military response ever carried out against terrorism.
Ever since, Entebbe has been cited by some as the best example of how to deal with terrorists: swiftly, boldly, bloodily, no deals struck, no quarter given.
Toughness and retaliation, making terrorists know they are going to pay a price, is the answer, argue admirers of the Israeli approach.
Ironically, the Air France plane at Entebbe was hijacked after takeoff from Athens, the same airport involved in the current Trans World Airlines case.
Inevitably, some people are asking why the U.S. can`t respond now as the Israelis did at Entebbe.
The U.S. has its own commandos–the elite Delta Force that reportedly was airlifted to the Mediterranean area soon after the TWA plane was hijacked.
But the Entebbe hostages were being held in Uganda, a primitive and unsophisticated country about 2,500 miles from Israel. Their captors never imagined the Israelis, who used Kenya as a staging base, could reach them.
The Entebbe hostages also were being held at the airport, well out of a crowded city, and all of them were in one place.
The American hostages apparently have been dispersed to several locations in Beirut, in a part of the city aswarm with fanatical followers of Iran`s Ayatollah Khomeini and thousands of armed Amal Shiite Moslem militiamen.
It would take a sizable and heavily armed force to wade into such a situation, and the casualties among rescuers and hostages almost surely would be far higher than those the Israelis suffered at Entebbe.
If there did exist an opportunity for an Entebbe-style rescue operation, it was probably in the few short hours before the hostages were taken off the plane at Beirut airport. But for all its investment in military hardware and mobility, the U.S. still does not have the airlift capability that could have delivered the Delta Force in those early hours.
A policy of toughness and no compromise in dealing with terrorism also involves a willingness to pay the price–in blood and political consequences. In 1978, the ferociously left-wing Red Brigade terrorists in Italy kidnaped former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and killed five of his bodyguards. They demanded the release of 13 of their jailed comrades.
The Italian government refused to deal with them, and 55 days later Moro was found shot to death, after having been horribly brutalized.
The government did not flinch, even when the wife of Moro, one of Italy`s most prominent political figures, protested that his country and party had betrayed him.
Italy launched an intensive campaign to hunt down and punish the killers and stamp out the Red Brigade threat. In the end, 32 terrorists got life sentences in prison and, as a bonus especially satisfying to the U.S., Italian investigators also came up with information that enabled police to rescue U.S. Army Brig. Gen. James Dozier, who had been kidnaped by the terror brigade.
While Italy`s handling of the Moro case must be rated a success and an argument for the tough approach, that approach can also go horribly wrong as it did at the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972. In that case, 7 terrorists seized 9 Israeli hostages and demanded that Israel release 200 Palestinian prisoners.
The Israelis, true to their policy, refused. The West German government, however, agreed to grant the terrorists safe passage to Egypt, and then had sharpshooters open fire on them at the airport.
Five terrorists were killed, but so were all the hostages and one policeman.
In the Beirut hostage situation, President Reagan has made it clear that he is not ready to pay the kind of price the Italians paid in the Moro case and the Israelis paid at Munich.
The U.S. will make no concessions to, and strike no deals with, the terrorists, Reagan declared, as he has in the past.
At the same time, however, he clearly abandoned his 1981 Inauguration Day pledge of ”swift and effective retribution” against terrorists. Now, he said, his top priority is getting the hostages home alive.
That, advocates of the tough approach would say, might in itself be seen as a concession and might encourage the captors to play tough.
While there have been other cases in which governments stood firm against terrorist demands, the far more frequent pattern has been to surrender.
The huge, and growing, wave of terrorism the world has suffered for nearly two decades now suggests clearly, almost undeniably, that caving in to terrorists` demands only whets their appetite and brings on yet more terror.
The modern era of what is now called international terrorism began–as recorded by Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne in ”The Terrorists: Their Weapons, Leaders and Tactics”–on July 22, 1968, when Palestinians hijacked an El Al airliner flying between Rome and Tel Aviv.
Less than six months later, in Athens, two men attacked another El Al plane with guns and hand grenades, killing one passenger.
That was the beginning, too, of the history of giving in to terrorists. Two Palestinians were captured and jailed in that attack, but the Greeks released them less than two years later when a Greek airliner was hijacked to Cairo.
The Greeks still believe in giving in. They released one of the would-be hijackers of the TWA plane last week in return for the freeing of Greek passengers, leaving American passsengers as hostages in Beirut.
It was in December, 1968, also that Israel first showed the world how it intended to deal with the problem. Two days after the attack on their plane in Athens, Israeli commandos swooped in to Beirut airport by helicopter and destroyed 13 airplanes.
The year after airliner hijackings began, terrorists perpetrated the first of what has become a mournful list of diplomatic kidnapings. On Sept. 4, 1969, in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Charles Elbrick, was held hostage until the Brazilian government released 15 political prisoners.
The next year, the kidnapings turned into murder. Daniel Mitrione, a police adviser attached to the U.S. embassy in Uruguay, was kidnaped and then assassinated when the government refused to negotiate a demand for freeing 150 prisoners.
The most spectacular airliner hijacking of all occurred in early September, 1970, when no fewer than four planes were seized by Palestinians. Three of the planes were flown to Jordan and one to Cairo.
Once again, there was capitulation as Switzerland, West Germany and Britain all released Palestinian prisoners in response to terrorist demands. But the Palestinians subsequently paid a heavy price exacted by a fellow Arab. King Hussein of Jordan became so angry at the hijackings that he launched his ”Black September” military offensive that drove the Palestinians out of his country–and into Lebanon, which ever since has known nothing but war and terror.
By 1972, the targets of terrorism were not only caving in to political demands but buying their way out of trouble. In February of that year, five Palestinian terrorists hijacked a Lufthansa airliner to Aden in South Yemen, and hijacked the West German government out of $5 million ransom for the plane and passengers.
In one of the most grotesquely callous responses to terrorism ever, the South Yemen government then charged the Germans another $1 million for
”landing rights” at Aden.
In May of 1972, a new player debuted on the international terror stage. Three members of the Japanese Red Army, recruited as kamikaze killers by the Palestinians, shot up Israel`s Lod Airport, killing 26 people and wounding 76. Two of the terrorists were killed and the other was sentenced to life in prison.
By 1973, things were going so well for terrorists that their demands began to escalate dramatically. Eight Palestinians took over the Saudi Arabian Embassy during a party in Khartoum, Sudan, and took two Americans and several other diplomats hostage.
This time, instead of demanding only the release of some of their own comrades, they also demanded freedom for the killer of Sen. Robert Kennedy and the imprisoned Bader-Meinhof gang in West Germany.
President Richard Nixon refused to deal, and American diplomats Cleo Noel and George Moore and a Belgian diplomat were killed.
The terrorists were arrested and convicted, but, in what has become a pattern, were later released.
That same year, terrorists displayed a dramatic escalation of the weaponry available to them from such well-heeled and persistent sponsors of murder and mayhem as Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy.
And anti-terrorist forces, once again the Italians, scored one of their more satisfying victories.
Italian police arrested five Arabs armed with two Soviet-made SAM ground- to-air missiles. The terrorists had rented an apartment in the flight path to Rome airport with the intention of shooting down an Israeli airliner.
In 1977, the Japanese Red Army struck at home, hijacking a Japan Air Lines plane and demanding a $6 million ransom and release of three of their imprisoned comrades.
Once again, the Japanese government caved in and the hijackers flew off to the Middle East to join a terrorist organization there.
That same year, though, the West German government tried the Israeli approach. After a Lufthansa plane was hijacked with 79 passengers and flown all over, it landed in Somalia, where the terrorists demanded an $18 million ransom plus freedom for the Bader/Meinhof gang.
West German commandos, however, flown all the way to the Somalian capital of Mogadishu, attacked the plane, killed three terrorists and rescued all the hostages.
Then in 1979-80, of course, came the Iranian capture of the U.S. Embassy hostages who were held for 444 days and released only on Ronald Reagan`s first Inauguration Day, 1981.
The record on that one–the dithering by the Carter administration, the botched Desert One rescue attempt, all the rest of it–is still fresh in American memories.
The hostages came home alive, but the whole episode can hardly be counted a triumph for the gentle approach.
The list of prominent victims is growing longer: Egypt`s Anwar Sadat, Earl Louis Mountbatten of Britain, Indira Gandhi of India, Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco of Spain killed; Pope John Paul II grievously wounded.
The list of countries hit by terrorism is almost endless. And the list of terrorist groups and causes–Palestinian, Islamic, IRA, Basque, Brazilian, Turkish, Japanese, Canadian, Spanish, Argentine, Iranian, Libyan, German, Puerto Rican–is not much shorter.
On and on it goes. There`s little comfort to be found in the history of how the world has dealt so far with this wave of terrorism.
And whatever the outcome for the American hostages now held by Shiite Moslems in Beirut, whatever approach the U.S. takes in this case, there is no real cure in sight.
Patience, appeasement, toughness, retaliation, retribution, they`ve all been tried. None so far is a sure-fire answer.
