Lone Wolf Terrorism (31 page)

But whereas terrorist groups, for the most part, have become more sophisticated in their counterintelligence methods regarding the Internet, including adopting various ways to elude detection by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies through changing Internet protocol addresses, using encryption and other stealth methods to communicate, and so forth, the lone wolves are lagging far behind. Whether it's due to a lack of sophisticated information technology capabilities or hubris in feeling they simply will not be caught by the authorities, lone wolves are most vulnerable when they surface via the Internet.

One of the lessons learned regarding lone wolf terrorism is that most lone wolves love to talk through the Internet. Whether it is by announcing to the world, as Colleen LaRose did, that she was ready, willing, and able to commit terrorist acts or by posting manifestos outlining
various extremist beliefs, as Anders Breivik did, the Internet gives us clues about who the lone wolves may be. In addition, the chat rooms they frequent and the online searches they conduct can all be potential pitfalls for the lone wolf, if their activity is uncovered by law enforcement.

As noted in
chapter 6
, lone wolves need the Internet more than the Internet needs them. I discussed in the
previous chapter
how this is different from the symbiotic relationship between traditional media (television, radio, print) and terrorists, in which each uses the other for mutual benefit, the media to get ratings and produce interesting stories for their audience; and the terrorists, particularly terrorist groups, to generate publicity for their cause and create fear in the targeted country.

While terrorist groups also need the Internet more than the Internet needs them, the groups would undoubtedly still survive and be active even without the benefits that the Internet provides (i.e., websites, communications, and so forth). Not so for lone wolves. While there would still be lone wolves, as there had been in the past, their numbers would be greatly reduced without the presence of the Internet. Since access to the Internet cannot and should not be restricted, the challenge is to find legal ways to use the Internet against lone wolves. I outlined some of these in
chapter 6
, including the monitoring of extremist chat rooms, alerts for when inflammatory manifestos and other threatening messages appear on the Internet, the interception of communications between potential lone wolves and terrorists abroad, and the monitoring of suspicious online purchases of materials that can be used to produce bombs and other weapons, including biological warfare agents.

It is worth noting that the Internet may provide lone wolves with a false sense of anonymity. The savvy terrorist groups are aware of this, but not so for most lone wolves. Many think that they can hide behind their keyboards and computer screens and become invulnerable to discovery. The more they use the Internet, the better our chances will be to prevent their attacks.

DON'T BE FOOLED BY THE LULLS IN LONE WOLF ATTACKS

Throughout the history of terrorism, there have been periods when the public and the government in a particular country thought the worst was over because a certain amount of time had passed since the last major attack. In the United States, for example, the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s, which was primarily aimed at US targets overseas, was believed to have been over with end of the Cold War and the return of American hostages from Lebanon. As the early 1990s progressed, even the Persian Gulf War in Iraq, with threats of Saddam Hussein–inspired retaliatory terrorist attacks against the United States, did not shatter the belief that a corner had been turned in the battle against terrorism.

That optimism came crashing down when a car bomb exploded at the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993, killing six people and injuring one thousand others, with most of the injuries due to smoke inhalation. But when there were no additional major terrorist attacks on US soil for a couple years, people once again breathed a sigh of relief. That, too, would be mistaken. A homegrown American lone wolf terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, set off a truck bomb at the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, killing 168 people. There would be another lull before the next major attack on US soil occurred, more than six years later, with the 9/11 attacks. And as of the fall of 2012, there had yet to be another major terrorist attack within the United States, leading many Americans to once again assume that the worst is over.

The lulls in terrorist attacks, however, are part of terrorism's mystique. As noted earlier, terrorists, including lone wolves, always have the advantage of perpetrating just one major attack to put terrorism back on the front burner in the public's mind and reverse all perceptions of progress in the battle against terrorism. That is why we should never be fooled into thinking we are winning a “war” against terrorists. And if the incidence of lone wolf attacks should subside for a period of time, it would only take one major one, such
as the 2011 Norway massacre, for the lone wolf threat to be front and center once again.

Lone wolves also have the ability to launch an attack or a series of attacks and then lay low for a long period of time before resurfacing again with renewed violence. This was the case with Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who began his reign of terror in May 1978 and continued sending or planting package bombs throughout the 1980s. However, after planting a bomb at the back entrance to a computer shop in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February 1987, which led to an eyewitness who provided the authorities with a composite sketch of Kaczynski that was widely circulated through the media, he stopped his terrorist attacks for more than six years, resuming with a package bomb sent to a University of California geneticist in June 1993. Another lone wolf who went a long period between attacks was George Metesky, the “Mad Bomber,” who terrorized New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. As noted in
chapter 6
, after placing a bomb in the city in 1940 and then another one a year later, he suspended his attacks until 1950, explaining in letters he wrote that he was patriotic and didn't want to detract from the US effort during World War II.

Both Kaczynski and Metesky used their periods of inactivity to improve their bomb-making skills. Their later bombs were more sophisticated and more powerful than the earlier ones.
¹³
Time is indeed on the side of the patient lone wolves, who can set their own timetable for where and when they are going to strike. There is no pressure on them to immediately follow up one attack with another. Until a lone wolf is captured, therefore, we have to assume that he or she will strike again, no matter how long that may be. We also have to assume that, in some cases, they will become more violent as time goes on. Just like a terrorist group that needs to escalate its violence or do something different with each subsequent attack to ensure that the public and government in the targeted country do not become desensitized to the “normal” flow of terrorism, so, too, does a lone wolf have to keep the pot boiling with more sophisticated and more violent attacks. An escalation in violence may also allow the lone wolf
to feel superior to the authorities, who appear helpless in catching the lone wolf and putting an end to the terrorism.

BE SKEPTICAL OF STATISTICS ON LONE WOLF TERRORISM

Just as we should not be fooled by lulls in lone wolf attacks, so, too, should we cast a skeptical eye toward any statistical reports or statements about terrorism. Statistics on terrorism can be misleading. The reason is terrorism's unique psychological hold on society and government, allowing just one major incident anytime, anywhere to change perceptions of the terrorist threat. That is why we need to be careful in interpreting government, research-institute, or academic reports utilizing statistics to explain various trends in terrorism. For example, at first look, a comparison of the number of international terrorism incidents in 2000 and 2001 would indicate that things were getting better in the battle against terrorism. In 2000, there were 426 international terrorist incidents. This number decreased to 355 in 2001.
¹⁴
Yet could we really state that things were getting better in 2001, given the 9/11 attacks? The number of casualties is also a poor indicator of whether things are getting better or worse in the world of terrorism. Some of the most important terrorist attacks in history had few or no casualties, such as the 1979–81 Iran hostage crisis that paralyzed the administration of President Jimmy Carter and had widespread international repercussions. In terrorism, it is the type of incident and its impact upon society and government that counts, not the frequency of incidents or even the number of casualties.

As misleading as statistics can be for overall terrorism, it is worse for lone wolf terrorism. That is because the database of lone wolf incidents is quite small. The study of lone wolf terrorism is still a relatively new field, and there is an understandable temptation to make generalizations based on very few cases. I noted earlier in this chapter how in one study the author concluded that lone wolves are likely to suffer from psychological disturbances even though the
study was based on just five cases. In another study, the author came to similar conclusions, even though only six out of twenty-seven lone wolves who were studied had serious psychological problems.
¹⁵

This is not to say that we can't gain some interesting insights about lone wolf terrorism from statistical analysis. For example, in one study that examined lone wolf incidents in fifteen countries from 1968 to 2010, it was found that the number of attacks had grown from thirty in the 1970s to seventy-three in the 2000s and that, out of a total of 198 attacks for the entire period, eighty-eight different lone wolves were responsible for the incidents. The total number of lone wolf attacks during this period was just 1.8 percent of all terrorist incidents from 1968 to 2010 in the fifteen countries examined. (These countries combined, which included the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Canada, among others, experienced 11,235 non–lone wolf terrorist attacks during the same period).
¹⁶
These data points give us a nice picture of how lone wolf terrorism, while a growing threat, is still dwarfed in terms of numbers by the incidence of terrorism committed by groups and cells.

However, when the author of the study cited above concludes that “lone wolf terrorism is predominantly, though clearly not exclusively, a US phenomenon” because there were 113 incidents in the United States during this period, accounting for 57 percent of all lone wolf attacks in the fifteen countries, one has to wonder if this is yet another example of how statistics can be misleading.
¹⁷
As already noted, it is not the number of incidents that count in measuring terrorism's impact on a society. One or two incidents can have as much effect in terms of generating fear and reaction in a country as can multiple attacks. Countries other than the United States that experienced significant lone wolf attacks included Norway (the massacre by Anders Breivik in 2011, one year after the end period for the above-cited data study), the Netherlands (the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh), Britain (the Nailbomber attacks), Italy (the “Italian Unabomber” attacks), Austria (the bombing campaign initiated
by Franz Fuchs), and Israel (the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the massacre of Muslims at a mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron), to name just a few. Rather than being restricted to any one country, lone wolf terrorism is clearly a global phenomenon.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, AND DANGER OF THE LONE WOLF AND THE IMPACT HE OR SHE CAN HAVE ON GOVERNMENTS AND SOCIETIES

This journey into the world of lone wolf terrorism has revealed a remarkable degree of creativity, innovation, and danger exhibited by the individual terrorist. From Mario Buda, who in 1920 set off the first vehicle bomb in US history, to Anders Breivik, who in 2011 was responsible for one of the first dual terrorist attacks ever by a lone wolf—a horrific massacre of youths in Norway that had followed by just a couple hours his detonating a car bomb in Oslo—lone wolves have proven to be just as dangerous as, and sometimes even more so than, the most formidable terrorist groups in existence.

In between the attacks by Buda and Breivik came as series of “firsts” in terrorism history, including the first use of anthrax letters to kill people and the first major midair plane bombing in the United States, all the work of lone wolves. As noted earlier, there are several reasons why lone wolves can be more creative and dangerous than many terrorist groups. First, since they are working alone, they do not have to answer to any higher-ups or colleagues. There is no leader of a group who may veto a lone wolf's ideas or other members who could ridicule or argue against a lone wolf's novel plans for an attack. Lone wolves are free to think up any type of terrorism scenario they want. Furthermore, since they only have to answer to themselves, lone wolves are usually not concerned about how many people they may kill or injure in an attack, unlike many terrorist groups, which have to consider potential backlashes from their supporters if they exceed a certain casualty total or commit a particularly gruesome attack. Terrorist groups also have to worry about a massive law-enforcement
and government response following certain incidents, such as the use of a weapon of mass destruction or another type of high-casualty attack that could lead to the demise of the group through arrests and other measures, whereas this is not a concern for the lone wolf.

Lone wolves have also demonstrated that they can have a profound effect on governments and societies. We saw how, in the Netherlands, the lone wolf assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn shocked a nation not used to terrorism, causing one government official to proclaim that with the killing, “the Netherlands had lost its innocence.”
¹⁸
The same was true for Norway, where, as noted in
chapter 2
, in the aftermath of the Breivik massacre, Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg stated: “I think what we have seen is that there is going to be one Norway before and one Norway after [the attacks of] July 22.”
¹⁹
In the United States, Timothy McVeigh changed the way many Americans viewed terrorism with just one major attack in Oklahoma City, making people realize that homegrown American terrorists were as serious a threat as Islamic and other foreign-based extremists. And Bruce Ivins single-handedly shut down government buildings and mail-processing centers, and spread fear throughout the United States about a “new” form of terrorism—bioterrorism—with a wave of anthrax letter attacks.