Sometimes called a lone actor terrorist, a lone wolf terrorist acts alone, without support from a terrorist group or organization. Modern use of the term goes back to Tom Metzger, founder of the White Aryan Resistance, who argued in the 1980s for “lone wolf” resistance to the US government.1 The same idea was earlier advanced by another right-wing theorist, Louis Beam, in an essay titled “Leaderless Resistance” that called for “very small or even one man cells of resistance.”2
In the 1980s, right-wing extremist organizations in the United States were being crushed by law enforcement agencies using informers and infiltrators. The lone wolf idea was that violent acts by anonymous individuals would be more difficult for law enforcement to penetrate than acts by members of large and hierarchical organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The cells were to be anonymous even to one another, with no communication or connection. The only commonality would be willingness to act against oppressive government. Metzger and Beam suggested that lone wolves should avoid membership cards, tattoos, letters to the editor, and participation in demonstrations—anything that would give authorities a link to the cause for which they would act.
From the beginning, then, a small cell—two or three individuals acting together—could be seen as lone wolf terrorists so long as they planned and carried out an attack without help from any larger group or organization. Deadly examples of lone wolf terrorists in the United States include Theodore Kaczynski (Unabomber; killed 3 and injured 23 between 1978 and 1995), Eric Rudolf (bombed 1996 Atlanta Olympics; killed 3 and wounded 117), and Omar Mateen (killed 49 and wounded 58 in 2016 mass shooting in a gay night club in Orlando, Florida).
This is not an easy question because it is not always clear whether an attack is politically motivated. Sometimes an individual perpetrates violence for personal reasons. A student who shoots up his school, for instance, is not usually seen as having a political cause. A disgruntled employee who attacks co-workers is not usually seen as having a political cause. But some cases are not clear-cut.
In November 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 and wounded more than 30 in a mass shooting at the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, Texas. Although Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu akbar” (“Allah is great”) during the attack, the US Department of Defense categorized the attack as “workplace violence.” It was not until 6 years later, in December 2015, that President Obama declared that the attack was an act of terrorism. Hasan acted alone, making him a lone wolf terrorist.
In February 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III, a 53-year-old computer engineer, flew a small plane into Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offices in a building in Austin, Texas. He killed one person and injured 13. He left behind a manifesto in which he blamed the US government, big business, and especially the IRS for taking his savings. The US government did not call this a terrorist incident because there was no sign of terrorist ideology and Stack was not associated with any extremist political group. If, as we have argued, grievance and anger rather than ideology are the key to understanding terrorism, then Stack was indeed a terrorist.
Despite occasional controversy over what counts as lone wolf terrorism, there are best-effort attempts to catalog examples of lone wolf attacks. A report by Frontline started with a database of possible lone wolf attacks in the United States, then excluded attacks that never came to fruition, were hoaxes, or did not seem to include any political intent. Results indicated that lone wolf attacks are rare but show a clear increase by decade, from 2 in the 1940s to 23 in the 2000s and 35 in the 2010s.3
The trend is not so clear in Europe, although lone wolf terrorism includes two salient cases. In July 2011, in Norway, Anders Breivik killed 77 in two attacks, the first a bomb and the second a mass shooting. And in July 2016, Mohamed Bouhlel killed 86 and injured 458 by driving a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France.
Security officials and citizens are alike in their increasing concerns about the threat of lone wolf attacks. As Metzger and Beam promised, these attacks are difficult to anticipate and prevent. President Obama recognized the threat in 2011:
The biggest concern we have right now is not the launching of a major terrorist operation, although that risk is always there, the risk that we’re especially concerned over right now is the lone wolf terrorist, somebody with a single weapon being able to carry out wide-scale massacres of the sort that we saw in Norway recently. You know, when you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder to trace those lone wolf operators.4
Lone actor terrorists are risking life and liberty for their cause. Why would any individual take this kind of risk? Why would any individual choose to sacrifice for a cause?
The usual answer to these questions is that group, organizational, and cultural pressures move us to do what we would not choose to do if we considered only our personal welfare. As described in Chapter 4, small group dynamics can provide rewards for those who take risks and make sacrifices for the group, and punishments for those who do not. Organizations similarly provide rewards for those—firefighters, police officers, soldiers—who take risks for organizational goals, and punishments for those who shirk their duty.
The puzzle presented by the lone actor terrorist is that the individual takes risks and makes sacrifices as a free choice, not subject to social pressures. The lone actor does not feel the power of group dynamics and group pressures and does not have organizational support. The puzzle is why an individual would freely choose violence for a cause, knowing that the choice will be costly: Prison, torture, and death are likely outcomes for an individual taking up violence against the power of a state.
A popular answer to the puzzle is that extreme or fanatic beliefs push some individuals to violence. This answer implies a single dimension of radicalization, ranging from individuals who care nothing about a cause to those who believe in the cause so strongly that they are ready to risk their lives for it. It is plausible that radical ideas produce radical behavior, and Silber and Bhatt popularized the single-dimension model in their 2007 New York Police Department report, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” The single-dimension model is similarly embodied in the metaphor that groups advancing extremist ideas are a “conveyor belt” to terrorism. In this view, terrorist violence is the radical behavior that proceeds from radical ideas.
As we already showed in Chapter 6, however, three kinds of evidence have contradicted the single-dimension model of radicalization. First, there are individuals who move to violence without support of radical ideas. At the individual level, mechanisms of radicalization include personal grievance, group grievance, love, escape, slippery slope, risk and status seeking, and social disconnection (unfreezing). Five of these seven mechanisms—group grievance, personal grievance, risk and status seeking, social disconnection, and escape from personal problems—can potentially move an individual to lone wolf terrorism without any help from radical ideas or political ideology. Love for someone already a member of a militant group is irrelevant for the lone wolf terrorist. Similarly, a slippery slope of increasingly extreme action is irrelevant for lone wolf terrorists, whose first radical act is usually their first and only attack.
Second, radical opinions are common but terrorists are few, lone actor terrorists even fewer. In 2007 and 2011 polls, about 8 percent of US Muslims said that suicide bombing of civilian targets is often or sometimes justified. Eight percent of the approximately 1 million adult US Muslims projects to approximately 80,000 who justify suicide bombing. But only hundreds of US Muslims have been arrested for violence-related offenses, and only about a dozen of these might qualify as lone wolf terrorists.
Third, research on deradicalization has highlighted the difference between extreme action and extreme opinion.5 Some captured jihadists are willing to give up violent action but not ready to give up extremist opinions. Others are willing to give up both violent action and extremist opinions. The first kind of change is deradicalization of action without deradicalization of opinion. The second kind of change is deradicalization of both action and opinion. The disjunction of action and opinion is not consistent with the idea that it is extreme opinion that produces extreme action.
Thus, three kinds of evidence weigh against the single-dimension view of radicalization that assumes bad behavior begins in bad ideas. Many individuals move to terrorism before they acquire extreme ideas. Ninety-nine percent of those with extreme ideas never act. And individuals can give up extreme action without giving up extreme ideas.
This is the evidence that led us, in Chapter 6, to the two-pyramids model of radicalization in which ideas—even the most extreme ideas—are not a sufficient explanation of extremist violence. If extreme ideas are not a useful explanation of extreme action, then the puzzle remains: How are we to understand lone wolf terrorists?
Five mechanisms of radicalization might move an individual to lone wolf terrorism: group grievance, personal grievance, risk and status seeking, disconnection (unfreezing), and escape from personal problems. These mechanisms can be seen in some case histories of lone wolf terrorists. Major Hasan, for instance, had a group grievance that Western forces were victimizing Muslims. He also had some personal grievances. He felt discriminated against as a Muslim, and his automobile was vandalized. He was ordered to go to Afghanistan to support soldiers fighting there against Muslims; his attack was an escape from this order. He was working on an Army base in Texas far from his family on the East Coast; he seems to have had no friends in Texas, so he was disconnected from the kinds of ties that keep most of us in our tracks. There is nothing in his history, however, to suggest he sought risk taking and status. So, to sum up, Hasan showed evidence of four of five possible mechanisms of radicalization at work in his trajectory to lone wolf terrorism.
What about Andrew Joseph Stack, the software engineer who flew his plane into an IRS office? There is no doubt he felt a personal grievance against the IRS and the US government in general. He was losing his business in a tax case. He felt that his life was ruined, so a suicide attack could seem an escape from an intolerable situation. But there is no sign that he was seeking risk and status, and he was not disconnected. His wife and stepdaughter left home for a hotel only the night before his attack, after he had begun work on his suicide note. Here is a case with evidence of only two of the five possible individual mechanisms of radicalization.
It is interesting to notice that Stack did express more than personal grievance against the IRS in his suicide note. He talked about other engineers who had suffered from IRS rulings and about how government bails out big businesses such as General Motors but lets the small businessman be crushed. Whether Stack is a suicide terrorist or just a suicide depends on how seriously we take the group grievance part of his suicide note. Here is a key passage:
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.6
We recommend reading the whole suicide note at the website given in note 6, then decide for yourself whether there is enough political intent to see Stack as a suicide terrorist.
Beyond case materials, there is a cumulation of information about lone wolf terrorists in Israel. In about 12-months from October 2015 to 2016, Israel experienced attacks by Palestinians that killed 40 and injured about 500. Most of the attacks were perpetrated by individuals using a knife or a hatchet. The preponderance of knife attacks led this year to be called “the knifing intifada.” Most individuals attempting knife attacks (150 of 250 assailants) were shot dead at the scene of the attack; these individuals are thus not just lone wolf terrorists but suicide lone wolf terrorists. Here is a description, from The American Interest, of what Israeli security forces learned about the attackers:
Most perpetrators have been quite young, between the ages of 17 and 22. Almost all of them have been unaffiliated with any Palestinian political faction. They embarked upon spontaneous individual initiatives, typically without sharing their plans of attack with friends or relatives. Often, they fit the definition of “from zero to hero” terrorists: They came mostly from the margins of their social groups; few if any were recognized as political activists or leaders among their peers. Social media, primarily Facebook, served as their platform rather than any of the many politically sponsored media outlets.
In most cases they were motivated by personal circumstances, striving to avenge and imitate previous attackers, and in some cases seeking to gain recognition as martyrs. Although many were driven to act by the widespread allegations that Israel was seeking to change the status quo at the al-Aqsa mosque, very few were devout Muslims. Patriotic sentiment trumped religion as the strongest driving force, coupled as always with feelings of indignation and humiliation at the presence of Israeli troops.7
Here is a similar description from The Economist:
After reviewing the profiles of scores of attackers, the intelligence officers found that they often acted on the spur of the moment. They were rarely linked to militant factions, and were not especially religious or poor. Many had a grievance: a son who felt unjustly treated, a brother who was disinherited, a bride who was beaten by her husband, and so on.8
Spur-of-the-moment action suggests action based on emotion and points away from ideology or religion. Rarely connected to a militant group and not especially religious also point away from ideology or religion. Low-status individuals seeking the glory of martyrdom are status seeking. Indignation and humiliation are emotional reactions to the group grievance that Israeli troops control Palestinians. Some attackers were motivated to revenge a relative or friend killed attempting to attack Israelis—that is, had a personal grievance as well as a group grievance.
What The Economist calls a grievance is not a grievance against Israeli Jews. In our terms, unjust treatment from a family member is a humiliation to be escaped and a signal of social disconnection; the relevant mechanisms of radicalization are thus disconnection and escape. It is important to notice that some of the attackers were seeking death in a manner described in the United States as “suicide by cop.” For instance, a young woman approached armed Israeli soldiers and waved scissors at them while too far away to reach them. Suicide is an extreme form of escape from personal problems.
Israeli experience with lone wolf suicide terrorists thus points to the importance of five mechanisms of radicalization: group grievance, personal grievance, status seeking, escape, and social disconnection. Unfortunately, we have no way to count how many individuals may show these same mechanisms but do not become lone wolf terrorists. We turn now from case study material to statistical studies of lone wolf terrorists.
The preceding section indicated that at least some of the five individual mechanisms of radicalization can be found in the lives of lone wolf terrorists. In this section, we try to find other and possibly more specific characteristics that may be common among lone wolf terrorists.
In an early example of this kind of research, Hewitt (2003) identified 27 lone actor US terrorists between 1955 and 2001 and suggested that the rate of psychological disturbance was higher (6 of 27) among the loners than among other US terrorists.9 More recent studies of lone actor terrorists point in the same direction.
Spaaij (2012) examined 88 cases of lone actor terrorists aggregated across 15 Western countries and found that lone actors are likely to suffer from some form of psychological disturbance and tend to be loners with few friends.10 Gill, Horgan, and Deckert put together an international collection of 119 mostly lone actor terrorists (including also isolated dyads and some individuals with loose group connections). No single profile was identified, but many of the lone actors seemed to be socially isolated.11 In the most methodologically sophisticated study yet conducted, Gruenewald, Chermak, and Freilich compared lethal attacks by lone actor and group actor US far-right extremists. Results indicated that the lone actors were younger; more likely to have a military background; more likely to suffer mental illness; and more likely to experience disconnection by separation, divorce, or death of a partner.12
Expanding the search, McCauley, Moskalenko, and Van Son sought to develop hypotheses about the characteristics of lone wolf terrorists by looking for the common characteristics of two kinds of mostly lone actor violent offenders: assassins and school attackers.13 The study used existing US government-sponsored reports to examine these two kinds of offenders.
The logic of comparing school attackers with assassins is that these two groups of offenders are like lone actor terrorists in perpetrating planful violence fueled by grievance. To the extent that assassins and school attackers share common characteristics, these characteristics may be risk factors for lone actor terrorism as well. The obvious demographic differences between the two groups (teenagers vs. adults) are actually a strength of the comparison: Any commonalities uncovered are the more striking and unlikely to be a reflection of life status or demographic factors.
The common characteristics of assassins and school attackers included grievance, depression, unfreezing (broken social ties), and weapons use outside the military. These four characteristics suggest the importance of means and opportunity for perpetrating violence. Grievance is a motive for violence, weapons experience provides a means, and depression and unfreezing lower the opportunity cost of violence as the perpetrator has less to lose.
An illustration of these characteristics can be made for the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan. Hasan turned to the Koran after the death of his parents, seems to have had no close relationships after he was transferred to Fort Hood, and was about to be transferred to Afghanistan (unfreezing). He saw himself discriminated against as a Muslim (personal grievance) and saw the War on Terrorism as a war on Islam (political grievance). He brought two weapons to his attack, one a sophisticated “cop-killer” pistol for which he purchased a laser sight—indicating experience with weapons beyond whatever slight weapons training the US Army provides for physician–psychiatrists. As far as we can ascertain, Hasan showed no signs of depression. So Hasan had three of the four characteristics common to assassins and school attackers: unfreezing, grievance, and weapons experience.
Taken together, these results indicate that grievance-fueled lone attackers are likely to have weapons experience, depression or other mental disorder, and temporary or chronic social isolation. We have called this the disconnected–disordered profile: socially disconnected loners with mental health problems. The two elements of the profile are interactive: feeling alone is painful and perhaps depressing; being depressed frays social connections.
Future research may discover characteristics that differentiate lone actor terrorists from assassins and school attackers, or it may turn out that lone actor terrorists are simply one facet of a larger phenomenon of grievance-motivated lone actor violence. Perhaps what a lone attacker says about his or her grievance determines whether we see the individual as a terrorist. Andrew Joseph Stack was a borderline case: Some saw him as a case of workplace violence, and some saw him as an anti-government terrorist.
There are lone actor terrorists who do not fit the disconnected–disordered profile—individuals who are not loners and not suffering mental disorder but who nonetheless undertake lone actor terrorist violence.
One such case is Vera Zazulich. A young Russian woman who had spent time in Siberia for anti-tsarist political activities, Zazulich heard about a student prisoner beaten for failing to doff his cap to the prison governor. Zazulich was outraged; she tried to learn if the terrorist group People’s Will was going to bring vengeance against the governor. The militants brushed her off. She decided someone had to do something, so she procured a pistol, went to see the governor, and shot him. After a tumultuous trial, she was acquitted and spirited out of Russia before the tsar could countermand the acquittal. In exile, she wrote and debated with the likes of Vladimir Lenin; she showed no sign of mental disorder and was connected with many political activists in exile.
Another such case is Clayton Waagner. Beginning in the 1970s, Waagner was convicted of various acts of theft and burglary, and in 1992 he was sentenced to 4 years in prison for attempted robbery. After serving his prison sentence, he was in Pittsburgh in January 1999 when his daughter Emily went into premature labor, giving birth to a granddaughter, Cierra, born dead at 24 weeks. Waagner’s commitment to fight abortion began when he held Cierra, touched her soft skin, and looked at her tiny but perfectly formed face and body. He says that he heard an internal voice—the voice of God: “How can you grieve so hard for this one when millions are killed each year and you do nothing.”
In September 1999, he was driving with his wife and children in a Winnebago that broke down. Police found stolen firearms in the stolen vehicle, and Waagner admitted that he was planning to use the weapons to kill abortion providers. Convicted for theft and firearms violations, he escaped from prison in February 2001. He described tracking and finding an easy shot at several abortion clinic doctors, but he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. He kept on the run by committing auto theft and robbery, and changed his plans: He would use fear instead of bullets.
In October 2001, Waagner mailed 285 letters to abortion clinics throughout the United States. Each letter contained a quarter-teaspoon of white flour and an anthrax threat. Coming soon after the still-unsolved anthrax attacks that followed the 9/11 attacks, the letters were taken seriously and seriously disrupted clinic operations. In November 2001, still on the run, he mailed 269 more letters to abortion clinics. Anticipating doubts and accelerated testing after the first hoax, he included in the white powder traces of a substance known to test positive in the most common test for anthrax. Again, he succeeded in shutting down many clinics. Captured in December 2001, he is serving a 30-year jail sentence in the US Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Before holding his dead granddaughter, Waagner was at the second or third level of radicalization in the opinion pyramid: He sympathized with those fighting abortion and may even have seen violence against abortion providers as justified. But he was doing nothing in the fight against abortion—that is, he was inert in the base layer of the action pyramid. His grief holding his dead granddaughter turned to guilt for doing nothing about the millions aborted, and from grief and guilt came radicalization in both the opinion and the action pyramids. As with Zazulich, strong emotion made the personal political; he felt suddenly a personal responsibility for action that radicalized him to the apex of the opinion pyramid. He moved also to the apex of the action pyramid (terrorists) as he stalked abortion providers.
Interesting here is the fact that Waagner had targets in his sights but could not pull the trigger. He was forced down the action pyramid to fight abortion with threats of violence that were in fact harmless. With his anthrax letters, he moved from the terrorist apex of the action pyramid to the radicals level of illegal political action without violence.
The two cases described—the tender-hearted secretary and the man of action—offer several clues for understanding how individuals can leave self-interest and loved ones behind to take risks in lone actor terrorism. Both were sympathizers with a cause and perhaps justifiers of violence in support of that cause. That is, both were in the middle levels of radicalization in the opinion pyramid. Zazulich had already reached the third level of the action pyramid in illegal anti-tsarist activism. Waagner, too, had broken laws but remained in the inert base of the action pyramid doing nothing to fight abortion. For both, something of great emotional significance occurred—unpunished violation of a student, the death of a granddaughter—and the political became personal. In both cases, the emotion came from identifying with—caring about—the welfare of others. Both were radicalized to feeling a personal moral obligation—the apex of the opinion pyramid—and both attacked perceived perpetrators of violence against those they cared about—the apex of the action pyramid.
What moved both, while others who shared their convictions did nothing, seems to have been an unusual capacity to care about the suffering of others. Both had solid social connections and no signs of mental disorder. We have called this the caring–compelled profile of lone actor terrorism. The capacity for empathy or sympathy is generally seen as quintessentially human and eminently humane. Here, we have a hint that there can be a dark side to caring greatly about others. Individuals can kill for love, including love of strangers seen as victimized.
We have found a number of ways in which lone wolf terrorists differ from the more common group-based terrorists. Lone wolf terrorists are more difficult to understand, because they are not subject to the pressures of group dynamics and group norms that are the usual way we explain how individuals can put a group or cause above self-preservation.
Group terrorists are predominantly normal individuals with no common characteristics that might provide a profile. In contrast, lone wolf terrorists do have some common characteristics, and we have suggested two possible characteristic profiles—the disconnected–disordered and the caring–compelled. Both profiles point to a kind of abnormality—the first in social disconnection and depression, and the second in an overwhelming sympathy with the sufferings of others.
Both profiles point to the importance of emotion in moving individuals to terrorism. The disconnected–disordered feel the sadness that goes with loneliness and depression. They are in pain and are pushed to action to escape their pain; they have little to lose. The caring–compelled feel sadness over the suffering of those they see as victims, and anger or outrage at those perceived as perpetrating suffering on the victims. These emotions push them to act despite the risk to their careers and families. For lone wolf terrorists as for group-based terrorists, it is extreme emotion rather than extreme ideas that moves these individuals to violent action.