CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

IRAN’S KIDNAPPING OF OUR embassy personnel and holding them month after month made America more aware of the rise of international terrorism. Growing turmoil around the globe, especially in the Middle East, made the planet a much more dangerous place. War and general bedlam formed a kind of backdrop for terrorism’s upward trend.

Part of my duties as a member of the Counterterrorism Joint Task Force was to gather data on terrorism, its nature, and genesis and to predict its evolution and offer solutions. I wasn’t surprised that terrorism and global unrest fed upon each other and upon the blood of victims. Terrorism did not occur in a vacuum; it increased according to the general condition of the world.

During the period our countrymen were held hostage in Iran, Soviets sent troops into Afghanistan to support a pro-Soviet coup, and Iraq invaded Iran. Both wars continued throughout the months of the Iran Hostage Crisis and bore every indication of continuing for years longer. I was certain in my own mind that they in turn would metastasize into even more conflicts and wars.

“We in government,” I commented to CNO Admiral Hayward, “have a tendency to look at acts of terror as unrelated incidents. We can, in fact, make predictions upon trends.”

“And your predictions, Commander Hamilton?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

I showed him a chart I made of terrorist acts within the last two decades or so and how they fed upon the instability of the world and themselves created new instability. Since 1962, I pointed out, there had been fifty-seven airliner hijackings or attempted hijackings, fifteen of which originated in the United States. There were also hundreds of other terrorist incidents directed against the United States, Israel, or the West, among then 8,200 bombings and bomb threats inside the United States between January 1969 and April 1970 attributed to campus disturbances and student unrest.

Incident	Location	Date and details
“Sunday bomber”	New York City	1960. Series of detonations in New York subways and ferries resulting in one dead and 51 injured.
American Airliner hijacking	Marathon, Florida	May 1, 1962. Hijacked to Cuba.
Political assassination	Los Angeles	1968. Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy shot and killed by Palestinian-Jordanian-Muslim.
Massacre	Munich, W. Germany	August–September 1972. Black September Palestinian terrorists at Olympic Village. Eleven Israelis and one German police officer killed. Five terrorists died.
Bombings	New York City	1973. Puerto Rican terrorists FALN. 40 bombings.
Assassination	Chevy Chase, Maryland	1973. Israeli Air Force attaché shot outside home.
Airport bombing	LaGuardia Airport	1976. 11 killed, 75 injured.
Car bombing	Washington D.C.	1976. Former member of Chilean government and assistant killed.
Kidnapping	Kabul, Afghanistan	1976. Kidnapped U.S. ambassador killed during gunfight.

My chart went on for page after page. The CNO threw up his hands. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Look at history and we see how they grow out of events. Radical Islam will be our next terrorist challenge.”

The United States’ first official war after the Revolutionary War was because of terrorism.

During and after the seventeenth century, Barbary pirates operating primarily in the Mediterranean from ports in the North Africa Ottoman provinces of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers seized ships for ransom and made raids along the seacoast as far north as the British Isles, the Netherlands, and even Ireland. Other than for loot and ransoms, the pirates’ main purpose was to capture Christians for the Ottoman slave trade and the Arabian market. An estimated one million Europeans were taken for slavery from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. England and Spain lost thousands of ships. Out of fear, civilians in Spain and Italy abandoned long stretches of their coast.

Pirates seized the first American merchant ship in 1784, then two more the next year. They had their own ambassador in Tripoli, who represented them before the North African Ottoman states of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis. These rulers offered the pirates safe haven and encouraged them to enslave, kidnap, and pillage on the high seas, for which the princes received a cut of the spoils.

Diplomats John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson went to London to negotiate with Tripoli. They demanded an explanation from Tripoli’s envoy, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, who explained that the piracy was “founded on the laws of Prophet Mohammed. It is written in the Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged our authority are sinners. It is our right and our duty to make war upon them wherever they can be found and to make slaves of all that can be taken as prisoner. Every Musselman who should be slain in such endeavors is sure to go to Paradise.”

The United States at the time did not have a navy. President George Washington had no choice but to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in “tribute” and for “protection.” In effect, for ransom.

One of President John Adams’s first undertakings after succeeding Washington to the presidency was to build a navy. Thanks to him, the U.S. had its Navy when Thomas Jefferson followed Adams to the presidency in 1801. “I was very unwilling that we should acquiesce in the humiliation of paying a tribute to those lawless pirates,” Jefferson said. “I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace through the medium of war.”

Jefferson dispatched the Navy and Marines overseas. General William Eaton led a successful military campaign against Tripoli, freeing captured seamen and crushing the terrorist force. After four years of fighting, Tripoli signed a peace treaty on America’s terms.

“Point being,” I stated to the CNO, “that the only way to deal with terrorism is by the sword.”

Modern Islamic terrorist tactics could be traced through Adolf Hitler and World War II. At the start of the twentieth century, over one million Jews were living peacefully alongside Arabs in Palestine. As Hitler began his rise, vast numbers of Jews fled Europe for the Middle East, creating anti-Jewish unrest. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a title granted by the British protectorate of Israel to Amin al-Husseini, was virulently anti-Jew. His idolization of Hitler led to the Islamic-Nazi pact. Throughout the war years, al-Husseini instigated violence and terrorist actions against Jews in Palestine. He also supported the Nazi war effort by raising an SS division of twenty-six thousand Muslims in Hungary.

During the last days of the war, Hitler looked to his favorite commando, Otto Skorzeny, to raise a band of soldiers trained to cause chaos and terror and spread fear in the enemy’s rear—a mobile army of Nazi terrorists called Werewolves.

It was Skorzeny who pioneered the theory of guerrilla cells operating independently behind enemy lines with no centralized command, blending in with the people so they wouldn’t be noticed. He wrote what was in effect the first terrorist handbook, a manual on techniques for “dirty fighting” that included everything from how to apply psychological pressure and blow up a fuel dump to planting booby traps and decapitating motorcycle couriers by stretching piano wire across roads.

After Germany lost the war, Skorzeny and a network of former SS officers escaped through “rat lines” to Egypt where they trained Muslim werewolves to operate against Israel and the West. Yasser Arafat, who rose to become head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was among those whom Skorzeny trained. Arafat and Skorzeny spread the disease of Nazi terror throughout the Middle East.

Former Nazis obtained such a foothold in Egypt under Gamal Nasser that Nasser appointed Skorzeny to be his military advisor. Under Nasser, Egypt melded fully into a Nazi-like state. He banned political opposition, assassinated opponents or sent them to prison, and expelled or killed 75,000 Jews.

Skorzeny relocated to Spain in the early 1960s, where he organized the “Paladin Group” that offered his own brand of consultation to put down any opposition to his client regimes and organizations and advise them on consolidating their power. Among his clients were Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, and various terrorists from the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

“Terrorist groups in the Middle East,” I said, while the CNO nodded his head in understanding, “still pattern their tactics after Skorzeny and his Nazi Werewolves. Terrorism from Islam will soon threaten the future of Western civilization—unless we stop them.”

“How do we stop them?” Admiral Hayward asked.

I shook my head and grinned. “With brains and balls,” I said.