One of the most memorable quotes concerning the need to learn lessons from past experiences comes from the American philosopher George Santayana, who, in 1905, wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”1 In those brief words, he captured the essence of why it is crucial for governments, societies, and individuals to understand past mistakes so as not to repeat them in the future. Without usually acknowledging Santayana, virtually every hearing held and report issued after a major terrorist attack follows his advice. “Lessons learned” is a crucial part of any investigation into a terrorist incident. These “lessons” can include practically any issue, ranging from intelligence failures and lapses in physical security to understanding how various policies and actions by a government or military may have led to the terrorist attack.

When it comes to lone wolf terrorism, however, uncovering lessons learned becomes a little more difficult. This is due to the fact that we're dealing with an individual terrorist and not a group or state sponsor. Intelligence failures, for example, are usually not cited, since it is hard to blame an intelligence or law-enforcement agency for not knowing about a plot when the terrorist was not part of any conspiracy and had minimal or no communications with others prior to the attack. The same is true for pointing to various foreign or military policies as the cause of a terrorist incident, since some lone wolves can be oblivious to what is happening in the world yet still launch a devastating attack. There have been, nevertheless, a sufficient number of lone wolf attacks over the years from which we can derive lessons that can guide us in better understanding this growing phenomenon.

ISLAMIC MILITANTS DO NOT HAVE A MONOPOLY ON THE LONE WOLF TERRORIST THREAT

Despite all the attention that has been given to Islamic extremism since the 9/11 attacks, we have seen in this book that lone wolf terrorism is indeed a diverse threat. While there have been lone wolves ascribing to Islamic militancy, there have also been many secular, single-issue, criminal, and idiosyncratic lone wolves. In fact, the two worst lone wolf terrorist attacks in history were perpetrated by non-Islamic terrorists. Timothy McVeigh, a right-wing, antigovernment extremist, blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Anders Breivik, a right-wing, anti-Islamic extremist opposed to multiculturalism in Europe, was responsible for the massacre of sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers, at a Norwegian youth camp, in addition to killing eight other people in a bombing earlier that same day in Oslo.

These two incidents demonstrate how misperceptions about terrorism can dominate the public agenda. While al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups and cells have been the most active extremists around the world in recent years, lone wolves have come from all parts of the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. For every Nidal Malik Hassan (who went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, as a protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), there is a Bruce Ivins, who sent out anthrax-laden letters, in part, as a means for gaining more funding for his anthrax vaccine. For every Colleen LaRose (also known as “Jihad Jane,” who traveled to Europe to kill in the name of jihad), there is a James von Brunn, who attacked the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, due to his hatred of Jews and other minorities.

That is why any effort to understand the radicalization process as a means for preventing, or at least greatly reducing, the incidence of lone wolf terrorism is doomed to fail if it only focuses on Islamic radicalization. The process by which individuals become right-wing, antigovernment militants, white supremacists, antiabortion and environmental extremists, and so forth has to also be included in any research project or community outreach program. Otherwise, no matter how much success may be achieved regarding reducing lone wolf Islamic terrorism, we will still be left with the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Anders Breivik, and Bruce Ivins.

Related to this is the fallacy of believing that changes in US foreign and military policies will significantly affect the threat of lone wolf terrorism. While several lone wolves may find inspiration for their violence in protesting specific US foreign policies, there are still plenty of others who are motivated to act for different reasons, including the environment, abortion, white supremacy, and other factors. And even if the United States were to retreat from all its commitments overseas and follow an isolationist policy, there would still be individuals who would commit terrorist attacks due to their irreversible perception of what American society represents, such as capitalism, consumerism, and materialism.

It is also important that we do not fall into the trap of believing that the main source of lone wolf terrorism today is emanating from the call by al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist organizations for lone wolves to attack the West. Following the death of Osama bin Laden and the increased difficulty of initiating large-scale, complex operations like those of 9/11 (due to the loss of their central training grounds in Afghanistan, improved security in many countries, and a series of setbacks over the years), al Qaeda is now emphasizing “individual jihad” in its calls for attacks against the West. In June 2011, just one month after bin Laden's death, an American-born al Qaeda spokesman, Adam Gadahn, released a video message titled “Do Not Rely on Others, Take the Task upon Yourself” on the Internet, in which he urged Muslims living in the United States to carry out individual terrorist operations. “What are you waiting for?” he asked in the video. He pointed out that it would be easy for anybody to go to a gun show and leave with an automatic assault rifle. He urged his followers to target major institutions and influential public figures.2 The role of al Qaeda in influencing lone wolves clearly has intelligence officials around the world worried. “I must say that my colleagues in Britain, in Australia and the United States think the same thing—we are already seeing an increase in the number of people who are acting as individuals and that really makes our lives complicated,” said Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in April 2012. He predicted that the number of al Qaeda–inspired lone wolf attacks would increase.³

However, it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on al Qaeda as the cause of the growing lone wolf threat. There is always a tendency when faced with a complex problem to think of it in black-and-white terms. That allows one to think there is a solution that can be achieved. This happened in the 1970s and 1980s, when some terrorism experts, such as Claire Sterling, in her influential book The Terror Network,⁴ argued that the Soviet Union was the main source of international terrorism and that if the United States and its allies could counter Soviet influence, then a big part of the terrorist problem would be solved. That proved to be wrong, as terrorism during that era had many origins, as is true today. We have to be careful that we don't perpetuate the legacy of al Qaeda based on what it accomplished with the 9/11 attacks and subsequent incidents. They are certainly part of the lone wolf problem, but they are not the major source. The fact that there is no central source for lone wolf terrorism is one of the key lessons to be learned about this form of terrorism.

The diversity in lone wolf terrorism also means that, just like terrorism overall, it can never truly be “defeated.” As long as there are individuals and groups who believe that terrorism is justified in the name of some cause, we will always have terrorism. Furthermore, as noted earlier, one does not even have to have a “cause” as we usually think of one in order to qualify as a lone wolf terrorist. If an individual is only motivated by money, greed, personal revenge, or some other purpose, his or her violent actions can still be considered terrorism if the effect on government and society is the same (i.e., heightened security, fear) as if the act had been committed by a terrorist with a political or religious agenda.

LONE WOLVES ARE NOT AS CRAZY AS MANY PEOPLE ASSUME

Whenever there is a terrorist attack, one doesn't have to wait too long for some observers to describe the terrorists as “madmen” or irrational human beings. Typical of this view is the description given by one psychologist, who wrote that most terrorists are “battered children forced into madness.”5 The thinking is that who but mentally ill people would kill innocent victims in the mistaken belief that they were furthering a cause. This, of course, ignores the harsh reality that, in many cases, terrorism pays off. It is a way for small groups and individuals to obtain results otherwise unobtainable, such as winning concessions from a targeted government during a hijacking or other type of hostage incident, creating a crisis atmosphere in the targeted country, gaining worldwide publicity, sabotaging peace efforts, and so forth.⁶ The limited number of psychological studies of members of terrorist groups has confirmed that most terrorists are indeed quite “normal.”⁷

When it comes to the lone wolf, however, the consensus among scholars and others is that the individual terrorist is somewhat different in terms of psychology and personality from those who join terrorist organizations. For example, one scholar argues that “although most terrorists are normal, the rate of psychological disturbance is certainly higher among the loners.”⁸ However, that conclusion was based on limited data; only twenty-seven American lone wolves were studied, with just six of them showing signs of mental illness.⁹ In another study of lone wolves in a few different countries, the author concluded that “lone wolf terrorists are relatively likely to suffer from some form of psychological disturbance,” even though only five lone wolves were examined, with three of them diagnosed with personality disorders and one with obsessive-compulsive disorder.¹⁰

What I suspect is occurring with the psychological explanations for lone wolf terrorists is that we tend to know more about them after an incident than we do about members of a terrorist group. After all, there are fewer lone wolves than there are terrorist group members, and while some terrorist group members (such as the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks) are analyzed and their background characteristics become well known, the majority of terrorists simply fade into oblivion after their attacks. There are just too many of them for researchers to conduct detailed psychological histories. It may very well be that if it were possible to get psychological data on every terrorist in the world, a few would undoubtedly have personality disorders and perhaps even mental illness.

Some of the lone wolves I discussed in this book clearly were mentally ill, such as Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Muharem Kurbegovic (the Alphabet Bomber), Bruce Ivins (the sender of the anthrax letters), and Charles Guiteau (the assassin of President James Garfield). Others had psychological problems, such as Nidal Malik Hasan (the Fort Hood shooter) and Anders Breivik (the perpetrator of the Norway massacre). But many other lone wolves were not “abnormal” in the psychological sense, such as Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, Roshonara Choudhry, and others. While some of them may have had views that were too extreme for membership in a group, or the groups may have viewed them as too unstable, they were still not “crazy,” which is the label often used by those who throw up their hands and claim that there is nothing we can do about the lone wolf terrorist. And while it may be true that some lone wolves combine personal grievances and problems with a political, religious, or single-issue cause in order to justify their violence, they are no less dedicated to the issues for which they are fighting for than the “regular” terrorists. As terrorism expert John Horgan wrote about terrorists in general: “Many attempts exist to denigrate terrorists and their cause by purposefully regarding them as psychopathic.”11 The same could be said about the misguided labels many people apply to the lone wolf.

THE INTERNET IS A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD FOR LONE WOLVES

The march of technology has been good for all terrorists, including lone wolves. It has given them targets with large numbers of people to attack, such as airplanes that can now carry over eight hundred passengers; more powerful and sophisticated weapons; advanced communication and navigational devices, including GPS units; and, of course, the most important gift of all—the Internet. If the Internet did not exist, terrorists would probably have had to invent it. Just as it's hard to imagine any of us conducting our lives today without access to the Internet, the same is true for most terrorist groups and lone wolves. From searching online for information on potential targets and weapons to posting various messages and manifestos, the Internet is used by practically every terrorist group and lone wolf in existence today. As prominent terrorism analyst Steven Emerson notes: “The Internet is a global communication medium that provides terrorist operatives and their organizations an often anonymous and instantaneous method of sending messages, images, intelligence, financial transaction, operational orders, training material, and any variety of their information to further their goals.”12

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.

The combination of danger, innovation, and impact that has characterized lone wolf terrorism in the past is destined to continue in the future. So, too, will the effort by governments and law enforcement to design ways to effectively combat this threat. While many lone wolf attacks, like those initiated by terrorist groups, will not be that significant in terms of the damage they cause or the reactions they elicit, others will undoubtedly have serious effects. What, then, can we expect to unfold regarding lone wolf terrorism in the coming years?