Individual Terrorists

T errorism is well suited for use by a weak force against a powerful force. Small groups of individuals who are opposed to a government can turn to terror to achieve their goals rather than face a nation's army.

With one terrorist act, a single person can strike a major blow against a government or an entire society. Some authors have called such terrorists "megalomaniacs," individuals who believe they have a destiny to make a big difference in world history. In many cases, the first time one of these terrorists strikes is the first (and often the last) time he or she is noticed by the world.

Megalomaniacs are hard to guard against. Traditional intelligence techniques such as spying are best at detecting larger groups of people who make their intentions public. Sometimes these groups even use terror to attract more attention to themselves. The megalomaniac terrorist, on the other hand, strikes first and seeks publicity only afterward, when prevention is no longer possible.

The techniques of the megalomaniac are often designed to accomplish a great deal in a single blow. Their tactics are not aimed at building up power in a region, controlling territory, or setting up a new government. Rather, their goals are negative: to kill a national leader, to destroy a famous building, or to bring down an airplane and kill many people.

Modern technology has given these people many tools and techniques to make this kind of terrorist strike possible, while at the same time making it difficult to spot terrorists in advance. International air travel means distance is no longer an issue. Terrorists from Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or nearly any other country can easily travel to the United States in a day, carry out their attack, and leave within hours, going into hiding somewhere that is out of the reach of American law enforcement. Hostile individuals from inside the United States find it even easier to travel to target sites by car or truck. Powerful weapons are easily bought or made from readily available materials such as fertilizer. These weapons can be delivered in an ordinary way: a rented van of the sort people use to move to a new home became a weapon when it was packed with a fertilizer-based bomb and parked in the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993. Another truck, rented from the same company, carried an even bigger bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Often these individual terrorists are sympathetic to the traditional causes embraced by terrorists: a nationalist cause, a political cause, or a religious cause. But rather than acting as part of a larger organization, the megalomaniac often believes that all it takes is one person to destroy an evil or achieve a good. (Most megalomaniac terrorists have said they wanted to destroy a source of "evil" rather than achieve something positive.) For example, convinced that a single politician is to blame for all the problems in the world, the megalomaniac believes that killing that individual will fix those problems.

John Wilkes Booth: Assassin of Abraham Lincoln

On April 14, 1865, an actor named John Wilkes Booth (1838–1865) shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Lincoln was watching a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., when Booth burst into the presidential box where Lincoln was sitting and shot him in the head. Booth shouted a phrase in Latin—"Sic semper tyrannis!" (Thus always to tyrants!)—as he jumped onto the stage, breaking a bone in his leg. Booth managed to make it out of the theater, but he was killed by soldiers a few days later near Washington. Lincoln died the following morning.

Although there was political turmoil in the country, Lincoln's election in 1860 accelerated the beginning of the American Civil War. The war began in April 1861 after Lincoln, a staunch abolitionist, was sworn into office. The war was fought between the forces of the North (the Union) and of the South (the Confederacy), over the rights of states to determine the legality of slavery. (Slavery was outlawed in the North, but was vital to the economy of the South.)

Lincoln's murder was part of a wider conspiracy, a secret plot to assassinate the president. Booth's original plan had been to kidnap Lincoln in March 1865 and take him to Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, to be held hostage. But Lincoln changed his travel plans, and Booth was unable to carry out his scheme. The next month, after the Confederacy had surrendered to end the war, Booth decided to shoot Lincoln instead. He believed that this could help bring the Confederate cause back to life. The other men in on the assassination plot were supposed to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) and other members of Lincoln's cabinet on the same night. None of those plans succeeded, although the secretary of state was stabbed and wounded by Lewis Powell.

Booth headed south on horseback, but Union soldiers caught up to him on April 26 near Port Royal, Virginia. The assassin refused to surrender, even after the barn in which he was hiding was set on fire. A Union sergeant shot and killed Booth, meaning they would never be able to learn more about the conspiracy or his reasons for killing Lincoln. Four members of the conspiracy were hanged on July 7, 1865. Several others who were accused of taking part in the conspiracy were sentenced to jail, but Johnson pardoned them in 1869, following widespread doubt about whether they had actually been involved.

Lee Harvey Oswald: Assassin of John F. Kennedy

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was shot and killed by a sniper who fired at his presidential motorcade driving through Dallas, Texas. Later, a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald (1939–1963) was arrested in a movie theater and accused of the assassination. Before Oswald could be brought to trial, or even closely questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby murdered Oswald in the entryway of the Dallas police headquarters. Ruby went to prison for the murder; he died there of cancer in 1967.

Oswald's background aroused intense suspicion about his murder of Kennedy. Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union (today, Russia and its neighboring countries), and was thought to be sympathetic to Cuba's communist dictator Fidel Castro (1926–), who was an ally of the Soviet Union. Was Kennedy's murder part of a plot to get revenge for the failed invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles (forced emigrants) that Kennedy had authorized in 1961? Was it revenge for Kennedy's success in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuban bases in October 1962? Or was it planned by some people in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who were angry because Kennedy withheld military support from the Cuban exiles who had taken part in the failed invasion? Some observers thought they had evidence of more than one gunman near Dealey Plaza, the place Kennedy's motorcade was passing when he was shot.

No solid evidence of such plots has ever been uncovered, but the rumors were still being discussed decades after the event. After the assassination, President Kennedy's successor in office, Vice President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73), ordered an investigation headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891–1974). The investigation, known as the Warren Commission, concluded that Oswald had acted alone, and that there was no wider plot or conspiracy. It seems quite possible that Oswald was a megalomaniacal terrorist, convinced that by one dramatic action he could change the course of history.

Timothy McVeigh: The Oklahoma City Bomber

At about 9 a.m. on Wednesday, April 19, 1995, a yellow rental truck exploded at the base of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The front of the office building collapsed, exposing the interior. The explosion and collapse killed 168 people, including 19 children—some of them only babies—who were in a day-care center on the second floor. At the time, it was the most people ever killed in a terrorist attack in the United States. It was not exceeded until the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C., in which more than three thousand people died.

Eighty minutes later, near Perry, Oklahoma, a highway patrolman stopped a car for driving without license plates. The driver was wearing a gun, and the patrolman arrested him. The driver's name was Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001).

Six years and two months later, on June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed in a federal prison in Indiana. He had been convicted of setting off the bomb in Oklahoma City.

The Branch Davidians and the militia movement

Before his death McVeigh said he had bombed the building in revenge for the federal government's raid in Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993. In that raid, eighty members of a religious cult called the Branch Davidians were killed in a fire and gunfight with federal agents at the end of a fifty-one-day standoff. About twenty of the dead cult members were children. The Branch Davidians believed, among other things, that the end of the world was about to happen, as described in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. The government had raided their compound in order to serve a warrant for failing to register firearms. Six cult members and four government agents died in the initial raid. Waco became a favorite cause among members of the loosely organized "militia movement" in the United States. Members of the militia movement believe that the federal government has become much larger and more powerful than the U.S. Constitution had intended. They think it has secret plans to seize property and enslave the population. Some militia members live in small rural communities in the Midwest and far West. They urge their members to carry guns to defend themselves against federal agents.

McVeigh's army years

McVeigh did not live on a militia compound, but he apparently sympathized with their beliefs. He was born in 1968 near Buffalo, New York. After graduating from high school and attending a junior college, McVeigh dropped out of school and worked as a security guard before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1988.

In the army, McVeigh developed a strong interest in guns and spent his free time cleaning his collection of firearms. He was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, where he was a gunner on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (similar to a tank). McVeigh was promoted three times, to corporal, sergeant, and then platoon leader. McVeigh reenlisted in the army and wanted to become a Green Beret (an elite group of soldiers within the Army), but before that could happen he was transferred to the Persian Gulf, where he saw action in battle against Iraqi troops, which had invaded Kuwait, during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). Still wanting to become a Green Beret, he returned to the United States to begin training. But he was not in good enough physical condition, and he dropped out of the Green Beret course after only two days. Not long afterward, he accepted an early discharge from the army. He returned to his father's home in New York state and returned to his old job as a security guard. But McVeigh did not settle down there. Instead, he moved around the country, living in motels and driving old cars, occasionally visiting old army buddies and sometimes selling weapons at gun shows.

Ruby Ridge enrages the militias

In the meantime, in 1992, government agents trying to arrest a white supremacist (a person who believes that white people are superior to those with darker skin) named Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, killed Weaver's fourteen-year-old son and later his wife as she was standing in the doorway of the family's cabin, holding a baby. (The baby was unharmed.) The agents were attempting to arrest Weaver on charges of selling illegal weapons. The incident outraged McVeigh, as it did other sympathizers with the militia movement. The next year, in 1993, McVeigh visited the site of the Branch Davidian siege near Waco, Texas, which was being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Hostage Rescue Team following a failed attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to storm the compound. The ATF, which was also involved in Ruby Ridge, was particularly hated by the militia movement. Militia members saw the agency as part of a government conspiracy to take away American citizens' guns. The siege at Waco, coming only a year after Ruby Ridge, seemed to some to be more evidence of this conspiracy.

Over the next two years, McVeigh moved frequently. He worked briefly as a security guard on several occasions. Other times he sold weapons at gun shows. In late 1994, while he was living in Marion, Kansas, McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols began collecting bags of fertilizer. (When mixed with diesel fuel, fertilizer can be turned into a powerful bomb.) In April 1995, McVeigh rented a truck and packed it with his giant fertilizer bomb. This was the truck that exploded on April 19 in front of the federal office building in Oklahoma City.

McVeigh's motives

It was pure chance that McVeigh was arrested so soon after the attack, although the FBI had published a wanted poster with a drawing of his face on it within two days of the explosion. The FBI identified McVeigh a few hours before he was scheduled to be released from jail on the license plate charge. There had been earlier speculation that terrorists from the Middle East were responsible for the attack, but antiterrorist experts disagreed. They believed that the attack taking place on the anniversary of the day the Branch Davidians were killed was a key clue.

After his conviction, McVeigh explained his reasons for the attack in a letter to a journalist. In it, McVeigh wrote that the bombing was a counterattack against all the raids that federal agents had carried out over the years. He argued that over the years, "federal actions grew increasingly … violent, to the point where at Waco, our government—like the Chinese—was deploying tanks against its own citizens… . For all intents and purposes, federal agents had become soldiers (using military training, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior."

McVeigh continued by saying, "I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah federal building was morally and strategically equivalent to the US hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations."

Nichols, who was an army buddy of McVeigh's, was also arrested and convicted of taking part in the Oklahoma City bombing. He was sentenced to life in prison. (At the time of the bombing, Nichols was at home in Kansas.) He later was charged with murder in connection with the bombing. In 2002 Nichols still faced criminal charges in the state of Oklahoma.

The aftermath of the bombing

The Oklahoma City bombing put a spotlight on a hidden part of American political life: an obsessive hatred of the federal government by people who believe they are about to be targeted by a government conspiracy. Ruby Ridge and Waco brought intense criticism of government actions, not only by the militia movement but also by many other people upset over the government's use of violence against its own citizens.

These three incidents taken together—Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City—also brought to public attention the existence of a network of heavily armed individuals, mostly in Midwestern and Mountain West states (Montana and Idaho in particular). These people considered themselves at war with the federal government. Many of them belonged to a variety of militia groups that combined anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) and fundamentalist Christianity (a religion that believes in following strict moral standards as set out in the Bible) with an intense hatred of big government, taxes, and controls of most kinds, especially control of weapons.

Even as McVeigh and Nichols were developing their hatred of the government, a hatred that finally exploded on a Wednesday morning in Oklahoma City, another individual was mailing bombs to people he associated with modern technology, which he blamed for ruining life on earth. Coincidentally, he mailed his last bomb shortly after McVeigh destroyed the federal building. He was known as the Unabomber.

Theodore Kaczynski: The Unabomber

For seventeen years, Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski (pronounced kuh-ZIN-sky; 1942–) sent bombs through the mail to addresses across the United States, killing three people and injuring twenty-nine others. The goal was to bring about his unique—some would say insane—vision of how the modern world should be. Despite a massive manhunt by the FBI that lasted for years, it was only after Kaczynski's younger brother told authorities about his suspicions that the man known as the Unabomber was finally arrested.

Kaczynski was a classic "mad bomber." A highly intelligent man (he graduated from Harvard University at age twenty and had an advanced degree in mathematics), Kaczynski developed a detailed theory of how modern society had been ruined by the Industrial Revolution, the period of technological development that began in the late eighteenth century. He blamed computers, among other things, for damaging healthy relationships among human beings. But Kaczynski lived alone in a tiny cabin he built in the woods of Montana, rarely seeing other people. Kaczynski never developed normal social relationships with adults, and on several occasions he wrote letters to psychiatrists seeking help.

A difficult past

Kaczynski was born in 1942 in Chicago. As a baby, he was hospitalized for several weeks, a fact that some people, including his mother, later blamed for his difficulty with forming social relationships. He was a brilliant boy and left high school at age sixteen to attend Harvard University. He later went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics. For two years he taught math at the University of California in Berkeley. He then quit and worked around Salt Lake City, Utah, for several years until returning to Chicago in 1977.

In Chicago his younger brother, David, got him a job in a factory where David worked as a supervisor. Apparently Kaczynski already showed signs of a disturbed personality. A female coworker he had dated asked him to stop seeing her, and shortly after that crude poems about the woman began to be posted around the factory. David eventually fired him, and some time later Kaczynski moved to a 12-foot-by-10-foot cabin he had built on a piece of property in Montana.

The bombings begin

In May 1978, about two months before Kaczynski began working at his brother's factory, a package was discovered in a parking lot at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The return address was a professor at nearby Northwestern University, but neither the sender nor the person it was addressed to knew anything about the package. When a campus police officer opened the package, it exploded, injuring his hand.

Over the next seventeen years, a total of sixteen bombs were sent to people across the country. Many intended victims were professors, often scientists or computer experts. In the beginning the packages containing the bombs were disguised to seem as if they had been sent from one professor to another. In 1980 the bomber began using a form of signature: a disk in the packages stamped with the letters "FC" (later said to stand for "Freedom Club"). Three people were killed when they opened booby-trapped packages; twenty-nine others were injured, some severely. One bomb exploded aboard an airplane, American Airlines Flight 444, from Chicago to Washington, D.C., on November 15, 1979. The bomb went off and caused injuries due to smoke inhalation; the plane diverted from National Airport (now Reagan) to Dulles, and finally made an emergency landing in Virginia, where several passengers were treated for smoke inhalation. The bomb had been rigged to go off when the plane reached a particular height above the ground. The plane Another bomb was simply left in a building at the University of California in Berkeley. When an engineering professor picked it up off the floor of the faculty lounge, it exploded, injuring his hand and arm.

The first person killed by the Unabomber, in December 1985, was Hugh Scrutton, the owner of a computer store in Sacramento, California. A piece of metal from the bomb that had been left in the parking lot behind his store pierced his heart. Other victims included Thomas Mosser, an executive with a New York advertising agency, in December 1994, and Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, who was killed in April 1995 by the last bomb known to have been sent by the Unabomber.

The "Unabomber Manifesto"

Also in April 1995, the Unabomber sent a letter to the New York Times newspaper that laid out the philosophical basis for the attacks. In it, he claimed that he was part of an anarchist group that wanted to "break down all society into very small, completely autonomous independent units." The letter said that if its manifesto was published, the group would stop its "terrorist activities." (Despite these claims, there was only one person behind all the bombs.)

As the FBI searched for the mysterious Unabomber, the New York Times and the Washington Post agreed to share the cost of printing the "Unabomber Manifesto." It was distributed in the Post on September 19, 1995. The newspapers explained they were printing it at the suggestion of the FBI, for "public safety reasons."

Arrest and conviction

As promised, the bombings stopped (in fact, the last bomb was mailed six months before the "manifesto" was printed). Five months later, Kaczynski's brother David contacted the FBI and said he suspected his brother might be the Unabomber. Two months later, in April 1996, the FBI arrested Kaczynski in his tiny Montana cabin, where they found a live bomb along with other evidence. In June Kaczynski was formally charged as the Unabomber.

In January 1998, after a complex legal process, Kaczynski pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in prison.

The case of the Unabomber raised an obvious question: was he sane? Kaczynski's lifestyle and behavior—living alone in a tiny cabin in the woods, despite his obvious brilliance and abilities—strongly suggest a person who was unbalanced. After his arrest, letters were found that Kaczynski had written to psychiatrists, asking for help in dealing with his social problems but asking to conduct the therapy by mail instead of in person. On the other hand, the "Unabomber Manifesto," while taking an extreme position, does not seem to be entirely the ranting of a madman. Kaczynski's technical ability in making and distributing the bombs certainly showed rational planning. Yet in his own letters to newspapers he described his activities as "terroristic" and promised to stop in exchange for printing the manifesto.

Terrorism and mental illness

There have been other crimes committed by individuals that seemed on the surface to have a political or social motive. However, there is some question as to whether these people were mentally ill. Among the best-known:

• On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan (1911–) was standing on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, about to step into his limousine, when a young man stepped up and started firing a pistol. Reagan was wounded, as were a Secret Service bodyguard and his press secretary, James Brady (1940–). The gunman was John Hinckley Jr., the son of a wealthy family from Colorado. Hinckley had been a psychiatric patient before the incident and had been on medication for depression. He was judged insane, and a court ordered him confined to a psychiatric hospital.
• Benjamin Smith killed two people and wounded several others during a weekend shooting rampage in Illinois and Indiana in 1999. Smith described himself as a white supremacist. During the shootings, Smith targeted Jews, African Americans, and Asians. He had a history of drug abuse in the years before his crime. On the day the last victim was shot to death, Smith killed himself.
• In August 1999 a gunman named Buford Furrow attacked a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, California, which also held a day-care center. The attack wounded five people. He then murdered a Filipino postal worker. Furrow was associated with a known racist terrorist group that supported white supremacy. He also had been a patient in a psychiatric hospital a year before the attacks.
• Richard Bauhammers shot and killed five people and wounded a sixth on April 28, 2000. The victims included two Indians, two Asians, one African American, and a Jewish neighbor of his parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Bauhammers told investigators afterward that he had looked up Web sites associated with white supremacists and that he wanted to become as famous as McVeigh and Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), the leader of the Nazi Party in Germany, responsible for the murders of six million Jews during World War II. Bauhammers had previously been hospitalized for mental illness and had taken various psychiatric drugs.

There is evidence that some mentally ill persons carry out actions—such as assassinating political leaders or attacking strangers of a specific race—that could fall into the category of terrorism. These mentally ill people often are described as terrorists for this reason. Other people called terrorists, such as

Kaczynski, have refused to plead insanity. (At his trial, Kaczynski threatened to fire his lawyers if they insisted on that defense.) However, those who refuse to plead insanity sometimes seem to lack a plan to change society or achieve political goals. Their terroristic actions seem random and pointless. Could anyone reasonably expect to bring about political change by charging into the street and shooting people at random? There is no definitive answer to the question of whether terrorists are, by the nature of their crimes, mentally disturbed, or whether mentally disturbed individuals can also be classified as terrorists.