Spycraft - Melton [189]
The Agency’s war against terrorism began decades before September 11, 2001. The CIA’s chief in Athens was assassinated in December 1975. In October 1983, terrorists used a truck bomb to blow up the Marine barracks in Beirut, murdering 241 U.S. soldiers. That same year, terrorists bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, including CIA officers. Then in 1984, CIA’s chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, was kidnapped, tortured, and later murdered in 1986. That same year, DCI William Casey created the DCI Counterterrorist Center staffed by representatives from the principal intelligence community agencies, with a mission to “preempt, disrupt, and defeat terrorists.”
While radical groups with diverse agendas, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the IRA, and the Weathermen, committed terrorist acts during the 1960s, America saw the face of terrorism up close during the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Broadcast live on international television, the dramatic scenes of masked Palestinian terrorists killing eleven Israeli athletes seemed as senseless as it was shocking.
To the CIA, the only new aspect of the appalling spectacle in Munich was its global broadcast. Acts of terror carried out by religious and political fanatics, either independently or with government sponsors, have influenced societies and destabilized governments for centuries.1 In the eleventh century, a Muslim sect, the Order of the Assassins, conducted suicide missions with the promise of “paradise to follow.”2 English Catholics conspired to blow up Parliament in 1605 in hopes of creating an uprising against King James I.3 The list of terrorist acts through history includes virtually every country and continent. However, in the last half of the twentieth century, the frequency of terrorist strikes accelerated dramatically. According to one account, 8,114 terrorist incidents occurred worldwide during the 1970s. In the 1980s, that number increased nearly 400 percent to more than 30,000.4
Advances in technology have aided terrorists in their efforts. New chemistries have reduced the amount of explosives needed to inflict significant damage, and television coverage typically allocates airtime relative to the number of people killed or injured. It can be argued that the net effect motivates increasingly more heinous acts in an attempt to attract the attention that drives public fear.
Targeting civilians is a fundamental terrorist tactic. In the nineteenth century, the radical German revolutionary Karl Heinzen envisioned a time when weapons of mass destruction, powerful enough to destroy entire cities, would be in the hands of terrorists.5 Stopping that from happening became one of CIA’s most important missions.
The first OTS officer assigned to Vietnam, Pat Jameson, may have been the first OTS tech drafted into the war on terrorism. During the early 1970s, terrorists were using tools already well known to Jameson, including false identities and documentation along with special weapons and improvised explosive devices. His experiences in Vietnam and Laos with target analysis and planning paramilitary operations allowed him to understand how terrorists identified target vulnerabilities and traveled undetected.
When the United States left Vietnam in 1973, OTS reassigned Jameson from Laos to one of its covert European bases. Now a seasoned tech with experience in both paramilitary and audio surveillance operations, he would become a primary Agency resource for creating counterintelligence programs in Europe and Middle Eastern countries. Early counterterrorism operations concentrated on putting audio devices into residences and offices of suspected terrorists. The strategy, Jameson recalled, “paid off handsomely,” particularly in West European countries where members of terrorist cells were often longtime residents and believed their radical activities were protected. For the Agency, these operations not only assisted countries in preventing attacks, they also provided a means to solidify and expand cooperation with local security