Terrorist attacks intensified considerably in 1985. They were diversified in the extreme: explosions at NATO installations in Europe, the hijacking of a ship and aircraft in the Mediterranean, the assault on the Colombian Supreme Court in Bogota, and the year-end attacks on passengers in the airports of Vienna and Rome.
Yet, carrying out a successful act of terrorism is a complicated undertaking, of which the act of violence is the simplest part.
To carry out an attack, terrorists rely on a vast, complex and demanding support system. This system supplies weapons, explosives, false documents, target selection, transportation, in-country support, operational intelligence, evacuation, medical and legal assistance.
An effective support network should be able to transport a group of terrorists from their safe haven to a foreign country, enable them to operate there, and then evacuate them safely. Often this happens. If performed correctly, and if strategy so demands, the support net should be able to complete these missions without being discovered by the local security forces, even after the attack.
Common factors
Despite their diversity, both geographical and political, the terrorist inventory for 1985 had two common denominators. They were directed against Western targets, and the terrorists could not have carried them out without support.
Though ostensibly unrelated, many of these acts of terrorism represent a small, visible fraction of a massive clandestine infrastructure. In the cases in which the infrastructure can be traced to some extent, it leads almost invariably to the Soviet Union and its regional clients and surrogates such as Angola, Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Libya, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Syria. It is less than credible that such infrastructures could be consolidated without the active participation of the secret services of these states, under the overall coordination of the Soviets.
Indeed, the worldwide escalation of terrorist activities reflects the growing significance of "special operation" in the heartlands of the countries who stand opposed to Soviet global strategy.
Terrorism, a relatively cheap, cost-effective, and safe (at least for its sponsors) method of coercion, has been used since the time of Lenin by the Soviet Union whenever it leaders judged that this tactic would most easily and efficiently achieve their objective with the least cost to themselves.
In the late 1960s, the Soviet Politburo decided that terrorism against countries allied with the United States could be useful in undermining public confidence and prompting a number of Soviet foreign policy goals, including the installation of regimes friendly to Moscow, at the expense of the United States and its allies.
In the Soviet Union's tactical handbook, terrorism in an element of war, but not necessarily of the prolonged "low-intensity" variety that the Western defense establishments dwell at length on
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