From: "Glenn Meadows" 

      Documents Reveal 30-Year-Old Terror Threats
      Monday, January 24, 2005


      WASHINGTON - Top government officials worry about the possibility of
radioactive "dirty bombs" being detonated in large cities.
Airlines, scared of losing business, protest that new security measures
will bankrupt them. Civil liberties groups fear a focus upon Arab-Americans
and Arab travelers will erode basic freedoms.

      Sounds familiar? It should. It is the present, and also the past -
more than three decades ago, according to declassified documents obtained
by The Associated Press.

      "Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand
at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (search), wrote in a 1977 report.

      It summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to
Combat Terrorism (search), a high-level government panel created to draft
plans protecting the nation from attacks.

      President Nixon created the group in September 1972 after Palestinian
commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games
(search). It involved players as diverse as Henry Kissinger (search) and
George H.W. Bush (search) to a young Rudolph Giuliani (search).

      "It is vital that we take every possible action ourselves and in
concert with other nations designed to assure against acts of
terrorism," Nixon wrote in asking Secretary of State William Rogers to
oversee the task force.


      "It is equally important that we be prepared to act quickly and
effectively in the event that, despite all efforts at prevention, an act of
terrorism occurs involving the United States, either at home or
abroad."

      The full panel met only once, in October 1972, to organize, but its
experts gathered twice a month over nearly five years to identify threats
and debate solutions, the memos show.

      Eventually, the panel's influence waned as competing priorities, a
change of presidents ushered in by Watergate, bureaucratic turf battles and
a lack of spectacular domestic attacks took their toll.

      But before that happened, the panel identified many of the same
threats that would confront President Bush at the dawn of the 21st century.

      The panel's experts fretted that terrorists might gather loose nuclear
materials for a "dirty bomb" that could devastate an American
city by spreading lethal radioactivity across many blocks.

      "This is a real threat, not science fiction," National Security
Council staffer Richard T. Kennedy wrote his boss, Kissinger, in a November
1972 memo describing the "dirty bomb" scenario.

      While Rogers praised the Atomic Energy Commission's steps to safeguard
nuclear weapons in a memo to Nixon in mid-1973, he also warned that
"atomic materials could afford mind-boggling possibilities for
terrorists."

      Committee members also identified commercial jets as a particular
vulnerability, but they raised concerns that airlines wouldn't pay for
security improvements such as tighter screening procedures and routine
baggage inspections.

      "The trouble with the plans is that airlines and airports will have to
absorb the costs and so they will scream bloody murder should this be
required of them," one 1972 White House memo said. "Otherwise, it
is a sound plan which will curtail the risk of hijacking
substantially."

      By 1976, government pressure to improve airport security and thwart
hijackings had awakened airline industry lobbyists.

      The International Air Transport Association (search) argued "airport
security is the responsibility of the host government the airline industry
did not consider the terrorist threat its most significant problem; it had
to measure it against other priorities. If individual companies were forced
to provide their own security, they would go broke," according to
minutes from one meeting.

      Thousands of pages of heavily redacted records and memos obtained by
AP from government archives and under the Freedom of Information Act show
the task force also:

      - Discussed defending commercial aircraft against shootdowns from
portable missile systems.

      - Recommended improved vigilance at potential "soft" targets, such as
major holiday events, municipal water supplies, nuclear power plants and
electric power facilities.

      - Supported a crackdown on foreigners living in and traveling through
the United States, with particular attention to Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans.

      - Crafted plans to protect U.S. diplomats and businessmen working
abroad, who were frequently the victims of kidnappings and gruesome murders.

      Although the CIA routinely updated the panel on potential terrorist
threats and plots, members learned quickly that intelligence gathering and
coordination was a weak spot, just as Bush would find three decades later.

      Long before he helped New York City weather the devastation of Sept.
11, 2001, as mayor, Giuliani told the panel in May 1976 that he feared
legal restrictions were thwarting federal agents from collecting
intelligence unless there had been a violation of the law.

      Giuliani, then the associate deputy attorney general in the President
Ford's Justice Department, suggested relaxing intelligence collection
guidelines - something that occurred with the Patriot Act three decades
later.

      Other panel members, however, felt that obstacles to intelligence
gathering were more bureaucratic than legal.

      Lewis Hoffacker, a veteran ambassador who served as chairman of the
working group, said institutional rivalries, particularly between the FBI
and CIA, were a constant source of frustration even back in the 1970s.

      "That was our headache, a quarter-century ago," said Hoffacker, now
retired. "They all pulled back into their little fiefdoms. The CIA was
always off by itself, and the FBI was dealing with the same situation
they're dealing with today."

      Finding the political will to fight terrorism in the absence of a
spectacular homefront attack also quickly became a problem. Proposals to
levy international sanctions against countries harboring terrorists drew
little support from the United Nations, the memos show.

      "The climate at the 1974 General Assembly was such that no profitable
initiative in the terrorism field was feasible," Kissinger,
then-secretary of state, reported to Ford in early 1975.

      Two years later, the terrorism working group was absorbed by the
National Security Council (search). In a 1978 report, the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee worried the Carter administration wasn't
giving enough attention to terrorism.

      "The United States will not be able to combat the growing challenge of
terrorism unless the executive policymaking apparatus is more effectively
and forcefully utilized," the panel warned.



--
Glenn M.



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