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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 THE WASHINGTONIAN JUNE 1984 Pages 93-181 WhereWill Terrorists Strike Next? As the Concrete Barriers Go Up All Over Washington, Terrorism Experts Say the Question No Longer Is Will Terrorists Hit Washington, But When and Where ith mounting horror, Larry Smith viewed the destruction. Thirty minutes earlier he had been getting into bed at his Alexandria home when the phone rang. ‘‘There’s been a bombing at the Capitol,’’ the operator told Smith, the Senate’s ser- geant at arms. It was November 7, 1983. Now, as he stood amid the rubble, he saw the Capitol—normally a symbol of solidity and permanence—as an ‘‘utter mess.”’ “*T felt sick,’’ he remembers. ‘‘I felt like someone had bombed my own home.’’ The blast had exploded from behind a seat in the hallway outside the Senate chamber, shattering and blowing off the doors of the Republican cloak- room and the office of Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd 25 feet away. Debris flew into the face of the marble bust of Teddy Roosevelt. Glass and marble bits Slashed and shredded portraits of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. Chan- delier glass sprayed Adlai Stevenson. The explosion was so powerful that it dispersed down three corridors, leaving a 250-foot path of destruction. ‘‘Any- thing that wasn’t a wall gave,’’ says Smith. ‘‘On a busy day, this corridor ‘is so crowded it’s hard to walk through. Had we been in session, we would have lost people, without question. People would have been blinded by flying glass.”’ Only a few days earlier, Smith had ee Bob Reiss is a widely published author whose upcoming novel, Divine Assassin, concerns terrorism in Washington. By Bob Reiss presented Majority Leader Howard Baker and Minority Leader Robert Byrd with a study concluding that security in the Senate needed to be tightened. New measures had been scheduled to be pre- sented to party caucuses three days after the explosion. **T felt like I'd been waiting for it to happen,’’ Smith says, ‘‘but it was dif- ficult to sell that to members of Congress when nothing had happened yet.”’ Today the bombed corridor is closed to visitors. Almost 30 more metal de- tectors have been installed at the Capitol and nearby congressional office build- ings. Women’s bags are searched con- stantly. Color-coded passes are now re- quired for people who work in the Cap- itol—red or yellow for staffers and aides, green for media, blue for lobbyists. Bulletproof metal plates have been in- stalled in the backs of the House mem- bers’ chairs. Concrete barriers seal the parking lot. At night, after visitors have left, Capitol police regularly stage mock rescue attempts in the buildings. But Larry Smith is still worried. Standing before the blast site, where a raised platform surrounds the damaged wall like three sides of a coffin, he is asked if he feels the new security pre- cautions are adequate. He answers with an unhappy shake of the head: ‘‘I have a feeling it’s going to happen again.’’ Smith is not alone. As the summer of 1984 approaches, legislators and law-en- forcement authorities are occupied with anti-terrorist preparations as never be- fore. Security armies are assembling at the sites of the Democratic and Repub- lican National Conventions, as well as at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles and the World’s Fair in New Orleans. ‘‘Washington is a particularly good target,’ says Dr. Yonah Alexander, anti- terrorism expert and fellow at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and In- ternational Studies. **There is no ques- tion that we will see more violence."’ Says Michael Ledeen, a former spe- cial adviser to Secretary of State Alex- ander Haig and consultant on terrorism to the Pentagon, ‘‘The question isn’t whether it will happen here. The ques- tion is why it hasn’t happened yet.” And so in ways both subtle and overt, the expectation of terrorism incorporates itself into the lives of Washingtonians at all levels. The President issues a policy directive calling for an ‘‘active defense against terrorism,’ including rewards of up to $500,000 for information on ter- rorists, as well as the creation of FBI and CIA paramilitary squads. Alabama Sen- ator Jeremiah Denton introduces a bill that would make terrorism a federal crime punishable by death if innocent victims are killed. A new 50-man FBI ‘‘hostage squad’’ demonstrates anti-terrorist tac- tics for reporters at the Quantico Marine base. All four divisions of the armed services train troops to ‘‘cope with ter- rorist incidents within this country,’” says a Pentagon spokesman. More signs: The Army commissions Dr. Robert Kupperman of the George- town Center for Strategic and Interna- tional Studies to write a report on ‘‘low- intensity conflict,’ which is what social scientists call terrorism. EPA security personnel request a talk on explosives. Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-ROP96-00788RO000100830MINUED NEXT PAGE