Thursday, April 10, 1986
Nation/World
University Daily Kansan
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Scientists studv terrorist motives
The Associated Press
ROME — A long-haired German construction worker. A sociology professor from Florence. A Belgian printer. A laid-off Yugoslav factory hand.
Each took "Der Sprung," which means "The Leap," and are going underground to plot, bomb and kill along with radical bands waging terror wars across Europe. Social scientists are trying to discover why.
"If we want to stop terrorism, we must understand terrorists," University of Rome psychiatrist Franco Ferraciat said.
Ferraciut and other investigators, undertaking independent studies of the terrorist mind, have found common traits. Terrorists frequently are loners, have lost parents while young and were failing professionally or educationally. They usually are middle-class, with above-average schooling. Guilt feelings often burden them.
Although frightened citizens may consider them deranged, the studies found conclusively that the large majority of terrorists were not psychotics, said Washington-based behavioral scientist Jerrold Post, who has studied terrorists for the U.S. government.
Law-enforcement officials agreed.
"Their fanaticism is extremely overrated," said Raymond E. Kendall, chief of the Interpol police network in Paris. "They prepare their operations very carefully. If I were a professional criminal going to rob a bank, I would behave in the same way."
The range of personalities and political causes makes generalizations difficult. But Post categorizes terrorists according to their feelings toward their parents.
Anarchic ideologues, such as West Germany's Red Army Faction and Italy's Red Brigades, are disloyal to parents who are loyal to the existing system, Post said. Nationalist separatists, such as the Palestinian guerrillas and Irish Republican Army, are loyal to families disloyal to the regime.
With the support of family and ethnic community, the nationalists are usually better adjusted and may operate relatively openly.
Ferracuti noted that the Palestinians, for example, have achievable, non-utopian goals that make it easy to recruit members.
But Western Europe's far-let terrorists are trying to impose a utopian dream on a world and therefore must lead clandestine lives, he said.
Ferracci, 58, who has written widely cited studies of Red Brigades members, Puerto Rican separatists and other radicals, traces the European terrorist movement to the student upheavals of the late 1960s, when university graduates could not find jobs and the Vietnam War was making radicals of Western youth.
Among Italian and West German terrorists, he said, half attended universities and an above-average number employed before go-underground.
Post thinks terrorists justify personal failures by blaming the system. In a sense, the terrorist group is the first real family they have found, he said.
The psychologists and security officials who know terrorists agreed that the conversion process was slow because occasionally a critical event occurred.
Ex-Red Army Faction member Michael Baumann wrote in an autobiography that when West Berlin police shot and killed a friend during a 1967 demonstration, Baumann had a "tremendous flash" that eventually convinced him to fight without mercy.
Many other terrorists also think they are on the defensive against a powerful aggressor state, the
specialists said. Ferraculi describes it as a fantasy war. The terrorists' terminology reflects it. They are "armies" and "brigades" that engage in "military operations" and demand "prisoner of war" status when captured.
"These people lose their sense of reality," said Hans-Werner Kuehn, a top West German anti-terrorist police official. Kuehn thought that in their writings, terrorists see themselves as if they could fight and defeat an imperialist system, which he said is a bantant misjudgment of their own capacities.
They also are found to have little remorse about killing people they view as agents of the system — whether policemen, industrialists, labor leaders or others, he said.
But they are not uniformly ruthless. The specialists said terrorists had disclosed in interviews that each escalation of violence stirred dissent in their ranks. Eventually the more violent members prevail.
In a confessional book, ex-Ex Brigades' assassin Patrizio Peci said he began to lose his detachment one day when one of his victims, pleading futility for mercy, suddenly struck him as a human being like himself.
Pilots blame insurance plot for crash
United Press International
MEXICO CITY — Pilots charged yesterday that a Mexican Airlines jet that crashed last week, killing all 168 people aboard, was bombed as part of a life insurance plot. Airline and government sources called the charges premature.
In a related development, a Mexicana internal memorandum, titled "Security Measures," was released Monday. It ordered new and tougher procedures on every Mexican flight to avoid bombs being placed aboard planes.
The seven-point memorandum, distributed to airport managers, pilots and flight attendants, ordered employees to prevent all flights from taking off until all passengers and their baggage have been identified and examined.
The new measures stem from the March 31 crash of a Mexicana Boeing 227 jet en route from Mexico City to the Pacific resorts of Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan with 166 passengers and crew members.
The jetliner crashed north of Mexico City shortly after the pilot requested permission to make an emergency landing.
Although there have been reports the plane was bombed, authorities investigating the crash have stressed that the cause of the disaster had not yet been determined.
In Beirut, Lebanon, on Saturday, groups called the Arab Revolutionary Brigades and the Egyptian
Revolutionaries said they had blown up the plane to protest U.S. attacks on Libyan targets.
Ten Mexicana pilots, interviewed in groups or separately at the Mexico City airport, said the plane was blown up for insurance reasons, not politics.
"We were already told Mexican authorities believe bombs were placed by people who hoped to claim life insurance from one or more of the dead passengers," said one pilot, who spoke on condition he not be named.
Other pilots said two bombs placed aboard the jetliner exploded within 30 seconds of each other, forcing the pilot to turn the plane around and head back to Mexico City.
West Germany expels Libyan officials
United Press International
BONN, West Germany — West Germany ordered the expulsions of two Libyan diplomats yesterday, one day after government sources said the United States had pressured Bonn to apply sanctions against Libya.
The expulsions were ordered by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher on the basis of accumulating evidence that the two
men had "taken actions incompatible with normal diplomatic practice," chief government spokesman Friedhelm Ost told a news conference.
Ost did not specifically state what the men were accused of, but said it was not directly connected with the attack Saturday night of a West Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. One U.S. soldier and a Turkish woman died in the bombing and 230 people were injured, including 64 Americans.
Ost said the Cabinet unanimously approved the expulsions. He quoted Chancellor Helmut Kohl as saying, "We will not let our American friends be bombed out or terrorized out."
The United States has blamed Libya for the nightclub bombing and last week's bombing of a TWA jet over Greece in which four Americans died. U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt said this week that evidence clearly indicated Libyan involvement in the
disco bombing.
Asked whether the government shared the U.S. view that Libya was responsible for the Berlin bombing, Ost said, "We have clues, but no concrete proof."
Some of those clues, he said, point toward possible involvement of the Libyan Embassy in East Germany. East Germany issued a statement yesterday denouncing the bombing of the nightclub.
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