International Terrorism

Report Outline
Political Violence in the 1970s
Origins and Uses of Terrorism
National and Global Responses
Special Focus

Political Violence in the 1970s

Concern Over Rising Terrorist Activity

Among the 86 hostages freed in a West German commando raid on a hijacked Lufthansa airliner in Somalia last October were a woman and her five-year-old son from Santee, Calif. A number of Americans were aboard a Japan Air Lines jet hijacked to Bangladesh earlier that month. On Sept. 10, 1976, a New York-to-Chicago jet was commandeered by five Croatian nationalists. Although none of the 81 passengers was injured, a New York City police officer was killed by a bomb left by the hijackers in Grand Central Station. On Sept. 21, 1976, Ronni Karpen Moffit, a 25-year-old fund-raiser for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., was killed along with co-worker Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, when a bomb exploded under their car. A month earlier, three American employees of Rockwell International Corp. were assassinated while being driven to work at an Iranian air force base in Tehran.

These Americans were recent victims of a spreading wave of international terrorism. In the past most terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens were directed at diplomats or other government officials. American business executives stationed overseas also were frequent targets, especially in Latin America. But as recent terrorist incidents indicate, political extremists at home and abroad are no longer restricting their attacks to the wealthy or influential. Today's terrorists have, Michael Waltzer wrote in 1975, “emptied out the category of innocent people.”

Between 1968 and the end of 1976, there were 1,152 international terrorist incidents, according to a recent CIA report. These included 137 kidnapings, 35 “barricade and hostage situations,” 501 bombings, 119 armed assaults or ambushes, 63 assassinations and 146 hijackings. U.S. citizens or property were victimized in 391 of these incidents. Last year alone there were 61 terrorist attacks on Americans or American property.