Last December, 106 Americans in five cities were asked their views about terrorism in a series of interviews conducted by Populus Inc., a public opinion research firm.
Although they couldn`t have known it, these ordinary Americans interviewed in Des Moines, Ft. Worth, New York City, Van Nuys, Calif., and Trumbull, Conn., played a key role in setting the Reagan administration`s policy on terrorism–a policy that last month sent American aircraft to bomb Libya, a sovereign nation in the volatile Middle East that was not formally at war with the United States.
”Americans would welcome actions against terrorists that are swift, forceful and aggressive . . . even if inadvertent casualties result,” a summary of the interviews said, as long as the retaliatory actions were wrapped in a policy that reflected U.S. respect for individual life and international law.
The survey was conducted for the Vice President`s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, and what the 106 people told Populus convinced the administration that the American public finally was ready to support, even enthusiastically favor, military retaliation against terrorism.
Whether this poll directed President Reagan in his actions or simply reassured him may never be known, but four months later he would order an attack remarkably along the lines of what the survey said the people wanted.
It may be curiously symbolic of the Reagan presidency that as the crews of the F-111 attack bombers flew to their targets in Libya on the night of April 14-15, they were there in part because of a carefully honed public relations and consciousness-raising program.
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Some bombs went astray into civilian areas, but, in terms of responding to the American public mood, Sen. Richard Lugar (R., Ind.) said, ”the President hit it about right.”
The raid, although subsequently overshadowed by the Soviet nuclear accident in Chernobyl and the economic summit meeting in Tokyo, represented a turning point in the American fight against terrorism. Even when the invasion of Grenada is considered, the attack on Libya was one of the most delicate and diplomatically dangerous decisions of Reagan`s presidency.
It has resulted in an unofficial state of war between U.S. and Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy, a radical leader who has demonstrated his ability to strike Americans abroad. Further, Reagan has sent U.S. military forces against a state that has the support of the Soviet Union, in waters prowled by a Soviet fleet, and in the most volatile region of the world.
As they returned from Tokyo, top administration officials confidently said they had ”Khadafy on the run” and that they planned in the next few weeks to increase the pressure further in hopes of doing what the bombing failed to accomplish, topple Khadafy. Secretary of State George Shultz, in a succinct remark directed at Khadafy, said: ”You`ve had it, pal.”
The President made his momentous decision after five years in office, after dozens of terrorist attacks in which Americans were killed, injured or humiliated and after thousands of words of threatening rhetoric.
He has said that he does not believe this raid alone will stop terrorism; indeed, he calls it one battle in a long war.
To measure how long this war may be, to speculate on its outcome, to understand what the bombing of Libya really will mean for Americans, is to trace the evolution of the Reagan administration policy on terrorism. If the Libyan raid more squarely than ever has put Americans on the front line in a war on terrorism, how did we get there?
In a series of interviews with senior administration officials, congressional leaders and intelligence and military experts, and a review of public and internal government documents, The Tribune found these salient elements in the formulation of the Reagan doctrine on terrorism:
— From the beginning, terrorism never has been solely a foreign policy or military problem. In the Reagan White House, it has been a domestic political question and no step has been taken without a sharp eye on its impact on the President`s image and, before 1984, on his re-election.
— The 1983 bombing of the Marine Corps headquarters at Beirut airport, in which 241 Americans died, is the watershed of terrorism policy. From that moment on, a military counterstrike in response to terrorism was inevitable in the hearts and the minds of the Reagan leadership.
— In the next two years the administration conducted a systematic consciousness-raising program designed to persuade the American people that they were at war with terrorists. It branded certain countries and their leaders as supporters of terrorists.
— Unlike other policies where the President`s role has been obscured, Reagan and his advisers concluded in 1985 that he would take command on terrorism. He himself is pitted against Khadafy as the personification of hundreds of faceless terrorists.
— The use of military force as an option always was conditioned by what many, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, thought was the fatal flaw of American leadership in Vietnam: no public commitment for military action. Part of the administration`s program was to avoid that pitfall.
— The formation of a policy nearly was crippled between 1983 and late 1985 by angry struggle over the use of force between Weinberger and Shultz. This struggle spotlighted the fragmentation of command on the issue and the absence of a consensus of how to counter the terrorist threat.
— Fighting terrorism has been hampered further by the enormous limitations inherent to a great power: a military apparatus, designed to fight a world war and unsuited for small, swift actions; a worldwide commercial, governmental and financial system that is impossible to defend against attack by terrorists and a population insulated by two oceans that has been largely untouched by terrorism.
In a sense the Reagan perspective was conditioned well before he entered the White House. He had criticized President Jimmy Carter`s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, and his political advisers were convinced that Carter`s failure to be decisive with Tehran had won Reagan the White House.
The Reagan administration vowed not to make the same mistake, and its early rhetoric was filled with bellicose warnings of what it would do if challenged. In 1982 when jumpy American diplomats in Nicaragua thought the embassy might be seized by Sandinista mobs, the White House openly bristled.
”This won`t be like it was with Carter,” one administration official told a newsman after seeing a cable from Managua. ”This administration will send in the marines and pronto.” (The feared attack never materialized and the nervous State Department official who sent the cable was rebuked later by his superiors.)
But the astute handlers of the President soon discerned a different problem: By elevating terrorism to a top public concern, the administration inevitably raised public expectations for action and results, something officials doubted they could deliver.
As a result, the Reagan administration ”turned down the volume” on the issue in late 1981, 1982 and early 1983. When Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave a tough speech on Libya and terrorism, he received a call that night in his hotel room from a White House aide, a senior administration official remembers. ”The message was `cool it,` and he cooled it,” this insider said. Remaining aloof from terrorism, moreover, was easy in those years. Although there were 11 terrorist attacks involving Americans in 1982, in which nine U.S. citizens died, terror had not yet moved to stage center.
In realistic terms neither the Middle East nor terrorism was a top priority in Washington. The President and most of his key advisers were preoccupied with Central America. They were convinced that the Soviet Union was posing a major test of wills in Nicaragua and they wanted to be, one senior official said, ”the administration that stops communism in the Western Hemisphere.”
Secretly, the Central Intelligence Agency launched a covert war against the Sandinistas by funding a group of Nicaraguan expatriates trained by Argentine military advisers.
The best and the brightest of Reagan`s early years spent all their time trying to win the war in El Salvador and promote the disintegration of the Sandinista control of Nicaragua.
In June, 1982, though, the Israelis took an action that would ultimately redefine the role of the U.S. in the Middle East and, indirectly, change the direction of terrorism. They invaded Lebanon.
Israel took this action to end the most severe aspect of its terrorist problem, to remove from a nearby sanctuary the forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been mounting hundreds of raids and rocket attacks onto Israeli territory.
Four years later a senior American official would agree to the notion, even though simplistic, that ”Israel settled its worse terrorist problem and created ours.”
The story of what happened in Lebanon is crucial to understanding the terrorist dilemma. In 1982 the U.S. role in the Middle East was that of an
”honest broker,” essentially a stance it had maintained since World War II. The U.S. was considered a nation with sufficient detachment to be a force for peace in the troubled region.
Though known to favor Israel, America still had succeeded in operating the famous ”two-track diplomacy,” which allowed it to act as a mediator between Israel and Arab states.
The U.S., clearly thrown off balance by the Israeli invasion, agreed to land marines in Lebanon, first to assist in the peaceful removal of the PLO and, after the massacres at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Beirut, to try to forestall total anarchy in the anguished little country. The second marine deployment was part of a multinational force, involving troops from France, Italy and Britain.
Shultz devised a policy that saw American troops providing stability to permit the withdrawal of the Israeli forces and the restoration of a Lebanon with a Lebanese Christian and Moslem government.
Both marine deployments consistently were opposed by Weinberger and many in the Defense Department, yet in the first months of 1983 it seemed to be working.
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The marines and the British troops provided a buffer between Israeli occupation forces south of Beirut and their Moslem adversaries and attempted to bring some sense of security to the crowded Moslem neighborhoods of West Beirut. It was in these ghettos where Israeli gunfire and the private militia of Lebanon`s Christian community had spread terror.
At the same time the American government sought to strengthen the Lebanese army so it could hold the country together when the multinational force pulled out. The army, unfortunately, was dominated by the Christians and had no historic role as an even-handed national force.
It is not clear at which moment the marines moved from the sidelines in Lebanon to become combatants, nor for that matter, exactly why. It is clear that the Moslems distrusted a plan to give the Lebanese army the power, equipment and training that America was pouring in. They wanted America out of Lebanon.
The first real trouble came on April 18, 1983, when a car bomb destroyed a large portion of the U.S. Embassy on Beirut`s promenade by the sea. The bomb killed 86 people and wounded 100. Among those killed were several of the CIA`s most informed Middle East intelligence officers who had been in Beirut for a meeting.
In the next weeks the marines began to take sniper fire and grenade attacks, apparently from Moslem militia posts surrounding their outpost at Beirut`s airport.
Over the spring and summer of the 1983, the U.S. escalated retaliation for these attacks, first by marine fire, then naval gunfire from escort vessels and finally the giant 16-inch guns of the USS New Jersey. To those who have studied the trauma in Beirut, it is in these months that Americans moved into the target range of Arab terrorists in the Middle East.
As Beirut became increasingly dangerous for Americans, the attention in Washington still was riveted on Central America and the Caribbean. The President and his top military and civilian advisers were engaged in putting the final touches on the plan to invade Grenada.
On Oct. 23, 1983, as the Grenada invasion got underway, a lone Moslem terrorist drove a truckload of explosives, packed tightly around a propane gas cylinder, into the marines` headquarters at the Beirut airport. The loss of 241 servicemen`s lives was greater than the marines had faced in a single day on a battlefield since World War II.
Rage and grief swept the American people and their President. ”Those who directed this atrocity must be dealt justice,” Reagan warned. But whom could they hit? The attack was claimed by a shadowy group calling itself Islamic Jihad, about which little or nothing then was known. The CIA, severely hampered by the loss of some of its best Mideast experts in the April bombing of the embassy, came to believe that Islamic Jihad was the nom de guerre of radical, fundamentalist Moslems, trained and backed by members of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini`s Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
The administration groped with the tragedy, but nothing really was done. Reagan authorized an air strike against an alleged terrorist training center in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon only to find that the French already had planned to bomb it.
During those weeks, Reagan learned the same lesson that Carter had learned in Iran, the limitations of power. The mysterious terrorists with no known location provided nothing that America could hit back at.
Moreover, the administration shied away from the Israeli tactic of launching an immediate, indiscriminate attack even though it did not know the source of the incident. ”Israel is in a state of war with virtually everyone around it,” one senior administration official said in a recent interview.
”We can`t operate like that.”
Shultz, his policy for peace and stability in Lebanon in the rubble of the marines` headquarters, first introduced what would become a key factor in forming the Reagan administration`s policy: ”state-sponsored terrorism.” The U.S. had known for a long time that the PLO received financial support from wealthy Arab oil states, a form of ”protection payment,” one intelligence officer said, designed to keep the PLO from turning on the moderate Arabs.
Many in the Reagan administration also believed that the Soviet Union, though not directing or controlling terrorism in the Middle East, stood to gain from it because it kept the region unstable and harassed Americans.
Neither the Arab oil states nor the Soviet Union could serve as an
”address” where America could deliver retribution for terrorist acts. But in the intelligence reports that emerged from the Beirut tragedies, and a later attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, the administration found evidence that Syrian and Iranian intelligence agents had furthered the missions.
Later they also would find the traces of the Libyan government. The sponsorship was a new definition; it painted a picture that the three governments used their diplomatic channels and other assets to assist terrorists in an attack.
Khadafy was to push his country to the top of that list very quickly. He was the only leader of the three countries to threaten terrorist acts publicly and to urge more of them. The Syrian government studiously denied involvement in terrorism and Khomeini, engaged in a desperate war with Iraq, was too distracted to pose much problem.
The United States had found a suitable address for terrorism in the Middle East: Libya.
MONDAY: Limited options.