Terrorism Wanted: a New Hideout

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It seemed too good to be true and, sure enough, it was. As the United Nations Security Council prepared early last week to vote on sanctions against Libya, that country's ambassador announced that his government would hand over to the Arab League two Libyan intelligence agents suspected of bombing Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. The understanding was that the two would be passed on for trial in either the U.S. or Britain. But when an Arab League delegation called in Tripoli, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi pronounced his ambassador "incorrect" and sent them away empty-handed. Meanwhile, the World Court in the Hague opened hearings on a Libyan charge that the U.S. and Britain have resorted to "blackmail" by threatening the use of force unless Libya surrenders the suspected bombers.

Gaddafi's chicanery, though, appeared to win him only a brief delay. Without ! waiting for the World Court's ruling, the Security Council is expected this week to adopt sanctions directing U.N. members to break all airline links with Libya, stop all sales of arms to that country and expel most Libyan diplomats. Such penalties, and Gaddafi's desperate efforts to escape them, signal that the civilized world's terrorist counteroffensive has made much more progress than is often generally recognized.

Not long ago, Gaddafi was the world's most public promoter of terrorism. Now he substitutes hypocrisy for defiance. He has, for example, closed some well- known terrorist training camps in Libya -- while allowing less publicized ones to keep running. Nonetheless, the fact that even Gaddafi no longer espouses their cause openly illustrates how terrorists, like everyone else, have had their world turned upside down by political upheaval.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union has cut off a principal source of money and materiel for left-wing extremist groups throughout the world. The formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe that once offered training bases and safe haven to terrorists are now cooperating with the West in tracking them down. In the Middle East, allied bombs and U.N. sanctions have left Iraq without the means or gumption to continue sponsoring terrorists. Since the gulf war, Syrian President Hafez Assad has taken care not to antagonize the U.S. He has expelled some foreign terrorists from Syrian-controlled Lebanon and has reportedly told others that they can stay in the Bekaa Valley only on condition that they do not venture forth to hit Western targets.

The upshot: a tally of international terrorist incidents compiled by the State Department fell from a peak of 864 in 1988 to 457 in 1990, the lowest since 1977. The count rose to 557 in 1991, but about half of those occurred during the Persian Gulf war and caused minor damage and few casualties -- and even so, the count was relatively low by the standards of the '80s.

State's figures, however, do not include incidents staged by terrorists who operate within one country with little or no foreign state sponsorship, such as the Irish Republican Army, the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Even the more conventional Middle East-based terrorists retain a dangerous capacity for bloodshed, as evidenced by the mid- March bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and assaults by Kurdish separatists who last week machine-gunned a bus in Istanbul and attacked policemen and police stations in five cities throughout Turkey.

Intelligence experts fear that many terrorists have been able to replace Soviet financing with money from Iran, which is said to be backing undercover extremists from Algeria to Thailand -- while simultaneously bidding for better official relations with the West. A rising fear is that Tehran may seek to capitalize on the chaos engendered by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. by inspiring Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the mostly Muslim Central Asian republics once ruled from Moscow. Worldwide, "Iran's attempts to export the Islamic revolution have largely replaced the former Soviet Union's communist revolutionary zeal" as a source of aid and comfort for terrorists, says Anat Kurz, an expert on terrorism at the Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Egyptian, Israeli and Western intelligence sources report that Iran has already helped establish a new terrorist refuge and base of operations in the African nation of Sudan, which has been taken over by another fundamentalist Islamic regime. Tehran is known to have dispatched thousands of its Revolutionary Guards there, and they are said to be conducting instruction in the arts of bombing and bloodshed for members of several extremist organizations at new training camps around Khartoum.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak reportedly has warned Sudanese officials that they are risking a military clash with Egypt by allowing the camps to operate, and the U.S. is considering adding Sudan to its list of countries that sponsor terrorism, but none of that so far appears to have had much effect. Many terrorist organizations and their sponsors seem for the moment to be lying low. But just as the devil in Christian theology is supposed to be most effective when people no longer believe in him, terrorists may be most dangerous precisely if -- and because -- the civilized world begins to downplay the threat.

With reporting by Ron Ben-Yishai/Jerusalem, William Mader/London and Elaine Shannon/Washington