Abstract
In December 1993 Colin Ferguson, a 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant, ambled down the aisle of a Long Island Rail Road car methodically firing his semi-automatic handgun at passengers. People crouched, cried, begged for mercy, but to no avail. By the time he was forcibly subdued, Ferguson had wounded 25 passengers, six fatally. After the shooting stopped, some survivors remained paralyzed with fear. Some trembled uncontrollably for days. As in other shooting rampages, including the 1999 episode at Columbine high school, the gunman inflicted pervasive terror. Yet the popular lexicon usually refers to these events as mass shootings or massacres—not terrorist incidents.
This irony comes to mind while reading Toxic Terrorists, a thought-provoking volume edited by Jonathan Tucker, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Monterey Institute. The book challenges—sometimes inadvertently—widespread assumptions about terrorism, especially when it is associated with chemical and biological weapons (cbw). In CBW lore, the core meaning of terrorism—scaring people out of their wits—often seems to have been turned upside down: The term is used routinely to describe CBW-related events when nobody was terrorized
Toxic Terrorists is developed around the 12 cases of purported chemical or biological terrorism most frequently cited in the academic literature. The cases are recapitulated in separate chapters by respected experts whose narratives are uniformly thorough and dispassionate. The most compelling virtue of the volume is its sense of balance. While appreciating the real threat of chemical and biological terrorism, the book refrains from warnings of imminent catastrophe. Mercifully absent, for example, is the often-heard but gratuitous pronouncement that a massive CBW terrorist attack is not a matter of if, but when.
Toxic Terrorists soberly deconstructs much misinformation that has fed contemporary beliefs, beginning by simple subtraction. Three of the 12 cases apparently never happened. David Clar-idge shows that contrary to popular assumptions, the Baader-Meinhof Gang probably did not steal mustard gas in 1975 from a U.S. base in West Germany, let alone threaten to use it. Terence Taylor and Tim Trevan assess allegations that French police in 1980 found bacteria that produce botulinum toxin at a Red Army Faction safe house. They conclude that “the incident never occurred.” John Parachini “refutes the claim” that the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 included the use of chemical weapons.
Nor do most of the remaining nine cases qualify as major terrorism incidents. Tucker and Jason Pate show that the possession of the toxin ricin in 1991 by members of the Minnesota Patriots Council did not pose a large-scale threat. Although deadly when ingested or inhaled, ricin “is not suitable for inflicting mass casualties.”
Jessica Stern recounts the antics of Larry Wayne Harris, strange and suspicious to be sure. In 1995, Harris's acquisition of plague bacteria drew the attention of law enforcement authorities, though a court found no evidence he intended to use the material for nefarious purposes. In 1998, Harris was arrested on suspicion of possessing deadly anthrax bacteria. Again, he was released when the bacteria proved to be a nonpathogenic strain used to vaccinate animals. Neither action constituted terrorism.
In fact, only three of the 12 cases involved release of chemical or biological poisons that resulted in mass casualties. And only one fits the model of a truly terrorist incident: the 1995 sarin nerve agent attack in the Tokyo subway by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. Early reports indicated that the chemical killed 12 people and injured 5,500. But injury estimates were vastly reduced when thousands of panicky survivors who reported illness were shown not to have been exposed to the chemical. Apart from the difference in weapons, the subway attack had more in common with the Long Island Rail Road shooting than with most cases on Tucker's list. Doubtless if Colin Ferguson had sprayed ricin instead of bullets, even if no one was injured, the Long Island Rail Road incident would have entered CBW lore as a spectacular terrorist event.
In the other two CBW cases that resulted in numerous casualties, pervasive fright seemed to have been absent. Ehud Sprinzak and Idith Zertal tell a searing tale of a post-World War II group called Avenging Israel's Blood that aimed to kill Germans in retribution for the murder of six million Jews. In April 1946 the Avengers poisoned some 3,000 loaves of bread with arsenic in a camp housing German prisoners of war. Around 2,000 prisoners reportedly became ill, though apparently none died. In Sprinzak and Zer-tal's telling, whatever the intention of the perpetrators, there is no evidence that the illnesses prompted an atmosphere of terror.
Similarly, as recounted by Seth Carus, at least 751 patrons of Oregon restaurants came down with salmonella poisoning in 1984 under conditions devoid of terror. At first, poor sanitary conditions were thought to lie behind the illnesses, none of which was fatal. Only months afterward was it determined that the outbreak had been caused by Rajneesh cult members who had laced salad bars and creamers with Salmonella typhimurium bacteria. Nor were the cult members who orchestrated the attack interested in inducing terror. They just wanted to test the technique as a possible way to disable voters at a future election. (Evidently, they did not pursue that bizarre idea any further.)
The purpose of reviewing the 12 cases, Tucker explains, is to help understand the motivation for CBW terrorism: “What types of terrorist groups or individuals are most likely to acquire and use such weapons, and for what purpose?” A worthy inquiry indeed, with the implicit aim of placing such knowledge in the service of deterrence. But in the end, the quest for commonalities in the 12 cases adds little to what is already known about motivations and characteristics of would-be terrorists. For every generalization, there remain—even among the 12 cases—large exceptions. Paranoia was common among some terrorists or groups, but not all. Several groups engaged in escalatory patterns of violence, but not all. Some were motivated by an apocalyptic vision, but not all.
Perhaps, as Tucker suggests, biological agents might be appealing to militants who only want to incapacitate temporarily (as did the Rajneeshees with salmonella) or conversely to kill large numbers (as apparently did Aum Shinrikyo in its quest for the Ebola virus). But it remains unclear how these propositions with all their exceptions can be transposed into instruments of deterrence. More valuable is Tucker's concluding conjecture that maybe “society should be less concerned with the terrorist use of CBW agents per se, and more concerned with mass-casualty terrorism from any source.” In view of the frequency of mass shootings and paucity of CBW incidents, this seems a profitable line of study.
Meanwhile, an observation by David Claridge should be heralded widely. He despairs of the unchecked rumors in the media and academic literature that the Baader-Meinhof Gang had acquired mustard agent. “Once one author accepted the rumor as fact, others simply followed suit, a case of ‘incestuous inter-quote.’” Incestuous interquote is not unknown in other areas of the CBW literature as well. Happily, the contributors to this fine book will have none of that.