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The History and Evolution of US Counterterrorism, 1967-1974

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The History and Evolution of US Counterterrorism, 1967-1974 Conceptualizing the “Arab Threat” The History and Evolution of U.S. Counterterrorism, 1967-1974 By: Gretta M. Ziminsky 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS: Title and Signature Page--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------0 Acknowledgements-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2 Abstract----------------–--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 Introduction----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4 Chapter 1------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------28 Chapter 2------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------52 Chapter 3------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------73 Conclusion----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------95 Bibliography------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------100 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis advisor Dr. Ibrahim al-Marashi for the research guidance he provided. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Kim Quinney. Her office door was always open whenever I ran into a hard spot. Without her kindness and guidance my thesis would not be what it is. Thank you Dr. Katherine Hijar for always being willing to help me along in my journey. Thank you Patty Cañas for letting me discuss anything and everything with you to ease my frustrations, our talks always put me in high spirits. Lastly, thank you to everyone in my graduate program that have become dear friends of mine. I enjoyed our time together so very much. Thank You, Gretta Ziminsky 3 ABSTRACT There is a great deal of scholarship dedicated to the study of terrorism and U.S. counterterrorism, especially in the years following the 9/11 events. Many of the historical works since 9/11 examine the development of U.S. counterterrorism in the Middle East, however, most works are dedicated to the evolution of U.S. counterterrorism since the 1980s, with the proliferation of political Islam. Additionally, historical scholarship on this topic is often teleological and traces the development of all previous terrorist attacks towards the dramatic 9/11 attacks. In almost all of the recent works, one learns that terrorism does in fact have a history, however, that history has little to do with the United States until after the attacks of 9/11. This thesis argues that that is not in fact true, and that terrorism has complex history that has much to do with the United States three decades prior to 9/11. The Nixon administration, along with a small number of radical Arab-Palestinians, transformed and re-conceptualized the threat of terrorism as both international, and directly connected to individuals of Arab descent. Whereas the terms “guerilla” and “terrorist,” before the emergence of Arab-Palestinian international terrorism, were and could be applied to various groups who perpetrated politically motivated attacks (e.g. airline hijackings, bombings, and hostage taking), the international terrorist threat became conceptualized, almost exclusively, as inherently Arab. This has much to do with the Cold War policy agendas and the geopolitical interests of the Nixon administration. By examining the evolution of the American conceptualization of the international terrorist, through a Cold War lens and its actual connection to the Middle East, this this shows that the Nixon administration, due to foreign and domestic interest, magnified a small threat and institutionalized the perception of the “Arab-terrorist” in American society. Keywords: US Counterterrorism, Nixon Administration, Operation Boulder, Terrorism, Nixon’s Foreign Policy 4 Introduction: The events of 11 September 2001, produced an unexpected new reality for the world to consider. The devastating and dramatic display of terrorist destruction broadcasted on live television was, for much of the American public, an initial exposure to the Arab-Muslim world of the Middle East. The consequences of the terror attacks of 9/11 continue to unfold and disrupt the international community, and sixteen years later it is still too soon to predict when or if the global conflict will conclude. However, it is not too soon to examine how and why transnational terrorism first emerged and how transnational terrorism and U.S. counterterrorism and conceptualization of the terrorist threat have evolved since their emergence. The American involvement in the Middle East, and the experience of modern transnational terrorism materialized more than three decades before 9/11, during the later years of the Cold War. For forty-seven years, the U.S. policymakers translated international relations through a Cold War context, and deterring Soviet influence and superpower confrontation throughout the world. Although the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War allowed the United States to emerge as the sole world superpower, the zero-sum policy strategy used in the Middle East in the previous decades authorized the reduction of complex decisions to a simplistic notion of whether states or individuals were Soviet-backed radical Arabs or U.S.-backed, moderate Arabs, willing to negotiate with Israel. This bipolar strategy not only exacerbated destructive regional issues in the Arab world, but it also facilitated a reshaped American conceptualization of Arabs and the Arab region and divided the Middle East in a binary, orientalist manner that was shaped by Cold War policy and American exceptionalism. 5 Today one of the perceived existential threats to the United States is terrorism; however, the terrorism that America fears is poorly defined in words and rather well understood through the race and religious characteristics of the perpetrators. Currently, the radical Islamist groups of the Middle East are considered to be one of the greatest threats to freedom and democracy. However, the Palestinian terrorist organizations of the 1970s established the foundation for the conceptual turn in the evolution of political violence. Although Cold War competition in the Middle East produced the environment necessary for regional violence to develop into an international threat, the Palestinian fedayeen helped structure the American perception of the transnational terrorist threat defined by irrational violence and characteristically Arab. The consequence of the 9/11 attacks, among many others, is the complete negation of the nation's knowledge of recent Cold War history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and how said policies effected the development of international terrorism. However, in order to understand the actions and policies of the recent U.S. presidential administrations, in regard to combatting modern transnational terrorism, it is imperative to trace the history and evolution of how the modern terrorist threat has been conceptualized, discussed, and countered since its inception. The 1970s mark a time when the world was confronted with a rancorous new reality that challenged international security. Through a ceaseless fight, the Palestinian terrorist organizations succeeded in both revealing the destructive power of transnational terrorism, and dramatically displaying the plight of the Palestinian refugees to the world. In the early years of the 1970s, the amount of international terrorist attacks directed at U.S. installations abroad proliferated greatly. Although the attacks were predominantly carried out by terrorist groups of 6 Latin America and Western Europe1, the symbolic and dramatic nature of the Palestinian fedayeen attacks in 1969, 1970, and 1972, are some of the most significant events in the history of U.S. counterterrorism. These attacks mark integral shifts in how both the U.S. government and American public conceptualized the terrorist and terrorist threat. Chapter Outlines: Chapter One: Chapter one discusses the political environment of the Middle East that led to the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and splinter groups, and how the Nixon administration responded to the United States’ first experiences with international terrorism. This chapter uses the 1969 hijarcking of TWA 840 and the 1970 Black September-Jordan Crisis to show how the Palestinian nationalist organizations challenged the Nixon administration, undermining the pursued détente in the region. The transnational nature of the Black September crisis challenged the policy approach because it weakened the state-to-state diplomacy strategy used during the Cold War.2 Nixon initiated détente in order to reduce the threat of nuclear war between the two superpowers, and to veer American public attention from the ongoing domestic unrest3 by broadcasting his extraordinary foreign policy successes. Détente was also pursued to bring a calmer environment to regions involved in Cold War conflicts. However, the emergence of transnational Palestinian terrorist organizations halted Nixon and Kissinger’s realist approach, as 1 According to a study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), between the years of 1968- 1979, there were a total of 3,336 international terrorist incidents, 1,348 of them directed against US targets. The majority of the attacks directed against US targets were conducted by terrorist organizations from Latin America
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