Terrorist Operations
Findings
In the course
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In the course of the 1980s, Americans -diplomats, military personnel, and ordinary civilians were the the immediate targets and victims of a number of terrorist operations launched by Iranians, by Iranian affiliated groups, or by radical Palestinian groups. The character of these operations varied widely, from the kidnapping of individual Americans off of Beirut streets through the course of the 1980s (a pattern that peaked in 1985; see Merari et al., 1986, p. 60), to the bomb explosion that killed 241 U.S. Marines in their barracks, also in Beirut, in October of 1983 (Mickolus, Sandler, and Murdock, Sandler, and Murdock, 1989, pp. 451 52). The effectiveness of the terrorist actions directed at Americans also varied widely. The Tehran embassy hostage crisis of 1979 81 helped precipitate the fall of the Carter Administration (Sick, 1991). The bombing of the Marine barracks drove the U.S. forces out of Lebanon (Hanle, 1989, p. 116), and the kidnapping and hostage holding of Americans in Beirut through the decade led to arms for hostages sales to Iran by the Reagan Administration, and ultimately helped to set the stage for the Iran Contra scandal. (The roots of the arms for hostages sales and thus of Iran Contra may, however, go back to the Tehran embassy hostage crisis; see Sick, 1991.) The hijacking of an American airliner from Athens to Beirut in June of 1985 led to U.S. pressure on Israel for the release of several hundred j
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The benefits of the hostage takeover were less obvious, and may not have been recognized in advance. The taking of numerous hostages in a newsworthy way had been seen previously only in the course of airliner hijackings (Clutterback, 1987, pp. 19 21). Hijackings, however, are almost inherently a time limited operation. Jerliners can only be landed at major airstrips, and airplane fuselages become uninhabitable in a short period of time. Hijacking dramas must therefore come to a swift end, either by the freeing of the passengers, their murder, or their transfer to some other place of captivity. The last can only be done if the hijackers have full control of the region around the airport. This in turn requires either anarchic conditions such as those in Lebanon in the 1980s, or a government willing to lend swift and full cooperation to the hijackers. In practice, no government has done the latter, possibly for fear of retaliation in the form of a cutoff of all international air service to its country.
In spite of their time limitations, airline hijackings have demonstrated the great power of hostage takers to capture the intense if transient attention of the Western media. In the Athens Beirut hijacki
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Approximate Word count = 10281
Approximate Pages = 41 (250 words per page)
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