The Zero Hour

Terrorism experts (an enormous number of them seemed to spring up all at once) all announced that America had lost its innocence, that America’s cities had become fortresses. The security in major buildings, particularly landmarks, was enhanced. Parking garages were no longer quite so easy for just anyone to enter. Concrete stanchions were placed around public spaces so cars could not drive into them. Incoming packages were X-rayed. Visitor passes and employee identification cards were checked more rigorously.

Unfortunately, that heightened vigilance lasted for only a few months. Although the new security cameras and the concrete stanchions remained in place, the shock of the World Trade Center bombing gradually faded, and people returned to life as usual.

The terrorism experts declared that America had finally joined the ranks of Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, where terrorism is a regular occurrence. Actually, the United States had seen terrorism before.

There had been a few isolated incidents: in Chicago in 1886, a bomb exploded in a crowd of policemen; in 1920, a bomb went off on Wall Street. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a wave of leftist-radical bombings, but they were sparse, mostly done by the Weather Underground faction of the Students for a Democratic Society and other members of the “white left,” who’d launched a campaign of urban terrorism hoping to spark a revolution. In a famous 1970 incident, leftist radicals had blown up the University of Wisconsin Army Research Center with a crude bomb made of diesel fuel and fertilizer. But the Weathermen dissolved in 1976 as a result of internal squabbling and by 1980 had more or less ceased to exist.

During the 1970s, the world was swept by terrorism, but the continental United States was mostly left alone, with the exception of a series of attacks, from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, by the Puerto Rican independence group FALN. Most of the Puerto Rican attacks, however, were limited to Puerto Rico. In 1980, in fact, more Americans were killed by lightning than by terrorism-and that was, worldwide, a big year for terrorism.

From time to time in recent years, America has gone through terrorism scares-in 1983, when a U.S. warship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane, and in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War. But very little ever materialized. Of the five terrorist incidents on U.S. soil in 1991, none was associated with the Middle East. Four took place in Puerto Rico; the only one that happened in the continental United States was an attack on the Internal Revenue Service Center in Fresno, California, on April Fools’ Day by a group calling itself Up the IRS, Inc.

In fact, in the thirty-four terrorist incidents recorded in the United States and Puerto Rico between 1987 and 1991, not a single person was killed or even injured.

So while the bombing of the World Trade Center certainly jarred America into the realization that terrorism could actually happen here, that realization faded all too quickly. By the end of 1994, America returned to its normal state of blissful unconcern.

And then, on April 19, 1995, came the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the worst domestic terrorist incident in U.S. history. Like TRADEBOM, the bomb was loaded onto a yellow Ryder rental truck. This one consisted of a ton of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer. It killed 167 people.

Fortunately, by the early 1980s the Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun to take terrorism seriously and had set up six Joint Terrorist Task Forces around the country. The largest was in New York City. It operated out of 26 Federal Plaza and was commanded jointly by the FBI and the New York City Police Department. And for more than a decade-until the Trade Center bomb-it went without an international incident, a “major special,” as such significant attacks are called.

The composition of the Joint Terrorist Task Force is always precisely 50 percent FBI agents and 50 percent New York City police detectives. Under the Memorandum of Understanding that established the task force, the FBI is the lead agency. The police members are sworn in as federal marshals to enable them to handle federal violations. A lieutenant oversees the policemen; an FBI supervisor oversees the agents.

It is a choice assignment for cops, and the task force members selected are always the cream of the detective corps. They tend to be senior detectives; the FBI members tend to be younger. They always work in teams of two and are further divided into squads-one that deals with Muslim fundamentalists, for instance, one for domestic terrorism, one for other international groups like the Sikhs or the Provisional Irish Republican Army.