Nixon-era task force predicted today's terror concerns

WASHINGTON -- Nearly three decades before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a high-level government panel developed plans to protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging from radiological "dirty bombs" to airline missile attacks, according to declassified documents.

"Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977 report that summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism.

The group was formed in September 1972 by President Nixon after Palestinian commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. The committee involved people as diverse as Henry Kissinger to a young Rudolph Giuliani, the once-secret documents show.

"It is vital that we take every possible action ourselves and in concert with other nations designed to assure against acts of terrorism," Nixon wrote in asking his secretary of state, William Rogers, to oversee the task force.

The full committee met only once, in October 1972, to organize, but its experts did get together twice a month over nearly five years to identify threats and debate solutions, the memos show.

The experts fretted that terrorists might gather loose nuclear materials for a "dirty bomb" that could devastate an American city by spreading lethal radioactivity.

"This is a real threat, not science fiction," National Security Council staffer Richard T. Kennedy wrote his boss, Kissinger, in November 1972.

Committee members also identified commercial jets as a particular vulnerability and made a plan for increasing passenger and baggage checks.

"The trouble with the plans is that airlines and airports will have to absorb the costs and so they will scream bloody murder should this be required of them," according to a White House memo from 1972. "Otherwise, it is a sound plan which will curtail the risk of hijacking substantially."

In 1976, the International Air Transport Association said "airport security is the responsibility of the host government. The airline industry did not consider the terrorist threat its most significant problem; it had to measure it against other priorities," according to minutes from one meeting.

Thousands of pages of records and memos show the task force:

* discussed defending commercial aircraft against being shot down by portable missile systems;

* recommended improved vigilance at potential "soft" targets, such as major holiday events, municipal water supplies, nuclear power plants and electric power facilities;

* supported cracking down on foreigners living in and traveling through the United States, with particular attention to Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans;

* developed plans to protect U.S. diplomats and businessmen working abroad against kidnapping and attack.

Though the CIA routinely updated the committee on potential terrorist threats and plots, task force members learned quickly that intelligence gathering and coordination was a weak spot, just as Bush would discover three decades later.

Long before he was mayor and helped New York City recover from the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Giuliani told the committee in May 1976 that he feared legal restrictions were thwarting federal agents from collecting intelligence unless there had been a violation of the law.

Giuliani, who at that time was the associate deputy attorney general in President Ford's Justice Department, suggested relaxing intelligence collection guidelines -- something that occurred with the Patriot Act three decades later.

Other committee members said that obstacles to intelligence gathering were more bureaucratic than legal.

Lewis Hoffacker, a veteran ambassador who served as chairman of the terrorism working group, said that institutional rivalries, particularly between the FBI and CIA, were a constant source of frustration even in the 1970s.

"That was our headache, a quarter-century ago," said Hoffacker, now retired. "They all pulled back into their little fiefdoms. The CIA was always off by itself, and the FBI was dealing with the same situation they're dealing with today."

Finding the political will to fight terrorism in the absence of a major attack in the United States also quickly became a problem. Proposals for international penalties against countries harboring terrorists drew little support from the United Nations, the memos show.

"The climate at the 1974 General Assembly was such that no profitable initiative in the terrorism field was feasible," Ford heard from Kissinger, his secretary of state, in early 1975.

Two years later, the working group was absorbed by the National Security Council. In a 1978 report, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee worried that the Carter administration was not giving enough attention to terrorism.

"The United States will not be able to combat the growing challenge of terrorism unless the executive policy-making apparatus is more effectively and forcefully utilized," the Senate committee warned.

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Documents related to this story are available at:

http://wid.ap.org/documents/nixonterror.html