Forecast: More Bombs Ahead

A former Puerto Rican terrorist talks

Once again, those Puerto Rican bombs. Three exploded in New York City one day last week, touching off fires in two stores and terrifying midday strollers outside Manhattan's main library. There were no casualties, but a letter calling for a "war of nerves" against "Yanki-imperialism" that was found in a phone booth made it clear that the lack of bloodshed was only luck: the Puerto Rican terrorists who call themselves the F.A.L.N. had struck again.

The three blasts--a fourth explosive device failed to go off--brought to 65 the total of known bombings since 1974 by the Armed Forces of National Liberation of Puerto Rico in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Newark, as well as in New York. The worst outrage: a 1975 lunchtime bombing of Manhattan's Fraunces Tavern that left four dead. Searching for reasons why the F.A.L.N. bombers have been able to persist, TIME Correspondent James Willwerth interviewed a former terrorist from a similar Puerto Rican independence group. Willwerth's report:

The F.A.L.N. is the latest standard-bearer of violent Puerto Rican nationalist tradition that goes back to 1868, when machete-carrying rebels briefly proclaimed a republic in the Spanish colonial town of Lares. In the 1940s and '50s, followers of Pedro Albizu Campos not only bombed buildings and murdered officials on the island but also brought terrorism to the U.S.: gunmen tried to assassinate President Harry Truman in 1950, and in 1954 shot up the House of Representatives.* The F.A.L.N. first appeared in August 1974, when it claimed responsibility for a bombing in Manhattan's Lincoln Center. The group has operated from deep underground from the start, frustrating FBI attempts at infiltration. As one FBI agent observes, "If you can't get in when they are still talking, you're out of business."

One Puerto Rican familiar with F.A.L.N. tactics is "Jose," a muscular, mustachioed sometime terrorist who now lives in Colorado and, at 32, describes himself as "retired." As Jose tells it, the F.A.L.N. is just one element--the noisiest, to be sure--in a rather fluid Puerto Rican terrorist community. Although its size is difficult even to guess at--estimates range between a few dozen members to hundreds--the community is said to be run by separate "central committees" in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland. On the island, says Jose, terrorist cells tend to have half a dozen or more members. But for security reasons mainland cells are smaller. "The danger here is greater," Jose explains. "The police have good technology and budgets for informers. You have to work more secluded."

Puerto Rican terrorism tends to be a family enterprise. Cells often contain cousins, brothers, husbands and wives. Jose, raised in Manhattan's Spanish Harlem, was deeply influenced by an uncle ("A man I would die for") who was active in the independence movement. After a street-corner childhood and a Navy tour that ended with a jail sentence, Jose developed a "total lack of respect" for the U.S. and migrated to Puerto Rico.

Judged trustworthy because of his family connections, he was admitted to an underground group, sent to Cuba to learn guerrilla tactics, then ordered to organize a six-member cell. Among other jobs, he was involved in the murder of an informer and an attempt to spring a fellow terrorist out of an Old San Juan jail.

On one occasion, Jose was assigned to bomb a U.S.-owned store in San Juan. A specialist in burglar alarms carried out the actual breakin. Then an explosives expert brought in two bombs while a heavily armed third terrorist waited in a car pondering some special instructions. "The bomb people were very important to us," Jose recalls. "So the getaway driver would give his word that he would fight if there was trouble, to give his comrade time to escape."

Jose was known to his cell members only by a code name, and he always passed instructions to them through a deputy. He got his own orders through "coordinators" who dealt with the central committee. When a cell-level operative meets his central committee bosses, spotlights and Halloween masks may be used to confuse identification. Recalls Jose: "I remember times where members I know would stand together at rallies or meetings and not know each other."

Dynamite used by the F.A.L.N. has been traced to thefts from construction sites in Colorado and New Mexico. But Jose says that Cuba and sympathizers in the Dominican Republic have also supplied the independence movement's guns and explosives--though not its funds. Beyond contributions from rich radicals and occasional fund-raising rallies, the revolutionaries finance their operations by robbing banks and smuggling drugs.

The terrorists worry constantly about informers. Once, Jose and a colleague were asked to test the reliability of an operative who had left the movement for a while and wanted to return. The man was taken to an apartment in Jersey City, where an "informer" was being held, then handed a pistol with.a silencer. As Jose tells it, "The brother turned around and pulled the trigger three times against the man's head. Wow, was he surprised when it didn't work!" The gun was not loaded. The "informer" was, of course, a decoy.

In Puerto Rico, terrorist activity has been declining, partly because of public aversion to the violence. In last year's gubernatorial election, radical independence parties polled less than 6% of the vote. Buoyed by a U.S.-aided rising standard of living, most Puerto Ricans--despite currently high unemployment--seem to be content with their ties to the mainland; at a conference of island editors and publishers in Dorado last week, Puerto Rico's Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo felt confident enough about bedrock pro-U.S. sentiment among Puerto Ricans to call for statehood. Yet the island's core of ardent independentistas insists on dismissing pro-American opinion. It reflects, Jose maintains, nothing but political "brainwashing."

The terrorists intend to continue their campaign--especially in the U.S. But gradually, the authorities seem to be succeeding in making life more difficult for them. Says Jose: "Only the old cells here are really safe today. There are even Puerto Rican FBI agents now."

The FBI got a break last year when a Chicago junkie caught selling dynamite led local cops to the apartment he had stolen it from. A search resulted in arrest warrants for Carlos Alberto Torres, 25, his wife Marie Haydee Beltran Torres, 22, and two others. All are the educated children of Puerto Rican immigrants. Carlos Torres, soon to be the newest addition to the FBI's Most Wanted list, attended the University of Illinois; his wife, a high school honors graduate, faces a murder charge: her fingerprint was found on an employment application left at the site of a 1976 bombing that blew off the back of the head of a bystander.

Mrs. Torres' frequent travels between Chicago and New York--and the use of the same dynamite in both places--have led some investigators to theorize that, instead of a large organization, the F.A.L.N. could be just one group of well-traveled terrorists. But a top New York City police official readily concedes: "I'm not optimistic that we've broken the organization's back. I'm always listening for that next explosion."

* Albizu Campos died in San Juan in 1965. This month President Carter commuted the 25-to-75-year sentence of Andres Figueroa Cordero, 52, one of the four terrorists who raided the House, because he is dying of cancer. The three others remain in prison, as does Oscar Collazo, who took part in the Truman attack.

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