Could It Happen Here?

In Berlin, a shattered discotheque; in Rome and Vienna, airline terminals strewn with bodies. So far, the U.S. has been spared the horror of a major terrorist attack. But as hostility intensifies between the U.S. and Libya, the shadow war could come closer to home. Security experts warn that extremists could find easy pickings in American cities. "We are absolutely unprepared here in the U.S.," says Dr. Robert Kupperman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former National Security Council staffer. "Everywhere in the country, government facilities, commercial installations and civilian networks make ideal targets for terror attacks." A U.S. intelligence analyst concurs: "We have become the ultimate challenge for every terrorist, and we are just not ready."

In Washington, security has been beefed up at the White House, where antiterrorist barricades have been installed to block cars and trucks. At the Pentagon, an underground concourse of shops and banks will soon be closed to anyone without special clearance. The State Department had also set up concrete barricades and sometimes screened visitors with metal detectors, but guards could not prevent a horrifying incident last summer when a 20-year-old man shot his mother to death, then took his own life just 100 yards from Secretary of State George Shultz's office. Since then Foggy Bottom has required more thorough personal searches, even for people carrying State Department passes.

In another likely target city, New York, the FBI and local police have established joint contingency plans to deal with terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, says an FBI official, "a determined nut can do great damage before you can neutralize him." For example, four men and two women said to be members of a terrorist group known as the United Freedom Front were able to set off ten bombs in military-reserve centers and corporate facilities in the New York City area before they were apprehended. The group was finally convicted of multiple conspiracy and bombing charges in federal court last month.

Authorities agree that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks is through timely intelligence. President Reagan has maintained that 126 terrorist missions were foiled in 1985. Federal officials said 23 of those were in the / U.S., including plots to kill Libyan dissidents and efforts by Sikh extremists to assassinate Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi during a visit last year.

The U.S. carefully keeps track of visitors and residents from hostile nations such as Libya, Iran and Syria. There are approximately 3,200 Libyans in the U.S. who have been granted temporary visas, including an estimated 1,200 students. The Government also maintains huge computer databases with information on individuals suspected of having radical, anti-U.S. associations. Meanwhile, the supersecret National Security Agency uses the world's most technologically advanced surveillance techniques to eavesdrop on questionable telephone calls and radio communications abroad and intercept and decode suspicious telex messages. To conform to U.S. privacy laws, the intercepts take place outside U.S. borders. But as the rest of the world painfully knows, determined terrorists are very hard to stop.