16 Years Ago In TIME

By Melissa August, Elizabeth L. Bland, Sora Song, Heather Won Tesoriero

It had been a week of TERRORISM: in Beirut, 37 American men were taken off a hijacked TWA jet by Shi'ite Amal militiamen and hidden in the city. In the Frankfurt airport, a suitcase bomb killed three and injured 42. In San Salvador, gunmen killed 13, including six Americans. A bomb was suspected in an Air India crash that killed 329. Two Tokyo airport workers were killed by a bomb in luggage just arrived from Vancouver.

A war in which almost anyone could be a target any time, anywhere, while carrying out the most innocent activities: waiting for a flight in an airport lounge, dining at a sidewalk cafe. A war waged by shadowy enemies who could be almost anyone: the passenger in the next airplane seat, the occupants of the next car driving by. Worst of all, a war in which civilized society so far is a bewildered, if not impotent, loser...

All this presents the Reagan Administration with not one but a series of puzzles. Security certainly can be tightened, but the U.S. must not let fear of terrorism turn it into a police state. Better intelligence is urgently needed, but terrorist groups, to put it mildly, are not easy to penetrate...The only certainty seems to be that for the foreseeable future, countering terrorism will rank second only to preventing nuclear war among the problems of assuring the survival of a free and stable society.

--TIME, July 1, 1985