Freelance Terrorism

The term freelance terrorism describes the actions of individuals or small groups who take it upon [Page 222]themselves to act against a target without the direct support of a terrorist organization. Their actions are largely the outcome of their own rage, although they have usually been encouraged, subliminally or otherwise, by others harboring similar hatred. Such is the case when extremist animal rights and environmental groups invite individuals visiting their websites or reading their literature to join the cause and launch an attack on the objects of their incendiary rhetoric.

Almost by definition, freelance terrorists (or “lone wolves,” as they are sometimes called) are not tied to any traditional terrorist group—or to any other group, for that matter. This is not to say that at some point they might not have been a card-carrying member of some type of terrorist organization; they might even have obtained some financial support or training from such a group. In large measure, however, they take solitary action, with only their conscience to guide them. The advice and counsel of others, even those sympathetic to the cause, is for the most part absent during their freelance actions.

However, a concerned, tentative, or even frightened comrade can often stop freelance terrorism from taking place. This was most certainly the case in the summer of 1997 when someone approached an officer of the 88th Precinct in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York, and said, “My friend is going to kill people in the subway.” On July 31, Gazi Ibrahim Abu Maziar and Lafi Khalil were arrested in an explosive-laden Brooklyn apartment before they could carry out a suicide attack on the subway. Abu Maziar and Khalil were later convicted and sentenced to long prison terms.

A lesson learned from this abortive suicide attempt is that more than one freelancer makes a group of freelancers more vulnerable, because the actions of one, impulsive or not, might compromise the mission of the group. An old saying attributed to organized crime members applies here: “Two can keep a secret if one is dead.” Two, three, or more freelancers acting in concert are, in theory, less dangerous than the solitary freelancer acting alone, as was the case with Mir Aimal Kansi. On the morning of January 25, 1993, Kansi, a 29-year-old Pakistani wielding an AK-47 automatic rifle, shot five individuals as they sat in rush-hour traffic outside the gates of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Other acts of international freelance terrorism took place in the United States in 1994 and 1997. In 1994 a Lebanese immigrant cab driver, Rashid Baz, “spray-fired” a Cobray M-11/9 assault pistol at a van carrying Hasidic students across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, killing one and wounding three others. And in 1997, Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, a 69-year-old Palestinian visiting the Empire State Building, took a semiautomatic handgun from under his coat and began shooting. After the rampage was over, two were dead—including Abu Kamal, who shot himself—and six others were injured. The solitary nature of these acts can lead to confusion in the media as to the perpetrator's motivation: was Kamal merely a deranged gunman, or was he a freelance terrorist? Investigators subsequently discovered letters written by Kamal, in which he railed against Americans and Zionists, leaving little doubt as to the political nature of his assault.

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