Lone Wolf Terrorism (8 page)

That Von Brunn went many years between attacks demonstrates the patience some lone wolves possess in plotting their operations. A terrorist group would have had to continue to attack or risk losing support among its members and those in the community who sympathize with the cause. Failure to launch continual attacks would also
portray an image of the terrorist group as losing in its battle against its perceived enemies. Lone wolves do not have those concerns. Time is on their side, as the Von Brunn case illustrates. It is likely that, during the long period between his attacks, Von Brunn took comfort with the thought that he was contributing to the cause with his white supremacist postings on the Internet. But, in the end, even for a man in his eighties, that was not enough. The lure of going out in a blaze of glory with a major terrorist attack in the nation's capital was too much for Von Brunn to resist.

SINGLE-ISSUE LONE WOLVES: ERIC RUDOLPH AND VOLKERT
VAN DER
GRAAF

Abortion, animal rights, and the environment have long been specific issues motivating both groups and individuals to violence. These types of extremists are consumed with their particular issue and are not trying to bring about widespread political change or revolution. Still, they can have a significant impact on government and society with their actions. In one case, a lone wolf opposed to abortion set off a bomb during the 1996 Olympics Games in the United States and raised fears concerning a new wave of domestic terrorism. That he was also able to elude capture for many years made him a folk hero to some people. In the other case, a lone wolf committed a political assassination in the Netherlands in the name of animal rights and touched a nerve in a country not used to such events.

Eric Rudolph

Every two years, when the Summer or Winter Olympic Games approach, the media and government officials raise the specter of an increased terrorist threat. This is understandable, since terrorists like to strike high-profile targets and garner maximum media exposure. The fear of terrorism during the Olympics is also fueled by the fact that, during the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, Palestinian
terrorists took Israeli athletes hostage, resulting in what became known as the “Munich Massacre.” The terrorists killed the hostages as German police launched a failed hostage rescue mission.

The irony, however, is that the Olympics are usually the safest place to be in terms of being protected against a terrorist attack. When authorities can put in place a tremendous amount of security around a specific area (i.e., the Olympic venues) for a limited amount of time, such as the approximately two weeks it takes to stage the Olympics, it deters most terrorists from attempting an attack. The reason that terrorists were able to perpetrate one during the 1972 Games was because it caught everybody by surprise. It was the first time there had been a terrorist incident at the Olympics. There was very little security at the 1972 Games, with the terrorists only having to climb over a fence to get into the Olympic Village. Since then, with one exception, all subsequent Olympics have been devoid of terrorist attacks.

That one exception occurred at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Eric Rudolph, an antiabortion militant, decided that the Olympics would be the perfect place to violently protest his opposition to abortion. He set off a bomb during a rock concert in Centennial Olympic Park, which didn't have as much security as the Olympic sports events. The bomb killed one person and injured more than a hundred others. A Turkish cameraman also died from a heart attack as he ran to cover the incident. Rudolph would eventually explain his motivation for the bombing in a statement he made after pleading guilty to that attack as well as to three other attacks in subsequent years. The goal was “to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”
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Rudolph had originally intended to sabotage the power grid in Atlanta and thus force the cancellation of the Games or “at least create a state of insecurity to empty the streets around the venues and thereby eat into the vast amounts of money invested.”
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He abandoned that plan when he could not acquire the necessary high
explosives to do the job. Instead, he set off a pipe bomb hidden in a knapsack he placed near the concert stage. An alert security guard, Richard Jewel, noticed the unattended knapsack and began clearing people away. He was later falsely accused of placing the bomb himself at the concert in order to be a hero. The July 27, 1996, terrorist attack at the Olympics, coming just a little more than one year after the Oklahoma City bombing, raised new fears about domestic terrorism in the United States.

Rudolph continued his violent campaign over the next two years, with bombings at an abortion clinic in an Atlanta suburb in January 1997 that injured six people; a bombing at a gay nightclub in Atlanta one month later, in which five people were wounded; and a third bombing, at an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, in January 1998, which killed one person and injured another. Rudolph planted second bombs at both the gay nightclub and the Atlanta suburb abortion clinic, set to go off after police and emergency-services personnel had arrived at the scene in response to the first explosions. Police discovered the second bomb at the gay nightclub and defused it, but the second bomb at the suburban Atlanta abortion clinic went off, injuring several people, including police officers. Rudolph later explained his motives for targeting law enforcement and emergency-services personnel:

Because this government is committed to the policy of maintaining the policy of abortion and protecting it, the agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly. And whether these agents of the government are armed or otherwise they are legitimate targets in the war to end this holocaust, especially those agents who carry arms in defense of this regime and the enforcement of its laws. This is the reason and the only reason for the targeting of so-called law enforcement personnel.
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It was after the Birmingham bombing that Rudolph took to the woods of North Carolina to hide from the authorities, having learned that his truck had been seen near the explosion site and
that it had been traced to him. Despite a massive manhunt by the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, Rudolph was able to avoid capture for more than five years. He most likely learned survivalist skills while serving with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division in the late 1980s. His ability to survive in the woods and thumb his nose at the authorities for so long gained him a folk-hero status among some people in Murphy, North Carolina, his last residence before he went on the run. T-shirts appeared that exclaimed, “Run, Rudolph, Run,” and “Eric Rudolph—Hide and Seek Champion of the World.”
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Rudolph was finally arrested in May 2003 after a rookie policeman on routine patrol spotted him behind a grocery store around four o'clock in the morning. Thinking that a burglary was in progress, the policeman arrested Rudolph, who gave the officer a false name. Another officer, however, later recognized him to be Rudolph.
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In April 2005, Rudolph pled guilty to the Olympic bombing and the three other bombings in order to avoid the death penalty. He was eventually sentenced to multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. As part of his plea agreement, Rudolph provided authorities with the location of more than 250 pounds of dynamite that he had buried in the North Carolina woods. FBI and other federal agents recovered the explosives at three different sites and destroyed them. In the statement released at his plea-bargain hearing, Rudolph explained his motivation for the bombing of the gay nightclub in Atlanta:

Along with abortion, another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality…. Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society…. But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet and into the public square…every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort.
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Yet it was the abortion issue more than anything else that drove Rudolph to violence. He made it clear that his terrorism against the
government was not part of any sweeping ideological motivation. “I am not an anarchist,” he said. “I have nothing against government or law enforcement in general. It is solely for the reason that this government has legalized the murder of children that I have no allegiance to nor do I recognize the legitimacy of this particular government in Washington.”
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At his sentencing hearing in August 2005, Rudolph expressed remorse only for the bombing at the Olympics. “I cannot begin to truly understand the pain that I have inflicted upon these innocent people,” Rudolph said. “I would do anything to take back that night.”
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He did not apologize for the bombings of the abortion clinics and gay nightclub.

Rudolph also denied that he was part of the Christian Identity movement. He issued a postscript to his plea-bargain statement in protest of the book
Hunting Eric Rudolph
, which claims that he was indeed a Christian Identity supporter.
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In the postscript, Rudolph wrote, “I would like to clear up some misconceptions about me which are based upon the false information, innuendos and lies disseminated by some unscrupulous individuals.” Rudolph claimed that “I am not now nor have I ever been an Identity believing Christian. I was born a Catholic, and with forgiveness I hope to die one.” He admitted to attending an Identity church for approximately six months in the early 1980s but claimed that was because the father of a woman he was dating went there. “While attending this church,” Rudolph wrote, “I never bought into the convoluted Identity argument of racial determinism.”
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Eric Rudolph therefore felt the need to once again convince everyone that he was a true lone wolf extremist, devoted to a single issue and not part of any other movement or ideology. He expressed some ambivalence, however, about resorting to violence in his fight against abortion in a letter that he sent to his mother while in prison. After telling her that perhaps he “should have found a peaceful outlet” for what he wanted to accomplish, he still voiced a rationale expressed by those terrorists who later in life may have doubts about what they did. “However wrongheaded my tactical decision to resort
to violence may have been,” he wrote, “morally speaking my actions were justified.”
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Volkert van der Graaf

On May 6, 2002, animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf walked past Pim Fortuyn, a controversial politician and potential prime ministerial candidate, and shot him five times from behind in the parking lot of the Dutch National Broadcasting Center as Fortuyn was leaving a radio interview. The assassination represented the first political murder in the Netherlands since it became a kingdom in 1813.
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For a country that felt immune to the terrorist assassinations common in many parts of the world, the Fortuyn killing sent shockwaves throughout the nation. “Things like this don't happen in Holland,” said one resident of an Amsterdam suburb. “It's like the 11th of September for us. Everybody thought this couldn't be, but we see that it is possible. I feel very insecure.”
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Dutch prime minister Wim Kok said that the political assassination was “deeply tragic for our democracy”
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and that “a dark shadow has fallen over the Netherlands that has given way to deep emotions.”
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Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said he believed something like this was “impossible in this day and age, in the European Union, in the 21st Century.”
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The shooting came just nine days before national elections in which Fortuyn's party, List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), was expected to do well. Despite the assassination, the elections were still held as scheduled, with LPF winning 17 percent of the vote and thereby becoming the second-largest party in parliament. A coalition government of LPF, Liberals, and Christian Democrats was formed, but it collapsed just six months later. By the next elections, the LPF had lost most of its support and was no longer a force in Dutch politics. Fortuyn had been a lightning rod for controversy with his anti-environmental, anti-immigrant, and anti-Islamic views. He had stated that he was in favor of legalizing mink farming, complained about “the problems
of multicultural society,” and called Islam a “backward religion.”
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Fortuyn also told an environmental group, “The whole environmental policy in the Netherlands has no substance any more. And I'm sick to death of your environmental movement.”
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Comments like those did not sit well with Van der Graaf. A lifelong advocate for animal rights, he had fought most of his battles in the courtroom. In 1992, he cofounded the Association Environmental Offensive (VMO) with a friend. The organization, through the court system, systematically challenged permits that had been awarded to fur and cattle farmers. Their goal was to force those businesses to shut down.
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Also, Van der Graaf believed it was his duty to stand up for animal rights. “People think it normal that you eat animals and that you let fish suffocate in nets when you catch them,” he once wrote. “But inside me arose a sense of justice—such things shouldn't be happening in a civilized country, I thought, but there is no one to stand up for them.”
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Prior to the event, Van der Graaf did not let anyone know about his intention to kill Fortuyn. The assassination, however, did not surprise people who knew him. “In my opinion, Volkert devoted all his time in doing stuff for VMO and animals,” one of his friends said. “His life was all about that. Whenever a person like Fortuyn comes along and says fur animals can be bred again, I can imagine Volkert losing his temper. Volkert is a rational person, who thinks always carefully over the purpose of his actions and consequences.”
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