Lone Wolf Terrorism (9 page)

As his friend suggested, Van der Graaf meticulously planned his attack on Fortuyn. On May 5, 2002, he searched the Internet for information on Fortuyn's daily schedule. When he learned that the politician would be having a radio interview the next day at the 3FM building at the Media Park in Hilversum, a town thirty kilometers southeast of Amsterdam, he decided that would be a good opportunity to implement his plan. He went there with a map of Media Park and the 3FM building that he obtained from the Internet and waited until Fortuyn exited the building. He claimed he did want to injure anybody else, so that is why he decided to shoot Fortuyn from behind:

I had figured out that if I would approach Fortuyn from the front, he might be able to see the attack coming. Shooting Fortuyn from behind would be least problematic. In that case he would not be able to duck away, which could cause danger for the others present at the scene. Next to that, I did not wanted [
sic
] Fortuyn to suffer more than necessary. Shooting from behind would make it possible to deadly wound him immediately.
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After the shooting, Van der Graaf ran from the scene but was captured a short time later. He did not talk about his motives for several months. He then claimed in a confession that he killed Fortuyn in order to stand up for the “weaker and vulnerable members” of Dutch society. He compared Fortuyn's rise in politics to that of Adolph Hitler and stated that he killed him as a favor to the Muslim minority in the Netherlands as well as other vulnerable segments of society.
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He described Fortuyn as a dangerous man “who abused democracy by picking on vulnerable groups” and who had terrible ideas “about immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, animals, and the environment.”
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With the exception of animal rights, and to some extent the environment, Van der Graaf's friends and relatives were shocked at his claiming his actions were done in the name of all the other causes that he mentioned above. They did not remember him as being politically engaged in those issues.
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Under Dutch law, even though Van der Graaf confessed to the murder, prosecutors still had to prove their case in court. In April 2003, Van der Graaf was convicted and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. He told the court that he regretted the killing and that he still “wrestled” with the question of whether he was right in murdering Fortuyn. “Every day I see it before me. I see myself shoot and Fortuyn fall,” he said in court.
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The Fortuyn assassination was a watershed in the Dutch experience with terrorism. As noted above, it sent shockwaves throughout the country. Several spontaneous shrines were created in the days after the shooting, with thousands of people leaving messages and thousands more paying their respects.
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It was not only the fact that a
political assassination had taken place that shocked the Netherlands, a country with a nonviolent and pacifist heritage, but that a powerful new voice in Dutch politics had been silenced. Although he was controversial, Fortuyn and his party had challenged the establishment and won many supporters. He “represented a political voice in which a substantial, but regularly ignored, part of the lower and middle classes of the nation heard their views and feelings reflected.”
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The assassination also led to an investigation concerning whether the government was negligent in not protecting Fortuyn, since he was a controversial figure who had received many death threats in the past. An independent commission concluded that, while the assassination of Fortuyn was “a serious attack on the democratic constitutional state,”
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the government could not be blamed for his murder. The commission emphasized that, even with protection, the complete safety of a politician cannot be guaranteed. As one government official noted, with the lone wolf assassination of Fortuyn, “the Netherlands had lost its innocence.”
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CRIMINAL LONE WOLVES: JOHN GILBERT GRAHAM AND PANOS KOUPPARIS

A unique category of lone wolves consists of those who perpetrate their violence for purely personal or financial gain. I discuss in the appendix why I believe these types of individuals should be considered terrorists; even though their motives are different from those extremists with political, religious, or ethnic-nationalist objectives, the impact of their actions upon society and government can be just as profound as that of more-traditional terrorists. Two cases illustrate this point. One involves an individual who carried out the first major midair plane bombing in US history in order to collect an insurance policy. The other deals with an individual working with a few family members in order to extort millions of dollars from the government of Cyprus.

John Gilbert Graham

Acting the role of a loving, devoted son, twenty-three-year-old John Gilbert Graham drove his mother to Stapleton Airport in Denver on November 1, 1955, carried her luggage inside the terminal, and kissed her good-bye before she departed on her United Airlines flight to Portland. From there she planned to continue on to Anchorage to visit her daughter. Daisie King must have thought that all was well with her son, who had previously been in trouble with the law. What she didn't know was that hidden in one of her suitcases were twenty-five sticks of dynamite, a timer, two dynamite caps, and a dry-cell battery.

Graham waited at an airport coffee shop until he heard word that the plane had crashed shortly after takeoff. He later telephoned the airline's office to find out if his mother was killed in the crash. When a sympathetic airline official informed him that it was very likely she was among the forty-four dead, Graham simply replied, “Well, that's the way it goes.” His motive for the bombing was greed: a $37,500 insurance policy on his mother's life that he bought from an airport vending machine shortly before she boarded the plane. He was also in line to share in his mother's $150,000 estate. What he collected, however, was execution in the gas chamber at the Colorado State Penitentiary a little more than two years later.
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Since this was the first major midair plane bombing in the United States, the FBI had no prior experience in investigating such acts of terrorism. It was, therefore, a pathbreaking effort on their part in reconstructing the aircraft to determine that explosives were the cause of the crash. Their investigation set standards for future scientific analyses of airplane bombings. The investigation of the Denver crash marked the first time that residues from parts of a plane were examined in a scientific manner to determine the exact cause of an explosion. Parts of the wreckage were sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC, for analysis, where it was discovered that sodium carbonate was on some of the parts of the aircraft. That led the FBI to conclude that the plane was brought down by a dynamite explosion.
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Meanwhile, in Denver, FBI agents studied the passenger list to see if there was anybody on board the doomed plane who might have been the target of a murder plot by someone who knew how to use explosives. Extensive background checks on all the passengers and their relatives led the FBI to Graham, who had a prior arrest record for forgery and knew how to use explosives, having worked for construction and logging companies that used dynamite. The insurance policy was another piece of the puzzle that led the authorities to Graham, who confessed but later recanted his confession. Ironically, even if Graham had never been caught, he might not have been able to cash the insurance policy because his mother never countersigned it.

Graham was arrested in November 1955, convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to death in May 1956. He was executed in January 1957. His execution occurred under Colorado law, since there was no federal law to cover his offense at that time. The bombing led Congress to pass a bill in 1956 that established the death penalty for anyone convicted of causing loss of life by damaging an airplane, bus, or commercial vehicle. An existing statute covered the sabotage of trains.
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The Graham bombing shocked the nation, including President Dwight Eisenhower, who was outraged by this new form of violence, along with most Americans. The bombing also led the FBI and the Civil Aviation Administration to conduct studies on measures that might be taken to detect explosives in luggage. However, sophisticated technology was not yet available to aid in designing effective and speedy airport security systems. As one observer noted shortly after the bombing, “The rigmarole involved in merely running the detector over every suitcase and hat box going aboard a plane would make present baggage routine, a frequent annoyance, seem like the essence of convenience. So, if the airlines continue current policy, the suitcase with the bomb inside is unlikely to be detected.”
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The United States had never before experienced an incident like the Graham bombing—a midair plane bombing over Chesterton, Indiana, in 1933 (see
note 4
from the introduction) did not receive
the media exposure or reaction across the country that the Graham bombing did. People were perplexed not only by the fact that individuals were capable of blowing up planes in midair, but also by the fact that the person responsible was motivated by the desire to kill his mother for money. An editorial in a local newspaper best captured the bewilderment of people over Graham's crime:

In Denver County Jail sits the greatest criminal enigma in Denver history and possibly the greatest in the reprehensible annals of American crime…. What kind of mind could grind out in minute and exacting detail the steps that John Gilbert Graham's mind did in piecing together his horrendous jigsaw of death…. What kind of heart could block out those compelling and instinctive bonds that exist between mother and son?…[And] what kind of a being could block out entirely 43 other lives in plotting for greed or hatred or convenience the death of one other person?…There seems to be no logical explanation.
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There was, however, a logical explanation. It was rooted in a troubled young man's personality and behavior, which gave plenty of warning signs that he was capable of this horrendous deed. Graham, who showed no remorse throughout his trial, had fought many times with his mother, despite her continual efforts to help him out of bad situations. He was convicted in November 1951 on forgery charges, having stolen several blank checks from a manufacturing firm he worked for as a payroll clerk the previous March. He signed the name of the company's owner on the checks and cashed them for $4,200. He bought a late-model convertible with the money and left Denver.

Graham was arrested the following September in Lubbock, Texas, on a different charge—bootlegging—after he tried to run a roadblock and was shot at by the police, who found a gun in Graham's car. He served a sixty-day sentence in the county jail and was then released to Denver authorities. He received a suspended sentence for the check-forgery charges and was placed on probation for a period of five years. His mother paid $2,500 toward restitution on
the $4,200 in forged checks, with Graham paying the rest in monthly installments of $40 per month. He regularly made those payments and had only $105 left to pay at the time of the plane bombing.
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Graham's mother also helped her son by hiring him to be the manager of a drive-in restaurant she owned in Denver. She was reported to be “downright proud” of him and how he had gotten his life together since his forgery conviction.
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However, Graham's probation report described her as someone who “appears to be a type that has over-protected her son.”
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She either turned a blind eye to his transgressions or just simply wouldn't believe her son meant to do anything wrong. This despite the fact that, when Graham confessed to the FBI regarding the plane bombing, he also admitted both to causing an explosion at the drive-in restaurant and to leaving his car on a railroad track and allowing it to be hit by an oncoming train in order to collect insurance on the car. His half sister reported that Graham had a violent temper and that, on one occasion, he knocked her down and kneed her in the chest. On another occasion, he hit her with a hammer. She also told the FBI that she and her mother had once witnessed him strike his wife for no apparent reason, scaring his mother, who was afraid her son might also hit her.
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Graham didn't seem too concerned about tipping his plans concerning the bombing of the plane his mother would be on. A credit manger testified at his trial that Graham once told him he had observed the way luggage was handled at Denver's Stapleton Airport and that it would be easy for someone to place a bomb on a plane.
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After his arrest, psychiatrists who met with him were curious as to his feelings about being responsible for the deaths of forty-four people, including his mother. He stated that he “realized that there were about 50 or 60 people carried on a DCB [DC-6B plane].” But, he continued, “the number of people to be killed made no difference to me; it could have been a thousand. When their time comes, there is nothing they can do about it.”
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With the Graham bombing, America was introduced to a form of terrorism that unfortunately would become all too familiar in subsequent
decades. Increased security measures would gradually be introduced at airports as the public came to understand the need for metal detectors, x-rays, and other measures designed to ensure its safety. No longer would the public only fear the possibility of an accidental plane crash. Now they had to also fear midair plane bombings. A wayward youth with a troubled past had ushered America into a new age of terrorism.

Panos Koupparis

One of the more unusual terrorist threats in recent history took place in Cyprus in March 1987, when a thirteen-page letter was sent to the president, Spiros Kiprianou. The letter was signed by a man calling himself “Commander Nemo of Force Majerus.”
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Commander Nemo was actually Panos Koupparis, a thirty-six-year-old British citizen of Cypriot origin. He threatened to disperse dioxin, a toxic chemical, over the Troodos Mountains south of Nicosia unless he was paid $15 million.