Industrial Workers of the World

A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis

Buda's Wagon (1920)
tomdispatch.com

You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
-- Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his
comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario
Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad
Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly
climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A
few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets
warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All
of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of
nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the
wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball
of shrapnel.

"The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the
celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true
story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve
stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a
great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas
Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble
of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."

Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan
himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded -- the
great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge.
Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of
scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror
to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist
fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was also an
invention, like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, far ahead of the
imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing
had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued
insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical
potential of Buda's "infernal machine" be fully realized.

Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of
an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to
transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a
high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to
determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload
of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine,
killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter
group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist
paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill
Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by
British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically -- producing notable
massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) -- but
the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional
Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes,
improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These
new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients
and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly
powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the
industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire
city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete
skyscrapers and residential blocks.

The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon
that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its
ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as
terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck
bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in
1983 prevailed -- at least in a geopolitical sense -- over the combined
firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S. Sixth
Fleet and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.

Hezbollah's ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the
1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United States,
France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to bring their
insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of the
new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set up
by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi financing,
in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the Russians then
occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle bomb attacks
in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded nearly 12,000.
More importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the IRA and Gama'a
al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the two leading
control-centers of the world economy -- the City of London (1992, 1993,
and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) -- and forced a reorganization of
the global reinsurance industry.

In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall
Street, car bombs have become almost as generically global as iPods and
HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali. Suicide
truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have been
franchised to Sri Lanka, Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, and
Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing car
bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. U.S.-occupied Iraq, of
course, is a relentless inferno with more than 9,000 casualties --
mainly civilian -- attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period
between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb
attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005,
13 in Baghdad on New Year's Day 2006 alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs
are the most effective device against American armored vehicles, car
bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering Shiite civilians in
front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian
war.

Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the
apparatuses of administration and finance are retreating inside "rings
of steel" and "green zones," but the larger challenge of the car bomb
seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may be the "sum
of our fears," but the car bomb is the quotidian workhorse of urban
terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may be helpful
to summarize those characteristics that make Buda's wagon such a
formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of urban insecurity.

First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and
destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans, or even SUVs can easily transport
the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to the
doorstep of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is still
evolving, thanks to the constant tinkering of ingenious bomb-makers. We
have yet to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized explosions with
a lethal blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs sheathed in enough
nuclear waste to render mid-Manhattan radioactive for generations.

Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40 or 50 people can be
massacred with a stolen car and maybe $400 of fertilizer and bootlegged
electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the
World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive outlay was in
long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself (one half ton of urea)
cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a ten-foot-long Ryder van.
In contrast, the cruise missiles that have become the classic American
riposte to overseas terrorist attacks cost $1.1 million each.

Third, car bombings are operationally simple to organize. Although some
still refuse to believe that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols didn't
have secret assistance from a government or dark entity, two men in the
proverbial phone booth -- a security-guard and a farmer -- successfully
planned and executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing with
instructional books and information acquired from the gun-show circuit.

Fourth, like even the ‘smartest' of aerial bombs, car bombs are
inherently indiscriminate: "Collateral damage" is virtually inevitable.
If the logic of an attack is to slaughter innocents and sow panic in
the widest circle, to operate a "strategy of tension," or just
demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally
effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating
its mass base of support, as both the IRA and the ETA in Spain have
independently discovered. The car bomb is an inherently fascist weapon.

Fifth, car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic
evidence. Buda quietly went home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J.
Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be renamed the
FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead after
another for a decade. Most of Buda's descendants have also escaped
identification and arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly recommends
car bombs to those who like to disguise their handiwork, including the
CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Syrian GSD, the Iranian Pasdaran, and the
Pakistani ISI -- all of whom have caused unspeakable carnage with such
devices.

Preliminary Detonations (1948-63)

"Reds' Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center"

-- New York Times' headline (January 10,. 1952)

The members of the Stern Gang were ardent students of violence,
self-declared Jewish admirers of Mussolini who steeped themselves in
the terrorist traditions of the pre-1917 Russian
Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the Macedonian IMRO, and the Italian
Blackshirts. As the most extreme wing of the Zionist movement in
Palestine -- "fascists" to the Haganah and "terrorists" to the British
-- they were morally and tactically unfettered by considerations of
diplomacy or world opinion. They had a fierce and well-deserved
reputation for the originality of their operations and the
unexpectedness of their attacks. On January 12, 1947, as part of their
campaign to prevent any compromise between mainstream Zionism and the
British Labor government, they exploded a powerful truck bomb in the
central police station in Haifa, resulting in 144 casualties. Three
months later, they repeated the tactic in Tel Aviv, blowing up the
Sarona police barracks (5 dead) with a stolen postal truck filled with
dynamite.

In December 1947, following the UN vote to partition Palestine,
full-scale fighting broke out between Jewish and Arab communities from
Haifa to Gaza. The Stern Gang, which rejected anything less than the
restoration of a biblical Israel, now gave the truck bomb its debut as
a weapon of mass terror. On January 4, 1948, two men in Arab dress
drove a truck ostensibly loaded with oranges into the center of Jaffa
and parked it next to the New Seray Building, which housed the
Palestinian municipal government as well as a soup-kitchen for poor
children. They cooly lingered for coffee at a nearby café before
leaving a few minutes ahead of the detonation.

"A thunderous explosion," writes Adam LeBor in his history of Jaffa,
"then shook the city. Broken glass and shattered masonry blew out
across Clock Tower Square. The New Seray's centre and side walls
collapsed in a pile of rubble and twisted beams. Only the neo-classical
façade survived. After a moment of silence, the screams began, 26 were
killed, hundreds injured. Most were civilians, including many children
eating at the charity kitchen." The bomb missed the local Palestinian
leadership who had moved to another building, but the atrocity was
highly successful in terrifying residents and setting the stage for
their eventual flight.

It also provoked the Palestinians to cruel repayment in kind. The Arab
High Committee had its own secret weapon -- blond-haired British
deserters, fighting on the side of the Palestinians. Nine days after
the Jaffa bombing, some of these deserters, led by Eddie Brown, a
former police corporal whose brother had been murdered by the Irgun,
commandeered a postal delivery truck which they packed with explosives
and detonated in the center of Haifa's Jewish quarter, injuring 50
people. Two weeks later, Brown, driving a stolen car and followed by a
five-ton truck driven by a Palestinian in a police uniform,
successfully passed through British and Haganah checkpoints and entered
Jerusalem's New City. The driver parked in front of the Palestine Post,
lit the fuse, and then escaped with Brown in his car. The newspaper
headquarters was devastated with 1 dead and 20 wounded.

According to a chronicler of the episode, Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the
military leader of the Arab Higher Committee, was so impressed by the
success of these operations -- inadvertently inspired by the Stern Gang
-- that he authorized an ambitious sequel employing six British
deserters. "This time three trucks were used, escorted by a stolen
British armored car with a young blond man in police uniform standing
in the turret." Again, the convoy easily passed through checkpoints and
drove to the Atlantic Hotel on Ben Yehuda Street. A curious night
watchman was murdered when he confronted the gang, who then drove off
in the armored car after setting charges in the three trucks. The
explosion was huge and the toll accordingly grim: 46 dead and 130
wounded.

The window of opportunity for such attacks -- the possibility of
passing from one zone to another -- was rapidly closing as Palestinians
and Jews braced for all-out warfare, but a final attack prefigured the
car bomb's brilliant future as a tool of assassination. On March 11,
the official limousine of the American consul-general, flying the stars
and stripes and driven by the usual chauffeur, was admitted to the
courtyard of the heavily-guarded Jewish Agency compound. The driver, a
Christian Palestinian named Abu Yussef, hoped to kill Zionist leader
David Ben Gurion, but the limousine was moved just before it exploded;
nonetheless, 13 officials of the Jewish Foundation Fund died and 40
were injured.

This brief but furious exchange of car bombs between Arabs and Jews
would enter into the collective memory of their conflict, but would not
be resumed on a large scale until Israel and its Phalangist allies
began to terrorize West Beirut with bombings in 1981: a provocation
that would awake a Shiite sleeping dragon. Meanwhile, the real sequel
was played out in Saigon: a series of car and motorcycle bomb
atrocities in 1952-53 that Graham Greene incorporated into the plot of
his novel, The Quiet American, and which he portrayed as secretly
orchestrated by his CIA operative Alden Pyle, who is conspiring to
substitute a pro-American party for both the Viet-Minh (upon whom the
actual bombings would be blamed) and the French (who are unable to
guarantee public safety).

The real-life Quiet American was the counterinsurgency expert Colonel
Edward Lansdale (fresh from victories against peasant Communists in the
Philippines), and the real leader of the ‘Third Force' was his protégé,
General Trinh Minh The of the Cao Dai religious sect. There is no
doubt, writes The's biographer, that the general "instigated many
terrorist outrages in Saigon, using clockwork plastic charges loaded
into vehicles, or hidden inside bicycle frames with charges. Notably,
the Li An Minh [The's army] blew up cars in front of the Opera House in
Saigon in 1952. These ‘time-bombs' were reportedly made of 50-kg
ordnance, used by the French air force, unexploded and collected by the
Li An Minh."

Lansdale was dispatched to Saigon by Allen Dulles of the CIA some
months after the Opera atrocity (hideously immortalized in a Life
photographer's image of the upright corpse of a rickshaw driver with
both legs blown off), which was officially blamed on Ho Chi Minh.
Although Lansdale was well aware of General The's authorship of these
sophisticated attacks (the explosives were hidden in false compartments
next to car gas tanks), he nonetheless championed the Cao Dai warlord
as a patriot in the mould of Washington and Jefferson. After either
French agents or Vietminh cadre assassinated The, Landsdale eulogized
him to a journalist as "a good man. He was moderate, he was a pretty
good general, he was on our side, and he cost twenty-five thousand
dollars."

Whether by emulation or reinvention, car bombs showed up next in
another war-torn French colony -- Algiers during the last days of the
pied noirs or French colonial settlers. Some of the embittered French
officers in Saigon in 1952-53 would also become cadres of the
Organisation de l'Armé Secrete (OAS), led by General Raoul Salan. In
April 1961, after the failure of its uprising against French President
Charles de Gaulle, who was prepared to negotiate a settlement with the
Algerian rebels, the OAS turned to terrorism -- a veritable festival de
plastique -- with all the formidable experience of its veteran
paratroopers and legionnaires. Its declared enemies included De Gaulle
himself, French security forces, communists, peace activists (including
philosopher and activist Jean-Paul Sartre), and especially Algerian
civilians. The most deadly of their car bombs killed 62 Moslem
stevedores lining up for work at the docks in Algiers in May 1962, but
succeeded only in bolstering the Algerian resolve to drive all the
pied-noirs into the sea.

The next destination for the car bomb was Palermo, Sicily. Angelo La
Barbera, the Mafia capo of Palermo-Center, undoubtedly paid careful
attention to the Algerian bombings and may even have borrowed some OAS
expertise when he launched his devastating attack on his Mafia rival,
"Little Bird" Greco, in February 1963. Greco's bastion was the town of
Ciaculli outside Palermo where he was protected by an army of henchmen.
La Barbera surmounted this obstacle with the aid of the Alfa Romeo
Giulietta. "This dainty four-door family saloon," writes John Dickie in
his history of the Cosa Nostra, "was one of the symbols of Italy's
economic miracle -- ‘svelte, practical, comfortable, safe and
convenient,' as the adverts proclaimed." The first explosive-packed
Giulietta destroyed Greco's house; the second, a few weeks later,
killed one of his key allies. Greco's gunmen retaliated, wounding La
Barbera in Milan in May; in response, La Barbera's ambitious
lieutenants Pietro Torreta and Tommaso Buscetta (later to become the
most famous of all Mafia pentiti) unleashed more deadly Giuliettas.

On June 30, 1963, "the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT" was left
in one of the tangerine groves that surround Ciaculli. A tank of butane
with a fuse was clearly visible in the back seat. A Giulietta had
already exploded that morning in a nearby town, killing two people, so
the carabinieri were cautious and summoned army engineers for
assistance. "Two hours later two bomb disposal experts arrived, cut the
fuse, and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when Lt. Mario
Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot, he detonated the huge
quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men were blown to pieces
by an explosion that scorched and stripped the tangerine trees for
hundreds of metres around." (The site is today marked by one of the
several monuments to bomb victims in the Palermo region.)

Before this "First Mafia War" ended in 1964, the Sicilian population
had learned to tremble at the very sight of a Giulietta and car
bombings had become a permanent part of the Mafia repertoire. They were
employed again during an even bloodier second Mafia war or Matanza in
1981-83, then turned against the Italian public in the early 1990s
after the conviction of Cosa Nostra leaders in a series of sensational
"maxi-trials." The most notorious of these blind-rage car bombings --
presumably organized by ‘Tractor' Provenzano and his notorious
Corleonese gang -- was the explosion in May 1993 that damaged the
world-famous Uffizi Gallery in the heart of Florence and killed 5
pedestrians, injuring 40 others.

"The Black Stuff"

"We could feel the rattle where we stood. Then we knew we were onto
something, and it took off from there."

-- IRA veteran talking about the first ANFO car bomb

The first-generation car bombs -- Jaffa-Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers, and
Palermo -- were deadly enough (with a maximum yield usually equal to
several hundred pounds of TNT), but required access to stolen
industrial or military explosives. Journeymen bomb-makers, however,
were aware of a homemade alternative – notoriously dangerous to
concoct, but offering almost unlimited vistas of destruction at a low
cost. Ammonium nitrate is a universally available synthetic fertilizer
and industrial ingredient with extraordinary explosive properties, as
witnessed by such accidental cataclysms as an explosion at a chemical
plant in Oppau, Germany in 1921 -- the shock waves were felt 150 miles
away and only a vast crater remained where the plant had been -- and a
Texas City disaster in 1947 (600 dead and 90% of the town structurally
damaged). Ammonium nitrate is sold in half-ton quantities affordable by
even the most cash-strapped terrorist, but the process of mixing it
with fuel oil to create an ANFO explosive is more than a little tricky
as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) found out in late 1971.

"The car bomb was [re]discovered entirely by accident," explains
journalist Ed Maloney in his The Secret History of the IRA, "but its
deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain of events began in
late December 1971 when the IRA's quartermaster general, Jack McCabe,
was fatally injured in an explosion caused when an experimental,
fertilizer-based homemade mix known as the ‘black stuff' exploded as he
was blending it with a shovel in his garage on the northern outskirts
of Dublin. [Provisionals'] GHQ warned that the mix was too dangerous to
handle, but Belfast had already received a consignment, and someone had
the idea of disposing of it by dumping it in a car with a fuse and a
timer and leaving it somewhere in downtown Belfast." The resulting
explosion made a big impression upon the Belfast leadership.

The "black stuff" -- which the IRA soon learned how to handle safely --
freed the underground army from supply-side constraints: the car bomb
enhanced destructive capacity yet reduced the likelihood of Volunteers
being arrested or accidentally blown up. The ANFO-car bomb combination,
in other words, was an unexpected military revolution, but one fraught
with the potential for political and moral disaster. "The sheer size of
the devices," emphasizes Moloney, "greatly increased the risk of
civilian deaths in careless or bungled operations."

The IRA Army Council led by Sean MacStiofain, however, found the new
weapon's awesome capabilities too seductive to worry about ways in
which its grisly consequences might backfire on them. Indeed, car bombs
reinforced the illusion, shared by most of the top leadership in 1972,
that the IRA was one final military offensive away from victory over
the English government. Accordingly, in March 1972, two car bombs were
sent into Belfast city center followed by garbled phone warnings that
led police to inadvertently evacuate people in the direction of one of
the explosions: Five civilians were killed along with two members of
the security forces. Despite the public outcry as well as the immediate
traffic closure of the Royal Avenue shopping precinct, the Belfast
Brigade's enthusiasm for the new weapon remained undiminished and the
leadership plotted a huge attack designed to bring normal commercial
life in Northern Ireland to an abrupt halt. MacStiofain boasted of an
offensive of "the utmost ferocity and ruthessness" that would wreck the
"colonial infrastructure."

On Friday, July 21st, IRA Volunteers left 20 car bombs or concealed
charges on the periphery of the now-gated city center, with detonations
timed to follow one another at approximately five-minute intervals. The
first car bomb exploded in front of the Ulster Bank in north Belfast
and blew both legs off a Catholic passerby; successive explosions
damaged two railroad stations, the Ulster bus depot on Oxford Street,
various railway junctions, and a mixed Catholic-Protestant residential
area on Cavehill Road. "At the height of the bombing, the center of
Belfast resembled a city under artillery fire; clouds of suffocating
smoke enveloped buildings as one explosion followed another, almost
drowning out the hysterical screams of panicked shoppers." A series of
telephoned IRA warnings just created more chaos, as civilians fled from
one explosion only to be driven back by another. Seven civilians and
two soldiers were killed and more than 130 people were seriously
wounded.

Although not an economic knockout punch, "Bloody Friday" was the
beginning of a "no business as usual" bombing campaign that quickly
inflicted significant damage on the Northern Ireland economy,
particularly its ability to attract private and foreign investment. The
terror of that day also compelled authorities to tighten their
anti-car-bomb "ring of steel" around the Belfast city center, making it
the prototype for other fortified enclaves and future "green zones." In
the tradition of their ancestors, the Fenians, who had originated
dynamite terrorism in the 1870s, Irish Republicans had again added new
pages to the textbook of urban guerrilla warfare. Foreign aficionados,
particularly in the Middle East, undoubtedly paid close attention to
the twin innovations of the ANFO car bomb and its employment in a
protracted bombing campaign against an entire urban-regional economy.

What was less well understood outside of Ireland, however, was the
enormity of the wound that the IRA's car bombs inflicted on the
Republican movement itself. Bloody Friday destroyed much of the IRA's
heroic-underdog popular image, produced deep revulsion amongst ordinary
Catholics, and gave the British government an unexpected reprieve from
the worldwide condemnation it had earned for the Blood Sunday massacre
in Derry and internment without trial. Moreover, it gave the Army the
perfect pretext to launch massive Operation Motorman: 13,000 troops led
by Centurion tanks entered the "no-go" areas of Derry and Belfast and
reclaimed control of the streets from the Republican movement. The same
day, a bloody, bungled car bomb attack on the village of Claudy in
County Londonderry killed 8 people. (Protestant Loyalist paramilitary
groups -- who never bothered with warnings and deliberately targeted
civilians on the other side -- would claim Bloody Friday and Claudy as
sanctions for their triple car bomb attack on Dublin during afternoon
rush hour on May 17, 1974 which left 33 dead, the highest one-day toll
in the course of the "Troubles.")

The Belfast debacle led to a major turnover in IRA leadership, but
failed to dispel their almost cargo-cult-like belief in the capacity of
car bombs to turn the tide of battle. Forced onto the defensive by
Motorman and the backlash to Bloody Friday, they decided to strike at
the very heart of British power instead. The Belfast Brigade planned to
send ten car bombs to London via the Dublin-Liverpool ferry using fresh
volunteers with clean records, including two young sisters, Marion and
Dolours Price. Snags arose and only four cars arrived in London; one of
these was detonated in front of the Old Bailey, another in the center
of Whitehall, close to the Prime Minister's house at Number 10 Downing
Street. One hundred and eighty Londoners were injured and one was
killed. Although the 8 IRA bombers were quickly caught, they were
acclaimed in the West Belfast ghettoes and the operation became a
template for future Provisional bombing campaigns in London,
culminating in the huge explosions that shattered the City of London
and unnerved the world insurance industry in 1992 and 1993.

Hell's Kitchen (the 1980s)

"We are soldiers of God and we crave death. We are ready to turn
Lebanon into another Vietnam."

-- Hezbollah communiqué

Never in history has a single city been the battlefield for so many
contesting ideologies, sectarian allegiances, local vendettas, or
foreign conspiracies and interventions as Beirut in the early 1980s.
Belfast's triangular conflicts -- three armed camps (Republican,
Loyalist, and British) and their splinter groups -- seemed
straightforward compared to the fractal, Russian-doll-like complexity
of Lebanon's civil wars (Shiite versus Palestinian, for example) within
civil wars (Maronite versus Moslem and Druze) within regional conflicts
(Israel versus Syria) and surrogate wars (Iran versus the United
States) within, ultimately, the Cold War. In the fall of 1971, for
example, there were 58 different armed groups in West Beirut alone.
With so many people trying to kill each other for so many different
reasons, Beirut became to the technology of urban violence what a
tropical rainforest is to the evolution of plants.

Car bombs began to regularly terrorize Moslem West Beirut in the fall
of 1981, apparently as part of an Israeli strategy to evict the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. The Israeli
secret service, the Mossad, had previously employed car bombs in Beirut
to assassinate Palestinian leaders (novelist Ghassan Kanfani in July
1972, for example), so no one was especially surprised when evidence
emerged that Israel was sponsoring the carnage. According to Middle
Eastern schoalr Rashid Khalidi, "A sequence of public confessions by
captured drivers made clear these [car bombings] were being utilized by
the Israelis and their Phalangist allies to increase the pressure on
the PLO to leave."

Journalist Robert Fisk was in Beirut when an "enormous [car] bomb blew
a 45-foot-crater in the road and brought down an entire block of
apartments. The building collapsed like a concertina, crushing more
than 50 of its occupants to death, most of them Shia refugees from
southern Lebanon." Several of the car bombers were captured and
confessed that the bombs had been rigged by the Shin Bet, the Israeli
equivalent of the FBI or the British Special Branch. But if such
atrocities were designed to drive a wedge of terror between the PLO and
Lebanese Moslems, they had the inadvertent result (as did the Israeli
air force's later cluster-bombing of civilian neighborhoods) of turning
the Shias from informal Israeli allies into shrewd and resolute
enemies.

The new face of Shiite militancy was Hezbollah, formed in mid-1982 out
of an amalgamation of Islamic Amal with other pro-Khomeini
groupuscules. Trained and advised by the Iranian Pasdaran in the Bekaa
Valley, Hezbollah was both an indigenous resistance movement with deep
roots in the Shiite slums of southern Beirut and, at the same time, the
long arm of Iran's theocratic revolution. Although some experts espouse
alternative theories, Islamic Amal/Hezbollah is usually seen as the
author, with Iranian and Syrian assistance, of the devastating attacks
on American and French forces in Beirut during 1983. Hezbollah's
diabolic innovation was to marry the IRA's ANFO car bombs to the
kamikaze -- using suicide drivers to crash truckloads of explosives
into the lobbies of embassies and barracks in Beirut, and later into
Israeli checkpoints and patrols in southern Lebanon.

The United States and France became targets of Hezbollah and its Syrian
and Iranian patrons after the Multinational Force in Beirut, which
supposedly had landed to allow for the safe evacuation of the PLO from
that city, evolved into the informal and then open ally of the Maronite
government in its civil war against the Moslem-Druze majority. The
first retaliation against President Reagan's policy occurred on April
18, 1983, when a pickup truck carrying 2,000 pounds of ANFO explosives
suddenly swerved across traffic into the driveway of the oceanfront
U.S. embassy in Beirut. The driver gunned the truck past a startled
guard and crashed through the lobby door. "Even by Beirut standards,"
writes former CIA agent Robert Baer, "it was an enormous blast,
shattering windows. The USS Guadalcanal, anchored five miles off the
coast, shuddered from the tremors. At ground zero, the center of the
seven-story embassy lifted up hundreds of feet into the air, remained
suspended for what seemed an eternity, and then collapsed in a cloud of
dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper."

Whether as a result of superb intelligence or sheer luck, the bombing
coincided with a visit to the embassy of Robert Ames, the CIA's
national intelligence officer for the Near East. It killed him ("his
hand was found floating a mile offshore, the wedding ring still on his
finger") and all six members of the Beirut CIA station. "Never before
had the CIA lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a tragedy
from which the agency would never recover." It also left the Americans
blind in Beirut, forcing them to scrounge for intelligence scraps from
the French embassy or the British listening station offshore on Cyprus.
(A year later, Hezbollah completed their massacre of the CIA in Beirut
when they kidnapped and executed the replacement station chief, William
Buckley.) As a result, the Agency never foresaw the coming of the
mother-of-all-vehicle-bomb attacks.

Over the protests of Colonel Gerahty, the commander of the U.S. Marines
onshore in Beirut, Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor, Robert
McFarlane, ordered the Sixth Fleet in September to open fire on Druze
militia who were storming Lebanese Army Forces positions in the hills
above Beirut -- bringing the United States into the conflict brazenly
on the side of the reactionary Amin Gemayel government. A month later,
a five-ton Mercedes dump truck hurled past sandbagged Marine sentries
and smashed through a guardhouse into the ground floor of the "Beirut
Hilton," the U.S. military barracks in a former PLO headquarters next
to the international airport. The truck's payload was an incredible
12,000 pounds of high explosives. "It is said to have been the largest
non-nuclear blast ever [deliberately] detonated on the face of the
earth." "The force of the explosion," continues Eric Hammel in his
history of the Marine landing force, "initially lifted the entire
four-story structure, shearing the bases of the concrete support
columns, each measuring fifteen feet in circumference and reinforced by
numerous one and three quarter inch steel rods. The airborne building
then fell in upon itself. A massive shock wave and ball of flaming gas
was hurled in all directions." The Marine (and Navy) death toll of 241
was the Corps' highest single-day loss since Iwo Jima in 1945.

Meanwhile, another Hezbollah kamikaze had crashed his explosive-laden
van into the French barracks in West Beirut, toppling the eight-story
structure, killing 58 soldiers. If the airport bomb repaid the
Americans for saving Gemayal, this second explosion was probably a
response to the French decision to supply Saddam Hussein with
Super-Etendard jets and Exocet missiles to attack Iran. The hazy
distinction between local Shiite grievances and the interests of Tehran
was blurred further when two members of Hezbollah joined with 18 Iraqi
Shias to truck-bomb the U.S. embassy in Kuwait in mid-December. The
French embassy, the control tower at the airport, the main oil refinery
and an expatriate residential compound were also targeted in what was
clearly a stern warning to Iran's enemies.

Following another truck bombing against the French in Beirut as well as
deadly attacks on Marine outposts, the Multinational Force began to
withdraw from Lebanon in February 1984. It was Reagan's most stunning
geopolitical defeat. In the impolite phrase of Washington Post reporter
Bob Woodward, "Essentially we turned tail and ran and left Lebanon."
American power in Lebanon, added Thomas Friedman of the New York Times,
was neutralized by "just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a stolen truck."

"Car Bombs with Wings:
A History of the Car Bomb" (Part 2)
Mike Davis

The CIA's Car Bomb University (the 1980s)

"The CIA officers that Yousef worked with closely impressed upon
him one rule: never use the terms sabotage or assassination when
speaking with visiting congressmen." — Steve Coll, Ghost Wars

Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the
Reagan administration and, above all, CIA Director William Casey were
left thirsting for revenge against Hezbollah. "Finally in 1985,"
according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in Veil, his book on
Casey's career, "he worked out with the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb
to kill [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who they determined was one
of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks, but was involved in
the taking of American hostages in Beirut… It was Casey on his own,
saying, ‘I‘m going to solve the big problem by essentially getting
tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon — the car
bomb.'"

The CIA's own operatives, however, proved incapable of carrying out the
bombing, so Casey subcontracted the operation to Lebanese agents led by
a former British SAS officer and financed by Saudi Ambassador Prince
Bandar. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated about 50 yards
from Sheikh Fadlallah's house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded Shiite
neighborhood in southern Beirut. The sheikh wasn't harmed, but 80
innocent neighbors and passersby were killed and 200 wounded. Fadlallah
immediately had a huge "MADE IN USA" banner hung across the shattered
street, while Hezbollah returned tit for tat in September when a
suicide truck driver managed to break through the supposedly
impregnable perimeter defenses of the new U.S. embassy in eastern
(Christian) Beirut, killing 23 employees and visitors.

Despite the Fadlallah fiasco, Casey remained an enthusiast for using
urban terrorism to advance American goals, especially against the
Soviets and their allies in Afghanistan. A year after the Bir El-Abed
massacre, Casey won President Reagan's approval for NSDD-166, a secret
directive that, according to Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, inaugurated a
"new era of direct infusions of advanced U.S. military technology into
Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives
and sabotage techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military
officers."

U.S. Special Forces experts would now provide high-tech explosives and
teach state-of-the-art sabotage techniques, including the fabrication
of ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil) car bombs, to Pakistani
intelligence service (or ISI) officers under the command of Brigadier
Mohammed Yousaf. These officers, in turn, would tutor thousands of
Afghan and foreign mujahedin, including the future cadre of al-Qaeda,
in scores of training camps financed by the Saudis. "Under ISI
direction," Coll writes, "the mujahedin received training and malleable
explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in
Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and
commanders. Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career
officers."

Mujahedin car bombers, working with teams of snipers and assassins, not
only terrorized uniformed Soviet forces in a series of devastating
attacks in Afghanistan but also massacred leftwing intelligentsia in
Kabul, the country's capital. "Yousaf and the Afghan car-bombing squads
he trained," writes Coll, "regarded Kabul University professors as fair
game," as well as movie theaters and cultural events. Although some
members of the National Security Council reportedly denounced the
bombings and assassinations as "outright terrorism," Casey was
delighted with the results. Meanwhile, "by the late 1980s, the ISI had
effectively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political
parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist
rule." As a result, most of the billions of dollars that the Saudis and
Washington pumped into Afghanistan ended up in the hands of radical
Islamist groups sponsored by the ISI. They were also the chief
recipients of huge quantities of CIA-supplied plastic explosives as
well as thousands of advanced E-cell delay detonators.

It was the greatest technology transfer of terrorist technique in
history. There was no need for angry Islamists to take car-bomb
extension courses from Hezbollah when they could matriculate in a
CIA-supported urban-sabotage graduate program in Pakistan's frontier
provinces. "Ten years later," Coll observes, "the vast training
infrastructure that Yousaf and his colleagues built with the enormous
budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 — the specialized camps, the sabotage
training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on — would be
referred to routinely in America as ‘terrorist infrastructure.'"
Moreover the alumni of the ISI training camps like Ramzi Yousef, who
plotted the first 1993 World Trade Center attack, or his uncle Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, who allegedly designed the second, would soon be
applying their expertise on every continent.

Cities under Siege (the 1990s)

"The hour of dynamite, terror without limit, has arrived." —
Peruvian Journalist Gustavo Gorritti, 1992

Twenty-first century hindsight makes it clear that the defeat of the
U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1983–84, followed by the CIA's dirty
war in Afghanistan, had wider and more potent geopolitical
repercussions than the loss of Saigon in 1975. The Vietnam War was, of
course, an epic struggle whose imprint upon domestic American politics
remains profound, but it belonged to the era of the Cold War's bipolar
superpower rivalry. Hezbollah's war in Beirut and south Lebanon, on the
other hand, prefigured (and even inspired) the "asymmetric" conflicts
that characterize the millennium. Moreover, unlike peoples' war on the
scale sustained by the NLF and the North Vietnamese for more than a
generation, car-bombing and suicide terrorism are easily franchised and
gruesomely applicable in a variety of scenarios. Although rural
guerrillas survive in rugged redoubts like Kashmir, the Khyber Pass,
and the Andes, the center of gravity of global insurgency has moved
from the countryside back to the cities and their slum peripheries. In
this post-Cold-War urban context, the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine
barracks has become the gold standard of terrorism; the 9/11 attacks,
it can be argued, were only an inevitable scaling-up of the suicide
truck bomb to airliners.

Washington, however, was loath to recognize the new military leverage
that powerful vehicle bombs offered its enemies or even to acknowledge
their surprising lethality. After the 1983 Beirut bombings, the Sandia
National Laboratory in New Mexico began an intensive investigation into
the physics of truck bombs. Researchers were shocked by what they
discovered. In addition to the deadly air blast, truck bombs also
produced unexpectedly huge ground waves.

"The lateral accelerations propagated through the ground from a truck
bomb far exceed those produced during the peak magnitude of an
earthquake." Indeed, the scientists of Sandia came to the conclusion
that even an offsite detonation near a nuclear power plant might "cause
enough damage to lead to a deadly release of radiation or even a
meltdown." Yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1986 refused to
authorize the emplacement of vehicle barriers to protect nuclear-power
installations and made no move to alter an obsolete security plan
designed to thwart a few terrorists infiltrating on foot.

Indeed, Washington seemed unwilling to learn any of the obvious lessons
of either its Beirut defeat or its secret successes in Afghanistan. The
Reagan and Bush administrations appeared to regard the Hezbollah
bombings as flukes, not as a powerful new threat that would replicate
rapidly in the "blowback" of imperial misadventure and anti-Soviet
escapades. Although it was inevitable that other insurgent groups would
soon try to emulate Hezbollah, American planners — although partially
responsible — largely failed to foresee the extraordinary
"globalization" of car bombing in the 1990s or the rise of
sophisticated new strategies of urban destabilization that went with
it. Yet by the mid-1990s, more cities were under siege from bomb
attacks than at any time since the end of World War Two, and urban
guerrillas were using car and truck bombs to score direct hits on some
of the world's most powerful financial institutions. Each success,
moreover, emboldened groups to plan yet more attacks and recruited more
groups to launch their own "poor man's air force."

Beginning in April 1992, for example, the occult Maoists of Sendero
Luminoso came down from Peru's altiplano to spread terror throughout
the cities of Lima and Callao with increasingly more powerful
coche-bombas. "Large supplies of explosives," the magazine Caretas
pointed out, are "freely available in a mining nation," and the
senderistas were generous in their gifts of dynamite: bombing
television stations and various foreign embassies as well as a dozen
police stations and military camps. Their campaign eerily recapitulated
the car bomb's phylogeny as it progressed from modest detonations to a
more powerful attack on the American embassy, then to
Bloody-Friday-type public massacres using 16 vehicles at a time. The
climax (and Sendero's chief contribution to the genre) was an attempt
to blow up an entire neighborhood of "class enemies": a huge ANFO
explosion in the elite Miraflores district on the evening of July 16
that killed 22, wounded 120, and destroyed or damaged 183 homes, 400
businesses and 63 parked cars. The local press described Miraflores as
looking "as if an aerial bombardment had flattened the area."

If one of the virtues of an air force is the ability to reach halfway
around the world to surprise enemies in their beds, the car bomb truly
grew wings during 1993 as Middle Eastern groups struck at targets in
the Western Hemisphere for the first time. The World Trade Center
attack on February 26 was organized by master al-Qaeda bomb-maker Ramzi
Yousef working with a Kuwaiti engineer named Nidal Ayyad and immigrant
members of the Egyptian group, Gama'a al-Islamiyya, headed by Sheikh
Omar Abdul Rahman (whose U.S. visa had reputedly been arranged by the
CIA). Their extraordinary ambition was to kill tens of thousands of New
Yorkers with a powerful lateral blast that would crack the foundations
of one WTC tower and topple it on its twin. Yousef's weapon was a Ryder
van packed with an ingenious upgrade of the classic IRA and Hezbollah
ANFO explosive.

"The bomb itself," writes Peter Lange in his history of the bombing,
"consisted of four cardboard boxes filled with a slurry of urea nitrate
and fuel oil, with waste paper as a binder. The boxes were surrounded
by four-foot tanks of compressed hydrogen. They were connected by four
20-foot-long slow-burning fuses of smokeless powder wrapped in fabric.
Yousef balanced on his lap four vials of nitroglycerine." The
conspirators had no difficulty parking the van next to the load-bearing
south wall of the North Tower, but the massive explosive proved too
small — excavating a four-story deep crater in the basement, killing 6
and injuring 1,000 people, but failing to bring the tower down. "Our
calculations were not very accurate this time," wrote Ayyad in a
letter. "However we promise you that next it would will [sic] be very
precise and the Trade Center will be one of our targets."

Two weeks after the WTC attack, a car bomb almost as powerful exploded
in the underground parking garage of the Bombay Stock Exchange,
severely damaging the 28-story skyscraper and killing 50 office
workers. Twelve other car or motorcycle bombs soon detonated at other
prestige targets, killing an additional 207 people and injuring 1,400.
The bombings were revenge for sectarian riots a few months earlier in
which Indian Hindus had killed hundreds of Indian Moslems. The attacks
were reputedly organized from Dubai by exiled Bombay underworld king
Dawood Ibrahim at the behest of Pakistani intelligence. According to
one account, Dawood sent three boats from Dubai to Karachi where they
were loaded with military explosives. Indian customs officials were
then bribed to look the other way while the "black soup" was smuggled
into Bombay.

Corrupt officials were also rumored to have facilitated the suicide car
bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 17,
1993 which killed 30 and injured 242. The next year, a second "martyr,"
later identified as a 29-year-old Hezbollah militant from southern
Lebanon, leveled the seven-story Argentine-Israel Mutual Association,
slaughtering 85 and wounding more than 300. Both bombers carefully
followed the Beirut template; as did the Islamist militant who drove
his car into the central police headquarters in Algiers in January
1995, killing 42 and injuring over 280.

But the supreme acolytes of Hezbollah were the Tamil Tigers of Sri
Lanka, the only non-Moslem group that has practiced suicide car
bombings on a large scale. Indeed, their leader Prabhaakaran "made a
strategic decision to adopt the method of suicide attack after
observing its lethal effectiveness in the 1983 suicide bombings of the
US and French barracks in Beirut." Between their first such operation
in 1987 and 2000, they were responsible for twice as many suicide
attacks of all kinds as Hezbollah and Hamas combined. Although they
have integrated car bombs into regular military tactics (for example,
using kamikazes in trucks to open attacks on Sri Lankan army camps),
their obsession and "most prized theater of operation" in their
struggle for Tamil independence has been the Sri Lankan capital,
Colombo, which they first car-bombed in 1987 in a grisly attack on the
main bus terminal, burning scores of passengers to death inside crowded
buses.

In January 1996, a Black Tiger — as the suicide elite are called —
drove a truck containing 440 pounds of military high explosives into
the front of the Central Bank Building, resulting in nearly 1,400
casualties. Twenty months later in October 1997 in a more complex
operation, the Tigers attacked the twin towers of the Colombo World
Trade Center. They managed to maneuver through barricades and set off a
car bomb in front of the Center, then battled the police with
automatics and grenades. The following March, a suicide mini-bus with
shrapnel-filled bombs affixed to its sideboards was detonated outside
the main train station in the midst of a huge traffic jam. The 38 dead
included a dozen children in a school bus.

The Tamil Tigers are a mass nationalist movement with "liberated
territory," a full-scale army and even a tiny navy; moreover, 20,000
Tiger cadres received secret paramilitary training in the Indian state
of Tamil Nadu from 1983 to 1987, courtesy of Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi and India's CIA — the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). But such
sponsorship literally blew up in the face of the Indian Congress Party
leadership when Indira's son and successor Rajiv was killed by a female
Tiger suicide bomber in 1993. Indeed, the all-too-frequent pattern of
surrogate terrorism, whether sponsored by the CIA, RAW, or the KGB, has
been "return to sender" — most notoriously in the cases of those former
CIA "assets," blind Sheik Rahman and Osama bin Laden.

The Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 was a different and startling
species of blowback, organized by two angry U.S. veterans of the Gulf
War rather than by Iraq or any Islamist group. Although conspiracy
theorists have made much of a strange coincidence that put Terry
Nichols and Ramzi Yousef near each other in Cebu City in the
Philippines in November 1994, the design of the attack seems to have
been inspired by Timothy McVeigh's obsession with that devil's
cookbook, The Turner Diaries. Written in 1978, after Bloody Friday but
before Beirut, neo-Nazi William Pierce's novel describes with
pornographic relish how white supremacists destroy the FBI headquarters
in Washington D.C. with an ANFO truck bomb, then crash a plane carrying
a hijacked nuke into the Pentagon.

McVeigh carefully followed Pierce's simple recipe in the novel (several
tons of ammonium nitrate in a parked truck) rather than Yousef's more
complicated WTC formula, although he did substitute nitro racing fuel
and diesel oil for ordinary heating oil. Nonetheless, the explosion
that slaughtered 168 people in the Alfred Murrah Federal Building on
April 19, 1995 was three times more powerful than any of the truck-bomb
detonations that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and other
federal agencies had been studying at their test range in New Mexico.
Experts were amazed at the radius of destruction: "Equivalent to 4,100
pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as
far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on
people outside the building up to a half-mile away." Distant
seismographs recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter scale.

But McVeigh's good-ole-boy bomb, with its diabolical demonstration of
Heartland DIY ingenuity, was scarcely the last word in destructive
power; indeed, it was probably inevitable that the dark Olympics of
urban carnage would be won by a home team from the Middle East.
Although the casualty list (20 dead, 372 wounded) wasn't as long as
Oklahoma City's, the huge truck bomb that, in June 1996, alleged
Hezbollah militants left outside Dhahran's Khobar Towers — a high-rise
dormitory used by U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia — broke all
records in explosive yield, being the equivalent perhaps of twenty
1,000-pound bombs. Moreover, the death toll might have been as large as
the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1993 save for alert Air Force
sentries who began an evacuation shortly before the explosion. Still,
the blast (military-grade plastic explosive) left an incredible crater
85-feet wide and 35-feet deep.

Two years later, on August 7, 1998, al Qaeda claimed the championship
in mass murder when it crashed suicide truck bombs into the U.S.
embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in a replay
of the simultaneous 1993 attacks on the Marines and the French in
Beirut. Located near two of the busiest streets in the city without
adequate setback or protective glacis, the Nairobi embassy was
especially vulnerable, as Ambassador Prudence Bushnell had fruitlessly
warned the State Department. In the event, ordinary Kenyans — burnt
alive in their vehicles, lacerated by flying glass, or buried in
smoldering debris — were the principal victims of the huge explosion,
which killed several hundred and wounded more than 5,000. Another dozen
people died and almost 100 were injured in Dar-es-Salaam.

Sublime indifference to the collateral carnage caused by its devices,
including to innocent Moslems, remains a hallmark of operations
organized by the Al-Qaeda network. Like his forerunners Hermann Goering
and Curtis LeMay, Osama bin Laden seems to exult in the sheer
statistics of bomb damage — the competitive race to ever greater
explosive yields and killing ranges. One of the most lucrative of his
recent franchises (in addition to air travel, skyscrapers, and public
transport) has been car-bomb attacks on Western tourists in primarily
Moslem countries, although the October 2002 attack on a Bali nightclub
(202 dead) and the July 2005 bombing of hotels in Egypt's Sharm
el-Sheikh (88 dead) almost certainly killed as many local workers as
erstwhile "crusaders."

Form Follows Fear (the 1990s)

"The car bomb is the nuclear weapon of guerrilla warfare." —
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer

A "billion-pound explosion"? One meaning, of course, is the TNT yield
of three or four Hiroshima-size atomic weapons (which is to say, only a
smidgen of the explosive power of a single H-bomb). Alternately, one
billion (British) pounds ($1.45 billion) is what the IRA cost the City
of London in April 1993 when a blue dump-truck containing a ton of ANFO
exploded on Bishopsgate Road across from the NatWest Tower in the heart
of the world's second major financial center. Although one bystander
was killed and more than 30 injured by the immense explosion, which
also demolished a medieval church and wrecked the Liverpool Street
station, the human toll was incidental to the economic damage that was
the true goal of the attack. Whereas the other truck bomb campaigns of
the 1990s — Lima, Bombay, Colombo, and so forth — had followed
Hezbollah's playbook almost to the letter, the Bishopsgate bomb, which
Moloney describes as "the most successful military tactic since the
start of the Troubles," was part of a novel IRA campaign that waged war
on financial centers in order to extract British concessions during the
difficult peace negotiations that lasted through most of the 1990s.

Bishopsgate, in fact, was the second and most costly of three
blockbuster explosions carried out by the elite (and more or less
autonomous) South Armagh IRA under the leadership of the legendary
"Slab" Murphy. Almost exactly a year earlier, they had set off a truck
bomb at the Baltic Exchange in St. Mary Axe that rained a million
pounds of glass and debris on surrounding streets, killing 3 and
wounding almost 100 people. The damage, although less than Bishopsgate,
was still astonishing: about 800 million pounds or more than the
approximately 600 million pounds in total damage inflicted over 22
years of bombing in Northern Ireland. Then, in 1996, with peace talks
stalled and the IRA Army Council in revolt against the latest
cease-fire, the South Armagh Brigade smuggled into England a third huge
car bomb that they set off in the underground garage of one of the
postmodern office buildings near Canary Wharf Tower in the gentrified
London Docklands, killing two and causing nearly $150 million dollars
in damage. Total damage from the three explosions was at least $3
billion.

As Jon Coaffee points out in her book on the impact of the bombings, if
the IRA like the Tamil Tigers or Al Qaeda had simply wanted to sow
terror or bring life in London to a halt, they would have set off the
explosions at rush-hour on a business day — instead, they "were
detonated at a time when the City was virtually deserted" — and/or
attacked the heart of the transport infrastructure, as did the Islamist
suicide bombers who blew up London buses and subways in July 2005.
Instead, Slab Murphy and his comrades concentrated on what they
perceived to be a financial weak link: the faltering British and
European insurance industry. To the horror of their enemies, they were
spectacularly successful. "The huge payouts by insurance companies,"
commented the BBC shortly after Bishopsgate, "contributed to a crisis
in the industry, including the near-collapse of the world's leading
[re]insurance market, Lloyds of London." German and Japanese investors
threatened to boycott the City unless physical security was improved
and the government agreed to subsidize insurance costs.

Despite a long history of London bombings by the Irish going back to
the Fenians and Queen Victoria, neither Downing Street, nor the City of
London Police had foreseen this scale of accurately targeted physical
and financial damage. (Indeed, Slab Murphy himself might have been
surprised; like the original ANFO bombs, these super-bombs were
probably a wee bit of serendipity for the IRA.) The City's response was
a more sophisticated version of the "ring of steel" (concrete barriers,
high iron fences, and impregnable gates) that had been built around
Belfast's city center after Bloody Friday in 1972. Following
Bishopsgate, the financial press clamored for similar protection: "The
City should be turned into a medieval-style walled enclave to prevent
terrorist attacks."

What was actually implemented in the City and later in the Docklands
was a technologically more advanced network of traffic restrictions and
cordons, CCTV cameras, including "24-hour Automated Number Plate
Recording (ANPR) cameras, linked to police databases," and intensified
public and private policing. "In the space of a decade," writes
Coaffee, "the City of London was transformed into the most surveilled
space in the UK and perhaps the world with over 1500 surveillance
cameras operating, many of which are linked to the ANPR system."

Since September 11, 2001, this anti-terrorist surveillance system has
been extended throughout London's core in the benign guise of Mayor Ken
Livingstone's celebrated "congestion pricing" scheme to liberate the
city from gridlock. According to one of Britain's major Sunday papers:

"The Observer has discovered that MI5, Special Branch and the
Metropolitan Police began secretly developing the system in the wake of
the 11 September attacks. In effect, the controversial charging scheme
will create one of the most daunting defence systems protecting a major
world city when it goes live a week tomorrow. It is understood that the
system also utilizes facial recognition software which automatically
identifies suspects or known criminals who enter the eight-square-mile
zone. Their precise movements will be tracked by camera from the point
of entry… However, civil liberty campaigners yesterday claimed that
millions had been misled over the dual function of the scheme, promoted
primarily as a means of reducing congestion in central London."
The addition in 2003 of this new panopticon traffic scan to London's
already extensive system of video surveillance ensures that the average
citizen is "caught on CCTV cameras 300 times a day." It may make it
easier for the police to apprehend non-suicidal terrorists, but it does
little to protect the city from well-planned and competently disguised
vehicle bomb attacks. Blair's "Third Way" has been a fast lane for the
adoption of Orwellian surveillance and the usurpation of civil
liberties, but until some miracle technology emerges (and none is in
sight) that allows authorities from a distance to "sniff" a molecule or
two of explosive in a stream of rush-hour traffic, the car bombers will
continue to commute to work.

The "King" of Iraq (the 2000s)

"Insurgents exploded 13 car bombs across Iraq on Sunday, including
eight in Baghdad within a three-hour span." — Associated Press news
report, January 1, 2006

Car bombs — some 1,293 between 2004 and 2005, according to researchers
at the Brookings Institution — have devastated Iraq like no other land
in history. The most infamous, driven or left by sectarian jihadists,
have targeted Iraqi Shiites in front of their homes, mosques, police
stations, and markets: 125 dead in Hilla (February 28, 2005); 98 in
Mussayib (July 16); 114 in Baghdad (September 14); 102 in Blad
(September 29); 50 in Abu Sayda (November 19); and so on.

Some of the devices have been gigantic, like the stolen fuel-truck bomb
that devastated Mussayib, but what is most extraordinary has been their
sheer frequency — in one 48-hour-period in July 2005 at least 15
suicide car bombs exploded in or around Baghdad. The sinister figure
supposedly behind the worst of these massacres is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the Jordanian arch-terrorist who reportedly criticized Osama bin Laden
for insufficient zeal in attacking domestic enemies like the "infidel
Shias." Al-Zarqawi, it is claimed, is pursuing an essentially
eschatological rather than political goal: a cleansing of enemies
without end until the Earth is ruled by a single, righteous caliphate.

Toward this end, he — or those invoking his name — seems to have access
to an almost limitless supply of bomb vehicles (some of them apparently
stolen in California and Texas, then shipped to the Middle East) as
well as Saudi and other volunteers eager to martyr themselves in flame
and molten metal for the sake of taking a few Shiite school kids,
market venders, or foreign "crusaders" with them. Indeed the supply of
suicidal madrassa graduates seems to far exceed what the logic of
suicide bombing (as perfected by Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers)
actually demands: Many of the explosions in Iraq could just as easily
be detonated by remote control. But the car bomb — at least in
Al-Zarqawi's relentless vision — is evidently a stairway to heaven as
well as the chosen weapon of genocide.

But Al Zarqawi did not originate car bomb terrorism along the banks of
the Tigris and Euphrates; that dark honor belongs to the CIA and its
favorite son, Iyad Allawi. As the New York Times revealed in June 2004:

"Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an
exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents
into Baghdad in the early 1990s's to plant bombs and sabotage
government facilities under the direction of the CIA, several former
intelligence officials say. Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National
Accord, used car bombs and other explosives devices smuggled into
Baghdad from northern Iraq… One former Central Intelligence Agency
officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a
bombing during that period ‘blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were
killed.'"

According to one of the Times' informants, the bombing campaign, dead
school kids and all, "was a test more than anything else, to
demonstrate capability." It allowed the CIA to portray the then-exiled
Allawi and his suspect group of ex-Baathists as a serious opposition to
Saddam Hussein and an alternative to the coterie (so favored by
Washington neoconservatives) around Ahmed Chalabi. "No one had any
problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," another CIA veteran
reflected. "I don't think anyone could have known how things would turn
out today."

Today, of course, car bombs rule Iraq. In a June 2005 article entitled,
"Why the car bomb is king in Iraq," James Dunnigan warned that it was
supplanting the roadside bomb (which "are more frequently discovered,
or defeated with electronic devices") as the "most effective weapon" of
Sunni insurgents as well as of Al Zarqawi, and thus "the terrorists are
building as many as they can." The recent "explosive growth" in car
ownership in Iraq, he added, had made it "easier for the car bombs to
just get lost in traffic."

In this kingdom of the car bomb, the occupiers have withdrawn almost
completely into their own forbidden city, the "Green Zone," and their
well-fortified and protected military bases. This is not the high-tech
City of London with sensors taking the place of snipers, but a totally
medievalized enclave surrounded by concrete walls and defended by M1
Abrams tanks and helicopter gunships as well as an exotic corps of
corporate mercenaries (including Gurkhas, ex-Rhodesian commandos,
former British SAS, and amnestied Colombian paramilitaries). Once the
Xanadu of the Baathist ruling class, the 10-square-kilometer Green
Zone, as described by journalist Scott Johnson, is now a surreal theme
park of the American way of life:

"Women in shorts and T-shirts jog down broad avenues and the Pizza Inn
does a brisk business from the parking lot of the heavily fortified
U.S. Embassy. Near the Green Zone Bazaar, Iraqi kids hawk pornographic
DVDs to soldiers. Sheik Fuad Rashid, the U.S.-appointed imam of the
local mosque, dresses like a nun, dyes his hair platinum blond and
claims that Mary Mother of Jesus appeared to him in a vision (hence the
getup). On any given night, residents can listen to karaoke, play
badminton or frequent one of several rowdy bars, including an
invitation-only speakeasy run by the CIA."

Outside the Green Zone, of course, is the ‘Red Zone' where ordinary
Iraqis can be randomly and unexpectedly blown to bits by car bombers or
strafed by American helicopters. Not surprisingly, wealthy Iraqis and
members of the new government are clamoring for admission to the
security of the Green Zone, but U.S. officials told Newsweek last year
that "plans to move the Americans out are ‘fantasy.'" Billions have
been invested in the Green Zone and a dozen other American enclaves
officially known for a period as "enduring camps," and even prominent
Iraqis have been left to forage for their own security outside the
blast walls of these exclusive bubble Americas. A population that has
endured Saddam's secret police, U.N. sanctions, and American cruise
missiles, now steels itself to survive the car bombers who prowl poor
Shiite neighborhoods looking for grisly martyrdom. For the most selfish
reasons, let us hope that Baghdad is not a metaphor for our collective
future.

[This article — a preliminary sketch for a book-length study — will
appear next year in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the
National Insecurity State (Routledge 2007), edited by Michael Sorkin.
Copyright 2006 Mike Davis. Mike Davis is the author most recently of
The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press)
and Planet of Slums (Verso). He lives in San Diego.]