During the 1920s and 1930s, terrorism became associated more with the repressive practices employed by dictatorial states than with the violence of nonstate groups like the anarchists. The word terrorism was used to describe the wanton violence and intimidation inflicted by the Nazi, fascist, and totalitarian regimes that respectively came to power in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The repressive means these governments employed against their citizens involved beatings, unlawful detentions, torture, so-called death squads (often consisting of off-duty or plain-clothes security or police officers), and other forms of intimidation. Such practices by governments against their own citizens continue today.

Recent history records the use of such measures by the military dictatorships that took power in Argentina, Chile, and Greece during the 1970s. But these state-sanctioned acts of violence are more generally termed terror to distinguish them from violence committed by nonstate entities. As noted previously, the word terrorism is generally reserved for acts committed by groups outside government.

D Anticolonialist Terrorism

After World War II, terrorism reverted to its previous revolutionary associations. During the 1940s and 1950s, “terrorism” was used to describe the violence perpetrated by indigenous nationalist, anticolonialist organizations that arose throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in opposition to continued European rule. Countries such as Israel, Kenya, Cyprus, and Algeria, for example, owe their independence at least in part to nationalist movements that used terrorism.

The most spectacular terrorist incident of the anticolonial period was the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel, by a Jewish underground group known as the Irgun Zvai Le'umi (National Military Organization). The hotel was attacked because it served at that time as the military headquarters and offices of the British administration in Palestine. Ninety-one people were killed and 45 others injured: men, women, Arabs, Jews, and Britons alike. The bombing ranks among the most deadly terrorist incidents of the 20th century. The Irgun's commander at the time was Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel and 1978 Nobel Peace Prize cowinner.

Begin is not alone among those once called terrorists who later ascended to the highest levels of power in their newly independent countries. Others include Kenya's president Jomo Kenyatta, Cyprus's Archbishop Makarios, and Algeria's president Ahmed Ben Bella.

E The Late 1960s and 1970s

During the late 1960s and 1970s terrorism assumed more clearly ideological motivations. Various disenfranchised or exiled nationalist minorities—as exemplified by the PLO—also embraced terrorism as a means to draw attention to their plight and generate international support for their cause. The PLO sought to create a state in what was historically known as Palestine: the land that became Israel in 1948 and the West Bank and Gaza Strip—territories occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967. A Palestinian group, in fact, was responsible for the incident that is considered to mark the beginning of the current era of international terrorism. On July 22, 1968, three armed Palestinians belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an Israeli El Al commercial flight en route from Rome, Italy, to Tel Aviv, Israel. Although commercial planes had often been hijacked before, this was the first clearly political hijacking. The act was designed to create an international crisis and thereby generate publicity.

Two years later, the PFLP staged an even more dramatic international incident, when it hijacked three commercial airliners—two American and one Swiss—although an attempt to seize a fourth plane, a British aircraft, was foiled. The planes were flown to a remote airstrip in Jordan and blown up after the passengers were evacuated, as television cameras recorded the incident for a worldwide audience.

The murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games provides one of the most notorious examples of terrorists' ability to bring their cause to world attention. Members of a Palestinian group called Black September seized the athletes at the Summer Games held in Munich, Germany. A global audience that had tuned in to watch the Olympics found themselves witnessing a grisly hostage situation that ended in a botched rescue attempt by German authorities in which both the terrorists and their captives were killed.

The PLO effectively exploited the publicity generated by the Munich hostage taking. In 1974 PLO leader Yasir Arafat received an invitation to address the UN General Assembly and the UN subsequently granted special observer status to the PLO. Within a decade, the PLO, an entity not attached to any state, had formal diplomatic relations with more countries (86) than did Israel (72)—the actual, established nation-state. The PLO would likely never have attained such recognition without the attention that its international terrorist campaign focused on the plight of Palestinians in refugee camps.

At a time of growing ethnic and nationalist awareness worldwide, other nationalist groups began to emulate the Palestinian example to increase recognition of their grievances. In Canada, for instance, a group of French-Canadian separatists kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner to Québec, and Pierre LaPorte, Québec's Minister of Labor, in October 1970. The group called itself the Front de Libération de Québec (FLQ), or Quebec Liberation Front. Although Cross was released unharmed, LaPorte was brutally murdered. Fearing more widespread unrest, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the country's War Powers Act in Québec, which suspended civil liberties and accorded the army extraordinary powers to maintain order in the province and uproot the FLQ.

Also during the late 1960s and early 1970s, political extremists began to form terrorist groups that opposed American intervention in Vietnam (see Vietnam War) and what they claimed were the fundamental social and economic inequities of the modern capitalist liberal-democratic state. These extremists were drawn mostly from radical student organizations and left-wing movements then active in Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States. Terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy received training at Palestinian camps in the Middle East. Among Baader-Meinhof's most famous acts was the 1977 kidnapping and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, a wealthy Germany industrialist. The Red Brigades achieved their greatest notoriety for the kidnapping and execution of former Italian Premier Aldo Moro in 1978.

F The 1980s and 1990s

Right-wing, or neo-fascist and neo-Nazi, terrorism movements also arose in many Western European countries and the United States during the late 1970s in response to the violence perpetrated by left-wing organizations. However, the right-wing groups lacked both the numbers and popular support that their left-wing counterparts enjoyed. Thus the violence of these right-wing groups—while occasionally quite deadly—was mostly sporadic and short-lived. The three most serious incidents connected to right-wing terrorists occurred in Bologna, Italy; Munich, Germany; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In Bologna a 1980 bombing of a crowded rail station killed 84 people and wounded 180 others. The date of the bombing coincided with the opening of a trial in Bologna of right-wingers accused of a 1976 train bombing. Also in 1980 a bomb planted by a member of a neo-fascist group exploded at Munich's Oktoberfest celebration, killing 14 and injuring 215 others. In 1995 white supremacists carried out a truck-bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which claimed the lives of 168 people.

Two of the most important developments in international terrorism during the 1980s were the rise in state-sponsored terrorism and the resurgence of religious terrorism. An example of an attack believed to be state sponsored was the attempted assassination in 1981 of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish citizen who allegedly was working for the Soviet and Bulgarian secret services. Other examples include the Iranian-backed car- and truck-bombings of the American embassy and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983 and Libya's role in the in-flight bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Religion was used to justify and legitimize, if not actually encourage, terrorist violence in the assassinations of Egypt's president Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 by Islamic extremists and of Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 by a Jewish militant. In both cases the assassins considered it a religious duty to halt the peace efforts of their victims. Muslim terrorists carried out the bombing of New York City's World Trade Center in 1993, and an obscure Japanese religious sect was behind the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization carried out simultaneous suicide bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; a suicide attack in 2000 on a U.S. navy warship in the harbor of Aden, Yemen; and the suicide attacks of September 11, 2001.

G September 11 Attacks

The events of September 11, 2001, have no precedent in the history of terrorism. On that day 19 terrorists belonging to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization hijacked four passenger aircraft shortly after they departed from airports in Boston, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. The first plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City shortly before 9:00 am. About 15 minutes later, a second aircraft struck the south tower. Shortly afterward, a third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth aircraft crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania after its passengers, hearing by cell phone of the other hijackings, attempted to take control of the plane from the hijackers before they could strike another target. Before September 11, terrorists had killed no more than about 1,000 Americans, in the United States and abroad, during the modern era of international terrorism, which began in 1968. Approximately three times that number perished on September 11.

The attacks also showed a level of patience and detailed planning rarely seen among terrorist movements today. The hijackers stunned the world with their determination to kill themselves and take the lives of the hijacked passengers and crews as well as the lives of thousands of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The United States reacted by declaring a global war against terrorism. In the first phase of the war, U.S. forces launched a massive attack on al-Qaeda's training and logistics bases in Afghanistan and toppled Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement. The Taliban had provided bin Laden and his followers with sanctuary and an opportunity to plan and orchestrate their worldwide terrorist campaign. See also September 11 Attacks.

The September 11 attacks prompted intense scrutiny of why the United States government had failed to detect or thwart the attacks—and what it should do to prevent future attacks. In 2003 a congressional inquiry detailed systemic problems in the U.S. government's counterterrorism efforts prior to the attacks. It revealed how the terrorists had entered and remained in the United States without raising suspicions, and how key opportunities to disrupt the attack were missed because of poor communication between the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies.

In 2004 an independent, bipartisan commission released an exhaustive account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks. The 9/11 Commission, known in full as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, found “failures of imagination, policy, capability, and management” across the government. Government leaders, it said, had failed to fully appreciate the sophistication and lethality of al-Qaeda and the probability that the group would launch an attack on U.S. soil.

The commission recommended a three-pronged strategy for preventing future attacks: (1) continuing to root out and attack terrorists, (2) preventing the further growth of Islamist terrorism, and (3) developing better protections against terrorist attacks. As part of this strategy, the commission recommended several changes in government structure. It proposed the creation of a national intelligence director to coordinate all intelligence-gathering work. It also urged the establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center to analyze all terrorism-related intelligence and to plan counterterrorism operations.