Lone Wolf and Autonomous Cell Terrorism

Jeffrey Kaplan, Heléne Lööw, Leena Malkki, Jeffrey Kaplan, Heléne Lööw, Leena Malkki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138851221
• eBook ISBN: 9781317530428
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

President Obama has declared that the greatest terrorist threat which America faces is attacks by lone wolf terrorists. This volume expands the lone wolf rubric to include autonomous cells: small groups of terrorists who cooperate, but operate independently. The challenge presented by lone wolves and autonomous cells, unlike the threat emanating from established terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, has proven intractable because of the difficulty of gathering intelligence on these actors or effectively countering their actions. Lone wolves operate under the radar, staging deadly attacks such as that at the Boston Marathon, and the 2011 attacks in Norway. This volume includes Theory and Policy Studies, individual case studies and the technological impacts of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons as well as the impact of social media in the process of recruitment and radicalization.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Terrorism & Political Violence.

Introduction

JEFFREY KAPLAN

Department of Religious Studies and Anthropology; and Institute for the Study of Religion, Violence, and Memory, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA

HELÉNE LÖÖW

Department of History, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

LEENA MALKKI

Network for European Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

The most likely scenario that we have to guard against right now ends up being more of a lone wolf operation than a large, well-coordinated terrorist attack.

—President Barack Obama¹

Lone wolf and autonomous cell violence is as old as time itself. Phineas, the biblical figure who might well be considered the archetypical Lone Wolf (Numbers 25:1-9) is credited with averting the wrath of God from the Hebrews by taking it upon himself to murder an Israelite man and a Midianite woman whose miscegenatistic coupling threatened the survival of the Hebrew people. Phineas’ act was cited by the Sicarii, a radical offshoot of the 1st-century Zealots, as the inspiration for the doomed uprising against Roman rule, which ultimately led to the expulsion of the Jewish people from the Holy Land. In recent years, Phineas inspired eponymous organizations or networks in the American Racist Right and the Israeli Radical Right.² The “Lone Avenger” motif has appeared in every era and in virtually every culture in the world.

The Lone Wolf Threat Today

As evidenced by the quotation by President Obama which precedes this introduction, “lone wolves” have become a term of art which is found in government and security circles no less than in the popular media. Even if lone wolves have always existed, it is commonly believed that it is a phenomenon distinct to our times that reflects many general trends in terrorism, conflicts, and societies in general.³ The Internet and social media are among major recent developments that have enabled communication in ways and in scope that was not possible before. More generally, in today’s globalized world, the power of an individual to do good or bad is believed to have increased greatly. Lone wolf terrorists are essentially an extreme manifestation of the feared “super-empowered angry men”⁴ who are believed to be next-to-impossible to detect in advance, but capable of major destruction.

One example of what such angry men can do was given on July 22, 2011, when the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik decided to turn the fantasies that had been flourishing in radical anti-Muslim subcultures into reality with a frightening determination and cold bloodiness. Breivik took lone wolf terrorism to a new dimension; he carried out two totally different kinds of attacks, one a car bomb in Oslo, and the other a shooting spree on the island of Utøya, Norway. His targets were mainly youngsters and no lone wolf has single-handedly killed more people in a single shooting spree than he did. His case is discussed in depth by Mattias Gardell in an article in this volume.

It is feared that lone wolves may be capable of much more than this. The ultimate threat scenario combines the unpredictability of lone operators with worries about the proliferation of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons in the post-Cold War world. Until now, this scenario was found disturbing but unlikely because the terrorists seemed to have neither motivation nor capability for such kinds of attacks. Now, many feel that it is not safe to assume that anymore. Two articles in this volume explore this scenario. Gary Ackerman and Lauren Pinson provide a thorough analysis of the CBRN pursuit of lone actors in history, while Patrick Ellis looks at what capabilities may be within the reach of the lone operators or small groups in the future, as well as a discussion about possible countermeasures to secure against this kind of an attack.

This apocalyptic scenario partly explains why so much attention is paid to the lone wolf threat. The U.S. is not alone in its focus on lone operators. Lone wolves are defined as the most significant terrorist threat in Europe as well. EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove has stated that EU intelligence and other “terrorism experts” have pegged the number of lone wolves operating on the continent to be somewhere in the 400 s:

“It is a phenomenon of ‘Lone Wolves,’ as we call them,” EU top Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told the German news agency DPA. “We can estimate that they are in the 400 s all across Europe.”⁵

These comments were offered in the context of the killings of Mohammad Merah, a French-Algerian allegedly operating in the name of Al Qaeda. This makes Merah’s identification as a lone wolf dubious. Rather than being taken alive, Merah jumped out the window with “guns blazing,” making it impossible to know the degree to which Merah may have operated as a lone wolf.⁶ More dubious still is the claim that 400 lone wolves are operating in the EU. By its very nature, lone wolf terrorism is opportunistic and unpredictable. There is no way to reliably estimate the number of lone wolves in the EU or anywhere else. If it was that easy, detection and thus presumably intervention would not be such a big challenge.

While Breivik’s actions transfixed European observers, lone wolf actors in the United States have undertaken more focused, but no less effective, attacks. The most well-known recent American lone wolf actor is Maj. Nidal Hassan. Major Hassan, an army medical officer based at Ft. Hood in Texas, was reportedly disaffected by American actions in the Islamic world and was himself facing deployment when he went on a shooting spree, killing thirteen and wounding another thirty persons. Found guilty of the murders, Major Hassan has been sentenced to death.⁷

A similar attack at an American base in Kuwait occurred when a U.S. Army Sergeant, Hasan Akbar, lobbed a grenade at fellow servicemen and followed up with automatic weapons fire, claiming that his act was intended to stop Americans from killing more Muslims in the Middle East. Then on April 15, 2013, two brothers acting as an autonomous cell set off ingenious home-made pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Miscalculating the design of the bombs, the blast scattered shrapnel only at knee level, killing only three but seriously injuring over two hundred. The act was soon followed by a massive police operation to capture the suspects. One of the brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed during the chase and his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was finally captured. The Boston Marathon bombing was the most effective act of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Oklahoma City too was the act of a two-man autonomous cell. Timothy McVeigh carried out the bombing and Terry Nichols dealt with the logistics of the act.

The contrast between the Oklahoma City bombing and all of the lone wolf and autonomous cell actions considered in this volume is instructive. In the post-9/11 cases, lone wolf attacks are by default and often erroneously identified with radical Islam. Oklahoma City by contrast was motivated primarily as revenge for the deaths of the Branch Dravidians who died in a standoff with the FBI and was carried out by a far right-wing actor. Nonetheless, many of the 21st-century lone wolf and autonomous cell attacks center around either Islamist or anti-Muslim extremists.⁸

The Islamic element of the contemporary lone wolf phenomenon is what most concerns governments and security services. The decade-long War on Terrorism has degraded the most threatening of the established Islamist terrorist groups. Al Qaeda central, for example, has been pushed to the periphery of the Islamic world and its leaders forced to live furtive lives ever in fear of the next cruise missile to fall on their heads. Its charismatic leader, Osama Bin Laden, was killed by a team of Navy SEALs in Pakistan in 2011. He was only the most well-known AQ casualty. Bin Laden’s second-in-command Saeed al-Shihri was also killed by an American drone. While there has been a great deal of controversy over the accuracy of U.S. military claims and increasing reporting of a vast underestimation of civilian casualties in the drone campaign,⁹ it is widely believed that between military pressure and the cruise missile campaign, AQ central’s command and control now constitutes a virtually negligible terrorist threat.

What remains of AQ is the third leg of the Command, Control and Communication (C3) triangle: namely, communication. Arguably the most significant casualty of the drone war was the American-born propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, who personified the new breed of Islamist radical. A convert to radical Islam, he transcended the world of Western AQ wannabes by making contact with his distant heroes, finding acceptance in their closed and highly compartmentalized ranks, and utilizing digital media to attract an unknown number of Western Islamists—many of whom like himself were recent converts to Islam.

Awlaki and the Western jihadists that he targeted in his writings constitute a nightmare for Western intelligence agencies. As border controls in the U.S. and to a much lesser degree the EU become increasingly effective, a 9/11 or 7/7 style mega-event utilizing imported jihadists is today taken less seriously as a threat. However, there is little defense against an individual citizen of a Western country with no record of radical activity in the past who, for reasons of his or her own, decides to strike a blow against the powers who are perceived as waging a war on Islam. To be sure, there is nothing innovative about this kind of proxy war. Western citizens acting in the name of foreign terrorist groups is a venerable terrorist tactic. Such actions may actively involve members of the organization. One example of this is the case of Murielle Degauque, a young Belgian woman who was convinced to carry out an Islamist-inspired suicide bombing with the aid of her husband and other terrorist operatives.¹⁰ Her case stands out as an example of the near impossibility of detecting and deterring homegrown terrorist strikes so long as the lone wolf actor avoids the mistake of seeking contact with the group or publicizing their beliefs or intentions on social media or the Internet. How then to counter cases in which the decision to strike and the means with which the action is to be conducted are left entirely to the would-be terrorist? Articles by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Gary A. Ackerman and Lauren E. Pinson, Christopher Hewitt, and George Michael examine various aspects of the problem of detection and deterrence.

It is important to keep in mind that, contrary to popular perception, lone wolves are not alone in the true meaning of the word. This point is highlighted throughout this volume. Lone wolves do not sit in dark cellars becoming self-radicalized (to use a term currently popular in the EU) in front of a computer, contrary to popular perceptions of the phenomenon. Lone wolves, however lonely they seem to be, are very much part of larger communities of likeminded actors. The fact that some seem to have spent most of their time in front of a computer does not mean they are alone—modern communication technology is just exactly what the word say, a technology to communicate with others.

The primary means of detecting and hopefully deterring lone wolf attacks is believed to be an effective monitoring of the Internet for signs of radicalization or incipient violence. This approach applies to both lone wolf terrorists and school shooters. Particularly in the world of school shooters, there are often traces of incipient violence that appear with little or no effort to shield these communications from outside observation. Failing interdiction, as the paradigmatic case of Anders Breivik demonstrates, the on-line traces of the perpetrators serve a forensic function, offering lessons to authorities as they prepare for the inevitable next violent tragedy.

The technical aspects of Internet surveillance are the subjects of the paper co-written by Katie Cohen, Fredrik Johansson, Lisa Kaati, and Jonas Clausen Mork from the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI). Their article demonstrates the inherent difficulties involved in monitoring the Internet. It documents ways in which police and intelligence agencies in Europe go about the nearly impossible task of mining the unfathomably vast sea of messaging on the Internet. It is no surprise that the United States has gone light years further in its efforts to mine the Internet for signs of foes real or imagined. The revelations of the National Security Agency’s overreach involving their obtaining on-line data on virtually every American citizen and every foreign national who might correspond with American citizens began with Edward Snowden’s leak of a trove of classified NSA files.¹¹ In light of these revelations, the warning contained in Cohen et al.’s article seems prescient:

It also challenges the feeling of a place—in our case the Internet—being truly public, in the sense of allowing and accepting the presence of peo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. On Tribalism: Auxiliaries, Affiliates, and Lone Wolf Political Violence
• 3. Counterinsurgency and Lone Wolf Terrorism
• 4. Law Enforcement Tactics and their Effectiveness in Dealing With American Terrorism: Organizations, Autonomous Cells, and Lone Wolves
• 5. Toward a Profile of Lone Wolf Terrorists: What Moves an Individual From Radical Opinion to Radical Action
• 6. The Pre-1914 Anarchist “Lone Wolf” Terrorist and Governmental Responses
• 7. Men in Black: Dynamics, Violence, and Lone Wolf Potential
• 8. Lone Wolf Islamic Terrorism: Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (Carlos Bledsoe) Case Study
• 9. Crusader Dreams: Oslo 22/7, Islamophobia, and the Quest for a Monocultural Europe
• 10. Hatred of the System: Menacing Loners and Autonomous Cells in the Netherlands
• 11. Political Elements in Post-Columbine School Shootings in Europe and North America
• 12. Lone Wolf Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Examination of Capabilities and Countermeasures
• 13. An Army of One: Assessing CBRN Pursuit and Use by Lone Wolves and Autonomous Cells
• 14. Detecting Linguistic Markers for Radical Violence in Social Media
• Index