Intersections of Crime and Terror

James J.F. Forest

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317980209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

During the last ten years an increasing number of government and media reports, scholarly books and journal articles, and other publications have focused our attention on the expanded range of interactions between international organized crime and terrorist networks. A majority of these interactions have been in the form of temporary organizational alliances (or customer-supplier relationships) surrounding a specific type of transaction or resource exchange, like document fraud or smuggling humans, drugs or weapons across a particular border. The environment in which terrorists and criminals operate is also a central theme of this literature.

These research trends suggest the salience of this book which addresses how organized criminal and terrorist networks collaborate, share knowledge and learn from each other in ways that expand their operational capabilities. The book contains broad conceptual pieces, historical analyses, and case studies that highlight different facets of the intersection between crime and terrorism. These chapters collectively help us to identify and appreciate a variety of dynamics at the individual, organizational, and contextual levels. These dynamics, in turn, inform a deeper understanding of the security threat posted by terrorists and criminal networks and how to respond more effectively.

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

Criminals and Terrorists: An Introduction

On January 24, 1878, a Russian revolutionary named Vera Zasulich became a populist hero after shooting and seriously wounding Colonel Fyodor Trepov, the oppressive and widely reviled governor of St. Petersburg who had recently abused a political prisoner. At her trial, when asked why she threw down her gun after the attack, she responded, “I am a terrorist not a murderer.”¹ Vera’s belief in the legitimacy of her actions—to her, the shooting was an act of political justice, not criminality—reflects a common theme throughout the world of terrorism, a world full of ideological attempts to justify violence. Criminals are motivated by a broad spectrum of reasons like personal enrichment, revenge, hatred of others, passion, psychological angst, and so forth, while terrorists believe that their actions—even the most violent or criminal—are justified by a higher cause. And yet, it remains difficult sometimes to separate terrorist and criminal activity. For example, terrorists maim, kill, and destroy, and it would be difficult to find a court of law anywhere in the civilized world that does not view these as crimes, regardless of motives or ultimate goals. Terrorists have also routinely engaged in money laundering, theft, fraud, extortion, smuggling (including drugs, weapons, and humans), bank robbery, and many other kinds of criminal activity.

In truth, as Alex Schmid notes, criminal and terrorist organizations have much in common: both are rational actors, they produce victims, they use similar tactics such as kidnapping and assassination, they operate secretly, and both are criminalized by the ruling regime and stand in opposition to the state.² However, by portraying their criminality with a cloak of ideological justification, politically violent actors demonstrate how purpose matters. As David Rapoport recently observed, the act of robbing a bank or engaging in drug trafficking can be to enrich oneself as a person, or to get money for an organization that sees itself as creating a better society.³ Further, as Schmid notes, terrorism and crime are distinguished not only by different purposes (e.g., political motivation versus a greater share of illicit markets), but also by their violence (e.g., terrorists tend to be less discriminate than criminals), and by their communication strategies (e.g., terrorists claim responsibility for violent acts and use the media to propagate their cause, whereas criminals usually avoid the media).⁴

It is also important to note that terrorists generally loathe being labeled as ordinary criminals. However, the story of Vera above represents one of relatively few examples in which the term “terrorist” was embraced by the perpetrators of the violence. Groups and individuals engaging in terrorism have much preferred to use labels like “freedom fighters,” or in the case of some religious groups, “holy warriors.” For example, Menachem Begin, the leader of an Israeli terrorist group known as Irgun, insisted that he led a group of “freedom fighters” and that the British were terrorists.⁵ In his September 13, 1982 court statement, Weather Underground member David Gilbert declared, “We are neither terrorists nor criminals. It is precisely because of our love of life, because we revel in the human spirit, that we became freedom fighters against this racist and deadly imperialist system.”⁶ More recently, Osama bin Laden often referred to al Qaida and other militant Islamists as “freedom fighters.”⁷

According to David Rapoport’s essential “Four Waves of Terrorism,” this intense desire for terrorists to portray their actions using different terms has changed in curious ways over the last century. In his analysis, modern non-state terror began in the 1870s and produced four successive overlapping waves. The “Anarchist” wave was basically completed by the 1920s; the “Anti-Colonial” wave succeeded it and lasted until the 1960s. The “New Left” wave then began and was virtually over by 2000, and the “Religious” Wave (which he describes as the contemporary era) began in 1979. Each completed wave lasted approximately forty years or a generation.⁸ First wave participants were particularly obsessed with distinguishing themselves from criminals. Early modern groups proudly identified themselves as terrorists, a description their opponents were pleased to use too.⁹ European anarchists decided to throw the bomb, which was particularly dangerous, because criminals would never use bombs that way.¹⁰ They refused to take hostages, even for the purpose of getting prisoners released, because hostage taking was associated with criminal activity and piracy. Groups in the second wave did take hostages, but only to get prisoners released. It was only in the third wave that hostages were taken for other reasons (like monetary ransoms), and criminal activity became widespread, especially in Latin America where the taking of hostages first became common.¹¹ This is also when we saw a skyrocketing number of airplane hijackings, particularly in the Middle East, during which demands were made for political concessions like the release of imprisoned colleagues.

According to Rapoport, it was only during the first wave that individuals like Vera called themselves terrorists, while in the second wave, terrorist group leaders like Begin preferred to emphasize the purpose of their violence, rather than the methods used. During this and subsequent waves of terrorism, virtually all politically violent groups have refuted the term “terrorist” to describe themselves. Meanwhile, governments have often preferred to use the term to describe a broad range of rebel or non-state groups that used violence. Rapoport observes that by the late 1960s, the mass media “confused or corrupted the language further by obscuring the distinction between ends and means altogether, using terms freedom fighter and terrorist as virtually interchangeable.”¹²

Overall, terrorist groups over the past 120 years have shown a keen interest in shaping perceptions about their activities—a concern not usually found among ordinary criminals. This historical perspective informs our understanding of contemporary terrorism and the nature of its relationship with criminal networks. But as John Picarelli notes in his contribution to this special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence, there are many ways in which scholars and scientists can contribute further to this understanding. He offers several framing questions and ideas for engaging the academic community in identifying and analyzing new kinds of research on the intersections of crime and terrorism. Particularly useful areas for study address the desire for definitional clarity, and often focus on specific attributes of organizations and their operating environments. These are the general themes addressed by the research articles in this Special Issue.

Definitional Challenges

Studies of crime and terror often grapple with the central debate over definitions: What separates a terrorist group from a criminal organization, a liberation movement or some other entity? From the U.S. Department of State’s view, the term “terrorism” means “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”¹³ According to Rapoport:

Terror is violence with distinctive properties used for political purposes both by private parties and states. That violence is unregulated by publicly accepted norms to contain violence, the rules of war and the rules of punishment. Private groups using terror most often disregard the rules of war, while state terror generally disregards rules of punishment, i.e., those enabling us to distinguish guilt from innocence. But both states and non-state groups can ignore either set of rules.¹⁴

Similarly, Bruce Hoffman defines terrorism as “the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change … [it is] designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victim(s) or object of the terrorist attack … [and] to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little.”¹⁵

In these and other definitions of terrorism, a common theme is that motives matter. Phil Williams also distinguishes terrorist and criminal organizations by their motives: at the heart of terrorist organizations is the desire to bring about political change, while criminal organizations focus on profit generation and maximization.¹⁶ Further, he notes, terrorist attacks should be seen as a sum total of activities that include fundraising, recruitment, training, development of special skills, and preparation for an attack which can stretch over several months or even years. Criminal organizations focus much of their energies on protecting themselves from peer competitors or government and law enforcement agencies, and pursue strategies to manage, avoid, control, or mitigate risk—but of course, many terrorist groups do this as well.¹⁷ Loretta Napoleoni draws clear distinctions between terrorists and criminals in how they view money. Criminal organizations run their operations like private corporations, with the accumulation of profit as the ultimate goal. In contrast, terrorist organizations are more interested in money disbursements than money laundering; instead of accumulation, money is to be distributed within the network of cells to support operations.¹⁸

Thus, the scholarly literature is rich with thoughtful arguments for how terrorists should be viewed as different from ordinary criminals. However, a growing number of authors have begun to suggest that the distinctions between the two may be fading. For example, Walter Laqueur has argued that fifty years ago a clear dividing line existed between terrorism and organized crime, but that “more recently this line has become blurred, and in some cases a symbiosis between terrorism and organized crime has occurred that did not exist before.”¹⁹ Other scholars such as Tamara Makarenko, Thomas Sanderson, Chris Dishman, R. T. Naylor, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Louise Shelley, and John Picarelli have described the phenomenon as a nexus, a confluence, a continuum, or some other kind of paradigm involving fluid, constantly changing relationships among members of terrorist and criminal networks.²⁰

According to Makarenko, the end of the Cold War and subsequent decline of state sponsorship for terrorism forced groups to seek new revenue sources, and most often this led them to engage in various kinds of organized crime activities.²¹ Some groups—like the FARC in Colombia and the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines—have slowly moved away from their original commitment to political violence and more toward increasing levels of purely criminal activity. In the case of the FARC, these Marxist guerillas in Colombia began taxing and protecting the drug trade, and are now seen by many as more of a peer competitor with Colombian drug cartels than as an ideologically-motivated group seeking political change. For the Abu Sayyaf Group, there are indications that profit derived from criminal activity has supplanted socio-political ideology as the organization’s raison d’être. Loretta Napoleoni refers to these developments as a “new economy of terror” in which sources of revenue include remittance from diaspora members, charities, profits diverted from legal and illegal businesses, kidnapping, piracy, and many other kinds of criminal activity.²²

These definitional issues are explored by several contributors to this special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence. For example, Phil Williams argues that although traffickers routinely torture, kill, and decapitate rivals (as well as police chiefs and local politicians), Mexico is not a victim of growing terrorism. He then offers a three-layered framework (rational strategic competition, factionalism and outsourcing, and anomic violence) to describe how the violence in Mexico is a rather different phenomenon from terrorism and one that cannot be captured under the rubric of political violence nor characterized as narco-terrorism or a criminal insurgency. Shawn Teresa Flanigan compares Mexican drug cartels to more “traditional” terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hizballah, noting commonalities in their provision of public goods, motivations for using violence, organizational structure, and other dimensions. She then explores how shifts in tactics and behavior may determine whether an organized crime group should be considered a terrorist organization.

In her comparison of the Kurdish ethno-nationalist group, the PKK, and the Colombian leftist group FARC, Vera Eccarius-Kelly describes how fluid interactions between terrorist groups and criminal networks and the sharing of knowledge about smuggling operations, money laundering systems, communications technologies, document forgery, and so forth can advance the interests and skills of both types of organizations. In some cases, terrorists and criminals are seen to cooperate within the same territory, share intelligence information, rely on the same corrupt government officials, and even conduct joint operations. These mutually beneficial relationships diminish the precision with which definitional categories can be applied to a specific organization. McKenzie O’Brien describes how the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines has fluctuated between an emphasis on terrorism and on criminal activity. And Jennifer Varriale Carson, Gary LaFree, and Laura Dugan observe that while most scholars of terrorism (as well as policymakers and practitioners) have characterized domestic radical environmental and animal rights groups as terrorists, thus far their attacks have been overwhelmingly a specific type of criminal activity— causing property damage—rather than injuring or killing humans, which is more commonly associated with terrorism.

To sum up, many kinds of analytical frameworks have been used to define and differentiate terrorism from other kinds of activity, but a common approach has proved elusive. Contributors to this special issue add to the conceptual diversity, and offer new perspectives on how crime and terrorism may be overlapping or converging. The cornerstone of research on these criminal-terrorist intersections is the organizational level of analysis. For some terrorist organizations, continued existence has become contingent upon aligning themselves with criminal organizations and engaging...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Criminals and Terrorists: An Introduction
• 2. Osama bin Corleone? Vito the Jackal? Framing Threat Convergence Through an Examination of Transnational Organized Crime and International Terrorism
• 3. When Politicians Sell Drugs: Examining Why Middle East Ethnopolitical Organizations Are Involved in the Drug Trade
• 4. The Opium Trade and Patterns of Terrorism in the Provinces of Afghanistan: An Empirical Analysis
• 5. Surreptitious Lifelines: A Structural Analysis of the FARC and the PKK
• 6. The Terrorism Debate Over Mexican Drug Trafficking Violence
• 7. Terrorists Next Door? A Comparison of Mexican Drug Cartels and Middle Eastern Terrorist Organizations
• 8. Terrorist and Non-Terrorist Criminal Attacks by Radical Environmental and Animal Rights Groups in the United States, 1970–2007
• 9. Fluctuations Between Crime and Terror: The Case of Abu Sayyaf's Kidnapping Activities
• 10. Exploring the Intersections of Technology, Crime, and Terror
• Index