The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism

Mark S. Hamm, Ramón Spaaij

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231543774
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The lethality of lone-wolf terrorism has reached an all-time high in the United States. Isolated individuals using firearms with high-capacity magazines are committing brutally efficient killings with the aim of terrorizing others, yet there is little consensus on what connects these crimes and the motivations behind them. In The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, terrorism experts Mark S. Hamm and Ramón Spaaij combine criminological theory with empirical and ethnographic research to map the pathways of lone-wolf radicalization, helping with the identification of suspected behaviors and recognizing patterns of indoctrination.

Reviewing comprehensive data on these actors, including more than two hundred terrorist incidents, Hamm and Spaaij find that a combination of personal and political grievances lead lone wolves to befriend online sympathizers—whether jihadists, white supremacists, or other antigovernment extremists—and then announce their intent to commit terror when triggered. Hamm and Spaaij carefully distinguish between lone wolves and individuals radicalized within a group dynamic. This important difference is what makes this book such a significant manual for professionals seeking richer insight into the transformation of alienated individuals into armed warriors. Hamm and Spaaij conclude with an analysis of recent FBI sting operations designed to prevent lone-wolf terrorism in the United States, describing who gets targeted, strategies for luring suspects, and the ethics of arresting and prosecuting citizens.

CHAPTER 1

Identifying Commonalities Among Lone Wolf Terrorists

To say that lone wolf terrorism is a neglected field of research is an understatement. The Congressional Research Service lists a total of 1,649 published reports on the general topic of terrorism. Only ten of them address the problem of lone wolf terrorism, and each concentrates on the lone wolf provision of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).1 Wholly absent is research on factors associated with the radicalization of individuals who become lone wolves. There are no publicly available FBI reports dealing specifically with lone wolf terrorism, and (prior to our research in 2015) none by the Department of Justice (DOJ) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—despite the fact that a 2009 DHS report concluded that “lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology is [sic] the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”2 The research void is doubly worrisome given that lone wolves are extremely difficult to detect and defend against.3 Moreover, the impact of existing counterterrorism measures on lone wolf terrorism remains unknown at a point in history when not only do lone wolf attacks appear to be increasing, but the lone wolf is changing the dynamics of international terrorism.4

Due to this lack of research, a new generation of police and intelligence officials will find that they are ill-prepared to meet the challenges of lone wolf terrorism in the future. Their college textbooks offer only scant information on the subject, typically providing case studies based almost entirely on press reports. Jonathan White’s Terrorism: An Introduction—the most widely used university text on terrorism today—contains only three brief cases of lone wolf terrorism, all perpetrated by white supremacists.

Empirical studies of lone wolf terrorism are equally scarce, and the reason for this lack of analysis has become the subject of debate among terrorism scholars. A common explanation is that terrorism has historically been an organized crime; consequently, researchers have focused on group dynamics (such as charismatic leadership, top-down recruitment, in-group solidarity) to explain individual pathways to terrorism. A related explanation is that most scholars who study terrorism are concerned with risk factors at the level of societies, not of the individual, so it is hardly surprising that few researchers have studied lone wolf terrorists.

Three studies dominate the small body of empirically based international research on lone wolf terrorism. While these studies (and related literature on lone wolves and radicalization) offer a guidepost for future research, they are also subject to varying definitions of the crime and rely on various units of measurement, making comparisons between the studies problematic. Yet these obstacles do not preclude the identification of several commonalities among the lone wolves. As the following review illustrates, these commonalities both validate and contest some key assumptions of the broader terrorism literature.

The Hewitt Study

The earliest analysis is Christopher Hewitt’s survey of three thousand terrorist incidents drawn from FBI annual terrorism reports, journalistic accounts, and previous research. Out of those incidents, Hewitt identified thirty cases of lone wolf terrorism in the United States between 1955 and 1999. Perpetrators were classified as rightwing racists, Islamic extremists, black militants, or anti-abortionists. While these cases represented only 2 percent of those arrested for terrorism offenses during the period in question, they accounted for 15 percent of all terrorist fatalities. Implying cross-cultural variations, Hewitt argued that lone wolf terrorism is predominantly a U.S. phenomenon. “American terrorism differs from terrorism in other countries,” he wrote, “in that a significant portion of terrorist attacks have been carried out by unaffiliated individuals rather than members of organized groups.”5

Hewitt explained the comparatively high incidence of lone wolf terrorism in the United States in terms of the strategy of leaderless resistance, adopted by American rightwing extremists and anti-abortion activists in response to a federal law enforcement crackdown on domestic terrorists during the 1980s. Leaderless resistance is based on the idea that a terrorist group, no matter how secret or well organized, simply cannot evade law enforcement; hence, terrorism is more readily accomplished by individual actors rather than a group.6 A decade after the radical Right’s move to leaderless resistance, FBI agents in San Diego, California, opened an investigation into the criminal activities of a self-proclaimed white supremacist named Alex Curtis. The investigation was dubbed “Operation Lone Wolf” due to Curtis’s encouragement of other white supremacists to follow what Curtis referred to as “lone wolf” activism.7 Thus was born the term lone wolf terrorism.

Hewitt found that lone wolf terrorism in America increased dramatically in the decades before 9/11. His statistics showed that only 7 percent of terrorist victims were killed by lone wolves between 1955 and 1977, but from 1978 to 1999 the proportion rose to 26 percent. “If the Oklahoma City bombing is included,” Hewitt wrote, “a majority of deaths after 1978, but before September 11, resulted from terrorism by unaffiliated individuals.”8

Though prescient, Hewitt’s analysis raises two methodological concerns. The first relates to his definition of lone wolf terrorism. As discussed in the introduction, Hewitt defined a terrorist group as consisting of at least four people; therefore, in addition to individuals, couples and trios were also counted as lone wolf terrorists. Such a methodology can potentially inflate the incidence of lone wolf terrorism.9 The second issue involves the units of analysis employed in the study. While Hewitt argued that a “significant portion” of terrorist attacks in the United States are carried out by lone wolves, he arrived at this conclusion by examining the number of victims killed in the attacks. Conflating the number of attacks with the number of fatalities can also obscure the incidence of lone wolf terrorism.

The Spaaij Study

A tighter conceptualization is offered by Ramón Spaaij in a series of reports on lone wolf terrorism in a global context.10 Spaaij defines lone wolf terrorism as political violence perpetrated by individuals who act alone; who do not belong to an organized terrorist group or network; who act without the direct influence of a leader or hierarchy; and whose tactics and methods are conceived and directed by the individual without any direct outside command or direction. The purpose of such a narrow definition is to distinguish lone wolf terrorism from terrorist activities carried out by large terrorist networks, small terrorist groups, or states.

Under this definition, attacks committed by couples or trios do not qualify as lone wolf terrorism (therefore Spaaij’s definition is not entirely compatible with Hewitt’s). This effectively excludes some terrorist attacks that are often attributed to lone wolves, including the Oklahoma City bombing. Even though the attack was perpetrated by an individual, Timothy McVeigh, it is well-documented that his accomplice, Terry Nichols, played a role in building the bomb that killed 168 people, including 19 children, and wounding more for than 500 others.11 Likewise, John Wilkes Booth would be excluded since historians are unanimous in their conclusion that Booth’s 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was part of a larger conspiracy to revive the Confederate cause.12

The case of Lee Harvey Oswald is less clear cut. Both the Warren Commission (President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover concluded that Oswald acted alone in the slaying of John F. Kennedy. Oswald does share some signal characteristics of the lone wolf terrorist, yet aspects of the case cast doubt on his classification as such. Namely, the destruction of critical evidence concerning the Kennedy assassination by FBI agents in Dallas, as well as the refusal by the CIA to release files on Oswald’s September 1963 visit to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City—including evidence of a potential motive for the assassination—make it impossible to know the full truth, especially in ascertaining whether Oswald had been encouraged by foreign interests to kill JFK. For these reasons, Oswald cannot be considered a lone wolf terrorist.13

Also excluded by the definition—because they lack an overt political motive—are acts of violence committed out of personal grief or in pursuit of personal vengeance, financial profit, or fame, thereby eliminating from consideration school shootings like those at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech.14

Based on his narrow definition, Spaaij analyzed the RAND-MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and identified forty cases of lone wolf terrorism in the United States between 1940 and 2010. Cases are corroborated through media and security reports, and chronologies and encyclopedias of terrorism. Spaaij also used the databases to identify forty-eight cases of lone wolf terrorism in Europe, Canada, and Australia between 1968 and 2010.

Last, drawing on media reports, writings and statements of perpetrators, police and court documents, and relevant literature, Spaaij employs a case study approach to analyze the micro-dynamics of lone wolf terrorism in five cases selected on the basis of (1) the number of fatalities and injuries, (2) the time span (ranging from a single attack to a prolonged terrorist campaign), and (3) the geographical location of the attacks. One case is drawn from each of the following countries: Austria, Israel, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski). The analysis concentrates on four aspects of the lone wolf phenomenon: motivations, social-psychological circumstances, processes of radicalization, and interactions between lone wolves and their environment.

Spaaij identified 198 lone wolf attacks in the United States and the other nations combined, claiming 123 lives and injuring hundreds more in bombings and firearms attacks. Lone wolf terrorism killed on average 0.62 people per attack, as compared to 1.6 deaths per attack for all types of terrorism. Spaaij’s study indicates that lone wolf terrorism is more prevalent in the United States than in other Western nations and, like Hewitt, Spaaij explains this variation by the relative popularity of the leaderless resistance strategy among American rightwing and anti-abortion activists. (The popularity of this strategy will be discussed later in the chapter.) A secondary analysis of Spaaij’s research suggests, however, that lone wolf attacks are more common and more deadly than terrorist group attacks in the United States (controlling for the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda).15

Also consistent with Hewitt, Spaaij’s data shows that American lone wolf terrorism has increased markedly over the past two decades, but it has increased markedly in other Western nations as well. Between the 1970s and 2000s, the total number of lone wolf attacks in the United States rose by 45 percent (from twenty-two to thirty-two attacks) and by a spectacular 412 percent (from eight to forty-one attacks) in the other countries.16

Yet it is the qualitative portion of Spaaij’s work on the case studies that offers insight into the process of radicalization, or how individuals adopt extreme views, including beliefs that violent measures need to be taken for political or religious purposes. While there is no standard profile of the lone wolf, Spaaij concludes that radicalization “tends to result from a combination of individual processes, interpersonal relations and socio-political and cultural circumstances.”17 Such a view is consistent with research showing that there is no single “conveyer belt” to radicalization. Instead, radicalization is a process involving a complex interaction of multiple pathways, including personal victimization, political grievances, and the influence of radical group dynamics.18 In this respect, Spaaij offers five insights.

First, Spaaij found a combination of personal and political motives at work in lone wolf terrorism. That is, lone wolves tend to create their own ideologies that combine personal vendettas with broader political or religious grievances.19 Though important, this finding also highlights the difficulties of assigning clear-cut motives for the terrorist attacks. Kaczynski’s political views, for example, reflected elements of anarchism and Luddism, which were intricately linked to both his personal resentment over perceived social rejection by organized society and frustration over his inability to establish a relationship with a woman. Such a worldview does not fit neatly into any of the commo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series List
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism
• 1. Identifying Commonalities Among Lone Wolf Terrorists
• 2. Old Wine in New Skin: Reimagining Lone Wolf Terrorism
• 3. The American Lone Wolf Terrorist: Trends, Modus Operandi, and Background Factors
• 4. The Roots of Radicalization
• 5. The Enablers
• 6. Broadcasting Intent: The Key to Preventing Lone Wolf Terrorism
• 7. Triggering Events
• 8. The Radicalization Model of Lone Wolf Terrorism
• 9. The Little Rock Military Shooting
• 10. The Pittsburgh Police Shooting
• 11. Lone Wolf Sting Operations
• 12. Lone Wolf Terrorism and FBI Mythmaking
• Conclusion: Countering Lone Wolf Terrorism
• Appendix: List of Cases
• Notes
• Index