Hide and seek: America's impressive record of catching terrorists is helping keep their activities to a minumum

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by Eugene H. Methvin

IT was shortly before 8 A.M. on January 25, 1993, the height of the morning rush hour. At the entrance to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va., as traffic was waiting at the stop light to make a left turn into the agency complex, a man got out of his car with a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle and walked among the other cars, shooting the people in them. In less than three minutes, he murdered two people and left three bleeding and maimed for life. All but one of the wounded were CIA employees. The gunman then calmly got back into his car and disappeared amid the spreading shock, panic, and terror.

Police had no clue as to the terrorist's identity until a Pakistani immigrant living in the area tipped them off that he thought it might be his roommate, who had disappeared the day after the shooting with no notice or explanation. The FBI found the assault rifle in the apartment, and forensic experts established that it matched the shell casings at the murder scene. Fingerprints found on the casings established the assassin's identity: he was Mir Aimal Kasi, a 28-year-old Pakistani had who entered the country illegally in 1992. The FBI established that Kasi left the country the day after the shooting on a flight to Islamabad, then flew to his home in Quetta, a city of 800,000 in Baluchistan, near the Afghan border. After a brief stay with his family, and just before the FBI announced he was wanted for the shooting, Kasi disappeared into the Afghan borderlands.

The FBI put Kasi on its "most wanted" list. The State Department advertised a $2-million reward, flooding Baluchistan with wanted posters, handbills, and even matchbooks bearing Kasi's picture. But for four years there was not a trace of him.

Then at 4 A.M. on a Sunday, June 15, 1997, in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan, 210 miles east of Quetta, a team of FBI and CIA agents knocked at the door of Room 213 of the seedy two-story Hotel Shalimar. When the sleepy occupant answered, they floored and handcuffed him. He cursed briefly, and they ordered him to shut up. He did. With a quick fingerprint check they identified him as the wanted Kasi and hauled him away. A day later, at a Pakistani Air Force compound at the Islamabad airport, they hurried him aboard a U.S. Air Force C-141 Starlifter and flew him back to Fairfax County, Virginia, to face American justice. On the way, as one FBI agent later testified, Kasi was chatty, voluntarily confessing to the 1993 killings and even signing a written synopsis of his confession.

A Virginia jury deliberated just four hours before convicting him of capital murder on November 10. Some thirty hours later in Karachi, also during the morning rush hour, gunmen killed four American auditors working for a Texas-based oil company. Once again, FBI agents flew to Pakistan, forewarned that the murders might be a ploy to lure them into a retaliatory trap in the cat-and-mouse game Uncle Sam has been playing with terrorists for more than a decade.

The capture of America's most-wanted terrorist was another triumph in a long string of generally unrecognized successes for American lawmen and policymakers in the war on international terrorism. In the last decade incidents have declined sharply, from an average of 616 a year in the 1984 - 88 span to 389 a year in the 1992 - 95 span. A major reason is that the world now knows that Uncle Sam has both a long memory and a long arm and will spare no effort to catch and punish those who commit terrorist acts against Americans. Congress in 1984 and 1986 made it a crime under U.S. law to harm an American citizen or attack an American business for political aims anywhere in the world, and it authorized the FBI to investigate, arrest perpetrators, and bring them to the United States to face trial in an American court. And most countries' foreign ministries and police eagerly help. The State Department through patient but persistent negotiations has created a growing web of international cooperation that includes ten international conventions and treaties covering aircraft hijacking and attacks on ships, diplomats, United Nations personnel, and the like. Terrorists today know there are not many places to hide.

Thus Fawaz Yunis today sits in a U.S. prison doing a thirty-year term for hijacking a Royal Jordanian jetliner from Beirut in 1985 with seventy passengers aboard, including four Americans. His capture represented the first use of the new anti-terrorism statute. The CIA enlisted the help of a former friend of his from Beirut who was living in Cyprus. This man engaged Yunis in a telephone conversation about drug deals, with CIA officers manning the tape recorder as Yunis admitted his role in the hijacking. In 1987 Yunis joined the man motorboating to a "drug deal" aboard a yacht the FBI had rented in the Mediterranean. Yunis soon found himself under arrest and aboard a plane to Washington. On the eve of his trial he lamented, "I never imagined that I would be arrested by the American government!"