As Cold War fades, new terrors dawn - Cover Story

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 31, 1994 | by Jamie Dettmer

He was paraded across the world's front pages -- a pudgy Venezuelan native known as Carlos the Jackal, bundled out of Sudan in August by French intelligence agents to face post-Cold War justice in Paris. But there was a tremendous irony attached to the capture of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, once the most wanted terrorist on Earth.

In fact, the day of the Jackal was over long before the Sudanese gave him up. No one much wanted Carlos anymore, not Western politicians who have more immediate national-security worries, and certainly not the new underworld birds of prey who had little use for an overweight, balding has-been. While Carlos, synonymous in the 1970s with spectacular international terrorism, was kicking up his heels and drinking too much in Sudan -- the last attack he mounted was more than 10 years ago -- the face of Europe changed, the balance of power in the Middle East shifted and the nature and geography of political violence metamorphosed. History simply passed Carlos by. It is instructive that Carlos was arrested in downtown Khartoum on his way to liposuction therapy and not in one of the many Iranian-sponsored guerrilla training camps for Islamic fundamentalists hidden deep in the Sudanese interior.

What in years to come may be called the Red period in international terrorism has given way to a more confused and chaotic but no less dangerous post-Marxist stage, one that is mixed with plain criminal delinquency. Charles Pasqua, the ambitious French interior minister who cut the deal with the Sudanese to allow French agents into the country, might have been better employed in turning the intelligence resources he devoted in capturing Carlos to hunting down the Jackal's successors.

A mostly hidden drama is being played out in Europe, one which Western authorities are singularly illequipped and disorganized to monitor -- let alone combat. The main figures likely will have considerable influence on the shape of the post-Cold War world if the West is not careful. They include former Eastern bloc intelligence officers, fundamentalist Islamic guerrilla groups, narcoterrorists and drug cartels, Russian mafia groups and some would-be nuclear powers: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and North Korea. Relationships are forming between them in ad hoc alliances involving guns, money and, scariest of all, nuclear materials.

A nightmare vision arising from paranoia? Bits and pieces of evidence from the last year would suggest not. As new international vultures pick at the remains of the Soviet empire for plunder and profit, connections between them can be seen. This summer, the veil on the new terrorist threat was raised slightly when police raided the home of Adolf Jakle, a shady, two-bit businessman. The raid in the quiet southern village of Tengen was part of a German police inquiry into a suspected counterfeiting ring. But what was unearthed triggered an international panic.

In a box, baffled investigators discovered a metallic substance that turned out to be a 5g stash of stolen Russian weapons-grade plutonium. Within weeks, three sting operations mounted by German authorities turned up further small amounts of Russian atomic material, though none of the highly enriched, bomb-ready material that was contained in Jakle's sample. The media concentrated its coverage of the atomic leaks on the origins of the material. But the "where" is only half the story. The "who," in some ways, is far more intriguing and disturbing.

Of the four interceptions by the Germans, the raid in Tengen was the most grave, admits a senior CIA official. First of all, it showed that weapons-grade plutonium-239 is available for sale on the black market. Second, Jakle, a cog in a much larger operation, provided enough information to German authorities to convince Bernd Schmidbauer, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's intelligence adviser, that smugglers had access to much larger amounts of similar material -- enough to make a cozen nuclear warheads. Other atomic bandits uncovered during the summer probably were involved in scams and were not in the position to supply significant consignments of plutonium or uranium to eager Middle Eastern buyers, CIA officials believe.

Schmidbauer was so shaken by what Jakle had to say that he actually interrogated the businessman himself, according to a German intelligence source. What he learned has not been made public, but security contacts say that Jakle named five Iraqi buyers (including a close associate of Jafar Dhia Jafar, the head of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program), spoke of a smuggling route through the Black Sea port of Varna to Athens and then on to Zurich, and mentioned the Bulgarian arms company Kintex, which long has been associated with Middle Eastern armsprocurement efforts and seems to have found the post-Cold War world even more congenial to business than the period when the Iron Curtain stretched rigidly across Europe. Jakle also mentioned the Stasi, the former East Germany's feared security agency.